MEDIEVAL AGE - LOCAL SOCIETY, ETHNICITY AND THE BARBARIANS

By 500 ad all the Roman provinces of the West had become barbarian kingdoms: the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul, the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Sueves and the Visigoths in Spain, the Vandals in North Africa, the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons in Britain. Ultimately this had stemmed not from huge military attacks and the outright conquest of territory from theRoman Empire, but from a break-down of Roman political structures in the last quarter of the fourth century, which exposed the weakness of Roman rule at the local level.

In areas where everything had hinged upon the presence of the Roman state, there was a dramatic collapse, and people sought new sources of local power. By c.500, although many Roman idioms of power persisted, people now also demonstrated their authority with material culture, which directly referred to non-Roman, barbarian sources, and especially to the Danubian Gotho-Hunnic culture of Attila’s short-lived empire. The Frankish king Childeric, who died some time around 480, was buried with Roman symbols like his official brooch and seal-ring, but his grave also contained gold-and-garnet ornament of Danubian inspiration.48 The fourth-century Roman Empire had depended for its further existence upon being able to continue to provide the backing for power at the local level. After 388 it lost, and never thereafter regained, its ability to provide this, so people looked elsewhere. Some barbarian warbands were inside the Empire and could provide alternative foci, especially when granted the government of particular provinces; other foci were provided by strong barbarian kings on the frontier who had the power to expand into the northern provinces, and could equally provide support for local authority when no alternatives existed.

We must put the provincials back into the history of the end of the Empire and the creation of the barbarian kingdoms. It will no longer do to see them either as passive and helpless or, as A. H. M. Jones, the great historian of the late Roman Empire, thought,49 as indifferent observers of the changes from Roman to barbarian political authority. Nor will it do to see senatorial aristocrats in southern Gaul, Spain or Italy taking office with the barbarians for the simple purpose of gaining protection. Some Spanish aristocrats tried, and admittedly failed, to hold the Pyrenees against the Vandals in the early 400s, but showed that they could raise armed forces.50 Southern Gallic aristocrats led military contingents raised from their lands both against theGoths and for them, forming an important component of their armies. In southern Spain, such aristocrats maintained political independence for many decades,51 so mere protection cannot provide the explanation. In the southern provinces the explanation must be that the new rulers provided what these local aristocrats had had for a long time, and what after 388 they were threatened with losing, that is, access to the centre of political power. The incomers provided the means whereby senatorial aristocrats could maintain their standing vis-`a-vis their peers, as well as retain their supremacy within their localities. This supremacy was also importantly maintained by the appropriation of ecclesiastical authority, as is well known, but the non-ecclesiastical, military or bureaucratic options were numerically far more significant and have been unduly neglected by historians.52 In 507 the Franks defeated the Visigoths at the battle of ‘Vouille’,53 and within a decade or so had driven them definitively from their Aquitanian kingdom. This led to the southern Gallic aristocrats’ removal from the centre of political power, but they soon sought a new one, taking service with northern Frankish kings in order to keep their options open.

In other regions the appeal to barbarian outsiders to maintain power at much more local levels, as in northern Gaul and Britain, was even more necessary. Here, people widely adopted the ethnic identity of the newcomers, as they did, after the political chaos of the mid-sixth century, in the Iberian peninsula. By 700, to all intents and purposes, everyone north of the Loire was a Frank, everyone in the south-east was a Burgundian, everyone in Spain was a Goth; everyone in lowland Britain was some sort of Anglo-Saxon; you had to go to Italy to find Romans. Where had the Romans gone? This was a problem even in 700; to explain the Romans’ apparent disappearance, Frankish and Anglo-Saxon writers had to invent stories of mass slaughter and expulsion of native Romans, although the problem was doubly serious in Gaul where they had to explain how the Romans had managed to teach the Franks Latin first.54

The categories of Roman and barbarian were fluid. In the post-Roman centuries this could be graphically illustrated. In Ostrogothic Italy, the Gothic rulers were almost never referred to as barbarians; barbarians were other foreigners, even other Goths! On the other hand, in the Burgundian kingdom, the label barbarian could be actively appropriated by the Burgundians to describe themselves. In Gaul, the Roman/barbarian dichotomy was turned to describe Catholic Christian as opposed to heretics or pagans. By the eighth century a bored Bavarian scribe could even turn the old attitudes on their head and write (in Latin!) ‘Romans are stupid; Bavarians are wise.’55

The new political identities of the Goths, Franks, Burgundians, Angles or Saxons could hence be adopted without much disgrace. This was particularly so in that it was the military elites of these people, the armed warriors, who called themselves Goths, Saxons or whatever, in the new kingdoms, and who held the military and political power. As further chapters will show, there was frequently a bipartite division of labour: barbarians fought; Romans paid taxes, so becoming a barbarian could bring with it tax exemption. In the post-Roman legal codes the ‘barbarian’ element of the population was often given legal privilege, another reason to adopt a barbarian ethnic identity. Even Gregory of Tours, a senatorial south Gallic aristocrat, had a maternal great uncle called Gundulf, a barbarian name perhaps associated with the fact that Gundulf had taken service in the Austrasian Frankish court. Returning to local communities, we can see that the adoption of a new ethnic identity could be important in striving for authority and power against rivals, especially in situations where people were looking for new sources of authority.56

How did one become a barbarian? Names were one way, as the example of Gundulf shows.We occasionally get references to individuals with two names, one Roman and one barbarian, revealing this process in action. Then there was material culture. In the new, emerging political units of the post-Roman West, dress-style and artefact-forms were important in demonstrating one’s political affinity, and this is shown archaeologically in brooch fashions and so on. Other, less archaeologically visible features such as hair-style were also used, as is referred to in a number of sources.57 However, the effects were not everywhere the same. In Britain, by 700 the language had changed; elsewhere the linguistic input of the barbarians was far less, even if they nevertheless changed people’s ethnic affiliation just as dramatically. Why was this? Is it simply a question of the number of barbarians, as is still usually supposed? Is it insignificant? Linguistic changes can be and have been effected by minuscule numbers of immigrants.58 This is a fair point but cannot stand up to close scrutiny, as it suffers, as do many theories of early Anglo-Saxon history, from its insularity. The Franks, Goths and Burgundians had similar, if not greater, political and military dominance without changing the local language, except along the Rhine. Yet arguments that explain the linguistic change in lowland Britain, and the fact that no such change took place on the continent, by reference to large numbers of incoming Anglo-Saxons are also too crude. We have to consider the other side of the coin; the strength of the provincial identity. In those areas where the transition to barbarian power was smoothest, that is southern Gaul and sixth-century Italy and Spain, Roman identity, especially amongst the aristocracy, was important, a source of pride which could be deployed against the parvenus, the barbarians and their hangers on. It is no surprise that no one changed their language here, although, as we have seen, many changed their names. It took the wars and political disruption of the mid-sixth century and the actual destruction of the old Roman aristocracy to change the situation in Spain and Italy. The situation never really changed in Aquitaine before the eighth century; the Aquitanians never became Franks. Instead, from the seventh century many of them increasingly adopted a Basque, or ‘Gascon’, identity. The reasons for this ethnic change are probably similar to those discussed above, for Britain and northern Gaul. Removal from, and an inability to participate in, core politics in Gaul meant the end of regularly managed patronage.Disappointed rival competitors for local power sought the backing, and adopted the identity, of a more immediate and militarily effective power: that of the Basques, who had been attacking southern Gaul since at least the sixth century.59

In the north, though, as we have seen, Roman identity counted for much less, and so in northern Gaul change of ethnic identity to the more ‘advantageous’ Frankish identity was more or less universal by about 600. In lowland Britain, as perhaps along the Rhine, the situation seems to have been even more extreme. It is not unlikely that Latin speech and Roman identity were replaced by both a British political identity, associated with the west British highland rulers, and by the English identity associated with the eastern newcomers. Latin culture rapidly collapsed after 388 and stood no chance. There may very well have been more English migrants than there were Franks in Gaul. On the continent the burial rites of the Germanic barbarians’ homelands make little or no appearance in the archaeology of the post-Roman kingdoms, but the cremation rites which the English had employed in northern Germany were adopted in lowland Britain too. It must, nevertheless, be conceded that the adoption of this rite could also be a function of the weakness of local British identity, and it should be noted that many Anglo-Saxons (like their continental counterparts) adopted the common late provincial and post-Roman rite of lavishly furnished inhumation. So we need not invoke huge numbers of barbarian migrants to explain even dramatic culture-change. We must consider the weakness of the indigenous culture as well as the strength of the incoming one.

This article has proposed that future work on the barbarians and their role in the changes that took place between the late fourth and seventh centuries should adopt new approaches. We have seen that the barbarian migrations should be understood as the result of the collapse of the Roman Empire, not vice versa; that the formation of the post-Roman kingdoms should be viewed as aspects of provincial history; that the changes of this period, the creation of those kingdoms, and of the new identities, must be understood as the results of active, conscious decisions by many people as part of their struggles and conflicts within their own local societies, because, in this, as in so many other periods of history, we have to put not just the social history back into the political, but the political back into the social, and above all we have to put the people back into their history.

Notes

48. Childeric’s grave: James (1988a), pp. 58–64, and Halsall (1995a). 49. Jones (1964), pp. 1058–64.
50. Aristocrats holding the Pyrenean passes: Orosius, Against the Pagans vii.40.5–10. 51. See n. 47, above, and Barbero and Loring, chapter 7 below.
52. Heather (1994b), pp. 177–97.
53. See Gerberding (1987), p. 41, for the suggestion that the battle of Campus Vogladensis took place, not at Vouille, as usually proposed, but at Voulon.
54. For example Bede, HE i, esp. 1, 34. A marginal comment to a ninth-century manuscript of the Liber Historiae Francorum adds to its eighth-century account the fact that the Romans were exterminated after teaching the Franks Latin: James (1988a), p. 237.
55. Gothic attitudes to the term ‘barbarian’: Amory (1997), pp. 50–85. On Burgundian attitudes to the term ‘barbarian’:Wood (1990); Amory (1993), pp. 1–28. Bavarian marginalia: Musset (1975), p. 190.
56. Bipartite divisions: Goffart (1980); (1982); Moorhead (1994), pp. 71–5; Halsall (1995b), pp. 26–32; Amory (1997), pp. 46–85, 91–108. On Gundulf, Gregory of Tours, Hist. vi.11.
57. Names: Amory (1997), pp. 86–91, 97–102, and passim. Archaeology: Halsall (1995a), pp. 56–61. On the processes by which the barbarians were integrated into the former provinces of the Empire and created new social and political groupings and identities, see the contributions to Pohl (1997); Pohl and Reimitz (1998); Pohl, Reimitz and Wood (2001).
58. Higham (1992), pp. 189–208; M. E. Jones (1996), p. 39.
59. On the Basques and Aquitaine, see James (1977), pp. 3–27; Rouche (1979); Collins (1984); (1986).

By Guy Halsall in "The New Cambridge Medieval History" v. I, edited by Paul Fouracre, Cambridge University Press, USA/UK, 2008, excerpts p. 51-55. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.