In the literal meaning of the term, neither Frankish expansion into north-eastern Gaul nor the Anglo-Saxon takeover of lowland Britain qualifies as Völkerwanderung. Neither were ‘peoples’ (German, Völker) to begin with, so they could hardly go wandering anywhere. And contrary to older conceptions of these processes, which envisaged something close to ethnic cleansing unfolding certainly in Britain and also in some areas north of the Loire, many indigenous Romano-British and Gallo-Romans clearly formed part of the new ethnic mix that had emerged in these former Roman provinces by the year 600 AD. The truth of this statement, however, doesn’t deny another. The previous two centuries had seen in both regions the unfolding of migratory phenomena that were substantial enough, whatever the actual numbers involved, to bring about major change on just about every level imaginable: politics, socioeconomic patterning, administrative organization and culture, whether material or non-material.
One advantage of taking the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish case studies together is that, between them, they pinpoint the limits and potential dangers of overusing the elite-transfer concept. It does not make analytical sense to bracket together the Norman Conquest of England, where the incoming migrant elite settled happily within an existing socioeconomic structure of eliteness, with other instances where migrants demanding rewards came in sufficient numbers to cause a major restructuring of the prevailing social and economic order. The fact that the immigrants probably amounted to no more than a minority both north of the Loire and south of Hadrian’s Wall makes no difference. In both zones, Anglo-Saxons and Franks were responsible for revolutionary transformations going well beyond a simple process of elite replacement of the kind exemplified by the Norman Conquest.
This raises the (perhaps not hugely important) issue of what might be the most apposite label to attach to each of these situations. Different researchers, I suspect, will take different views, but to my mind ‘elite transfer’ might be most usefully restricted to the type of encounter in which the domination of new immigrants did not require major socioeconomic restructuring along the lines of the Norman Conquest. And if you make that choice, the obvious term to reserve for alternative instances that did require a complete remaking of the socioeconomic order becomes ‘mass migration’. This will have some jumping backwards in alarm, but the fact is that no one believes any more in complete population replacement – the old invasion-hypothesis version of mass migration – so that ‘mass’ is an available and currently undefined, or imprecisely defined, term. It also has the advantage of tying in very neatly with the qualitative definition of mass migration employed in comparative migration studies. Remaking social and economic orders right down the social scale will always administer a huge shock, whatever the cultural context, and whatever the numbers of migrants involved.
Much more important than particular choices of label, however, is the conclusion that in cases such as the Franks and Anglo-Saxons, migration is not an alternative explanation for major cultural change – even material cultural changes such as the adoption of a new burial rite – to social stress. The supposed equation between furnished burial rites and social stress does not always work, and each case needs to be looked at closely. Neither the odd furnished burial in an otherwise unfurnished cemetery landscape, nor regularly furnished burials in highly regulated contexts such as the Reihengräber, look as though they reflect social stress. The great advantage of the Frankish evidence over the Anglo-Saxon comes from the fact that so many of their cemeteries have been dug up more recently (although some of the more recent Anglo-Saxon cemetery excavations do make the same point). These excavations have also allowed the initial process of electing to bury the dead with a relatively wide array of goods to be more thoroughly explored, and it is this which to my mind puts social stress and migration so firmly on the same page of the explanatory hymn book. Being able to see that the insertion of a rich outsider into a community led the locals to bury both in an entirely new cemetery and according to the outsider’s rituals can only prompt the conclusion that adopting the new rite was part of the indigenous response (part-voluntary, part-involuntary, I would imagine) to the problem posed by having a new landowning elite roll into town (or, in fact, into the country).
This of course is only a model, and matters did not everywhere progress in the same fashion. At Krefeld-Gellep, immigrant and native seem to have kept to separate cemeteries, but the general pressure to conform was strong enough to bring the latter culturally into line nonetheless. The fact, too, that the Frankish settlement process happened after the fact of conquest, while that of the Anglo-Saxons occurred in mid-struggle, could have contributed to some substantially different local consequences. Continued conflict with other indigenous groups might well have made it more difficult for conquered natives to achieve good outcomes in the Anglo-Saxon case than in the Frankish, and, as we have seen, the linguistic evidence strongly indicates that the new landowning elite of lowland Britain by c.600 AD was composed overwhelmingly of immigrant elements.
These particular points aside, there are many ways in which Frankish and Anglo-Saxon migration illustrate and develop the main themes of this book. Transport logistics – the Anglo-Saxons providing a first example of sea-borne migration – and active fields of information decisively shaped both, but perhaps above all it is again the interaction of migration and patterns of development, and the huge role played by prevailing political structures, that jump out of the evidence. Frankish and Anglo-Saxon migration can be seen as mechanisms by which unequal patterns of development were renegotiated. Despite its own economic transformations during the Roman era, non-Roman western Europe lagged sufficiently far behind adjacent areas of the Empire for the latter’s wealth to exercise a strong pull. Unlike a modern economy, the wealth of this world was generated above all by agricultural activity, and offered migrant labour few high-paying or high-status jobs – being a peasant was no more fun west of the Rhine than it was further east. The main way for most outsiders to access any of this wealth, therefore, was to raid it regularly for movables, apart from a relative few who made it big in the Roman army. Throughout the Roman period, this greater wealth was protected by armies and fortifications. As lowland Britain and north-eastern Gaul fell out of central imperial control at different points in the fifth century, however, the restriction these imperial institutions had imposed upon the capacity of outside populations to seize control of capital assets was removed, and raiding, after a time lag, turned into predatory migration, aiming at the seizure of landed estates.
Unequal development was ultimately responsible, then, for both flows of migration. But both the Frankish and the Anglo-Saxon versions were effect, rather than cause, of central Roman collapse. They played a major role in dismantling such structures of local Roman provincial life as remained upon their arrival in northern Gaul and Britain, respectively, but in both cases it was the failure of the imperial centre’s capacity to maintain enough force on its fringes that exposed these provincial Roman societies to immigrant attention.
What, though, of the bigger picture? If we widen the focus to the western Roman Empire as a whole, what role did migration play in its overall collapse? And given that migration and patterns of development ought to be close bedfellows – as indeed we have found them to be again in this chapter – what effects did the collapse of the Empire have upon the prevailing pattern of unequal development that had marked out Rome and its neighbours before the era of the Huns?