Why this book needs to be written part 1

Reason One: the Carolingian achievement is a compelling historical problem

This one needs a little unpacking. Put it simply, in the eighth century, three Carolingian rulers, Charles Martel, Pippin the Short and Charlemagne, working in succession, were able to create the largest state that Western Europe had ever known since the days of the ancient Roman Empire. Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, then held it all together for another generation. And even though it fractured into three kingdoms and soon more after Louis' death, his successors were able to almost succeed in pasting it all back to together until the last of Louis' grandsons, Charles the Fat, died in 888 without an heir. After that point, no continuous territorial state on the scale of the Carolingian Empire would be seen again until the very short-lived empires of Napoleon and Hitler.  

The question this necessitates is why one family (the Carolingians) were able to gain uncontested political authority over such a large area of mainland Europe for as long as they did?  How did they manage that without a tax system, a large professional civil service, standing armies and speedy communications? Yet manage they did. And by exploring how they did it, one is able to gain a lot of insight into how power and authority work, especially in a premodern setting but also beyond it. 

Reason Two: nations and Europe

On the Continent, the Carolingians appear quite differently depending on who you speak to. The French and Germans have traditionally argued over who can claim ownership of Charlemagne as a national hero. Late medieval artists found a sort of compromise there by showing him with both the Fleur de Lys of France and the German imperial eagle. 

As exemplified here in this panel painting in Aachen from 1470. Photo credit: yours truly

Of course, lets not forget that Charlemagne, and his father Pippin the Short, grandfather Charles Martel and great-grandfather Pippin of Herstal, were actually born in the Liege area of what is now Belgium. This adds an interesting spin for the old British joke about how its impossible to name five famous Belgians. And certainly the Carolingian past does matter to the Belgians too - a lot of the leading scholars of this period from the late nineteenth century up until the 1970s were Belgians, or else French, Germans and Austrians. But interestingly, roughly since the UK joined the EU in 1973, they've become increasingly superseded by the British and the Americans, and the most cutting edge Carolingianist scholarship in the twenty-first century tends to come from universities in the UK and the US. 

The Carolingian age is also often seen as the starting point for France and Germany. There's of course the famous (or infamous) Treaty of Verdun in August 843, which divided the Carolingian Empire between the three sons of Louis the Pious into West Francia (roughly corresponding to modern France), East Francia (roughly corresponding to Germany) and Lotharingia (corresponding to no currently existing European state). As subsequent events were to avail themselves, Lotharingia did not emerge into the next century as an independent sovereign kingdom and its former territories now belong to 8 different modern European nation states. By contrast West and East Francia did, and over the next millennium they would evolve into the modern nation states of France and Germany that we know and love (or loathe depending on who you ask). And in the meantime, the descendants of the ninth century West and East Franks would fight several wars between 938 and 1945 to claim different bits of what had been Lotharingia as their rightful territory. 

But really its not as simple as being able to say that the struggles between rival Carolingian kings created France and Germany, made Belgium the cockpit of Europe and were an ultra-long-term cause of WW1. History didn't inevitably have to turn out this way. If King Lothar II of Lotharingia or Emperor Charles the Fat hadn't died without legitimate male heirs in 869 and 888 respectively, then everything could have turned out very differently. And after the Carolingians were gone, there were many moments where Western European history could have taken a very different turn. To give some underappreciated examples, if Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy had not been killed at the battle of Nancy on 5th January 1477, then a powerful Middle kingdom could have re-emerged in between France and Germany. Or if Queen Mary I of England had produced a child from her marriage Philip II of Spain in 1554, then Belgium and the Netherlands would be under English/ British control and the balance of power in Western Europe that successive pan-European conflicts between 1688 and 1918 were fought to protect simply would not have existed.

Instead, I think the Carolingians serve to remind us that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the nations of France and Germany or the current Western European state-system. Instead they enable us to see a very different political set-up in Western Europe in action, and contemplate many different possibilities for where Western European history could have gone. This is one of the reasons why I think history is such a useful subject. It exists not just to show how the present state of affairs came to be, but also how the present state of affairs hasn't always been the case and how it could be very different. History is in no way a subject that naturally supports the status quo, and its radical (indeed dangerous) potential has been recognised as far back as China under the first emperors.

And what about Europe. It was certainly talked about in more than just a geographical sense in the Carolingian era. The first use of the term "European" in a cultural sense appears to have come from an eighth century Latin chronicle, albeit one written by a Christian writer living in Islamic Spain. One of Charlemagne's chief advisors, Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon from Northumbria, talked a lot about Europe as a cultural entity defined by Latin Christianity. In practice this meant that Europe for the Carolingians was France, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, northern Spain, Great Britain and Ireland. And it was from across this zone that scholars came to Charlemagne's court, including Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Visigoths from Spain and Lombards from Italy. Charlemagne was also on more or less friendly terms with the kings of Mercia, Wessex and Asturias and had a special relationship with the pope in Rome. Not for nothing did a poet around the time of his imperial coronation in 800 call him "The Father of Europe."

If Alcuin lived today, he'd definitely have voted Remain. Here he is with his pupil Hrabanus Maurus dedicating a book to Bishop Otgar of Mainz in a manuscript made in the Abbey of Fulda in the second quarter of the ninth century. Photo credit: By Fulda - Manuscript: Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, cod.652, fol. 2v (Fulda, 2nd quarter of the 9th century), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=380431

Obviously this marked a huge shift away from the world of ancient Greece and Rome, where Europe really was just a geographical expression and the Mediterranean what really mattered. But to what extent does Charlemagne's Europe correspond to today's Europe. Certainly that was what people felt in the quarter century following the defeat of Nazi Germany, during the early days of the Cold War with its very clear east and west split almost corresponding to the eastern frontier of Charlemagne's Empire. On the western side of the "Iron Curtain" running from the Baltic to the Adriatic, European integration was beginning to commence and Charlemagne looked like a more than convincing spiritual father to adopt for it. From 1950, the West German city of Aachen began to award the Charlemagne prize for anyone who did any noteworthy work towards unifying Europe. The six members of the European Coal and Steel Community who signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 to become the European Economic Community (the direct forerunner to today's European Union), were France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, West Germany and Italy. They thus almost exactly corresponded to the territories of Charlemagne's Empire, minus a few regions here and there.

The late twelfth century reliquary to Charlemagne created by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at Aachen. Photo credit: my own

Even as the EEC/ EU enlarged itself in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Charlemagne could still be kept as its mascot. After all, the UK, Ireland, Spain and Portugal, even if they weren't strictly speaking part of the Carolingian Empire, were still very much part of Carolingian Europe. Greece and the Scandinavian countries obviously had a bit more explaining to do if they were going to be fitted into the general narrative. But when it came to the enlargements that followed the Treaty of Athens in 2003, then the whole idea that Charlemagne was the original visionary of the EU completely fell apart. The new member states like Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Malta were places that were barely on the Carolingians' radar and to whom Charlemagne was as much of a symbolic unifying figure as Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. And while the early EU was born out of the ideology of Christian Democracy, at present 27% of the population of the current European Union have no religion at all (considerably more in the member states north of the Alps) and 2% are Muslims. What does Charlemagne, who spread Christianity at the point of a sword in Saxony and fought holy wars in Al-Andalus, mean to them?

But at the same time, it doesn't look like the EU is going to fill the whole map from the Atlantic and the Pillars of Hercules to the Bosphorus and the river Don (the boundaries of Europe in classical geography) any time soon, as reflected by the prolonged hesitancy over Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Moldova, Ukraine, Turkey and Iceland's accessions. Russia, Belarus, Norway, Switzerland, the Vatican City and the tax havens will either never be allowed to join or have no desire to join. Meanwhile the Eurozone Crisis, Brexit and the European Commission's condemnations of Poland and Hungary for not honouring their commitments to democracy and human rights have suggested to some that European enlargement by the early twenty-first century had already gone too far and was fundamentally incompatible with any idea of "ever closer union." In this way, the Carolingians remain fundamentally relevant to us. This is because they were the first to ask where the boundaries of Europe, in political and cultural terms, began and where did they end. And this is a question that still needs to be asked today and desperately so. 

Before we move on, let us also consider that the Carolingians horizons also extended beyond Europe, as reflected by Charlemagne's diplomacy with the Abbasid Caliphate and contacts with Christian communities in North Africa and the Levant. Cynics may remark that mentioning this is just pure tokenism to go with the current mood and nothing more. But certainly its interesting to see how the diplomatic gift of an Asian elephant to Charlemagne by Caliph Harun Al-Rashid in 802 has gone in the historiography from being a quaint curiosity to being the main subject matter of an exciting new monograph from a young early medievalist academic. And I do myself think that the fact that it was even possible to transport an elephant from India to Baghdad, Pisa and eventually Aachen must reveal something broader and deeper, and that maybe the early medieval world was more connected than we have thought.

 And as far as race and imagining the other is concerned, it must be said that neither Charlemagne nor anyone else in western Europe in the seventh to tenth centuries would have identified as a "white person" because that identity label did not exist yet. The Carolingians definitely believed in the superiority of Frankish culture and Latin  Christianity and could be xenophobic and intolerant. But they were just as if not more prejudiced towards Basques and east Romans, the latter of whom they called "Greeks" as a term of abuse, than they were towards Muslim Arabs. And while subsaharan Africa (known as Ethiopia to the Carolingians) seemed like a strange and exotic place, so did the remote regions of Norway and Sweden. Of these countries in the freezing north, one ninth century Frankish missionary called Rimbert sincerely asked his friend, the learned Ratramnus of Corbie, whether the dog-headed people he believed to inhabit there were humans or animals. And in an age when anti-Semitism is again on the rise, let us also remember that the Carolingian kings and emperors were much more tolerant and enlightened in their attitudes towards Jews than western European monarchs in the Later Middle Ages would be.

A long overdue update

Its been almost six months since I've posted anything here, which has to have been the longest hiatus this blog has had since, well, the beginning. And well a lot has been going on in this space of time. First there was the final term of the PGCE which was hectic and incredibly stressful but ultimately successful in the end - by July I had qualified as a secondary school history teacher and secured my first paid full-time teaching job at the very first school I'd trained at. And I'm now coming up to the end of the first month at the job. Now you might be asking "surely you could have spared us at least one blogpost during the summer holidays in between?" I of course am probably just self-indulgently imagining that I have any kind of devoted fan club like that at all, and a good few of my blog posts have essentially been just arguments with myself. But still, I do feel this inactivity deserves an explanation. And that explanation is that this August I began researching and writing a book on my favourite people in history - the Carolingians, of course!

Now there are of course a lot of books on the Carolingians of course, though certainly not as many as there are on Ancient Rome, the Norman Conquest, the Tudors, the Industrial Revolution, the  American Civil War, Nazi Germany or other incredibly mainstream historical topics. And, at least as far as the literature on the Carolingians by and for Anglophones is concerned, its predominantly aimed at academic early medievalists who already know their way around the sea of Charles', Pippins and Louis' and for whom Benedict of Aniane, Bernard of Septimania and Berengar of Friuli are a lot more than just names. At the very least they come in the form of textbooks aimed at first year undergraduates who in the UK are doing a compulsory medieval history paper as part of their Bachelors' degree in History, or on the other side of the Atlantic are doing the Plato to NATO Western Civilisation courses that are a big part of humanities curricula there. Everything out there either relies on quite a lot of assumed background knowledge or is written in a style that the general reader might find jarring or heavy-going. The closest exceptions to this general rule are Chris Wickham's "The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 - 1000" (2009) and Janet Nelson's "King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne" (2018), and absolutely brilliant as they are they're not quite ideal for the lay person. There really is precious little out there aimed at the general reading public, which I think is a gap that needs to be filled. 

But why is it a gap worth filling and why should the general reading public (in the UK specifically) care about the Carolingians. After all, they don't have brand recognition like the Tudors or even the Plantagenets do. People of a certain generation didn't spend their teenage years reading historical novels about them, and the closest thing to a Television series that features them is The History Channel's "Vikings." Charlemagne is probably the only Carolingian monarch whose name is at all meaningful to most ordinary educated British people interested in history. Needless to say, none of the Carolingians command fanclubs, unlike with medieval English monarchs, among whom Richard III commands the biggest of them all - counter-intuitive as that may seem to some people until you've spent enough time on certain corners of the internet. And I only know of one UK secondary school that has the Carolingians on their curriculum, whereas the Norman Conquest, Thomas Becket, Magna Carta and the Peasants' Revolt are almost ubiquitous and even the Anglo-Saxons are making a comeback in Year 7 history lessons. After all, a lot of people like to read history books on stuff they're already very familiar with and interested in (that's why Ancient Rome, the Tudors, the World Wars and modern America are able to carve out such huge slices of the popular history book market pie). 

Then there's the more political side to it all. On the surface of it, there's nothing in recent politics that makes the Carolingians seem super relevant and topical to now. The territories of the Carolingian Empire (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and the northeastern corner of Spain) don't feel very pivotal in global affairs right now, unlike say Russia and Ukraine which are now filling history bookshelves in Waterstones and Blackwells. Nor can we claim the Carolingians as part of some kind of common cultural or civilisational heritage here, now that we've Brexited. Forget any past pioneers of European unity, they're for the Brussels bureaucrats, metropolitan liberal elites and the dreaded experts. True patriotic Britons should want to read about Alfred the Great, not Charlemagne. And from a different political standpoint, aren't the Carolingians too white and European? History is going global and decolonising now. Why focus on Western Europe in the seventh to tenth centuries which as we are constantly being reminded was, globally speaking, a backwater? Instead, one could be enlightening the general reading public on contemporaneous Tang China and the Abbasid Caliphate, whose highly advanced empires make the achievements of the Carolingians look puny and insignificant by comparison. And Peter Frankopan's "The Silk Roads" (2016) has demonstrated clearly that exactly this kind of enterprise is not only worthy, it can also be hugely successful!

But having weighed up all these counter-arguments, I'm still mad enough to think that I should write a book on the entire history of the Carolingian dynasty. This wouldn't just cover the headline Carolingian monarch, Charlemagne, but give the full gamut of Carolingian history from their earliest origins as courtiers to the Merovingian kings of the Franks in the seventh century through to the death of the last Carolingian monarch, Louis V of West Francia, in 987. Indeed, in some ways the planned book even goes beyond this, as it includes two chapters on origins of the Franks and the Merovingians (to provide background) and also explores what was going on in neighbouring realms as they influenced or were influenced by the Carolingians. How is this project not pure fanaticism and insanity, especially for someone who is just a school teacher with a masters' degree in medieval history?

But hear me out. In the next couple of posts, I will give the reasons why I think this is a worthwhile project for a popular history book.

Not really on topic: just a nice, fairly expressive ninth century Anglo-Saxon fresco from Winchester I saw this summer.

 

The coronation of Charles III in long term historical perspective

Its extraordinary to think of what's transpired in British royal history in the last year - a Platinum Jubilee (the first ever in British history and quite possibly the last), the funeral of a Queen and now a Coronation (the first in 70 years). And so far I haven't said anything about them here. But now, as a historian who is very much into the history of monarchy, religion and elite ritual, I feel like I should say something. My interest in such things is not exclusively historical. I am a quiet royalist - I support the British monarchy, but I'm not ostentatious or obsessive about it. You certainly wouldn't have found me camped out on the Mall this morning. I don't even have a favourite royal, and there's plenty of members of the royal family I dislike. I don't think they're perfect or beyond criticism. But I see our constitutional monarchy as infinitely better for the UK than a republic. And even as an agnostic I have no objection to having a head of state that (notionally) appointed by God to rule over us, just like I have no objection to the Church of England existing. 

Bit boring I know, but I don't want any journalists suing me for copyright. So I had to pick this.

But personal opinions aside, I think the coronation is very interesting from a historical perspective. Like the present monarchy itself, its a mixture of old and new. There are many elements of Charles' coronation that are new. One of the things I noticed when I was watching it on TV was the multi-faith element. There was a small Greek Orthodox choir singing, no doubt a nod to King Charles' late father, the Duke of Edinburgh. Charles was attended on not just by Anglican bishops but also by a Catholic cardinal, a Greek Orthodox bishop and representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities in the UK. This no doubt reflects two things. First is Charles' own desire to be seen not as Defender of the Faith but Defender of Faith. This is of course at odds with the very coronation oath he swore today, which has remained unchanged since 1689 when the Glorious Revolution made it a requirement for all future monarchs to uphold the Protestant faith. The second is the changing nature of British society has forced the monarchy to adapt with it. Its debatable how religious the British really were in the 1950s, and secularisation was undoubtedly already underway. About 3 million people out of a population of more than 41 million in England regularly took communion in an Anglican church, down by more than 500,000 from 1935. Other Protestant churches were also suffering decline, though Roman Catholics were more stable. But census data shows by far the majority of the population still identified as Christian when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, even if most of them only attended church services irregularly. Cultural Anglican Christianity was very strong indeed i.e., in music Benjamin Britten, in art Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer, and in literature T.S Elliot and C.S Lewis. And though the first mosque in the UK had been built in Woking, Surrey, in 1889 there were no more than a few hundred Muslims, Hindus or Sikhs in the UK. Now, thanks to 70 years of post-imperial immigration and the changes that followed the cultural revolution of the 1960s, this is very different. Now, as of the 2021 census, only 46.2% of the population of England and Wales identify as Christian, a 13.1% drop from 2011. This makes it the first time in British history since the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century that less than 50% of the population has identified as Christian. And among those born after 1980, the percentage of Christians who are Roman Catholics in England and Wales is equal to or exceeds those who are Anglican Protestants, for the first time since the reign of Elizabeth I. And while Anglican church attendance has decline by 9% in the last decade, Pentecostal church attendance has gone up by 50% thanks, in large part, to Nigerian immigration. And now more than 37% of England and Wales' population have no religion, a rise of 12% from 2011. It has been for this third of population that the deeply religious nature of the coronation ceremony has been most controversial, indeed downright offensive to the sensibilities of some. And about 10% of the population of England and Wales identify as members of a non-Christian religion (approximately 6% Muslims, 2% Hindus and 2% Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists and other religions respectively). The remaining 6% of the UK population refused to say what their religious beliefs were. Having lived in southwest London all my life, I'm reminded of this religious diversity almost every day. So by including those multi-faith elements in Charles III's coronation, the monarchy was acknowledging that the UK in 2023 is not the Protestant Christian nation it still essentially was in 1953. 

The music likewise reflects change as well. I absolutely love Handel's Zadok the Priest, that's been a staple tune of all British royal coronations since the coronation of George II as king of Great Britain and Ireland in 1727. And I don't mind Elgar. But it was good to see Greek Orthodox acapella, a Gospel Choir and Andrew Lloyd Webber added to the mix for the first time ever. My mother also pointed out how a significant portion of the choristers in Westminster Abbey were female. This would not have been the case in 1953, as girls' choirs were not permitted by the Church of England until Salisbury Cathedral in 1991 took the progressive decision to allow them, allowing more opportunities for female musical talent to be recognised than had previously been available. 

Indeed, its fair to say that the monarchy, much as it tries to appear timeless and unchanging, really does change a lot both with each individual monarch, who has their own style of kingship/ queenship, and with the general direction of travel of British politics, society and culture. I won't go into every detail of the history of English/ British royal coronations in the last 1100 years. That would take forever, and the Church of England has produced a full historical  commentary on the coronation service. But what I will talk about is what I'm qualified to talk about as an early medievalist. Namely the aspects of English royal coronations that are still recognisable from how they were more than a thousand years ago.

Coronations haven't everywhere and always been a part of monarchy. While Egyptian pharaohs and the Biblical kings of Israel were crowned, coronations were never a part of "European" monarchical traditions until the later Roman Empire. In the late third century, after decades of constant mutinies in the legions, civil wars, assassinations and coups d'etat, the Roman emperors stopped pretending notion that the Republic was somehow still going, just under a different kind of management, were only princeps ("chief citizen"). It was from this point on they started to embrace a visibly royal style more similar to what had existed in the Near East for thousands of years, and indeed what we think of when we think of royalty today, and crowns were part of it. Emperor Aurelian (r.270 - 275) was the first to wear a diadem, and by the time of Constantine it had become part of the regalia - the symbolic objects a legitimate emperor needed to possess. The first Roman emperor to receive a "coronation" was Julian in 361 when, according to the soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, the emperor was lifted by his troops up onto a shield and a diadem was set upon his head. After Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire in 381, the ecclesiastical element started to feature, but only in the East - in the fifth century, Eastern Roman emperors began to be crowned by the patriarchs of Constantinople, but the pope did not do the same for their western counterparts. 

Coin of the Roman Emperor Aurelian, the first to possess a crown. Photo Credit: York Museums Trust Staff - This file has been provided by York Museums Trust as part of a GLAMwiki partnership.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47407397 

In the post-Roman kingdoms, it doesn't seem like coronations were much of a thing in the sixth and early seventh centuries. Kings were acclaimed and raised up onto a shield, just like Roman emperors had been before them, but they weren't crowned. Kings had other special markers of royalty. The Merovingian Frankish kings had their luxurious long hair and chariots drawn by oxen, and early Anglo-Saxon kings had royal helmets i.e., the helmet which may or may not have belonged to King Raedwald (d.628) of East Anglia at Sutton Hoo. But in Spain, the Visigoths started a new trend - the earliest Visigothic king who we know for sure was crowned was King Sisenand in 631. Then in 672, with the accession of King Wamba (r.672 - 680), the Visigoths started a new trend - the anointing of kings. This is a practice that was literally as old as the Bible. Indeed, Handel's Zadok the Priest we heard played today refers to none other than the anointing of Solomon as king of Israel. But after the fall of the ancient kingdom of Israel, anointing ceased to be a part of kingship anywhere in Europe or the Mediterranean until the Visigoths revived it. Or is that quite so. Around 700 AD, a monk called Adomnan of Iona described how St Columba had, back in the 560s, anointed a number of Irish kings. Anyway, whether we can call it a Visigothic or an Irish invention, anointing was a very new thing in the sixth and seventh century West, and other countries were slow to catch on. But it was highly significant all the same as it could be used to establish that a monarch's legitimacy, like that of Solomon as king of Israel, came directly from God. The origins of divine right begin here. Indeed in both 1953 and 2023, the anointing of Elizabeth II and Charles III respectively were deemed too sensitive to be shown on television.

The "Votive Crown" of King Recceswinth, made in Spain in the 650s. King Recceswinth wouldn't have worn it, it would have actually been used for decoration in a church. Photo credit: By Ángel M. Felicísimo from Mérida, España - Corona de, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51253204

But some votive crowns did end up being worn by kings. The "Iron Crown of Lombardy" was maxde as a votive crown sometime in the fourth of fifth centuries AD and was later donated by the Lombard Queen Theodelinda to Monza Cathedral in 628. But by the fourteenth century, it was being used to crown Holy Roman emperors as kings of Italy - the first documented one being Emperor Henry VII in 1311. It may well be the oldest surviving royal insignia in the entire history of European monarchy. Photo credit: By James Steakley - photographed in the Theodelinda Chapel of the cathedral of Monza, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5403306

Queen Bathsheba pleads with the elderly King David to have her son Solomon made his successor. Solomon is then promptly anointed by Zadok the Priest. From the Bible of Master Jean de Sy, made in 1372 for King Charles V of France. Now in the National Library of the Netherlands. Public Domain.

The people who really cemented anointing and coronations as a widespread feature of European monarchy that has endured to the present day are none other than my favourite people - the Carolingians. I've written here before about the coronation and anointing of Pippin the Short in 751 and his reanointing in 754, and I'm not going to do so again. Likewise, I won't revisit the coronation of Charlemagne. Indeed its generally thanks to the Carolingians that most of our western ideas of what king looks like really solidifed and became embedded - they pioneered the use of orbs and sceptres as well. While sadly we've got no film footage of Carolingian coronations, we have the second best alternative - detailed scripts and choreographies written by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882). Hincmar wrote them for the West Frankish king Charles the Bald's coronation at Metz as king of Lotharingia in 869 following the death of nephew, King Lothar II. In total, Charles the Bald went through four coronations in his fifty-six years of life; that's one hell of a lot of coronations.

Hincmar describes how Charles the Bald was firstly blessed by the seven bishops present - Adventius of Metz, Arnuld of Toul, Hatto of Verdun, Franco of Tongeren, Hincmar of Laon (Hincmar's own nephew), Odo of Beauvais and Hincmar of Rheims himself. Then Hincmar said "May the Lord Crown you" and anointed Charles the Bald on his forehead with a chrism of holy oils. Then Hincmar gave more blessings before instructing his colleagues to set the crown of Lotharingia on Charles's head. After this Charles was given the sceptre before Hincmar gave the final blessing "May the Lord give you the will and power to do as He commands, so that going forward in the rule of the kingdom according to his will together with the palm of continuing victory you may attain the palm of eternal glory, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ." Finally, there was a mass and King Charles the Bald took communion bread and wine from the bishops, before Hincmar ended the service with a prayer for God to protect the new king and give his soul a place in Heaven.

A clear visualisation of Hincmar's idea of sacred kingship in the Metz Sacramentary, made in 869 - the same year as Charles' coronation. Indeed the king being crowned by God in this image may well be intended to be Charles the Bald. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Latin 1141 F2v, Public Domain.

In all of the basic outlines of the service, the coronation service that Hincmar organised and performed for King Charles the Bald in 869 is not at all different to that which Justin Welby did for King Charles III in 2023. The Carolingian legacy undoubtedly lives on in the modern British monarchy, not least in that we have kings called Charles.

After the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, we see further moves towards royal coronations as we know them today. Widukind of Corvey gives us a detailed description of Otto the Great's coronation as King of Germany in 936. He describes how Otto was presented with the sword "with which you may chase out all adversaries of Christ, barbarians and bad Christians, by the divine authority handed down to you and by the power of all the empire of the Franks for the lasting peace of all Christians." Then Otto was given the bracelets and cloak and was told "these points falling to the ground will remind you with what zeal for the faith you should burn and how you ought to endure a preserving peace to the end." Next he was given the sceptre and staff and reminded of his kingly duty to protect all the churches, widows and orphans in the kingdom and to be merciful to all his subjects. the bishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier then anointed and crowned Otto the Great, and he sat on the throne of Charlemagne. The giving of the bracelets and the sword, which weren't part of Carolingian coronations and were thus fairly new to Otto the Great's coronation, are now part of British royal coronations, as we saw on television today. 

The last Ottonian king, Henry II (r.1002 - 1024), is presented with his sword and sceptre by two bishops whole being crowned by Christ in his personal sacramentary produced between 1002 and 1014. München BSB Clm 4456 Seite 33c. Public Domain.

How did these Continental ideas come to England. The answer is that Aethelstan, the first ruler of a united kingdom of England brought them over. Aethelstan had a lot of continental connections. His sister Eadgyth married none other than Otto the Great in 929. His other sister, Eadgifu, married King Charles III the Simple of West Francia, the grandson of Charles the Bald and namesake of our current king. And after Charles III was deposed and imprisoned following the battle of Soissons in 923, his son Louis IV went to live with his uncle, Aethelstan, in England. So Aethelstan knew a lot about continental kingship. Aethelstan therefore decided in 925 not to be acclaimed king and presented with the royal helmet but to be acclaimed, anointed and crowned as king, following continental practice. And this happened at Kingston-upon-Thames, bang in my local area. The first coronation we know about in detail, however, was that of his grandnephew Edgar the Peaceful at Bath in 973. It was Edgar's coronation that really set the ball rolling for later coronations, including that of our present king. The coronation thus really is the only aspect of the British monarchy where there's any meaningful continuity between its tenth century beginnings and the twenty-first century institution we know today. 

King Edgar on the frontispiece of the New Minster Charter, made in 966. 

And that is the end of my potted history of the early medieval origins of British royal coronations. I hope you've enjoyed it. 

From the sources 14: conquest, conversion and what it meant to be a Christian in the eighth century

One version of Carolingian Christianity. The obverse side of Harrach ditpych, made as an ivory book cover for a gospel book by the so-called "Court School of Charlemagne" c.800. At the top we can see the four evangelists, on the middle right the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, the middle left the Nativity, the botton right the Crucifixion and the bottom left Mary and Mary Magdelene visiting Jesus' tomb and finding it empty. So very focused on the Bible and the core of the Christian story in the gospels, fitting the profoundly religious ethos of Charlemagne's court. The reverse side (below) was carved in Visigothic Spain or Lombard Italy sometime between 700 and 750. It shows the apostles Peter and Paul, important symbols of the Institutional church. Photo credit: yours truly.

A very different side of early medieval Christianity is shown in this stone carving from the Cologne region in Western Germany. We don't know the date of it - it could have been made any time between 600 and 1050. We have no idea who made it either, but they were certainly much lower in social standing and prestige than the court of Charlemagne, hence the much cruder artistry. It shows Christ as a charismatic, superhero-like figure, taming the beasts during his 40 days in the wilderness. 

One of Charlemagne's greatest and most controversial achievements has got to the conquest of Saxony. Some of you might be asking, where's that? 

Basically, if we were to divide modern Germany into quarters, Saxony in the eighth century would very roughly correspond to the top left quarter. Indeed, for those of you who know your Cold War history, eighth century Saxony almost (but not exactly) corresponds to the British Zone of Occupation from 8th May 1945 - 1st January 1947. It was also the ancestral homeland of the Angles and Saxons who came over to Britain in the fifth century. 

An early twentieth century map of Old Saxony. Credit: By Gustav Droysen - General Historical Hand Atlas, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2465783. Compare to the map of the British Occupation Zone in post-WW2 Germany (below).

Credit: By User:52 Pickup - Based on map data of the IEG-Maps project (Andreas Kunz, B. Johnen and Joachim Robert Moeschl: University of Mainz) - www.ieg-maps.uni-mainz.de., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4951565

This was a heavily forested region of Northern Germany that had never known Roman rule. It had no cities or roads. And it knew very little of "government." The Continental Saxons had no kings or written laws. They were basically lots of different independent tribes who, so far as we can tell, all spoke Old Low German. Each tribe was ruled by an ealdorman, who had the power to raze the villages of anyone who opposed his authority though we know little else about them. The Saxon social hierarchy was divided into three groups - the nobles (edhilingi), free peasants (frilingi) and slaves (lazzi).  In times of great external threat, they would all come together under the leadership of temporary war-leaders that are called duces in the Latin sources. The instinctive English translation of this word is "dukes", but that is misleading. Representatives from all the Saxon tribes and all three castes met in annual assemblies at a place called Marklo, where they confirmed their unwritten tribal customary laws, settled disputes and made decisions about whether or  to go to war. So while the Continental Saxons were generally quite primitive, they didn't lack political organisation altogether either. And most importantly of all, they were Germanic pagans, who worshipped Odin, Thor, Tyr, Frey, Freyja and a whole host of more local deities. 

Here are the Merseburg charms, a short list of spells and prayers written in Old High German verse from pre-Christian Saxony preserved on a flyleaf a ninth century sacramentary, inserted there by a monk of the monastery of Fulda sometime before 1000 AD. It was discovered at Merseburg Cathedral Library in 1841 by Georg Waitz, a titan of medieval academic history, and was studied extensively by Jakob Grimm of Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales fame. This is one of the very few pieces of evidence, written or material, we have for what the religion of the Pagan Continental Saxons actually was like. It raises so many questions as well. Why would a Saxon monk include vernacular pagan charms, no doubt ones recited by his ancestors, in a book of hymns and rituals written in Latin for use in Christian church services? Credit: By Unknown scribe - https://archive.thulb.uni-jena.de/korax/rsc/viewer/Korax_derivate_00002549/VDS_Ms%20Cod%20I%20136_088.tif, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78257477

Why was it such a big achievement for Charlemagne to conquer Saxony? Its not hard to see the answer. There was no central government to negotiate surrender with, no capital to lay siege to and no head of state to kill or take prisoner. The contrast here with Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom in Italy in 774 or the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 couldn't be more obvious. Basically, as the primary sources make incredibly clear, the conquest couldn't succeed until every last Saxon tribe, indeed every last free Saxon male, submitted to Charlemagne. The lack of roads and cities it even more difficult, to the point the Franks had to try and create the infrastructure (fortified towns, canals etc) from scratch in order to conquer Saxony. 

What's more, it was totally unprecedented. The Romans had completely given up trying to conquer Germany in 17 AD, setting the frontier at the strategic chokepoints provided by the rivers Rhine and Danube. Contrary to German nationalist mythmaking, this was not because of Arminius (a.k.a Hermann the German) butchering Varus and the Roman legions at the Teutoburger Wald. Indeed, Augustus' grandson Germanicus Julius Caesar had led expeditions to avenge Varus and punish the Germanic tribes in 15 AD. However, the more time Germanicus spent in Germania, the more he realised that the conquest simply wasn't worth it. Compared to Gaul or even southern Britain, Germany was just too poor and underdeveloped and its people were just too resistant to the idea of Roman rule, so that it would be a lot of hassle for too little gain.

The Merovingians (481 - 751) had managed to bring much of central and southern Germany into their Frankish kingdom, and slowly Christianise it with the help of Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries. But with Saxony, the most they were ever able to do was, every couple of generations, defeat the Saxons decisively in battle, ravage as much of their territory as they could and force them to pay tribute in herds of cattle. Meanwhile, the Saxons regularly raided over the rivers Main and Rhine into Frankish territory and sometimes took sides in internal political struggles in the Frankish kingdom. Thus when the Carolingians took over, it seemed politically advisable to neutralise the Saxon threat. Moreover, an important part of the Carolingians' image as kings involved them being enthusiastic defenders and promoters of Christianity, and by the mid-eighth century peaceful attempts at converting northern Germany were getting nowhere. Charlemagne needed to take a different approach to the Saxons from his Merovingian predecessors, or even from his grandfather and father - namely wholesale systematic conquest. 

As I said earlier, and this was something that Charlemagne's biographer Einhard and every historian after him remarked on, the task wasn't easy. The conquest of Saxony took 32 years (772 - 804) as a result of constant rebellion, truce-breaking and resistance to Christianisation on the part of the Saxons. Charlemagne had to respond to this with severe brutality. The most infamous incident was at Verden in 782 where the Frankish sources say that 4,500 Saxon prisoners of war were slaughtered at Charlemagne's orders. Einhard also claims that Charlemagne deported ten thousand rebels from Saxony and forced them to live elsewhere in Gaul and Germany. Its perhaps no surprise that the Saxon wars have provoked a lot of unease in modern times. The massacre at Verden would definitely be considered a war crime today, and certainly reveals a dark, ruthless streak to Charlemagne's leadership. He had of course shown such a streak on a few other occasions. Let's not forget this was the very same Frankish king who divorced his first wife (the Lombard princess Desiderata) then waged war against her father, defeated and humiliated him. He also may or may not have murdered his nephews, Richard III style. Yet I think anyone who claims the conquest of Saxony amounts to a "genocide" is taking it too far. Much like with the comparable case of Oliver Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 (I recently taught this to my Year 8s), some perspective is needed. As Charlemagne saw it, he was punishing oath-breakers, not exterminating an inferior race. Indeed, much of the Saxon nobility converted and became part of the post-conquest ruling class, and the Carolingians allowed the Saxon language and tribal customary laws to survive. And the Merseburg Charms I showed you earlier show the process of Christianisation was in truth a lot more complex than conversion at the point of a sword (more about that later). 

It has also made German nationalists question whether they should see Charlemagne as a German national hero. Notably, the Nazi Party in their early days in the power condemned Charlemagne as a French imperialist under the influence of  who heartlessly slaughtered the racially pure Aryan Saxons. Indeed, at a Nazi rally in 1934, 4,500 torches were lit in memory of the Saxons slain in Verden, and 4,500 memorial stones were erected for them as well. The pro-Nazi playwright and pseudoarchaeologist Edmund Kiss imagined Charlemagne torturing the Saxon war-leader Widukind into converting to Christianity by having blonde haired, blue-eyed Saxon maidens raped by dusky Jews and Moors. As always, these sauerkraut-flavoured fascists with a passion for ancient Hindu symbols and goose-stepping made monstrous distortions of German history to further their own genocidal white supremacist ideology. 

The Sachsenhain: the Nazi memorial to the Saxons slain by Charlemagne in 782. Its truly disturbing to think that the massacre of 4,500 Germanic warriors more than a thousand years earlier was seen by Hitler's supporters as an act of inhuman cruelty, but when they went on to engage in the industrial mass-murder of millions of Jews, communists, homosexuals, disabled people, Slavs etc less than a decade later it was seen as the right course of actiom.

The consequences of the Conquest of Saxony were huge. Within three generations of the conquest, the Saxons had been completely converted to Christianity and a network of bishoprics and monasteries had been established all over the region. The Saxon aristocracy had become much wealthier and more powerful, and gained much more landowning rights vis a vis the free peasantry. Then in the tenth century, the Carolingians were replaced in the lands east of the Rhine by a new dynasty of kings and emperors who themselves hailed from Saxony and claimed descent in the maternal line from Widukind himself - the Ottonians (919 - 1024). And in the High and Late Middle Ages, Saxony was part of the heartlands of Western Christendom, producing missionaries, Teutonic crusader knights and Hanseatic merchants. Finally in the sixteenth century, it would give birth to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Other than through violence, how was this transformation achieved? Fortunately for us, like with a lot of other events in Carolingian history, the conquest and Christianisation of Saxony has generated quite a lot of primary sources by early medieval standards. The one that follows is a Capitulary (royal legislative directive) that Charlemagne issued for the Saxon territories. The date is uncertain. Traditionally it has been dated to 785, when Widukind submitted to Charlemagne and accepted baptism, resulting in a seven year lull in hostilities between Franks and Saxons. But recently, Yitzchak Hen, Robert Flierman and Ingrid Rembold have suggested that it was more likely written a decade later, in 794 or 795. 

The dating does make a significant difference. If it was written in 785, then it would have come from a victorious Frankish king, still in his prime, confidently asserting his authority over the conquered Saxons. But if it was written in 794 or 795, then it would have come from a stressed-out, middle-aged ruler who had just been through the fourth (and last) great crisis in his reign. In 792, Charlemagne's own eldest son, Pippin the Hunchback (768 - 811), had plotted with a group of Frankish nobles to assassinate him and usurp the throne. The conspiracy was foiled, and most of the conspirators were executed, though Charlemagne was merciful to his own son - he had him tonsured and imprisoned in a monastery instead. In the same year, the Saxons revolted, Gaul was hit by a devastating famine, Arabs and Slavs invaded the southern and eastern frontiers and war had begun with Avar Khaganate in Hungary. To add to this, a new heresy called Adoptionism was spreading into the Pyrenees from Spain. Charlemagne therefore needed to make a statement about his authority and what direction the regime was going to go now. This he did at the Council of Frankfurt in 794, where Charlemagne condemned both Adoptionism and the worship of images supported by the Greek Church as heresies, fixed grain prices and reformed the coinage. All of this basically showed that he was a good orthodox Christian king who cared for the physical and spiritual welfare of his people. He then embarked on his final military campaign in Saxony. 

Its in this context that I think Charlemagne's Capitulary for the Saxon Territories makes the most sense. It would made a good muscular statement of his power and authority as a Christian ruler in a time of crisis/ post-crisis. We've seen other examples of how Carolingian rulers used legislation to this effect, such as the Edict of Pitres (864) issued by Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald. We might not have to go as far as the late Patrick Wormald in seeing most early medieval royal law-making as really being an exercise in propaganda. But there is some merit in this kind of view, considering that there's always a gap between what the law says and what society does. That gap was going to be even bigger in the Carolingian Empire, which possessed only a skeletal government bureaucracy and lacked standing armies, police forces or even professional lawyers and judges (north of the Alps anyway). And Wormald was undoubtedly right to think that laws, first and foremost, reflect the mindsets of the people who make them.

The Capitulary for the Saxon Territories basically lays out the laws by which Saxony will be governed once it is conquered. It prescribes the death penalty for 11 different crimes and transgressions, probably more than any other single legislative act in early medieval history, that some historians have called it the "Terror Capitulary." But what makes the Capitulary so interesting to me, is that it tells us so much about what being a Christian meant to Charlemagne and his advisers as they made one final push to convert the pagan Saxons. 

(All of the following source quotations are taken from Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69)

Chapter 4: If anyone, out of contempt for Christianity, shall have despised the holy Lenten fast and shall have eaten flesh, let him be punished by death. But nevertheless, let it be taken into consideration by a priest, lest by chance anyone from necessity has been led to eat flesh. 

Chapter 6: If anyone deceived by the Devil shall have believed, after the manner of the pagans, that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and on this account shall have burned the person, or shall have given the person's flesh for others to eat, or shall have eaten it himself, let him be punished by a capital sentence.

Chapter 8: If anyone of the race of Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptised, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death. 

Chapter 9: If anyone shall have sacrificed a man to the devil, and after the manner of the pagans shall have presented himself as a victim to the demons, let him be punished by death.

Chapter 15: Concerning the lesser chapters all have consented. To each church let the parishioners present a house and two mansi of land. And for each one hundred and twenty men, noble and free, and likewise liti, let them give to the same church a man-servant and a maid-servant.

Chapter 16: And this has been pleasing, Christ being propituous, that whencesoever any receipts shall have come into the treasury, either for the breach of peace or for any penalty of any kind, and in all income pertaining to the king, a tithe shall be rendered to the churches and priests.

Chapter 17: Likewise, in accordance with the mandate of God, we command that all shall give a tithe of their property and labour to the churches and priests; let the nobles as well as the free men, and likewise the liti, according to that which God shall have given to each Christian, return a part to God.

Chapter 18: That on the Lord's day no meetings and public judicial assemblages shall be held, unless perchance in a case of great necessity or when war compels it, but all shall go to church to hear the word of God, and shall be free for prayers and good works. Likewise, also on special festivals they shall devote themselves to God and to the services of the church and shall refrain from secular assemblies. 

Chapter 19: Likewise, it has been pleasing to insert in these decrees that all infants shall be baptised within a year; and we have decreed this, that if anyone shall have despised to bring his infant to baptism within the course of a year, without the advice or permission of the priest, if he is a noble he shall pay 120 solidi to the treasury, if a freeman 60, if a litus 30.

Chapter 21: If any man should have made a vow at springs or trees or groves, or shall have made any offering after the manner of the heathen and shall have taken a repast in honour of the demons, if he shall be a noble [he shall pay] 60 solidi, if a free man 30, if a litus 15. If, indeed, they have not the means of paying at once, they shall be given into the service of the church until the solidi are paid.

Chapter 22: We command that the bodies of Saxon Christians shall be carried to the church cemeteries and not to the mounds of the pagans.

Chapter 23: We have ordered that diviners and soothsayers shall be handed over to the churches and priests. 

From these chapters from the Capitulary I've shared with you we can see the following patterns in what made one a Christian, according to Carolingians:

1. Baptism is absolutely essential to making someone a Christian, and therefore everyone over the age of 1 year old must be baptised or face consequences.
2. Christians must fast during Lent, attend Church on Sundays and celebrate Christian holy days by not working or attending any kind of public meeting other than religious services. 
3. Christians do not make human sacrifices, pray in sacred groves or bodies of water, burn witches or consult fortune-tellers - these superstitions make you a relapsed pagan in need of punishment.
4. Christians must be buried in churchyards. 
5. Christians must live in a parish community and provide for their local priest, including by compulsory payment of the tithe.

All the ways in which it defines being a Christian are either through external acts i.e. getting baptised, going to Church on Sunday, fasting in Lent etc, or negative i.e. not making human sacrifices. Nowhere in the legislation does it talk about what Christian ideas and teachings the Saxons should know, other than they shouldn't be believing in certain pagan superstitions like polytheism, nature worship cannibalistic witches or fortune-telling. The bit about witches is worth re-iterating since it corrects the misconception that early medieval Christians burned witches - on the contrary, they saw witch-burning as a pagan superstition be outlawed! In these senses, being a Christian in eighth century Saxony was very different to being a Christian in twenty-first century Britain. If you asked someone nowadays what makes someone a Christian, the first things they would talk about would be believing that Jesus is God and following the teachings of the Bible. And its well known in the modern West that there are plenty of people who are baptised, have church weddings and funerals, attend the occasional Sunday service and celebrate Christmas and Easter, but do not consider themselves Christians because they don't "believe" in Christianity. 

A lot of this apparent weirdness can be attributed to the fact that this a piece of government legislation was issued in a region that was still in the process of being converted to Christianity. Certainly, no one in eighth century Gaul, Italy or Anglo-Saxon England, regions where everyone had "converted" to Christianity by 700, was concerned about human sacrifices. But there were lots of condemnations of "pagan" customs and superstitions i.e. the Anglo-Saxon monk and missionary Saint Boniface complained in the 740s that people were celebrating the New Year in the "pagan fashion" by singing, dancing and feasting outside St Peter's Basilica in Rome. We've also seen before how Agobard of Lyon condemned belief in weather magic, popular among the Burgundian peasantry, as unchristian. Boniface and Agobard were of course extreme puritans by the standards of the day and the people they were condemning would have likely seen nothing "pagan" about their own activities. But it does go to show that even in the areas that were already long since converted, Christianity was still being defined, and it was very much the Carolingian dynasty's mission to make sure everyone was following "correct" Christianity.

Its also in the period 700 - 900 that in Gaul, Italy and Anglo-Saxon England we get lots of legislation mandating infant baptism and observing Christian fasts and holy days. Carolingian Saxony was, however, unusual in making church attendance compulsory. The King of Mercia and his bishops at the Council of Clovesho in 747 simply said that all people should be allowed to attend church on Sundays. Likewise, the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories, is unusual in legally enforcing Christian burial for all. While most churches elsewhere in western Europe had graveyards by 900, there was no legal requirement that worshippers be buried in them. That was the decision of individuals and their families. Most Frankish and Anglo-Saxon bishops only required their flocks to receive communion bread and wine three times a year. Its also in this period that the practice of confessing your sins to a priest, originating in sixth century Ireland, became widespread and mandatory across Western Europe. Meanwhile, Frankish and Anglo-Saxon churchmen were prescribing religious penances for all kinds of crimes and misdemeanours, and were getting creative with all kinds of public religious rituas. Finally, it was in this period that a parish system was being established - most villages in Gaul and Italy had a local church, though Germany and Anglo-Saxon England lagged behind.

So in many ways the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories reflects the general flavour of eighth century Christianity for most ordinary lay people. It was all about what you did in public and how you belonged to and participated in a community through various festivals, rituals and obligations. But what you actually believed deep inside didn't come into it very much.

Oh, and as a final bonus, here is a link to Charlemagne's own verified descendant, Christopher Lee, singing in a death metal band about the massacre at Verden in 782.   

Most of you will know that Christopher Lee over the course of his very long theatrical career played a vampire, a Bond villain, a wizard, a Sith Lord and a dentist. But a blessed few know that he played Charlemagne too. 

References:

Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69

Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West, Hambledon Continuum (1998)

Paul Fouracre, Frankish Gaul to 814, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 85 - 109

Julia Smith, Religion and Lay Society, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 654 - 678

Ingrid Rembold, 'Quasi  una  gens: Saxony and the Frankish world,c. 772–888', History Compass 15 (2018), pp 1 - 14 

Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, edited and translated by David Ganz, Penguin Classics (2008)

Should history be compulsory to 16?

 

Medieval but not European for a change: the world famous examination system of imperial China under the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279)

So in a previous post, I explored what the History Curriculum for Key Stage 3 (11 - 14 year olds) is like in mainstream UK schools. There I argued that despite the way that politicians and the media often caricature it, its a lot broader, diverse and more enriching than just a narrow fixation on Henry VIII and Hitler. That's not to say that history teaching in lower secondary school (what folks across the Pond would call Middle School) does not have its problems, but its not in the state of general decay that a lot of people think it is.

But when we get to the teaching of history at Key Stage 4 (14 - 16 years old), when pupils are being prepared for the standardised exams known as GCSEs that they take at the end of Key Stage 4 when they are 15 - 16, we encounter problems of a different kind. Indeed, I think its here that those who complain about the curriculum being all about sixteenth century England and the Second World War are slightly more justified in their criticisms.

Now I may need to remind my North American and Continental European readers that, highly unusually among first world countries, in the UK any kind of formal study of history stops being compulsory at the age of 14. In England, about 47% of 15 - 16 year olds sit GCSE history exams in June every year. That's still a very large number, indeed significantly larger than was the case 20 years ago, but that still means that GCSE history is a course that less than half of British children take. Thus for a lot of people, including politicians, journalists, academic historians, educationalists and, last but not least, a minority of secondary school history teachers, the biggest problem with GCSE history is that its optional.

Here I must say where I stand on this. I do not support making GCSE history compulsory. This may seem odd for some of you. I am after all an lifelong obsessive enthusiast for the subject, who studied history at GCSE, A Level, undergraduate degree level and master's degree level. I am also a trainee history teacher and a paid-up member of the Historical Association. And to state the obvious, I am writing these words on my very own history blog. So why should I be arguing for something that's surely going against my professional interests? Arguably, in the eyes of some, this would make me a traitor to my subject, worthy of being tarred and feathered.

The reasons why are as follows. The first is that we all need to show a little self-awareness. I am all too aware from teaching children in two mainstream, non-selective schools that most children are not at all like I was when I was their age. The people who are clamouring from the rooftops for history to be compulsory till 16, if not 18, are people like myself and need to realise this. And the fact that most teenagers don't have wide-ranging knowledge and intellectual curiosity for the past can't simply be blamed on the quality of history teaching or that they can drop it at the age of 14. 

We've got to remember that factors outside of schools contribute so much too. To go from my own experience, I was reading about historical subjects as wide ranging as Alexander the Great, the Romans, Feudal Japan, the Aztecs and Incas, the British Empire and the World Wars from the age of 8. I obsessively looked at the globe in my room and at books of maps, finding out where everything was and who controlled which countries at any given time. I was also taken to ancient sites, castles, palaces and museums by my parents. Whether my passion for the past is innate, a product of my middle class upbringing or the result of something else entirely I don't know. Though I am pretty sure its not a result of the the history teaching I've received. While I remember it was always very good, from primary school through to degree level, I'd never say it was ever the main reason why I loved the subject. And most of my substantive knowledge of history does not come from formal study of any kind, but from reading for pleasure. Disciplinary knowledge (use of evidence, source analysis, reasoning with historical concepts) has been where good teaching has really made the difference for me. I'm sure many professional historians could say similar. Indeed, there are a few who admit to having found school history boring. This isn't to cast doubt on the ability of good teachers at secondary level to inspire a passion for the past in pupils - after all, that's part of the reason why I'm in the job.

Now this part of the discussion is perhaps completely missing the point. I don't think anyone is arguing for a compulsory history GCSE because we need more historians. Let's not forget that there are proponents of every other non-core subject (geography, music, art, PE, drama etc) who would love to see their numbers bolstered. And if the real aim of the game were to inspire a passion for history among the youth, then surely history GCSE would not need to eb made compulsory anyway?

The reasons why people support compulsory history at GCSE really are twofold:

1. It provides invaluable transferrable skills to help the younger generation in the world of further study, work and adult life.
2. A more historically-informed public makes for better citizens.

The transferrable skills is the one I have the least time for. Don't get me wrong. I think that actual historical reasoning is an invaluable thing to have learned, and not just if you want to become a professional historian, a history teacher or anyone professionally involved with history in any way. Being able to weigh up different testamentary accounts of what happened is of course invaluable to the lawyer, and thinking about how multiple causes and factors can lead to an event makes for good journalism. And just generally, historical thinking allows you to look at contemporary society in a more critical, long term perspective. It also enables you to understand how interpretations of the past, which we encounter all the time in politics and the media, come about and how to look at them with a critical eye too. At the same time, historical thinking is a huge challenge to teach and learn, and as any history teacher knows, even more challenging to assess using standardised testing rubrics. Furthermore, all the elements of historical reasoning are encountered through the Key Stage 3 curriculum, when history is still compulsory.

Then we come to the generic skills that are easiest to learn, easiest to assess and most desirable to employers of all shapes and sizes. Stuff like coming up with a structured argument, analysing evidence, evaluation etc. These have very little to do specifically with history. Evaluating views is something you have to do if you take any humanities subject at GCSE, like Geography or Religious Studies. Likewise, questions that require you to analyse evidence are sure to come up on any Biology, Physics or Chemistry paper. And essay-writing is fundamental to English Language and Literature, which are the core, compulsory subjects par excellence. If the case for studying history were to be reduced to these, then we would be doing a massive disservice to the subject. Reducing secondary education, especially but by no means exclusively in the humanities, to the acquisition of generic, transferrable skills for work and future study is of course a huge problem that I don't have the space to tackle here. Fortunately others have already done so. Indeed, Michael Fordham, a veteran history teacher and tutor at Cambridge's Institute for Continuing Education, has made it his mission to fight against genericism in the world of secondary education. 

The latter reason is where the case for complusory history to the age of 16 might appear stronger, but its also where it gets most politically-charged. There's the argument, going back to Cicero in the first century BC, that the study of history is essential to being a good citizen. Indeed, that's one of the reasons why the history is a  compulsory subject from the ages of 5 - 14 (Key Stages 1, 2, 3) in the UK. It is also for that reason that many people end up asking the question "why stop there, then?" They argue that surely the children of today will be better adult citizens tomorrow if they continue to study history till at least the age of 16, or indeed to the very end of their secondary schooling. 

Yet when it comes to the exact purpose of this, there are essentially two different views on this. 

One is an essentially nationalistic view. Children need to study history because they need to learn how great the UK is and why they should cherish their British citizenship. This is essentially the argument Michael Gove put forward back in the early 2010s, when he set out his master plan for root and branch reform of the history curriculum. Gove believed, and presumably still does today, that children need to know about the UK's ancient and unique traditions of parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, religious tolerance and individual liberty. History in schools, according to him, "ought to celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world" and portray Britain as "a beacon of liberty for others to emulate." Gove's main attention was focused on history at Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3 (7 - 14 years old), where he resolutely failed to implement his vision and ended up with a curriculum fundamentally similar to the one before. He was also supportive of the idea of compulsory history at GCSE, lamenting in one of his keynote speeches that pupils get to drop the subject at 14. Gove neither succeeded in radically reforming the GCSE nor making it compulsory either, though he did succeed in boosting the numbers taking it through the English Baccalaureate scheme. Under this, schools were given ratings according to how many pupils were taking GCSEs in academic subjects, namely English Language and Literature, Mathematics, Combined or Triple Science, a Foreign Language (Ancient or Modern), and a Humanity (History or Geography). In practice, this has meant that in all English state schools hoping to be rated "Good" or "Outstanding" by OFSTED (the government inspectorate for schools), the top 90% of pupils have been told they have to choose either History or Geography at GCSE. On this account, Michael Gove maybe deserves some credit for the currently very high number of pupil studying history at GCSE. In 2019, 47% of 15 - 16 year olds in England sat History GCSE exams, compared to less than a third in 2011. As a history teacher, I generally think this is one of the better things to come out of Gove's bungled reforms, though it does highlight a lot of the problems that would arise should history become compulsory. 

The second variant is a more progressive, left-wing one. Under this perspective, pupils need to study history until the end of their compulsory schooling in order to understand the roots of modern day injustices and try and fight for change. A key moment here was Black Lives Matter, especially the toppling of the seventeenth century slave trader Edward Colston's statue in Bristol on 7th June 2020. This generated a public debate over the UK's imperial history and how it should be remembered in the twenty-first century. Many people saw the school history curriculum as being at the heart of the solution to the current ignorance and amnesia. For example, Sam Freedman, an expert on educational policy, tweeted in response to Colston's fall "days like today are why I think history should be a compulsory subject to 16. You can't participate in the present if you don't understand the past." Indeed, before Colston's bronze likeness was taken for a swim in the Bristol Channel and just a week after the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd catalysed it all, an online petition was presented to Parliament. It demanded that history be made compulsory at GCSE, and that the history of Britain's involvement in slavery, colonialism and racism be taught. Needless to say, it was rejected.  

Ultimately, as I've said before with the closely related issue of what should be on the Key Stage 3 curriculum, I'm in agreement with neither. To allow either side of the political spectrum to tightly prescribe the content of the history curriculum to any age group, based on their own ideological version of British history seems highly dangerous. R.A Butler, the Minister for Education under the National Government during WW2, who essentially created secondary education in England and Wales as we know it today with the Education Act of 1944, had the foresight to see the dangers in this. Winston Churchill wanted the central government to prescribe the curriculum for history and other subjects - "tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec" is what he said to Butler. Michael Gove and his fellow travellers would applaud Churchill for this today. But Butler successfully resisted this, and it was only after the 1988 Educational Reform Act that a National Curriculum for history began to be developed. And as I've said before, in practice this has given English state schools a lot of autonomy over what history content their pupils learn at Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 and long may that continue. 

And reforming the content that pupils learn at GCSE/ Key Stage 4 is much less straight forward that people might think anyway. In practice, what actual historical content pupils study for their history GCSEs is dictated by what periods and topics the four exam boards (Edexcel, AQA, OCR and Eduqas) offer. Edexcel is a for-profit organisation (owned by the publishing company Pearson), while AQA, OCR and Edquas are private charities under the law. All four are in competition with each other and are essentially driven by market forces. Thus they offer whatever content secondary school history departments across England are most comfortable teaching, not what Westminster and Whitehall dictate. While some people want to the government to stop the outsourcing of GCSE exams to private companies and would like to see a single public-funded examboard, until this happens it effectively puts the dampers on any kind of radical reform of GCSE curricula. And that, by extension, removes part of the impetus for a compulsory history GCSE, as what's currently on offer from the main examboards is not the historical content that any of supporters of a compulsory history GCSE on the right or the left would want to see. More about that another time.

Now I'm going to stop waffling and really cut to the chase. I simply don't think compulsory history to 16 is right on the principle of freedom of choice. Obviously pupils need GCSEs in English, Maths and Science if they're going to be at all employable, but beyond that they should have freedom to choose which subjects they like. But more importantly, even if complusory history to 16 was the right idea in the abstract, I don't think its at all feasible in practice. 

I have not been a teacher for very long at all (two school terms as a trainee). But already from teaching in two very good but very normal London state schools, I know that compulsory history would be detrimental for many pupils. In my Key Stage 3 classes (11 - 14 years old), when history is still compulsory, I've taught pupils with the reading age of an 8 year old, refugees who can barely speak English and pupils with all kinds of other complex learning needs. For these pupils, being in mainstream education is itself an immense challenge. What matters for them is that they can get 5 grades 9 - 4 (A* - C in the old parlance) at GCSE, including English and Maths, so that they can succeed in adult life. Everything else for them really is an added bonus at best. Forcing them to do history at GCSE could very well be a nightmare for them. Alternatively, you could say that since even the core subjects they have to take already (especially English) place such huge demands on their literacy as is, perhaps having a humanity in the mix is a good thing as it helps build and reinforce those cross-curricular literacy skills. Indeed they might find it more interesting and fun writing essays about the Harrying of the North or the Cuban Missiles Crisis than "Macbeth" or "Pride and Prejudice." But alternatively, that subject that lights the spark of their interest and helps them build their literacy skills might be volcanoes and earthquakes, comparing Christianity and Islam or Greek mythology. Once again, while I can totally agree that studying a humanity (besides English Literature if we're counting it as one) is invaluable and something at all GCSE students should do, it shouldn't have to be history. Geography, Religious Studies and (where it is offered) Classical Civilisation are just as worthwhile. Indeed, and really I ought to have made this argument before, if we make history compulsory at GCSE why not just make all mainstream humanities subjects compulsory, as indeed they are in those countries where history is compulsory till school leaving age.  

Now for the vast majority of pupils in mainstream secondary education, there's no doubt that they could get a decent pass under the current GCSE history exam specifications if they had the motivation to. And here motivation is the key word. If pupils get to choose their subjects, they're a great deal more enthusiastic than if they're forced to them, by the same logic that volunteers make better fighters than conscripts. And for the subjects they are forced to do, namely English, Maths and Science, they at least have a powerful form of negative motivation there - if they fail them, they'll be virtually unemployable. I know this from experience, as I hated GCSE Maths but I knew I had to do well at it, and in the end I did. That kind of negative motivation can't exist for non-core subjects like history, which aren't seen as essential by most employers. What that then makes for when a non-core subject like history is made compulsory is one hell of a lot of disaffected learners. Anyone who has taught any academic subject at Key Stage 3, when they're all still compulsory, knows how pupil disaffection manifests itself - poor effort and poor behaviour in the classroom. On a bad day with a particularly difficult Key Stage 3 class in a non-academically selective school, a significant portion of lesson time can be taken up with the teacher managing pupil behaviour. But at least at Key Stage 3, disrupted lessons can be written off as the pupils don't have to pass external exams, only internal assessments set by the school/ subject departmental leadership. Whereas at GCSE, every bit of curriculum time is precious, especially in a subject like history. It is thus really important that your pupils are with you, almost from the moment they enter the classroom, so you can maximise on you actually teaching and them actually learning content. 

Linking to all this talk of motivation and subject content is the final reason why history should not be compulsory at GCSE, and that is a simple logistical one. There simply aren't enough trained history teachers for every 14 - 16 year old in the country to be studying it, especially in the current teacher recruitment crisis in England. This hasn't hit history nearly as badly as some other subjects high in demand, like physics, computing or design and technology. But it demonstrably has all the same. What this means is that, already at Key Stage 3, many schools are getting non-specialists, whose actual subject specialism may be Geography, Religious Studies, Sociology, Psychology, Business Studies etc, to teach history. This situation really isn't ideal, but its just about workable at Key Stage 3 with the right kind of subject leadership, staff training and resources. However, if GCSE History were to be taught by non-specialists, it would be letting the pupils down, plain and simple. In order for pupils to be motivated and do well at GCSE, they need teachers who possess good knowledge both of the content of the periods they're studying and of history as a discipline. 

Indeed as Kristian Shanks, a history teacher and deputy head of a secondary school has pointed out in an article arguing for exactly the same position I am now, we've seen the horrors this can bring with another subject - Religious Studies. Lots of state schools used to make Religious Studies compulsory at GCSE, in order to meet their statutory requirement of providing for the Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural development of 14 - 16 year olds. What this led to was a dumbed down course in which pupils could receive as little as one lesson a fortnight, taught by non-specialist teachers and with lots of disaffection and poor behaviour. Indeed, as someone who took Religious Studies for GCSE at a private school where it wasn't a compulsory subject and was given much more curriculum time, we were able to cover all the content we needed to get As and A*s in just two terms. For the whole of year 10 and some of year 11, we spent our Religious Studies lessons discussing Kierkegaard and Batman, or watching movies like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" or "Kingdom of Heaven." Indeed, when the EBacc was created, the government couldn't countenance making Religious Studies eligible for the humanities component - it just wasn't intellectually stimulating or challenging enough. The same cannot be allowed to happen to history!