The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  Peasant families were not egalitarian either. Many peasants had unfree servants and farm workers; and gender relations were unequal as well. Certain tasks were highly gendered: weaving was called ‘womanly work’; ploughing was ‘manly work’. And the legal subjection of women (already characterized for the aristocratic world in Chapter 8) was at least as complete in the peasant environment, or indeed more so: hence the interest of a woman like Anstruda, who could at least control the terms of her subjection. Few women appear as independent actors in any of our documents, and even fewer of them are peasants. Normally men acted for them, as alienators of land or as plaintiffs in court, or else they appeared alongside brothers or husbands. Their space was in general terms not the public world of law (they appear in it, in fact, hardly more often as independent actors than do the unfree, who at least sometimes appear in law courts to contest their status), but more the world of the household and the house. We do not have any sort of account of internal family relationships at the peasant level, but it is likely that women ran the peasant household commissariat, as we can show that peasant women did in later centuries and that women did at the aristocratic level already in the early Middle Ages. One indicator of this is that in the furnished burials of the sixth and seventh centuries, women are often buried with keys, which seem to represent their control over household money and supplies. We saw in Chapter 3 that the cliché of public roles for men, private roles for women did not fully describe the late Roman world; even in the early Middle Ages it is misleading unless it is properly understood, for many important economic roles were taken by women inside the household, weaving, certainly, and probably other artisanal activities as well (it is a case that has been put for household-level, unprofessional, pottery production, the kind that was normal in early Anglo-Saxon England, for example). But, that said, the public world was not for the most part very accessible to peasant women anywhere in the early Middle Ages. This marked a real change from late Rome.

  The kings of early medieval Europe all saw themselves as drawing an element of their legitimacy from their links with the entire free (male) people of their kingdoms, seen in ethnic terms: free Lombards, Franks, West Saxons, men of Dál Ríata and so on. One result is that law codes deal with the whole free population, and often pay a good deal of attention to village-level, peasant society, as we see in the laws of Liutprand in Italy (dating from the years 713-35) or of Ine in Wessex (dating to c. 690), or the Frankish Pactus Legis Salicae (c. 510). These are not descriptions of those societies; as was argued in Chapter 1, royal legislation tells us almost nothing in this period except what was in the mind of the legislator, for, in relatively simple political systems like these, written law was seldom enforced in detail or even known about at the village level. Liutprand, at least, often responded to real cases that were presented to him for judgement, but the Pactus might be an entirely imaginative recreation of a peasant society in reality unlived by anybody, a Frankish ideal, as the mythical nature of its legislators indeed hints may be the case. All the same, that ideal reconstruction does at least tell us about expectations of peasant activity. An important law in the Pactus Legis Salicae is law 45, ‘Concerning migrants’, which envisages that any newcomer to a Frankish village (villa) could be vetoed by any current (free, male) inhabitant, as long as the latter could obtain the sworn support of ten other free males for an oath-swearing ceremony held three times in as many weeks: a substantial proportion of the village, then, not just a single person, but still a right of veto. Even though we have no account of such a procedure actually being carried out, and no idea how many Frankish villagers even thought that vetoes existed, we can at least conclude that the political culture of the Frankish kingdom assumed that local-level solidarity was coherent enough for such a process to be conceivable. This links back to the identity which is visible in 700 or so for villages like Gœrsdorf; but it also shows that at least some peasant-level protagonism was recognized as legitimate by legislators.

  This recognized protagonism was also associated with the duty of free peasant males to attend law courts and to bear arms. The Lombards, Franks, etc. were armed peoples; the royal link to the free, associated with the public assemblies referred to in Chapter 4, was above all expressed in terms of justice and military service, always the key elements in any medieval political system. Law courts could be local, as we have seen for the Redon villages; it is unlikely that many peasants went to larger-scale, county-level, hearings, which were more the preserve of élite political communities. Whether many peasants really participated in warfare can also be doubted; armies in this period were generally small, up to 5,000 for the Merovingians and far less than that for the Anglo-Saxons, and could usually have been made up of aristocrats and their entourages, who were also, unlike peasants, trained to fight. We saw in Chapter 8 that the Northumbrian aristocrat Imma in the Mercia of 678 saved his life by claiming to be a peasant, who could therefore be presumed not to have taken part in the battle his army had lost. But it is nonetheless striking how consistently legislation assumes that everybody, including free peasants, was liable for military service - in Visigothic Spain in the 670s-680s, indeed, even some of the unfree were. This was partly a royal image: if you were free, you could and should fight, even if in practice you did not. It was also partly shorthand for wider public obligations. Under Charlemagne, men who had fewer than four tenant houses had to club together and send one of their number to fight, meaning that peasant cultivators would rarely go; conversely, those who did not fight did other public service, building roads or bridges or fortresses. But the existence of these assumptions also meant that if a peasant really did want to serve in the army, and had the money to buy a horse and a sword in order to do so, then such service was possible. Medium owners, in particular, could well have been able to fight as often as there was a war, which in some places (eighth-century Francia is the classic example) was every year.

  This network of assumptions about public obligation also presumed that there were no sharp dividing-lines between the various social strata of free society. There was a legal break between unfree and free, but there was as yet no division between a free peasant and an aristocrat. The leaders of village society, if they joined the army, might end up the retainers of a powerful lord; consistent patronage or lucky marriages (or both) over a generation or two might allow them to be lords themselves, for there was no formalized boundary to cross. This must have been rare, but it was possible, and we find low-born bishops and even (but more rarely) counts in our sources on occasion, like Leudast of Tours (d. 583), about whom Gregory of Tours was so disdainful (see Chapter 5). ‘Being aristocratic’ was as yet a fairly informal affair; being close to kings (Königsnähe), holding office, controlling substantial lands, living a military lifestyle, were all necessary to a greater or a lesser degree, according to the time and the place, but people who satisfied local assumptions about aristocratic practice seem to have been more or less acceptable to other aristocrats (except to their enemies, at least, as Gregory was to Leudast) whatever their origin. This would not change until 1000 or so, and, when it did, society itself would change too, as we shall see in Chapter 21.

  The early medieval peasantry, even if they were landowners, were circumscribed by their aristocratic neighbours, who were so much more wealthy and powerful than they, but in the last two millennia the period 500-800 was probably when aristocratic power in the West was least totalizing, and local autonomies were greatest - taking into account regional differences, as we have seen. This is one of the main markers of the specificity of the earliest Middle Ages. Another that has often been invoked by historians is a relatively low population, and a relative lack of control of the natural world. An image of the early Middle Ages as one of small groups, huddled together in tiny settlements, surrounded (menaced) by uncultivated woodland and waste, is still widely shared, even among professional historians and archaeologists. This wildness is certainly an exaggeration, however. Woods and pastures were not l
imitless; the Vosges forest did not extend to Gœrsdorf, and in England there was relatively little woodland at all. Even in what is now Germany, where there were great forests well into the modern period, these were for the most part exploited at least for timber and rough grazing (as well as hunting), already in our period, although it is certainly true to say that using - and clearing - woodland would be more systematic in later centuries, as we shall see in Chapter 22. Early medieval landscapes were less fully controlled than they would be after 1000 or so, but they were by no means wildernesses. Archaeology, too, shows that villages could be ordered. Regular sets of wooden buildings and outbuildings in courtyards are common in north European archaeology from Northumbria and Denmark to Bavaria, particularly from the seventh century onwards, and often before. Vorbasse in Jutland, Kootwijk in the Netherlands, Cowdery’s Down in Hampshire, Lauchheim in Alemannia and Kirchheim in Bavaria are particularly well-studied examples (see below, Chapter 10). In southern Europe, village organization was regionally more variable and could be more fragmented, but there are even fewer signs that any part of the land was empty. Indeed, on the rare occasions when we can estimate the size of the population of individual villages in written sources, as in the polyptych of Saint-Germain, or when collective groups of villagers are listed in legal documents, squaring up to expansionist lords (there are examples from the ninth century or early tenth in both the Appennines and the Pyrenees), we can see that in some places early medieval settlement levels could match those of later centuries.

  All the same, it would be wrong to leap from a catastrophist reading of the early medieval economy to too much of a continuitist one. It is likely that there was a population drop between the Roman empire and the earliest Middle Ages, not reversed until the tenth century or in some places even later. The density of archaeological sites falls in most places after the Roman period; in both northern France and eastern England, low plateau areas may have been left to pasture, with settlement and fields tending to concentrate in river valleys. Field surveys in other areas have often suffered because identifiable early medieval pottery (the standard marker of settlement in field archaeology) was less widely available or is less well known, but even the most generous interpretation of our Italian or Spanish evidence could not argue for settlement densities matching those of the Roman empire. Any quantification of this would be dangerous, but, overall, it is likely that the landscape was less intensely used in the earliest Middle Ages than either before or after, even if few zones saw any significant land abandonment. Why this population drop took place remains obscure. The early medieval bubonic plague epidemic, which began in the eastern Mediterranean in 541 and is attested in the West on several occasions in the late sixth and seventh centuries, is often invoked as a deus ex machina to explain it, along the lines of the Black Death of 1347-9. This argument relies, however, on some very literal readings of narrative texts, which tend to describe plague in apocalyptic terms. The plague existed, certainly, and killed people too, but neither the archaeology of Syria nor the documents of Egypt support a population collapse in the mid-sixth-century East. As for the West, if there was a population decline in northern France and England, it had already begun in the fifth century, far too early for the plague. Demographic drops do seem to coincide with periods of political crisis and a lessening of aristocratic power, however, and it is possible that a decreasing intensity of peasant subjection, together with a lessening concern for systematic estate management (something we shall return to later in this chapter), allowed for slow reductions in local populations. The slow demographic growth of the Carolingian period, conversely, went hand in hand with an increase in aristocratic landowning and in the intensity of exploitation of a tenant population. Rather than being a guide to the very early Middle Ages, in fact, the polyptych of Saint-Germain tells us most about that period of growth. We shall return to the economic system of the polyptychs in Chapter 22.

  The early medieval period was also one in which exchange became much more localized. We have already observed that the fifth century saw the weakening of the great Mediterranean routes when the Vandals broke the Carthage-Rome tax spine in 439. These routes by no means vanished overnight, however. African olive oil and Red Slip fine pottery, both of which are easily identifiable archaeologically (the former because it was transported in amphorae), continued to be exported to Italy, southern Gaul and Spain; less went to Italy, but more is attested in Spain, at least at the outset. Nonetheless, across the sixth and seventh centuries African goods are less and less visible in the northern Mediterranean: they vanish first from inland sites, and then from minor coastal centres. By the late seventh century they are found only in major sites, Rome, Naples, Marseille; nor was this compensated for by the late sixth-century revival of exchange with the East, after the east Roman reconquest of Africa in 534. When, around 700, African productions stopped altogether, nothing replaced them in the western Mediterranean on that scale. What we find instead on the steadily increasing number of Mediterranean excavations are local products, of very variable quality and range of distribution. This variability is even more marked if we add the productions of northern Francia and Britain, which had been part of a separate exchange network focused on the Rhine army in the late empire. Let us look at this variability briefly, the simplest productions first, the most complex and wide-ranging last.

  Early Anglo-Saxon England is the best-documented example of a really simple exchange system. Its archaeology shows us that all English pottery before around 720 was handmade, and mostly very locally produced, not necessarily by professional potters, and not even in kilns. Nor did the Anglo-Saxons import much wheel-turned pottery from the Continent (most of it is found in Kent). The frequent presence of weaving tools in house-compounds and female graves shows that cloth was made inside individual households, as well. Metalwork was perhaps not so localized - the brooches found in burials could have been transported over wider areas - but this, too, could have been the work of single travelling craftsmen, working to order in local communities. Little else seems to have been exchanged on more than the local level: a little amber, glass beads, the small-scale (and relatively inexpensive) luxuries of a peasant society. Only the relatively rich and powerful had access to more expensive luxuries, in worked and enamelled metal (including gold and silver) for instance, often bought from Francia, but often also made by dependent craftsmen in royal courts; slaves were part of this luxury network too, largely locally produced in the context of the inter-kingdom wars of the early Anglo-Saxon period (Imma was sold as a slave in London to a Frisian). It would be difficult, however, to say that England had much of a market economy before the eighth century; the huge bulk of production of artisanal goods was at the level of the single village. England can here stand for Wales, Scotland and Ireland, where much the same was true. These lands rarely made any pottery at all; they used wood, leather and iron instead, with equally localized production patterns. They imported some pottery from Francia, and, in the years around 500, occasionally even from the Mediterranean, but this was a high-status luxury, and there is, overall, even less evidence of such imports in western Britain and Ireland than there is in eastern England. Outside Britain and Ireland, we can find an equal simplicity in artisan production in northern Germany and Scandinavia, beyond the Roman frontier. Inside the former western empire, only parts of the Spanish Mediterranean coast show similar patterns so far; but more small areas with simple productive patterns are likely to appear, particularly in Spain, as archaeological work becomes denser.

  More complex patterns of production and exchange are visible in the western Mediterranean. Here we find more professional types of artisan, almost always made on a wheel, in both fine and coarse (kitchenware) types; these ceramic types were often available across a city territory, and sometimes further afield, in distribution networks which must have been market-driven. We can see patterns of this kind in parts of southern Gaul, Lombard and Byzantine Italy, and at least some of Visigothic Spain.
Gaul, Italy and Spain had in fact already in the late empire had productive systems of this type, alongside African imports. In the post-Roman period, these systems became rather more localized, but they survived when African imports dried up. After 700, Africa itself seems to have retained local productive systems of this kind as well. Ceramics are our best guide to the scale of these systems; but there are some signs that iron- and bronze-work was produced professionally at this local level as well - western Andalucía and Rome with its hinterland are two well-studied examples - and metal products of this kind seem to have been available across a wider geographical range than pottery. Italy and Spain contained networks of relatively localized economies in the late sixth to eighth centuries; every zone had a slightly different history, and clearly differentiated products. Some of these economic areas were larger-scale than others, too; Rome, in particular, seems in the eighth century to have been the focus for a much wider region than was normal by now in the western Mediterranean, covering much of the Tyrrhenian Sea: it imported wine from Calabria and Naples, oil-lamps from Sicily, and in the later eighth century developed a new glazed fine ware, now called Forum ware (it was first found by archaeologists in the Roman Forum), which would in the ninth century be available (in small quantities, at least) from Sicily to Provence. Rome was a big city by eighth-century standards, however, and had for long been a transport focus. The eighth century in the rest of the western Mediterranean, except the Adriatic, was pretty quiet, with almost no sign of any interregional trade except for luxuries. Marseille, the traditional entrepôt at the mouth of the Rhone for all traffic going from the Mediter ranean north into what was by now the Frankish heartland, went into an eclipse at the beginning of the eighth century, and not even the luxury trade had much effect on it after that for some time. Localized production systems do not need such entrepôts, and it is this localization, even if at a decent quality of product, which marks the seventh and, even more, the eighth century in the western Mediterranean as a whole.