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

by Chris Wickham

  Frankish royal palaces, or at least the major ones, were more complicated than this. Carolingian Ingelheim consisted of a set of large rooms (including a royal hall) built in stone, arrayed around a substantial apsed and colonnaded courtyard, 100 by 70 metres in size, some of which still stands. This was also (apart from the apse form) the case in Aachen, where the scale was larger. This can still be seen from one part of it, the palace chapel, with its internal marbling, nineteenth-century replacements for its rich mosaics and a throne standing in the gallery. The numerous rooms in these palaces, which visitors had to pass through, were doubtless set out for effect. Merovingian sources already make this clear, as when Duke Rauching was shown into King Childebert’s private chamber, probably in Metz, in order to be killed in 589 (as described in Chapter 5). But it is Carolingian sources which stress most clearly the intricacy of royal or imperial display. Ingelheim in the 820s was described in a poem as having ‘a hundred columns, with many sorts of buildings, a thousand entrances and exits and a thousand inner chambers’, as well as having an elaborate painted programme in the church drawn from the Bible, and an even more striking decorative programme in secular areas of the palace, featuring classical heroes and Christian Roman emperors, and leading up to narrative scenes featuring Charles Martel, Pippin III and Charlemagne himself. Notker of St. Gallen, in his Deeds of Charlemagne of the 880s, imagines a fantastic story in which Byzantine ambassadors to Charlemagne come into the palace (which palace, Notker does not say), and go through groups of nobles, four times convinced that the central figure must be grand enough to be Charlemagne - one is on a throne, another is in the emperor’s private apartments - before they are finally ushered into a separate room, and into the presence of Charlemagne, clad in gold and jewels and glittering like the sun. Notker never went to court, but he had talked at length to senior courtiers, and his image of the spatial complexity of the court rings true, given what we know of the big Carolingian palaces. It may be added that the material culture of display was here focused as much on the dress of human beings as on the walls of the palace (Priskos noted the same of Attila’s residence); but if Ingelheim was typical in its decoration, the walls all conveyed meaning too.

  Palaces competed in order to impress. The Franks could not match the display of Constantinople, where Liutprand of Cremona, envoy for King Berengar II of Italy in 949, was so struck by the mechanical singing-birds and the mechanical lift under the throne of the Magnaura palace only one of many buildings in the palace complex. But inside the material cultural possibilities of Latin Europe, visiting Carolingian Aachen and Ingelheim was as complicated and overwhelming an experience as anything available. Notker also claimed that the ‘ever-vigilant’ Charlemagne could look down from the windows of his chamber at everyone in the palace, including at what was happening in the houses of his aristocrats, so as to see ‘everything they were doing, and all their comings and goings’. This precursor of Jeremy Bentham’s (and Michel Foucault’s) panopticon, even though once again doubtless an imaginative flourish on Notker’s part, shows the degree to which such palaces were expected, in all their complexity, to be under the direct control of the king/emperor as well. For that complexity itself made royal power visible, and therefore had to reflect, at least ideally, the concrete operation of that power, that is, knowledge, and, when necessary, coercion based on that knowledge.

  Our evidence for village layouts is entirely archaeological, and here I can only discuss a few examples out of a hundred or more. They do not tend to demonstrate any conscious planning, and were built up out of individual farm units, by the peasants themselves. The way this build-up occurred varied from region to region, however, and also across time; it demonstrates changes in sociability, sometimes in village-level competitiveness, and in village hierarchies. In particular, in the last third of our period, the growing internal hierarchies of western European village society began to take material form.

  In the western Roman empire, villages were relatively rare. The rural landscape was certainly hierarchical, with the villas of landowners operating as estate-centres for a dependent population, and indeed often acting as highly ambitious monumental complexes, designed to impress aristocratic peers; but the peasant majority in most areas lived in houses scattered across the landscape, without any obvious sociability. One has to move to the East to find nucleated village complexes, and some very striking ones still survive in the landscape, particularly in southern Anatolia, Syria and Palestine. The villages of the north Syrian Limestone Massif, rich from oil export, and lucky in their long-lasting and easy-to-carve stone materials, are the best-surviving of this set, and have been the most systematically studied. The village of Serjilla, for example, is a complex of a church, a community building, a bath-house, and nearly twenty houses, some still with a second storey and a roof, each in its own courtyard, in no obvious spatial order. The houses vary in their scale, most of them having four rooms or less, but some with substantial extensions; they have similar decoration, with regular (if severe) carved surrounds to doors and windows, and quite elaborate roof pediments, but they vary here too; many, for example, have internal colonnades. Building size may indicate family size, but it indicates resources too; architectural elaboration indicates ambition. So also does the village bath complex - a relatively unusual amenity for a village - which was put up in 473 by Julian and Domna, as a mosaic inscription tells us. There is no sign, all the same, that the inhabitants of Serjilla were anything other than peasants (or stone-workers); no house is typologically distinct, as would befit a residence or rent-collection centre for a landlord. But they must have been remarkably prosperous as a group, some of them doubtless with a few tenants of their own (Julian and Domna for example), and also mutually competitive on a substantial scale, above all at the height of Syrian oil production in the fourth to sixth centuries. For once, the density of surviving housing in the Limestone Massif allows us to track that competition through display in some detail. When we have written accounts of eastern village societies, they often appear as very fractious; the buildings of villages like Serjilla allow us to trace that tension on the ground. But the absence of a clearly marked élite housing is all the more striking. It may indeed have made the fractiousness much worse, for society was not formally stratified, and there was more to play for.

  Village societies existed in the Germanic world north of the Roman empire; and similar villages also crystallized in the post-Roman kingdoms of the West, sometimes doubtless under the influence of incoming Germanic groups, notably in the case of the Anglo-Saxons in England, though the village-form also emerged in parts of the post-Roman West where there were relatively few incomers, such as southern France or central Italy. When villages did appear, they were in wood, overwhelmingly the dominant medium for rural housing in Europe until after 1200, except for parts of Mediterranean Europe, where stone came in a century or two earlier. We cannot track local relationships with the density possible for Serjilla, partly because houses only survive through their post-holes, and partly because they tended to be even more uniform. In a substantial area from Denmark to the Alps, and west into central France and England, villages were made up of farmstead blocks, centred on a main building (very long in Denmark, up to 40 metres sometimes, where it included living quarters and an animal byre; rather shorter in southern Germany or England), with subsidiary buildings and sunken-floored huts, which seem for the most part to have been outhouses for artisanal activity and storage, the whole set in a yard, usually fenced. The squares of each farmstead often created quite regular patterns for these villages, set on either side of a main road or else in a block around a crossroads, a regularity further enhanced because longhouses and other main buildings tended quite often to be parallel to each other. This regularity enhanced the sense of uniformity created by similar house and farmstead plans.

  Farmstead units were not all alike, though. In some villages, they were; but there was often one rather larger house, often on the edge of the settl
ement. Vorbasse in Denmark is a good example of this, for this settlement, like many in Denmark and the area of northern Germany and the Netherlands, regularly shifted site inside the same agricultural territory, and changes in its patterning can thus be more easily compared from century to century, in this case (unusually) from the first century BC to the twelfth century AD when it settled down on its present site. From the third century to the start of the eighth, there was always one rather larger farmstead in Vorbasse, half again as large as its neighbours, with a bigger main building, and more imported goods found in it. In one of the village’s shifts, around 300, the rest of the village shifted but the larger farmstead stayed put, which marks the stability of the social position of its owner even more firmly. Vorbasse evidently had a leader, then; but we would be wrong to see him (or her) as a local lord, still less the village’s landlord. His house was larger and richer than those of his neighbours, but, as at Serjilla, it was not otherwise different. And it is interesting that around 700, when Vorbasse reorganized itself more substantially than usual on a new site, the larger farmstead disappeared. Leadership had been stable here for a long time, but was not so structurally solid that it could not be sidestepped, even if we cannot tell precisely how.

  Lauchheim in Alemannia, in the upper Danube valley, settled from the sixth century to the twelfth, shows a more hierarchical pattern. Here there were around ten farmsteads along a road, but one was much larger already by the seventh century, and became twice the size by the eleventh. Here, the larger farmstead was indeed typologically distinct, for it had a much larger number of non-residential post-hole buildings, probably for storage, plausibly of grain and other produce collected in rent. It also had its own small cemetery, with rich burials, in the late seventh century, before burials moved to the churchyard of the eighth-century church. It would be fair to call this central farmstead of Lauchheim an estate-centre, and it is quite possible - even if not certain - that its holder was, or became, the landlord of the village as a whole.

  Most excavated villages had some sort of identifiable hierarchy, at least of resources, which probably points to village leadership, too; but it was not always stable (different houses could be the largest one in a village in different centuries), and, even in Lauchheim, that hierarchy did not point to a radically different lifestyle for the inhabitants of the largest house. From the Carolingian period onwards, however, we begin to get signs of structural differences. The first innovation was characteristically the village church, often built in stone from the start; village church-building tended to begin after 700, and to gain pace in later centuries (see above, Chapter 8). Once a church was built in a village, the settlement tended to gain a more stable spatial structure (and, in Denmark, to stop moving site); and churches always had aristocratic or local patrons and, generally, resident priests, whose élite status was reinforced by the considerable investment church-building involved. The most striking change came, however, when local leaders or lords began to fortify their residences. This development, which can be summarized succinctly (if simplistically) as ‘the rise of the castle’, was rare before 900, and not widely generalized until after 1000 (below, Chapter 21), but came in the end to characterize most of Europe. It happened in different ways in different places; in some places, Lauchheim-type estate-centres gained bigger fences, then ditches, then stone walls, then stone residences, perhaps on an artificial hill or motte above the village; in others (as in England) some lords had moved into increasingly fortified residences, which had no necessary connection with still-fragmented peasant settlement, by perhaps 900, a long time before mottes appeared in the wake of the Norman Conquest. In central-southern Italy and other parts of southern Europe, villages were themselves fortified in the tenth to twelfth centuries (and called castra or castella, castles), with a lord’s residence developing as an internal fortification (a rocca or cassero) inside the village. In each case the relationship between the castle-dwelling lord and the village or villages around was different, the difference being very clear on the ground.

  A good example of that Italian development is Montarrenti near Siena in southern Tuscany. Here, a village on the slopes and summit of a hill is documented from the late seventh century onwards; the houses were small and one-roomed, as is typical for Italy; the whole village already probably had a palisade around it, and the hill-top had a separate fence, although the houses there were of much the same size. Already in the early ninth century the hill-top palisade was replaced by a stone wall, surrounding a large wooden building (probably a granary), a grain-drying oven, and a mill-stone: as at Lauchheim, one can see an estate-centre crystallizing here. This burnt down later in the century, but the wall was rebuilt in the tenth. The hill-top still had wooden houses in the tenth century, but in the late eleventh stone towers began to replace them, to create a clearly seigneurial focus. Settlement continued lower down the hill, however (perhaps with breaks), and by the twelfth century the lower hill-slopes were themselves surrounded by a wall which included the whole village, by now mostly built of stone, although the upper cassero remained the seigneurial centre. It was this whole village that was called a castrum from the end of that century (I would guess by the early eleventh, judging by other Italian examples, but we do not have the documents for Montarrenti), but it had a clear settlement hierarchy in it, one which had begun already in the ninth century, and which was permanently fixed in the towers of the eleventh. This sort of articulated spatial hierarchy has plenty of parallels in the settlement archaeology of Tuscany and Lazio (two well-studied regions of Italy), and has, as we shall see in Chapter 22, clear analogues in our documentation for the increasingly militarized social hierarchies in tenth-century villages, for Italy and elsewhere. The social hierarchy, however, was made increasingly manifest and solid in village architecture. Once village élites moved to stone towers, they were making visual claims to status and lordship, which they could back up by armed force, and which were no longer negotiable, as village leadership had frequently been two or three centuries before. Display here was not intended to compete with neighbours, but to exclude them.

  The display involved in building huge prestige constructions like Hagia Sophia and that involved in building a flashier village house was quite different in scale, but it had many of the same aims: to impress, to establish status and power, maybe to elicit fear and submission. (The two types of display were even sometimes linked; the decoration of the emperor Zeno’s huge church to honour Simon the Stylite in the 470s at Qa‘lat Sim‘an in the Limestone Massif was copied by village church builders all over the region in the next generation.) The frames of reference in which display operated varied very greatly from region to region and between different types of building, however; and it is that variability which tells us most about cultural assumptions. Justinian was bouncing his architectural references off earlier pagan buildings and near-contemporary churches, all of which he was aiming to surpass. Al-Walid was aiming to surpass, too, but was also aiming at establishing a fundamental difference from past styles of building-plan and mosaic decoration, to mark out the novelty and superiority of the Muslim religion. Edwin and his predecessors were making claims to links with a Roman past which evidently had local prestige, even though Yeavering was north of the former territory of the later Roman empire. Paschal was reasserting papal centrality through unbroken links with past architectural and decorative styles, inside and against a world with quite different political configurations. Charlemagne was offering his visitors a visual and spatial experience in his palaces which had no recent parallels in northern and western Europe, and which was intended, doubtless successfully, to mark him out as unique, at least to people who had no experience of Constantinople. The lords of Montarrenti were not just showing their local mastery and their defensive capability with their stone towers, but were also drawing on urban models of building, and thus transferring urban power and cultural prestige into the construction of rural lordship; and, in a less top-down and more competi
tive way, it was also urban prestige that was evoked by Julian and Domna’s bath-house.

  The intervisuality of architectural style is one of the most powerful conveyors of meaning and visual effect. As remarked at the start of this book, archaeology, and the study of material culture in its widest sense in art history and architectural history, tends to tell us different sorts of things from the study of narrative and documentary texts. Material culture tells us more about the use of space, the function of spatial relationships, as well as, of course, stylistic and technological changes; written culture tells us more about human relationships, choices, conscious representations of the world around us. But the construction of visual meaning, by emperors and peasants alike, links these two worlds: it is material culture, not words, which tells us about the choices of al-Walid, or Paschal, or Julian and Domna in Serjilla. That is why this chapter is the central one in this book; it offers a way to compare the strategies of every actor in the early Middle Ages, rich or poor, and not - for once - just those who had access to the written word. And the audiences of buildings such as these were also far wider than those of any written text, save of the sections of the Bible and Qur’an most often read out in religious ceremonies, and these latter tended not to change much across time and space. The whole population of Europe was thus involved in the communication discussed in this chapter, and could even, if they chose, participate as communicators, not just as audiences. Indeed, as archaeology makes its inevitable advances in the future, this is a sector of historical knowledge which, for a change, we shall know progressively more about.