8
Valerius of the Bierzo was an ascetic hermit living in the mountains of north-west Spain at the end of the seventh century; unlike most hermits, he was of aristocratic origin, and wrote accounts of his own life. This life was pretty miserable. Valerius was perpetually tormented by the devil, who got a local aristocrat and a bishop to try to make him a priest, thus regularizing his position (fortunately they both died), and who also turned local priests and monks (of the monastery to which he was loosely attached) against him. Valerius’ disciples were rejected by him, or dissuaded by terrible weather, or killed by brigands; one, Satur ninus, built a church near Valerius’ hermitage, and began to do miracles, but then, also tempted by the devil, he became proud and thought he would get more veneration if he had his own hermitage, so he left, but not before stealing Valerius’ books. Only after forty-two years did Valerius get royal patronage without conditions. Sour, self-righteous, ungrateful and paranoid, as well as obstinate in his chosen path, Valerius may give us the most authentic voice of the early medieval hermit. The moral awfulness of the Bierzo in his writings is most likely to be the reflection of his own mind, not of any particular local reality. The solidity of the Christian infrastructure in this relatively cut-off region, notwithstanding the brigands, is equally striking.
One aspect of moral degradation that was apparently absent in the Bierzo was the survival of ‘pagan’ practices. This may be surprising; Bishop Martin of Braga (d. 579), based slightly further west, had preached against them at length shortly before his death, complaining of people who observed a wide variety of what he considered un-Christian rituals, lighting candles beside rocks and trees, throwing bread into fountains, not travelling on inauspicious days, chanting over herbs. Nor did this end with Martin. A late ninth-century slate text from the Asturias, slightly further north, preserves an incantation against hail, in the name of all the archangels and St Christopher, adjuring Satan not to trouble the village of the monk Auriolus and his family and neighbours; in effect, an entirely traditional magical text, although couched in Christian terms. Maybe north-west Spain was so regionally diverse that practices like these did not occur in the Bierzo; maybe Valerius was so wrapped up in himself that he did not notice them; but maybe he, like Auriolus, did not see them to be as wrong as Martin did. After all, what could be described as weather magic was practised even by saints, as when Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) held off hail with a cross made out of his staff, and when Gregory of Tours did the same by putting a candle from St Martin of Tours’s tomb in a tree. We must recognize from the start the diversity of early medieval Christianity in the West, both in beliefs and in practices. And there is another point to note: Gregory also revered Martin of Braga, however different their views about candles. We do not, even among the uncompromising (who were numerous in the early medieval church: Valerius is only an extreme version of a type), often find the ferocity of religious disagreement that was typical in Late Rome. The spiritual challenges and problem-solving sketched out in this paragraph would have been recognizable in the Roman world, but the context had changed. We need to explore how.
The episcopal hierarchy of the late empire in most places survived into the early Middle Ages without a break. As we shall see, the monastic tradition established by John Cassian and Benedict of Nursia did as well, and took on ever greater force in northern Europe. The organizational framework of Roman Christianity, discussed earlier, was still fully in operation. One important difference, however, was that it was less united. This can be explored through looking at the authority of the popes. Nominally the senior bishop of the Latin church, the pope between 550 and 750 was little looked to by people in Francia, Spain, even northern Italy. In religious and political terms, popes themselves were orientated eastward, to the patriarchs in the Byzantine empire and (after the 630s) in the caliphate, their equals, and they sparred over eastern-generated theological issues; as institutional leaders, they were looked to above all by the Byzantine parts of Italy, and even there they had energetic rivals in the archbishops of Ravenna. The register of letters of Gregory the Great (590-604), who was also the most significant theologian to be pope in the early medieval period, has survived; the 850-plus letters in it are overwhelmingly addressed to central and southern Italy, especially Naples and Sicily, and also to Ravenna and Constantinople. Fewer than thirty are to Gaulish recipients, if we exclude Provence, where the pope had lands, and fewer than ten to Spain. Only in England did the popes have real influence, thanks to Gregory’s initiative in sending the first mission to Kent in 597 under Augustine of Canterbury. Although the Kentish mission did not convert most of the Anglo-Saxons (the Irish were the most successful missionaries in England), the Roman connection was made permanent by Theodore of Tarsus’ reorganization of the English church after 669. Most medieval archbishops of Canterbury from then on received the pallium, a linen band representing their office, from Rome, and this, too, gave the papacy considerable leverage in England. Apart from in England, however, the institutional unity of the western church remained nominal for a long time. It recognized a common identity, certainly, but its liturgies became different, and its monastic traditions were extremely various as well. The Carolingians revived the Roman link, and (more importantly) they also centralized church practices along Frankish lines, and monastic practices along Benedictine ones; all the same, a structured western church focused on Rome in any serious way did not develop until after the end of the period covered by this book. The Visigoths and Franks had plenty of church councils, but these were councils of the bishops of a kingdom, and did not look outside the borders of Spain and Francia respectively. Essentially, the political fragmentation of the western empire had fragmented the church as well.
One consequence of all this is that the western church did not have much trouble with heresy in this period. The Arian-Catholic division lasted until 589 in Spain, as we saw in Chapter 6, and was violent while it lasted; well-informed contemporaries like Gregory of Tours and Gregory the Great rejoiced at the Catholic victory in the third council of Toledo. Gregory of Tours had a personal obsession with the evils of Arianism, indeed, which appears many times in his Histories. The signs are, however, that his contemporaries in Francia were altogether more neutral on the subject, perhaps considering Gregory’s dinner-table speeches about Arianism (at the expense of unfortunate Gothic envoys) somewhat out of place. In Spain, religious orthodoxy remained important, as the late seventh-century persecution of the Jews shows. Indeed, the Spanish bishops even persecuted Priscillianists, a very marginal sect; vegetarianism itself, a standard ascetic trait, was a little suspect in Spain because Priscillianists refused meat, and the 561 council of Braga required vegetarian clerics at least to cook their greens in meat broth, to show their orthodoxy. But new heresies did not appear even in Spain before the late eighth century, and in Francia, and later in England, religious controversy in this period was hardly ever about doctrine. Only the date of Easter caused difficulties, and then only in the Irish and Welsh churches, where in the seventh and eighth centuries it became apparent that the local rules for calculating Easter diverged from those in Rome. Where controversy lay was in the behaviour of clerics, and whether their sexual activity, mode of dress, or the gifts they may have paid for their office (the sin of simony) undermined their sacrality. There was never a time without rigorists who could wax angry on the failings of bishops and priests in these respects.
As noted in Chapter 3, even under the empire the purity of the clergy may have mattered more in the West than in the East, and their exact beliefs about the Trinity somewhat less. But the lack of intense theological argument in this period probably also betrays a smaller critical mass of highly educated churchmen. The two centuries after 550 were not as low a point for functional literacy, even for the laity, as was once thought. Government was based on writing everywhere on the Continent until after the Carolingian period; kings and the lay aristocracy could normally read, and could sometimes compose quite elaborate Latin, as in the court of Childebert II in the 580s, or that of Sisebut in the 610s. (Writing itself, as a specific technical skill, was probably less widespread, and dictating to copyists was normal.) A more developed literary training was usually restricted to churchmen by now, and it was more orientated towards ecclesiastical works than had been the case two centuries earlier; Gregory of Tours cites more Sidonius and Prudentius than Sallust and Virgil. One could certainly still be well informed in this period; libraries could still be large as was that of Isidore of Seville, and could even be created from scratch, as with the substantial library in Bede’s Jarrow, apparently mostly bought by the monastery’s founder Benedict Biscop in the 650s-680s during his visits to Rome. Bede was a genuine example of an intellectual who had read widely, at least in Christian literature, as a result. All the same, he was the only one in Northumbria in his age; he had no one really to argue with. He tried; some of Bede’s writings (particularly about chronological computation) are quite rude. But this is a long way from the concentration of trained and ambitious theologians in the great eastern cities, Alexandria and Antioch, which had produced Arianism or Nestorianism. This would not reappear in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms until Charlemagne and Louis the Pious established a court ecclesiastical culture, in the three generations after the 780s (see below, Chapter 17). Only Rome would have been large enough to generate such debate in the meantime. That it did not do so may simply show that it was too culturally and spatially fragmented as well. It is also likely that career success in the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy did not depend much on theological skill; Gregory the Great was the only exception, and there is evidence that he was unpopular.
The political fragmentation of the western church and the absence of heresy were, as has been implied, linked: people simply did not have regular information about what was going on outside their own local and regional circuits. A letter of 613 from the Irish monastic founder Columbanus to Pope Boniface IV survives; it dates to the moment of Columbanus’ career in which he had arrived in Lombard Italy, to establish the monastery of Bobbio, after more than two decades in Francia and Alemannia. It expresses great surprise that Boniface (he hears, now he has come to Italy) adheres to the Constantinople line over the Three Chapters schism, and chides him severely for it. Yet the papal position on this had been unchanged since the 550s, and was controversial in northern Italy, at least. Any knowledge of a relatively sharp theological debate seems to have been absent over the Alps, or, at the least, Columbanus could claim it was. If there was that lack of personal contact, then unorthodox belief would not easily expand, and might not even be known about. All kinds of local versions of Christianity could develop under these circumstances, without contestation from elsewhere. It is this localized world that Peter Brown has called one of ‘micro-Christendoms’, a phrase that has had good fortune in recent years: a world of steady divergence in ritual, rule and tradition, as also in the political structures and socio-cultural practices of secular society.
It is a localization, all the same, that we should not exaggerate. People moved about; Columbanus himself is an example. Above all, pilgrims went to Rome, something which becomes well attested in the late sixth century and developed substantially in the seventh and eighth. The Anglo-Saxons are particularly prominent in our evidence; Benedict Biscop and Wilfrid each went several times. The routes became well known, with the result that, as Boniface of Mainz said in 747, in many cities of Italy and Gaul all the prostitutes were English. And there were Franks as well; several seventh- and eighth-century saints’ lives, for Amandus of Maastricht (d. 676), Bonitus of Clermont (d. c. 705) or the Bavarian Corbinian of Freising (d. c. 725), feature pilgrimages to Rome, some more than once. The Lombards in the 740s instituted a passport system on the Alpine frontier for pilgrims to Rome, giving them a sealed document which they expected back on the return journey. There is an entire literature of guides to Roman churches and tombs which begins in the seventh century, and pilgrim hostels for different ethnic groups, Franks, Frisians, Anglo-Saxons, were built between the Vatican and the Tiber. Outside Rome, there were regional pilgrim centres as well, like St Martin’s tomb at Tours, which attracted visitors from all across northern and central Gaul. This might seem less surprising, perhaps, given the extent of élite movement on secular business, and secular communication by letter, across the whole of the Frankish lands, as we saw in Chapter 5 for Desiderius of Cahors; still, pilgrimages involved peasants, too, as is very clear in Gregory of Tours’s collection of the miracles experienced by pilgrims to St Martin. The West’s local societies were by no means hermetically sealed. But this movement remained ad hoc, and did not as yet lessen the variety of the cultural trends of the post-Roman period. This fits the steady localization of economic exchange, too, which reached its peak in much of the West in the eighth century, as we shall see in the next chapter.
The Christian culture of the early Middle Ages was, however disunited, not under threat. Lowland Britain lost most (though probably not all) of its Christianity after the Anglo-Saxons took over, but apart from that retreat, itself reversed in the seventh century, Christian missionaries steadily pushed northwards: into Ireland in the fifth, Pictland in the sixth, and then Frisia in the early eighth, and Saxony under Charlemagne. It is actually quite hard to reconstruct western Germanic paganism, which would have been highly variable anyway. Unlike Graeco-Roman paganism, it was not literate, and did not survive as a resource for later literary imagery either, as the classical gods did - and as those of Ireland did as well, thanks to the coherence and traditionalism of the Irish learned professions, into which the church was assimilated. We are left with hostile and often stereotyped descriptions of pagan rituals or cult-sites, like the Irminsul, the sacred idol of the Saxons, destroyed by Charlemagne in 772. But there is no reason to think that Christian belief changed much as a result of its exposure to a new frontier of paganism beyond the old bounds of the Roman empire, apart from sometimes in terminology, as with the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, whose spring festival took place in the Easter period and whose name was borrowed by Anglo-Saxon Christians.
What the rigorists of the early medieval church did have to face, all the same, was the fact that traditional rituals of varying origins survived everywhere, routinized into local Christian practice. The churchmen of the late empire had often opposed them, as we have seen, but had by no means uprooted them, and the churchmen of the early Middle Ages, in an era of weaker institutions, were even less likely to do so. This is sometimes expressed in terms of pagan survival or revival by our authors, as in the case of Martin of Braga. This is a rhetorical style that was commonest closer to the old Roman frontier, presumably because real pagans were closer there; so the Life of Eligius, bishop of Noyon (d. 660), moves smoothly from Eligius’ sermons against pagan practices, themselves by now a fairly formulaic set, to his preaching against ‘demonic games and wicked leapings’ held on St Peter’s day in Noyon. The participants here were much annoyed by this, however, as they held them to be ‘legitimate . . . customs’, and the implications in the text that this has something to do with paganism are further undermined by the fact that they involved the followers of the major Frankish aristocrat and Neustrian maior domus Erchinoald: these were Christians; it is just that they were performing rituals that Eligius (or his biographer) did not like, or could not control. When Anglo-Saxon missionaries spread from now-converted England back to the Continent, with Willibrord (d. 739) and then Boniface (d. 754), they used the imagery of paganism extensively as well. In Willibrord’s case he really was in pagan territory, in Frisia; but Boniface worked mostly in central Germany, fully part of the Frankish world even if disorganized ecclesiastically, and the ‘pagan’ practices he describes there were more likely to be local Christian customs, like those at Noyon. (Boniface, indeed, writing to Pope Zacharias in 742, complained that there were ‘pagan’ practices even on the streets of Rome, in the First of January celebrations which were still very popular, which Zacharias admitted was true.) As in the late Roman period, simple preaching against such customs was unlikely to get rigorists very far, precisely because they were seen as Christian already. The task of the church would either be to absorb and legitimize them, as perhaps with Eostre, or to set up more ‘orthodox’ religious rituals in rivalry. Religious processions on major saints’ days or to major cult-sites, for example, developed everywhere as part of a Christian ritual aggregation more clearly directed by bishops and other members of the church hierarchy.
This does not mean that ‘the church’ (which was anyway not a concept anyone used in this period) operated as a coherent unit, however. Far from it; the authors of our sources disagreed, between themselves and with their contemporaries, often quite markedly, about what were legitimate religious practices and what were not, and, more generally, about what correct supernatural power consisted of in an age in which direct divine intervention in human society was considered normal. Let us look at four related aspects this: the sanctity of the living; cult-sites and the miraculous; good and bad supernatural acts; and the general issue of supernatural causation.
There were not so many isolated ascetics in the West. Valerius of the Bierzo was atypical in this respect. There were some, certainly; Gregory of Tours tells us about several, as for example Hospicius, who in the 570s lived in a tower outside Nice, wrapped in chains, and who could perform miracles, or Vulfolaic, who spent time as a stylite on a column on the edge of the Ardennes, and whom Gregory met in 585 and was much impressed by. But his account of Vulfolaic expresses a significant ambivalence: bishops had come to the stylite and ordered him off his column, saying that the Ardennes hardly had the climate for it, unlike Syria, and instructing him to form a monastery. ‘Now, it is considered a sin not to obey bishops,’ Vulfolaic said (according to Gregory), so of course he did so, and the bishops smashed the column; Gregory met him in the monastery, where he had remained since then. Gregory’s view is clear: the bishops were probably wrong here, but disobeying them would have been worse. Indeed, when ascetics did disobey bishops, Gregory saw them as openly demonic, as with the unauthorized miracle-workers who on two occasions turned up in Tours and attracted crowds around them, and who were rude, not respectful, to Gregory. Gregory of course gives us a bishop’s view, and such charismatics could evidently gain a considerable following. But Gregory was not being hypocritical either. Bishops at least had a church organization to legitimize them and train them. The trouble about saintly individuals was that it was hard to know when they were alive if their wonder-working was divine or demonic. Ascetics could come to bad ends, like the Breton Winnoch, dressed only in skins, whom Gregory supported, but who drank too much of the wine offered by his followers and died of alcoholism. What value were his miracles then? The miracles of saints when they were dead were by contrast safer, ‘much more worthy of praise’, as Gregory says elsewhere, because they came from completed lives, and from people whose sanctity was testable; the bodies of the saintly dead were not corrupted, and smelt of roses, so that it could be seen that they were not ordinary sinners. Dead saints were also easier to control. Bishops could ensure that they were buried in cathedrals, or episcopally controlled churches like Saint-Martin at Tours, and could organize and take benefit from their cult. The cult of relics of the saintly dead became a dominant feature of the medieval church, in both East and West, but in the West it had little rival during the period covered by this book.
Not everyone was as uneasy about living saints as Gregory of Tours. Gregory the Great, who had been a monk before becoming pope and was openly regretful about being forced back into the spiritual dangers of the secular world, was romantic about ascetics; his accounts of them stress the incomprehension of too-worldly bishops more than his name-sake in Tours ever did. Saints who were part of the standard church hierarchies, as bishops and abbots, or who accepted the authority of such hierarchies, were also not a problem to most authors, and there are any number of saints’ lives about them. And there was clearly a space for isolated charismatic sanctity in the mission situation, as with Patrick’s evangelization in Ireland in the fifth century (the savagery of his cursing of the incredulous was enthusiastically described in Muirchu’s seventh-century Life), or with Cuthbert’s miracle-working and companionship with angels in the 650s-680s, in the half-converted lands of what is now Northumberland, written up by two eighth-century authors (one of them being Bede). Patrick was also a bishop, and Cuthbert became one; these were not opponents of hierarchy. But the space for even this sort of charisma steadily decreased, as time went on. Aldebert was a bishop in central or eastern Francia in the 740s, and a rival to Boniface in the latter’s reorganization of the Frankish church. He had saintly relics with him, he dedicated churches and crosses, he knew the sins of supplicants before they confessed, his hair and nails were venerated, all standard signs of sanctity: and for this he was formally condemned and defrocked in a church council in Rome by Pope Zacharias in 745. Perhaps he had exaggerated, in that it was seemingly he who distributed his hair; he certainly exaggerated in brandishing a letter written by Jesus which had fallen from heaven in Jerusalem, and was picked up by the archangel Michael (Zacharias concluded he was mad), and in listing an unusual and thus perhaps demonic list of angels to pray to. But in a steadily more ordered church, he was by now out of place, and he had made the mistake of opposing Boniface as well: he had to go.
These accounts show clearly that the miraculous was a normal part of the early medieval world; the contest was over who controlled it. Whatever modern rationalists may think about the possibility of miracles taking place, we must recognize that in the early Middle Ages, as under late Rome, there was little doubt about it. It is not that miracles were natural: the power (whether from God or from the saints) that they represented derived, precisely, from their being supernatural, a breach of the natural order. Writers did recognize that there was therefore a danger that they might not be believed, and often were more careful than usual to supply chains of sources for miracles, going back to authoritative eyewitnesses; but the incredulous were regularly stigmatized as ‘rustic’, too boorish to realize how divine providence worked. That is to say, it was incredulity, not (or not only) excessive credulity, that marked peasant inferiority in this period in the eyes of literary élites.
Pilgrimages to saints’ tombs were especially marked by miraculous events. This is clearest in the miracle-book about St Martin written by Gregory of Tours, largely based on the records made by his priests at Martin’s shrine, which had become a large complex of buildings outside the city, focused on the reception of visitors. There was a network of such major cult-sites all across the West. In Gaul, which is relatively well documented, six of them seem to have been particularly important by the seventh century, the churches of Saint-Denis and Saint-Germain in Paris, Saint-Médard in Soissons, Saint-Pierre in Sens, Saint-Aignan in Orléans and Saint-Martin in Tours, all of which were made into monasteries by Queen Balthild around 660. The cult of St Martin, as we have just seen, was enthusiastically advertised by the bishops of Tours. The first two or three of these six, however, were by contrast very much Merovingian-backed cults, essentially royal foundations. In the most important of these, Saint-Denis, Merovingian kings were regularly buried, from Dagobert in 639 onwards. The kings’ support for Saint-Denis (and Saint-Germain, another royal burial place, and probably Saint-Médard as well) shows that a desire to control cult-sites, and to make political capital out of them, was not restricted to bishops. In the Christian topography of the early medieval West, the hot spots, the most powerful points, were all sites with the relics of saints, and it is understandable that people should want to play politics with them. Indeed, this could be very direct: it could involve theft. Rome, which was such a pilgrimage centre largely because of the huge number of saints buried there (thanks to the fact that pre-Constantinian persecution and execution of Christians, martyr-creating, was always most active in the imperial capital), perhaps had more saints than it needed, and certainly many more than it could guard. Stealing saints became particularly common there in the ninth century, as we shall see in Chapter 17. But fighting over saints’ bodies was older than that; Gregory of Tours is proud to recount how Martin’s body, shortly after he died in 397, was stolen by the men of Tours from Poitiers. All such thefts were justified; if they had not been, the saint would have stopped them, miraculously of course.
Not all supernatural activity was seen as good. Saints’ lives and sermons are full of alternative wonder-workers, witches, magicians and soothsayers, who could cast spells, cure, affect the weather and tell the future. These were bad people in the eyes of the writers, but they were clearly numerous. People disagreed over whether they were fraudulent or had real (demoniacal) powers. Among secular legislators, Rothari in Italy in 643 thought that witches should not be killed, for ‘it is in no wise to be believed by Christian minds that it is possible that a woman can eat a living man from within’, but Liutprand in 727 banned soothsayers both male and female (they were to be enslaved); similarly, the Salic lawgivers in Francia prescribed heavy fines for casting spells to kill someone or to make a woman barren. Among ecclesiastical writers, there is a wider tendency to assume that demons were behind their activity (thus Caesarius of Arles, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville and the Carolingian Hincmar of Reims), although an alternative Carolingian strand (Hraban Maur, Agobard of Lyon), like Rothari, denied that their spells could work at all. Actually, Gregory had it both ways on occasions. He tells a story of two children, servants of his, affected by bubonic plague, one of whom was treated by a soothsayer with amulets and died (that is, the magic did not work), while the other drank dust from St Martin’s tomb mixed with water and recovered. This links into the classic hagiographical topos of the magic battle in which the magician/ witch/pagan priest fails and the saint is successful, even if in this case Gregory names himself as an eyewitness. Conversely, plenty of his soothsayers really could tell the future, thanks to demons. One notable account from 577 has Prince Merovech and Duke Guntram Boso, both taking sanctuary from King Chilperic in Saint-Martin in Tours, and thus temporary and unwilling (in Merovech’s case, unpleasant) tenants of Gregory. Both tried to foresee what would happen to them. Guntram Boso went to a soothsayer, who said that Merovech would become king and Guntram his general, and later a bishop; to Gregory it was obvious that the devil was simply lying to him. Merovech used the sortes instead, an entirely Christian divinatory mechanism based on opening the Bible at random and reading sentences (he put the Bible on St Martin’s tomb for greater effectiveness) - unfortunately, and more accurately, these said he would die. Gregory used the sortes too, backed up by an angelic vision, which said the same. Here we see the degree to which this sort of personalized use of the supernatural could be both complementary and in rivalry. All the parties nevertheless assumed that the supernatural world could be manipulated, whether in a good or a bad way.
This private control over the supernatural, ‘magic’, persisted, no matter how much it was reviled by rigorists. It would be reasonable to imagine that, throughout our period, most people had access to magic-workers of one kind or another, whether the local wise-woman or even, on occasion, the local priest. The tenth-century manuscripts containing books on medicine from Anglo-Saxon England, such as Lacnunga and Bald’s Leechbook, which are full of healing spells, came from monastic or cathedral copying-schools, after all. And, here as elsewhere, it must be stressed that the village wise-woman, too, would in most cases have seen her powers as operating in an entirely Christian context, and so would her clientele. The supernatural world was all around, and accessible. The virtue of saints (living or dead) could channel it and make miracles; more edgily, spells and sortes could command it. After all, as all our historians repeat, God’s justice intervened directly in human affairs, making the bad die young and the good prosper, ensuring that virtuous kings won their battles and wicked kings lost (or else, since this did not always occur, allowing the wicked to prosper in order to punish the sins of others). Anyone who believed this sort of immediate divine causation would have little real trouble with the miraculous, and maybe even the magical; there was so much space in Christianity for the exercise of supernatural power.
It was possible to buy into divine causation so much that people denied there was any other kind. Gregory of Tours largely thought this: kings must know that God’s will lay behind everything. As for illness, it derived from demons or God’s punishment for sin, and cures came from repentance or the power of St Martin; doctors were not an acceptable alternative to Gregory, but rivals, on a par with magic-workers. (That said, Gregory did have a doctor, Armentarius, with him when he became bishop in 573; Armentarius failed to cure him from dysentery when St Martin’s dust succeeded.) But Gregory may have been an extremist in this respect; certainly Caesarius of Arles saw doctors as good, and in themselves rivals to magic-workers. Merovingian kings all trusted doctors enough to have them by them all the time; and a Greek doctor, Paul, even became bishop of Mérida in Spain and a saint in the early sixth century; the abortion he skilfully performed on a dead foetus to save the life of the mother, a fabulously wealthy aristocrat, was said in his saint’s life to be the origin of the wealth of the episcopal see thereafter. In medicine as in public life, people were essentially eclectic. One could believe in miraculous cures but, if one was rich enough, still have doctors beside one; and one could believe - everybody believed - that God decided battles, but few generals thought this meant that they did not need trained troops as well, if they could get them. People needed both. And, mostly, people did not see this as a contradiction.
There has been a stress on bishops in this chapter, for they are very prominent in our sources. They really were central, however, if only because the ecclesiastical hierarchy was fairly simple as yet. In the countryside, rural churches were not non-existent, but as yet relatively few. In Italy, a long-Christianized land, there were in the diocese of Lucca sixty rural baptismal churches (plebes) by the tenth century, and these had probably for the most part been founded by the sixth; this may seem a substantial number, but each was the main church for many different settlements. Only in the eighth century did other churches begin to be founded, a trend which continued (with some blips) into the twelfth: by then, Lucca had over six hundred rural parishes, a very different pattern. In Francia, too, rural churches with the right to baptize expanded in number only after 700; and in England, where large ‘minster parishes’ were the norm, this process only really began after 900. So most villages and rural settlements did not yet have their own church; the clergy of the diocese were largely concentrated in the bishop’s own entourage (and in urban churches if cities were big enough); as a result, the ritual activity of each diocese focused, far more than would be the case after the tenth century or so, on the bishop. Bishop Daniel of Winchester, an otherwise exemplary bishop, went blind before he died around 744, a circumstance that seems to have prevented him from baptizing; no one took his place, with the result that many children died unbaptized in his diocese in his last years. This was an extreme case, and it could not have happened in Italy, where there were more baptismal churches, but it does show how ritually important the person of the bishop was. He controlled all the diocesan religious rituals, including processions and festivals, that he could, and sought to control more.
The processions organized by bishops could hold off the plague, cause rain to fall, put out fires and confound enemy armies, if we believe the saints’ lives about them. In one dramatic case from Ravenna in around 700 (according to Agnellus’ episcopal history in the 840s), Archbishop Damian organized a formal penitential procession, divided between men and women, clergy and laity, in order (miraculously) to discover the truth, after one of the urban factions secretly murdered the menfolk of a rival faction. Bishops represented their cities and dioceses politically, but they also did so spiritually. It is remarkable how often episcopal miracles concern the liberation of prisoners held by counts and other secular officials, or the saving of condemned men from death, in many cases quite regardless of their guilt. This matches the more secular ransoming of captives that bishops performed routinely, as well as episcopal pleas for tax relief for their dioceses in front of kings: they were protectors of their flocks in every sense. Bishop Fidelis of Mérida in the mid-sixth century secretly proceeded around the city’s urban and suburban churches by night, following a fiery globe, in the middle of a crowd of saints; those who saw him were sworn to secrecy, and if they spoke about it they died. Small wonder that when Bishop Masona of Mérida was exiled by Leovigild in the early 580s, and also when Bishop Desiderius of Vienne was exiled by Brunhild in 603-7, the city experienced famine, plague and storm till its pastor returned.
Bishops thus mattered greatly. Accordingly, it is not surprising that they tended to be of aristocratic origin, something that we have seen for different countries in previous chapters. There were cases in which they were of lesser birth, and rose up the local church hierarchy because they were good administrators or personally virtuous, but this was probably by now relatively rare everywhere. Being an aristocrat meant that one could rely on a secular (and ecclesiastical) political network that would make any bishop’s life easier. Praejectus of Clermont (d. 676), who was not of high birth, does not seem to have been an astute politician, as we saw earlier, and was killed by aristocratic rivals. Conversely, his second successor Bonitus, of ‘Roman’ noble birth according to his saint’s life (he was indeed probably a descendant of the emperor Avitus and of Sidonius Apollinaris), was a high official in the court of Sigibert III, and became prefect of Marseille, before succeeding his brother Avitus II as bishop of his home town in 690 thanks to Pippin II’s patronage; subsequently he was able to act as a dealer for Pippin, persuading rebels in Lyon to return to loyalty. When he retired a little after 700 and travelled to Rome, it was natural for him to be received by the Lombard king Aripert II, for whom (of course) he did miracles. We have seen similar Frankish bishops operating in the circle of Desiderius of Cahors a generation earlier, too, and the large number of Merovingian saints’ lives makes them particularly well attested in Francia, but they had their analogues in Italy, Spain, England and Ireland as well.
Being an aristocrat and, possibly, a former secular official also meant, however, that an aristocratic lifestyle was very familiar to such bishops. They lived well (this is stressed less in saints’ lives, but it is quite clear in, for example, Gregory of Tours’ Histories); increasingly, they took on secular roles even as bishops. They involved themselves in high politics, which sometimes killed them, as with Leudegar of Autun in 678; increasingly, they also led armies in war. In the sixth century this was still rare in Francia, but it was more common in the seventh and eighth, as with Savaric of Auxerre (d. c. 721), who invaded five neighbouring bishoprics and died on the way to attack a sixth; his successor Hainmar fought Arab raiders from Spain. The bishops of Trier and Mainz in the early eighth century are well-known examples. Milo of Trier (d. c. 757) was the son and great-nephew of former bishops of Trier, an ally of Charles Martel, and a bête noire of Boniface; he is depicted in hostile sources as living a classic lay aristocratic lifestyle. Gewilib of Mainz (d. c. 759) succeeded his father Gerold, who had fallen in battle against the Saxons; Gewilib went back in the next Saxon war and killed his father’s killer. Boniface had him deposed for this in 745, and succeeded him in his see, although Gewilib lived on, enjoying some local respect. Boniface achieved no real change of episcopal style, anyway; martial bishops remained common under the Carolingians. All this must not be seen as a ‘secularization’ of the church (although Boniface undoubtedly thought so); Milo and his father Liutwin were keen monastic patrons, and Liutwin indeed became a saint. But they were aristocrats; this is what aristocrats did. In Italy, too, Bishop Walprand of Lucca, son of Duke Walpert of the same city, another respected church leader, seems to have died in the war against Pippin III in 754.
The other side to this coin was that aristocratic birth was regarded by many as intrinsically virtuous. Over and over again, saints’ lives stress noble birth as a positive element in the saint’s future holiness; only a very few writers (Bede, not himself an aristocrat, was one) play it down. The rapid expansion of monasticism in Francia, England, Ireland in the seventh century and Italy in the eighth is clearly associated with this sort of intrinsic aristocratic virtue, more even than the episcopal church. Of course, aristocrats had the wealth to endow monasteries in the first place; but they chose abbots and abbesses from their own families, if indeed they did not become the head of the monastery themselves. Columba in Iona (d. 597), himself nephew and cousin of kings, was succeeded by male-line family members, with only one break, in the next century, as his seventh successor, his biographer Adomnán (d. 704), proudly relates. Major female monastic founders and abbesses, Hild of Whitby (d. 680) or Gertrude of Nivelles (d. 653) were also from the highest ranks, Hild a great-niece of King Edwin, Gertrude the daughter of Pippin I; they became saints and they, too, were succeeded by relatives.
The foundation of a monastery in fact served two purposes. One was the honouring of God and the establishment of a group of specialist devotees to that process of honouring, which was a virtuous act and would ease one’s passage to heaven, reinforced by the prayers of the monks or nuns, still more if the founder also became a monk or nun, dedicated to ascesis in the framework of the monastic rule. The other was to act as an organizing pole for the founder’s family: most monasteries remained under de-facto family control (and, if possible, out of control of the local bishop), with abbots and abbesses choosing successors who were either direct kin or family clients; and land given by relatives to the monastery did not really leave the family unless the latter lost control of the foundation. These two purposes were by no means in contradiction; indeed, the more the monastery shone as a spiritual beacon, the more other people would give land to it as well, and the more the founding family would gain status - and the more prayers would be said for them. One had to be careful to do this right. Bede raged against false monasteries in Northumbria in a letter of 734, and Fructuosus of Braga had already said the same for northern Spain around 660: both saw cosy family foundations, with no pretence to religious commitment, as a confidence trick, aimed only at escaping lay obligations. Such monasteries must have been common, in fact, and were probably considered normal by most, indeed virtuous. But the great foundations were more spiritually committed, without, for the most part, abandoning family ties; that would not come until much later, not until after 1000 in most cases.
Linked to these monastic foundations, but not restricted to it, came a huge increase in church land. Kings, bishops, aristocrats and indeed smaller landowners gave land to cathedrals, monasteries and local churches throughout Europe: from the sixth century in Spain, Wales and Byzantine Italy, from the early seventh, probably, in Frankish Gaul and Ireland, from the late seventh in England, from the early eighth in Lombard Italy and Germany east of the Rhine (the dates are those of our earliest references to extensive gift-giving; that for Gaul may be too late). The eighth century seems to have marked a temporary high point for such gifts; they became less frequent in these areas in the early ninth. David Herlihy has estimated, however, that by then almost a third of the land area of Francia and Italy was probably ecclesiastically owned. The motivation for these gifts was of course religious; the imagery of an exchange of gifts, a physical gift to a church in return for prayers, or burial in the church, or even heavenly life, recurs often in surviving documents, for such gifts are the initial basis for most of the documentary archives that survive from this period onwards. But they were part of family strategies, too; the prayers were often for families, and it was common in Italy, for example, for a donor with three sons to give a quarter of his property - an extra son’s portion - to the church. The gifts were also often to family foundations, or to the foundations of secular or ecclesiastical patrons whom one might need to impress.
The appearance of landed gifts of this kind often follows on quite closely from the end of the practice, common in the sixth and early seventh century in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms, of burying valuables in the ground as part of the funerary clothing and accoutrements of dead family-members. Getting rid of property in preparedness for death, or as part of the death ritual, was a public act, with resonance for one’s social status, for both pagans and Christians. (Not that furnished burials in themselves imply paganism, as was once thought. There were plenty of standard Christian examples, including St Cuthbert himself. But they began in the pagan period, in England for example, and have the same features in both pagan and Christian regions.) It has also been argued that burying goods is a mark of élites still relatively unsure of their local status, and concerned to negotiate it by competitively disposing of property, which became less necessary once aristocracies became stable and wealthy. The argument has particular force in Anglo-Saxon England. Why one might move from the ceremony of burying movable goods to that of the handing over of land (and also movables) to the church remains unclear; but churches themselves vastly preferred the latter, of course, and as they gained in influence this must have had weight. And one result of the shift to landed gifts was that individual churches and monasteries could gain considerable wealth, putting themselves, as institutions, on the level of aristocratic families in terms of resources. This in itself added to the desire of aristocrats to control them; it also made the richest monasteries into powerful political players, as we saw for Clonmacnois in Ireland, and as would soon be the case for Fulda and St. Gallen in Germany, Nonantola, Farfa, S. Vincenzo al Volturno and Montecassino in Italy, Saint-Denis, Saint-Germain and Saint-Bertin in what is now France, to which we should add, for the tenth century, Cluny in France, and Ely and Ramsey in England. Already in the 660s the retired Queen Balthild said to her fellow nuns in her monastery at Chelles that they should play the political game, visiting and giving gifts to kings, queens and aristocrats, ‘as was the custom, so that the house of God would not lose the good reputation with which it had begun’; in the ninth century and beyond this would be the mark of a recognizable monastic politics.
The moral king looked after his people, was successful in war, was just and generous and listened to bishops. These were international presumptions in the early Middle Ages, and they were important. In Ireland, indeed, unjust or unsuccessful kingship was explicitly believed to bring climatic disaster, and other peoples thought the same (cf. below, Chapter 17, for the Franks). War was unavoidable; even the most religious of kings had to do it, or their kingdoms were in danger. King Sigeberht of East Anglia retired to a monastery in the 630s, but was called back by his people when Penda of Mercia attacked, to give them courage; this did not work, unfortunately, and he died in battle (Bede, our source for this, tells the story fairly flatly, and he may well have thought Sigeberht’s non-military choices were wrong). Doing justice was, together with war, the basic attribute of early medieval government, and all kings were assessed by observers for their fairness in judging and accessibility to plaintiffs; actual law-making was less important before 750, except perhaps in Spain. Generosity was the necessary marker of every king, large or small, who wanted to have or build up a loyal entourage; hael, ‘generous’, was a standard epithet of successful Welsh kings, for example, and we saw in Chapter 5 the political importance of the treasury for Frankish kings; conversely, a vignette in Beowulf depicts the Danish king Heremod as mad when he not only killed members of his entourage but ‘did not give the Danes treasures in pursuit of high esteem’, and his men abandoned him. Listening to bishops is an attribute that is particularly likely to be stressed by our sources, which are nearly all ecclesiastical. Gregory of Tours praised Guntram most out of his contemporaries, perhaps for this reason above all, and Braulio of Zaragoza could in the 640s give unsought advice even to Chindasuinth, controversial and ruthless though the latter was; all the same, bishops were themselves political players, and respect for them was only sensible. Every successful Christian king in our period played church politics, indeed, and some, notably in seventh-century Spain, pursued it very assiduously.
Our sources, even though so very clerical for the most part, nonetheless give secular values a good deal of respect. The effective polygamy of Merovingian kings is only occasionally criticized in our sources; Columbanus was the only ecclesiastic who actually condemned a king for it, Theuderic II, and he was expelled from the kingdom for his pains. (The Franks may have given their kings more licence, though; Visigothic, Lombard and Anglo-Saxon kings were all at least sometimes criticized for sexual excess.) And the violence that was the inevitable consequence of war was hardly ever condemned, at least if it was done to other people. It is crucial to remember that the whole of secular society was by now militarized, throughout the West, and clerics, too, took military virtues for granted. Military obligations at least in theory extended even to the peasantry (see Chapter 9), and characterized all the aristocracy by definition; with this came training in arms and in quasi-military sports such as hunting. Kings put their palaces beside woodland regions that were easy to reach for hunting; the Frankish and Lombard kings began to see some of these regions as ‘forest’, royal reserves, in which only they could hunt. Aristocrats did not do this yet, but they were certainly as enthusiastic about the sport as kings were; Charlemagne at the turn of the eighth century had to upbraid his counts for cutting short judicial hearings in order to hunt, and Milo of Trier’s aristocratic attitude to episcopal office was epitomized by his death, killed by a wild boar. A militarized lifestyle marked kings and aristocrats in every respect, indeed; as we have seen, it was the major change in élite culture that followed the end of the Roman empire. Aristocratic clothing, marked by a large amount of gold and jewellery worn on the person and (for men) a prominent belt, similarly bejewelled, descended from the military costume of the Roman period, and so did the symbolism of the belt itself, which generally represented military or political office (though by now the belt was bigger and flashier than under Rome). Eligius of Noyon, when a secular official for Dagobert I in the 630s, was already saintly enough to give his ornamenta to the poor; Dagobert gave him another belt, however; he could not avoid wearing that.
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 Faremoutiers 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.
The early Anglo-Saxons are much less clearly documented, but their emphasis on dynastic legitimacy could in principle have had an impact on royal mothers; loose succession rules meant that there were few child kings in England before the tenth century, but, when there were, their mothers would be important (below, Chapter 19). The early prominence of powerful abbesses in several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms also implies some parallels to the Merovingian situation. The Visigoths and Lombards put less stress on female politics, however. This is again partly a problem of our sources, which include few narratives, and which are also prone to depict women’s political action even more negatively than in the kingdoms further north: the Arian queen of Spain Goiswintha (d. 589), for example, widow of King Athanagild (and also mother of Brunhild of Francia), who conspired against Leovigild and Reccared in turn, and sought to undermine Reccared’s conversion to Catholicism, as John of Biclar recounts; or, in Italy, Queen Rosimunda (d. c.573), who engineered the assassination of her husband Alboin in 572 but came to a bad end, according to Paul the Deacon. Paul is indeed consistent in depicting female political protagonism, by queens or duchesses, in the most negative light, with the exception of his heroine, Theodelinda, wife of two successive kings, correspondent of Gregory the Great, and probably queen-regent to her son Adaloald (616-26). Her example at least shows that given the right circumstances a woman could have considerable authority in Italy. These circumstances were repeated in the autonomous duchy of Benevento in 751-5, when Scauniperga, Gisulf II’s widow, ruled with her young son Liutprand, calling herself dux together with him, and was listed first in documents. Benevento had a stable ruling family, which must have helped Scauniperga into that role. At other times, adult kings succeeded, often by coup, and the absence of a dynastic principle did not help female protagonism; but attitudes like those of Paul, if widely felt, would have made their space still more limited. The Lombards certainly did not value the sort of independent political action that was sometimes available to aristocratic women in the Byzantine parts of the peninsula, as with the patricia Clementina in the Naples of the 590s, who appears in Gregory the Great’s letters as a sometimes controversial political figure in Naples, both an ally and an enemy to local clerical leaders (her unfree dependants staged a small peasants’ revolt against a papal envoy; she tried to stop the election of Bishop Amandus of Sorrento because she wanted him to stay in her entourage). Indeed, aristocratic female dealers like Clementina, powerful because of their own wealth without any explicit family context, look back to the late empire rather than forward into the early Middle Ages, anywhere in the West, including the Byzantine lands. Later, the bonds of family, whether by birth or by marriage, would be everywhere.
I stress high politics here, not because the exercise of political power is necessarily the most important thing anyone did, but rather because this is where the evidence is located. It was argued in Chapter 3 that gender assumptions, although universally more constraining for women than for men in the later Roman period (and all the constraints listed there applied in the early Middle Ages too), gave more space for a range of female activity than they did later. In general, female protagonism in the early Middle Ages was more clearly tied in to the lifecycle and to family strategies than it had been under the empire. It was also more constrained by legal norms. Even though ‘barbarian’ laws, even less than those of Rome, did not circumscribe social action much in practice, they at least reflected the mind-sets of legislators; and they universally assume legal disabilities for women. Women were expected to be under male legal protection in most of our societies, that of their father, brothers, husband in turn, until they were widowed. In some early medieval societies they were then legally independent, but they were in a weak position, and the control of the lands they by then had access to (dowry from their father, a ‘morning-gift’ from their husband - the latter could amount to a lot, a quarter of his property in Lombard Italy, sometimes a third in Francia) was under threat from their children and from male relatives of all sorts. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of this sort of threat to widows: for example, in Italy, Rottruda of Pisa, whose attempts to found a pilgrim-hostel according to her dead husband’s wishes were opposed by his brother in 762, or Taneldis of Clemenziano in the Sabina, who disinherited her son’s heirs in 768, for the ‘many injuries and bitter trouble and damage’ that he did to her. Morning-gifts in land seem also to have been more often sold than any other family property in central Italy, which implies that the land women might inherit was seen as less essential to retain.
Lombard Italy was, indeed, out of all these societies, the one where the legal constraints on women seem to have been greatest; it was probably matched only by Ireland. In Italy, women remained under legal protection, that of their male children, even as widows. Lombard legislation spends a good deal of space setting out the obligations of men to treat women properly, which testifies to a general culture of constraint. In 731 Liutprand listed the mistreatments that would cause a man to forfeit his rights of legal protection over a woman: if he let her go hungry, did not clothe her according to his own wealth, had sex with her or married her to a slave, or struck her (unless ‘in honest discipline’). Lombard law also so totally assumed that women did not bear arms that it made no provision for what happened if they committed violent acts, as Liutprand discovered with horror in 734; in future they were to be publicly humiliated, and their husbands, presumed to be the real perpetrators, should pay compensation. This was a law directed at peasants, not aristocrats, but it testifies to a set of gendered assumptions that were particularly Lombard, and are reflected also in the writings of Paul the Deacon. They would have been recognizable north of the Alps, too, but they were most consistently applied in Italy.
The early Middle Ages have traditionally been seen as more ‘Germanic’ than late Rome, the product of invasion, and also as the location of a cultural ‘Romano-Germanic’ fusion, which would be developed and perfected under the Carolingians. As I have implied in previous chapters, this does not seem to me an accurate characterization. For a start, early medieval societies in the West had common features whether there had been invasion or not: Byzantine Italy and Wales were in many ways parallel to Lombard Italy and England respectively. Ireland, too, with little contact with the ‘Germanic’ world, had similarities with it (although, of the societies we have looked at, this was in many respects the most atypical). The real contrast inside the ex-Roman provinces was not between societies that had been invaded or conquered and the others, but between the Continent and Britain: in the former, the basic Roman political and social structures survived (though they were in most places ramshackle and underfunded), and in the latter they did not; tribal societies were a feature of both the Anglo-Saxon and the Welsh parts of post-Roman Britain. Overall, in fact, the major change in political culture was not Germanization but militarization: the age of a dominant military aristocracy began in the fifth and sixth centuries, and continued throughout the West for more than a millennium. As we shall see in Part III, this was a feature of the Byzantine empire, and to a lesser extent the caliphate, as well.
All the same, identities did change. Fewer and fewer people in the West called themselves Romani; the others found new ethnic markers: Goths, Lombards, Bavarians, Alemans, Franks, different varieties of Angles and Saxons, Britons - the name the non-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain had given themselves by 550, the Romani having left, and a word itself due soon to be replaced by a Welsh term, Cymry, ‘fellow countrymen’. Even in a part of the former empire unconquered by invaders, that is to say, the Romans were not the Britons themselves, but other people, earlier invaders, who had come and gone. And although of course the huge majority of the ancestors of all these peoples were men and women who would have called themselves Roman in 400, the Roman world had indeed gone, and Roman-ness with it.
The early Middle Ages was materially a much simpler period than the late empire, and Roman buildings and ruins were all around, generally dwarfing more recent constructions, and generally also more carefully built. Did early medieval peoples feel insecure or nostalgic about the Roman past? There is very little sign of it. Gregory of Tours, although of an aristocratic Roman family, seems hardly aware the empire has gone at all; his founding hero was Clovis, and all his loyalties Frankish. Paul the Deacon wrote up Romans and Lombards alike, and, although he knew well how violent the Lombard invasion was, it seemed to him inevitable, and he was proud of his Lombard antecedents. To those who did not warm to the image of Scandinavia as the ‘womb of [Germanic] nations’, there was Troy as another non-Roman origin myth, and also the Israel of the Old Testament (the Franks in particular came to use the latter imagery frequently: see Chapter 16). And if writers did not focus their identity exclusively on ethnic origin, they identified with their province instead, as with Isidore of Seville’s praise of Spain in the 620s: ‘Rightly did golden Rome, the head of nations, desire you long ago. And . . . now it is the most flourishing people of the Goths, who in their turn, after many victories all over the world, have easily seized you and loved you: they enjoy you up to the present time amidst royal emblems and great wealth, secure in the good fortune of empire.’ For Isidore, the man of the whole early medieval period most imbued with a pre-Constantinian literary culture, that was the past, and the present was equally glorious.
The ‘myth of Rome’ was indeed, more and more, the new Christian Rome of basilicas and martyrs’ tombs. The guidebooks for pilgrims do not put particular stress on the huge pre-Constantinian buildings still standing in the city (as often, thirteen centuries further on, they still are); these were at best a monumental backdrop to the new numinous foci of the Christian world. Tombs were a metonym for Rome: in Ireland, the word ruaim, ‘Rome’, actually came to mean a monastic cemetery. This Rome persisted; the imperial image of Rome and its empire, by contrast, was increasingly abandoned. Carolingian rulers and their entourage would be much more interested in the Roman empire, reviving the title of emperor, using Suetonius on Augustus as a model for a biography of Charlemagne, copying classical texts, recommending Roman histories to each other; but they did so in a framework of a Frankish/Carolingian self-confidence so gigantic that they had to draw on all the models that existed, imperial Rome, Troy and Israel all together, so that they could surpass them. For them, too, however, the Rome they most valued was the Christian one, of basilicas, tombs, and, increasingly, popes.
The final point that needs to be made is that the beliefs and practices discussed here did not change much after 750. For the most part, pre-Carolingian examples have been used here, but instances from any century up to 1000, and indeed beyond, could as easily be given. The Carolingians (Louis the Pious in particular) largely unified monastic regulation, and the scale of their political control brought churchmen from all of the West into more regular contact. They developed a more regular educational system, especially for the élite, which reversed the intellectual isolation of figures like Bede, and which allowed theological debate and even heresy to reappear (see Chapter 17). But the basic presuppositions about religious practices described in this chapter continued to underpin the Carolingian reform programme, and indeed survived its partial eclipse at the end of the ninth century. As for aristocratic attitudes, and concepts of gender difference, these barely shifted at all in the Carolingian period. The political and cultural changes that will be discussed in Part IV of this book rested on a foundation of values that remained stable for a long time.