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

  Royal and aristocratic courts also had a different etiquette from those of the Roman world. The otium of the Roman civilian aristocracy, literary house-parties in well-upholstered rural villas, and the decorum of at least some imperial dinner parties (above, Chapter 3), was replaced by what sometimes seems a jollier culture. This was focused on eating large quantities of meat and getting drunk on wine, mead or beer, together with one’s entourage, usually in a large, long hall. In Italy, drunkenness was possibly less acceptable, but north of the Alps it appears in every society. There is an eighth-century parody of Salic law which turns its enactments into a drinking game, played between the lord Fredonus, his wife and his retainers. In Ireland, drunken competitive boasts between heroes dominate the plot-line of one of the vernacular prose tales, The Tale of Macc Da Thó’s Pig. And in England and Wales those who drank their lord’s alcohol saw their subsequent loyalty in battle as an obligation in return for that hospitality. The etiquette of collective eating did, however, have Roman antecedents as well, even though what one ate and how one ate it had changed; under the empire, as later, eating with someone was a sign of friendship, refusing to do so marked hostility. In 384 it was only under pressure that Martin of Tours ate with the emperor Magnus Maximus, with whom he had religious differences; three hundred and fifty years later, Eucherius of Orléans knew in 732 that Charles Martel had become his enemy when Charles ‘left the prepared meal’.

  More positively, when kings were in one’s own neighbourhood it was a mark of favour, even if an expensive one, if they accepted hospitality. Patronage links with rulers could result from hospitality even to their men, as in the case of Wilfrid in Northumbria, who was presented to the wife of King Oswiu in the 650s on the recommendation of the aristocrats his father had entertained. These patterns of hospitality were carefully calibrated. Retainers ‘knew the mode of conduct proper to a noble society’, as Beowulf puts it. Guests brought gifts to hosts, including kings, as well as expecting them in return. The Irish missionary to Northumbria Aidan of Lindisfarne (d. 651) was notable for not giving money to aristocratic guests, and giving away their gifts to the poor. This was a calculated risk: would it be seen as a sign of charismatic spirituality, or one of meanness or hostility? In Aidan’s case the bet paid off, but the risk was still there. Political etiquette did not have fewer rules than in the Roman period, however different they were, and however drunk people got.

  Royal and aristocratic women participated in this world of political feasting, as has been seen, and had clear roles on occasion; for example the Danish queen Wealhtheow, ‘a lady thoughtful in matters of formal courtesy’, was in Beowulf the person responsible for passing around the collective mead-cup in the royal hall, at the start of the meal. How many women apart from the host’s wife actually attended such gatherings is not clear, however, and the public politico-military world and its values tend to be marked as male. Classic masculine aristocratic virtues included honour, loyalty and bravery. The combination of these three can be seen in the choice of the entourages of both Cynewulf and Cyneheard of Wessex to fight to the death around their lords, and, together or separately, they recur in any number of accounts of military actions from all the societies of the West. The defence of honour could sometimes go well beyond the sensible. Paul the Deacon tells a story from the early eighth century about Argait, a local commander in north-eastern Italy who was pursuing Sclavenian brigands in the area; he lost them, and Duke Ferdulf of Friuli made a joke at his expense referring to the fact that arga meant ‘coward’ in Longobardic. Argait, furious, attacked the full Sclavenian army, in its hill-top camp, by the most difficult route; Ferdulf then thought it dishonourable not to lead the Friulian army as a whole after him, and the Friulians were nearly all killed. Paul tells the story, and doubtless touches it up, as a morality tale about stupidity and disunity, but, as usual, it would only work if its sentiments were recognizable. This sort of imagery of fighting to the death should not be overplayed. Plenty of battles ended with the headlong flight of the losers, usually after a few hours (day-long battles were less common; longer battles very rare). But the close-knit hand-to-hand fighting that was the commonest form of battle in the early medieval period required a basic courage (and a strong physique) to work at all, and it is likely that male aristocrats prone to fear did not last long.

  Loyalty cost more than a few cups of wine in a hall. Lords (including kings) in this period, as later in the Middle Ages, might expect to feed and clothe an armed entourage while they were young, but they needed land in order to marry and settle down. It was when aristocrats were young that they moved about, between kings in England for example; once they were settled they would normally only move if they were exiled. But the moment of settling a dependant required sufficient landed resources to set him and his family up. This was a nearly universal requirement in our societies; the only exception was Ireland, where political dependence was expressed through gifts of cattle. Lords needed to have a lot of land (and thus rents, usually in produce) even to feed a large armed entourage, but they needed still more if they were to settle them in the future, and there was a danger that the land they gave to dependants might eventually slip out of their hands altogether. This ‘politics of land’ remained a basic problem for all early medieval rulers and magnates. It required resources of such size that, on the level of the aristocracy, only Franks could easily afford them; it is not surprising that an aristocratic politics involving autonomous private armies is well documented in this period only in Francia.

  The best long-term solution for lords was for families of dependants to be stably located on landed estates, with the sons coming to the lord’s court when they were young, to be trained and to become socialized into loyalty, swearing oaths of loyalty, too (an important element in all dependence), before inheriting their father’s land, marrying and returning to it. These lands seem usually to have been given outright by lords in this period to their sworn dependants, their fideles. There are also signs of experimentation with less permanent cessions of land, to give lords some legally based bargaining powers if their fideles were less faithful in the future. In particular, the great ecclesiastical landowners, whose documents we have, can be seen in and after the eighth century to make cessions to their dependants in the lesser aristocracy for three lifetimes (a popular choice in England), or as a lease for rent (a popular choice in Italy), or, in Francia, by precarious tenure (called precaria or beneficium), which meant that the lord could in principle reclaim it at any time. Church landowners in the eighth century were accumulating land so fast that they could without fear cede quite a lot of land out anyway; it was indeed common for the holders of leases or precariae to have been the original donors of the land in question. (Effectively, the donor made a spiritual gift for his soul which often only cost him a very small rent, plus an entry into the church’s or monastery’s political and military clientele, and this might be a benefit as much as a commitment.) We cannot track the choices of the great lay aristocrats in the same way, but successful magnates tended always to increase their lands, and could thus easily grant them out to military clients too. Essentially, the long-term dangers of the politics of land, in this period as in others, were felt by political losers, who were not increasing (or who were losing) their lands, rather than by political winners. Loyalty to lords was probably both commoner and safer than disloyalty.

  Aristocrats, large and small, also had close family connections, with brothers and cousins and, further afield, ‘kin’ in the widest sense, to whom they felt obligated. These kin-groups were organized in a variety of different ways in western Europe. Sometimes they were restricted to male-line kin, sometimes they respected relationships through females too, although these tended to be less important. Sometimes they were fairly formal, like the three- and four-generation gelfine and derbfine in Ireland, which had some responsibilities for collective agriculture; more normally, however, there was an element of choice, of which kinsmen one wanted to stay closest to,
and which one wanted to avoid. One was expected to support kin in disputes, by swearing oaths in their support or, in extreme cases, fighting for them, and one would also expect to give support in economic or political difficulty. Liutprand in Italy in 717 assumed that if a man was killed and his killer paid compensation for the death (this was the wergild, the honour price for a man, calculated according to social status), the compensation should go to the male heirs of the deceased in the order they would inherit - although not women, for they are ‘unable to raise the feud (faida)’. Kin loyalty, even if selective, was a universal assumption in our period. An older historiography saw loyalty to kin and loyalty to lords as in contradiction, and tracked the rise of lordship at the expense of kinship. This is a false opposition; most people respected both without difficulty. Where there was conflict (if the different lords of two brothers fought each other, for example) there might be personal tragedy; one example is the Cynewulf- Cyneheard affair, in which kin were on opposite sides. But we cannot track a systematic trend towards one and away from the other; there was usually no need to choose. It is instead likely that, between the Merovingian and the Carolingian period, and still more after the Carolingian period ended, both kin loyalty and lordship became tighter and more articulated, as we shall see in Chapter 21.

  Kin-groups feuded. Men (particularly aristocrats) were prone to anger, they drew their weapons (which they often had with them) easily, perhaps especially when they were drunk, they wounded or killed each other, and their kin took revenge. Families could remain in ‘enmity’ with each other; Liutprand in 731 thought that if this was the case they should not intermarry, and made the voiding of a betrothal easier if enmity had resulted from a kin-killing. We can track some systematic feuding, as with the case in Tournai in 591 in which a man killed his sister’s husband for adultery, was killed by the husband’s kin in return, and the feud spread steadily outwards to other relatives, never diminishing. (Queen Fredegund solved the difficulty, Gregory of Tours claims, by killing all the survivors.) All the same, most feuds seem to have ended rather more quickly, with the paying of compensation, perhaps after a single act of vengeance. Feuding, like kinship itself, should be seen strategically, not legalistically. ‘Enmity’ was not likely to persist unless there were more solid conflicts (over political power, say, or land) than those produced by the flaring-up of anger that was so common in our period. One might indeed have felt that kinsmen keen to feud were the ones most to be avoided. The idea of feud was important, all the same. It went to the heart of honour and maleness. In the most famous and most-discussed of all early medieval feuds, that involving Sichar of Manthelan (near Tours) in 585-7, terms were established halfway through by Gregory of Tours that involved Sichar compensating his opponent Chramnesind for the death of his relatives. Sichar and Chramnesind became close friends thereafter, until Sichar, when drunk, taunted Chramnesind for doing well out of the settlement. ‘Chramnesind was sick at heart. “If I don’t avenge my relatives”, he said to himself, “they will say I am as weak as a woman, for I no longer have the right to be called a man.” ’ So he killed Sichar then and there. Gregory, whose words these are, clearly applauded Chramnesind, and indeed the latter really had no other choice; Sichar’s insult was so serious as to open up the feud again at once. Settlements were like scar-tissue: they could open up again only too easily. And, if they did, refusal of the feud was a denial of masculinity.

  Sichar was an aristocrat, a personal dependant of Queen Brunhild; in all our societies feud and honour seem to be seen not only as male but as particularly aristocratic prerogatives. Aristocrats were indeed more ‘noble’ in the moral sense, at least in their own eyes, and it is unlikely that Gregory would have been as sympathetic to a peasant Chramnesind, if he bothered to record his actions at all. Aristocrats were, as we have seen, more prone to sanctity too, which was by no means seen as in contradiction with their links to honour and violence. Bishop Landibert of Maastricht died around 705, besieged in his house in Liege by his mortal enemy Dodo, domesticus of Pippin II, sword in hand until he threw it down to pray just before Dodo’s men came in, according to his hagiographer; this did not stop post-mortem miracles and a rapid expansion of his cult in Liege. This sort of image that aristocrats were structurally different from other people did not mean that there were legally defined lines between ‘nobles’ and the lesser free, particularly not in Francia and Italy; wealth, political patronage, military commitment, or office were all things one could gain separately, if one was lucky, slowly moving up the social ladder. Curiously, the only society with elaborate legal barriers between aristocrats and the lesser free was Ireland, where the wealth differences were probably least important. But training, language and behaviour, including learning how to stand and walk, were important markers that made aristocrats different, probably in all our societies. A Northumbrian aristocrat called Imma was at the battle of Trent in 678, which his side lost; knocked unconscious, he was captured next day, Bede tells us. He pretended to be a peasant who brought food to the army, so he was not killed, but it soon became clear ‘by his face, dress and speech’ that he was really aristocratic, so he was sold as a slave. English societies were not those with the sharpest social distinctions in Europe, but Imma still stood out. The observations about behaviour and etiquette made in these pages only apply to aristocrats; we shall look at peasants in more detail in the next chapter.

  Honour and masculinity were closely tied together, as we have seen. The space for the honour, loyalty and political protagonism of aristocratic women was substantially more restricted. It was not absent, all the same. Women ruling in their own right were not more common in this period than any other; only one is known, and that from a sketchy source two centuries later: Queen Seaxburh of Wessex (672-4), who succeeded her husband for a year. Conversely, we have seen that in Francia queens-regent such as Brunhild, Fredegund, Balthild and Chimnechild could be extremely powerful, and this gives us an insight into the female exercise of authority. The importance of these women was, for a start, very closely associated with the dynastic centrality of the core Merovingian male line. Royal wives and concubines were many in the Frankish world; if they wanted real power, it was as a mother of a king, so they had to ensure that their own son succeeded. Fredegund had to engineer the death of at least two stepsons, for example (at least according to Gregory of Tours, who has, however, to push the evidence somewhat to implicate her in this). When they ruled as regents, their rule was more contested than was Merovingian kingly authority, too. But it was real power they had, all the same; people obeyed them, built careers around them, fought for them. Indeed, Gregory said his patron Brunhild acted viriliter, ‘in a manly way’. Janet Nelson argues that their authority also derived from the location of so much Merovingian political practice in the royal court, the household whose organization was largely under queenly control. This is likely enough as well, although Merovingian-period queen-mothers were unusually powerful, despite the fact that queens controlled the household everywhere. We see a balance in Merovingian female political authority that is a feature of politically powerful women throughout the Middle Ages: female political action, where it existed, was more fragile and more contested than male action; but there was sometimes space for it all the same. We also could not reasonably doubt that queens like Brunhild had honour.

  This role for women was particularly associated with the Merovingian blood-line, in that royal mothers could be powerful whatever their social origins. Among the Frankish aristocracy of the Merovingian period, however, women with a proper aristocratic ancestry could be fairly active as well. The typical aristocratic woman, whether wife or mother, does, it is true, tend to appear in our sources as an appendage to male actors, giving land to churches together with a husband or a son, for example. The few women in the Merovingian period who made surviving wills without the participation of a male relative (because they were widows or consecrated nuns, like Erminethrudis or Ermintrude in Paris around 600 and Burgundofara in Fa
remoutiers in 634) also possessed much less land than the aristocratic norm; autonomous female actors were, once again, in a relatively fragile situation. Aristocratic women could nonetheless choose to consecrate themselves to virginity and found monasteries, as numerous saints’ lives tell. These lives tend to stress the opposition of their fathers to such a choice (as opposed to one of marriage for the advantage of the family), and the support of their mothers. As Régine Le Jan notes, this has to be a topos, a narrative cliché: in reality, such female monasteries were very much part of family strategies, and women like Burgundofara of Faremoutiers or Gertrude of Nivelles, and the monasteries they founded, prospered and faltered as their families (respectively the Faronids/Agilolfings and the Pippinids) prospered and faltered. Nevertheless, the monastic option gave such women the chance to be protagonists inside family politics, and Gertrude, like Burgundofara, took that chance and developed it.

  Plectrude, widow of Pippin II, illustrates these possibilities further. She was very influential during Pippin’s lifetime; we find her at his side as they take over and give land to the monastery of Echternach in 706, for example, a monastery previously patronized by her mother Ermina. This influence was doubtless linked to her own aristocratic background in the Trier area, and the fact that, thanks to her relatives, Pippinid family influence could expand southwards. But Pippin was not just the richest aristocrat of the age; he was also senior maior domus for all the Frankish lands, and their effective ruler. At his death in 714, his two sons by Plectrude were dead; with Pippin’s deathbed agreement, his young grandson Theodoald succeeded as maior, with Plectrude running the government. Without anything approaching the security of Merovingian dynastic legitimacy, that is to say, the Pippinids were happy to adopt Merovingian-style queen-regent practice. Plectrude was evidently tough enough for the job; she imprisoned her only family rival, her stepson Charles Martel, at once. But a year later there was a Neustrian revolt against Pippinid rule, and shortly after that Charles escaped and revolted as well. As we have seen, it was Charles who won the civil war of 715-19, and Plectrude had to give up Pippin’s treasure (and thus all chance of high political protagonism) to Charles by 717. She failed, and she did so partly because of her gender: her power was even more fragile and contested than Brunhild’s. But there was at least a political space for her to make the attempt, and Carolingian-period historians, writing under the rule of Charles’s descendants, treated her with considerable respect.