Controversies 1: What do we do with the Anglo-Saxons? Part 1

 

Perhaps the most famous symbol of Anglo-Saxon England, the Sutton Hoo helmet excavated in 1939 and possibly worn by King Raedwald of East Anglia (560 - 624)

Just over a week ago, on 30 September, the Russian president Vladimir Putin blamed the explosion of the Nordstream 2 pipeline on “Anglo-Saxon”powers. “The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: they moved onto sabotage … It is hard to believe but it is a fact that they organised the blasts on the Nord Stream international gas pipeline.” By “Anglo-Saxons”, Putin almost certainly meant the USA, the UK and their NATO allies. He said this in the context of a speech justifying his plans to annex Ukrainian territory, condemning Western “Satanism”, imperialism and hypocrisy and casting the war in Ukraine as a holy war to defend the Russian people from spiritual degeneration, sexual deviancy and, the favourite bogeyman of the far-right, transgenderism.

Perhaps it was the Anglo-Saxon saboteurs again who behind the Russian bridge in Crimea catching fire

A just over a year ago, US Republican congresswoman and far-right conspiracy theorist (she believes in QANON and “white genocide”) MarjorieTaylor Greene established an America First Caucus that would protect “Anglo-Saxonpolitical traditions”, and in their seven-page manifesto they hashed out thefamiliar anti-immigrant talking points and cliches. They also insisted that “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” had nothing to do with race.

Over this summer, the palace of the early kings of East Anglia, which included Raedwald, the wearer of the ultra-famous Sutton Hoo helmet, wasunearthed at Rendlesham in Suffolk. The palace was found to have been occupied between 570 and 720 AD – it was recorded in the writings of the Venerable Bede (d.735) as the place where King Aethelwold of the East Angles stood as godfather at the baptism of the erstwhile pagan King Swithelm of the East Saxons in 662. Its great hall was found to be 23 metres long and 10 metres wide (just over a fifth of the area of an Olympic swimming pool). Back in June, an Anglo-Saxoncemetery containing over 140 graves from the fifth and sixth centuries was discoveredat Wendover in Buckinghamshire. And in August, the eighth century monastery ofCookham in the Thames Valley, which played an important role in the Mercian kingsexpanding their power south of the Chilterns, was excavated by a team of archaeologists from the University of Reading including Gabor Thomas, who I’vementioned here before. And last year, the largest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxoncoins was discovered in Norfolk by an amateur metal detectorist. Some feel justified in saying we’re living in a golden age of Anglo-Saxon archaeology.

All these different examples reflect the different meanings of the term Anglo-Saxon. The first, most popular in Continental Europe, is touse that term to decry perceived British and American imperialism and maligncultural influences – the French president Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO in 1966 in attempt to free it from “Anglo-Saxon” domination. Putin is following in that tradition. The second meaning is mostly confined to the US, and is used to essentially mean white Americans of predominantly English ancestry, though anyone of Protestant Northern European descent – Dutch, German, Scandinavian – can find inclusion with the label as well. Thomas Jefferson, who taught himself Old English, hugely admired what he saw as the proto-democratic traditions of Anglo-Saxon government, and tried to frame the new American republic he’d helped found as a kind of successor state to Anglo-Saxon England. The American Revolution certainly helps explain why Anglo-Saxon rather than English American caught on – the former associated with a lost golden age of primitive democracy in the old country, the other with the imperial centre (technically called Great Britain) they’d just seceded from. The term Anglo-Saxon has been used since the nineteenth century as a rallying cry by racist groups in the USA like the Ku Klux Klan to incite hatred and violence not only against African Americans but also Jews, Irish, Italians, Poles, Catholics generally and anyone who wasn’t of English/ Germanic ancestry and Protestant. When Marjorie Taylor spoke of “Anglo-Saxon” political traditions, she probably meant them in that sense despite claiming she hadn’t brought race into it. Then the third sense is what’s most familiar to us in the UK. That is to designate a historical period between the fifth and eleventh centuries, in which lowland Britain (what we now call England) was dominated by kingdoms founded by Continental Germanic migrants and also to refer to the culture and peoples associated with it.

Pro-KKK, anti-Catholic propaganda from the 1920s

Popular newsprint outlets didn't like it when JFK, a practicing Catholic of Irish ancestry, challenged the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) ascendancy that had dominated US politics until the 1960s

The first two senses are deeply pungent. But the third seems innocent and neutral enough, doesn’t it. Well, apparently, not anymore. In September2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in the USA dropped theAnglo-Saxon from their name – they are now the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. This was precipitated by their second ever vicepresident (the society was only founded in 1983), Mary Rambaran-Olm resigned earlier that year, at the Race4Race event held at Washington’s FolgerShakespeare Library. She resigned on the grounds that the field of Anglo-Saxon studies was rife with bullying, elitism, sexism, racism, lack of concern for the struggles of graduate students and early career scholars and sexual harassment. Rambaran-Olm of course welcomed the decision of the members to have the name changed, as a step in the right direction to tackle the field’s multitude of problems and a gesture of solidarity to the victims. Since then, she and a group of other US medievalist literary scholars, have called for the term Anglo-Saxon to be dropped from academic books and journals, university courses, museums and heritage sites, claiming that is both historically inaccurate and racially-charged. You can read their arguments here. All of this is essentially an off-shot of a of a broader crisis in academic medievalist circles in the Anglosphere. The use of various medieval symbols and motifs at the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville in 2017 has raised all kinds of uncomfortable questions about how to deal with the abuse of the medieval European past by neo-fascists, white nationalists andother far-right types, who clearly see medieval Europe as an ultra-macho, whites-only place and idolise Viking warriors and other people from the medieval past they see as warrior role-models and exemplary of white Nordic superiority. Here ofcourse it must be said that ancient Greece and Rome have also been misappropriated on a colossal scale by racists going back to the eighteenth century, and that at the forefront of the Neo-Nazi/ white supremacist historical conscience are the American Civil War and WW2. There’s also a huge concern, in both the UK and the US about the lack of ethnic diversity in the humanities, especially among professors and other senior scholars. This raises important questions about how we make the field more open, accessible and comfortable to people from non-white backgrounds.

Nazi propaganda poster in occupied Norway encouraging Norwegian men to join the Wehrmacht to follow in the footsteps of their Viking warrior forbears. What the alt-right was doing at Charlottesville goes back to their OG fascist forerunners.

Jake Angeli, the Shaman of QANON at the Capitol Insurrection on January 6 2021. Though he's dressed like a Native American, he does have lots of Norse symbols including the Valknut of Odin, Thor's hammer Mjolnir and Yggdrasil, the world tree. St Boniface please help us against these nutters!

The campaign to abolish the term Anglo-Saxon has gained some momentum in the United States, but has been met with mixed reception on this side of the Atlantic. Here all of us, except for a substratum of far-right lunatics, think of the term exclusively in the third sense. Some academics have welcomed this move and called for similar stuff to happen here– Stewart Brookes, who taught me palaeography at Oxford, is one of them. Michael Wood, the celebrated TV historian whose “In Search of the Dark Ages” brought Anglo-Saxon history to a wider public than ever before, has basicallychosen sit on the fence in relation to it, instead just reminding us to be nice to each other and try and make the field as inclusive to ethnic minorities as possible, which no one other than a chauvinist could disagree with. Those in the historical profession who don’t like controversies, have simply kept their heads down. Others, however, have rushed to defend the term Anglo-Saxon from the charges levelled against it, and have argued that we can promote a visionof the Anglo-Saxon past that doesn’t pander to racist fantasies while notabandoning the term to the racists. They have also pointed out the various inadequacies of the alternative term being proposed by Rambaran-Olm et al – “early medieval England.” An open letter was signed by a team of UK academics led byarchaeologist John Hines arguing in defence of the term Anglo-Saxon whilst committing themselves to opposeracism and abuse of the early medieval past by the far-right. Some UK academics also wrote online articles in defence of the term Anglo-Saxon, and were then harassedfor it by a particularly crass and vicious group of American medievalistliterary scholars whom I won’t name (they don’t deserve publicity here). Indeed, Howard Williams, an archaeologist at the University of Chester, was libelled in an academic journal by some of them, and the journal’s editorsrefused to retract their statements despite the fact they broke the law and allthe rules of academic engagement. Medieval history is often renowned for being behind with the times, but eventually the culture wars with their associated nastiness were going to catch up with it. Underlining all of this is a sense of mistrust between European and North American academics, that I’ve come to be quite aware of, which you can see a perfect example of here (scroll down to the comments section especially).

Do Anglo-Saxons make you think more of this?

Or this? 

So where does that leave me in all of this. Some of you might think I shouldn’t comment at all for I have no skin in the game. I am after all a Continental early medievalist (Carolingianist) not an Anglo-Saxonist, so why should I be pontificating about this. I am however going to be teaching Anglo-Saxon England to a year 7 class in my first placement school. And as an early medievalist this controversy fringes on so many things that are relevant and of interest to me, namely the construction of ethnic identities in the middle ages, historiography and memory and the relationship between the early medieval past and the politics of the present, which has been there since the high middle ages. In a subsequent post (the part 2) I will be arguing that we should retain the term Anglo-Saxon, that the racists have no real claim over it, that it is not irredeemably tainted with racism and that the term “early medieval England” is thoroughly inadequate because there was nothing that could really be called England before the tenth century without a huge degree of anachronism and teleological thinking. But that will unfortunately have to wait till next week at the earliest. In the meantime, have a lovely weekend!

 

 

From the sources 5: Peasants and power

Smaragdus of Saint Mihiel (770 – 840), a Visigothic immigrant from Spain (like Theodulf of Orleans, friend of this blog, whom he knew personally) that became abbot of a monastery in what is now Lorraine in eastern France, wrote a commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict. If an elite man (potens) were to approach the monastery gate, he should pound on the gate with his fist or staff, and the gatekeeper would greet him humbly and ask for a blessing. But if a poor or low status man (pauper) approached, he should cry out humbly and the monastery gatekeeper would respond with a reassuring “Thanks be to God.” This should not be news, but Carolingian Francia was not a democracy, nor did it make any claim to being egalitarian. It was clear to everyone that kings, bishops and a landowning aristocratic elite, some of whom were tonsured and some of whom wore sword-belts, were in charge and that it was the duty of the common people to respect and obey them. The same principle of course applied for husbands and wives, fathers and sons and masters and slaves. Only the spiritual sphere did egalitarianism apply – the Bible had made it clear everyone had an equal chance of getting into Heaven.

Sourced from Chris Wickham "The Inheritance of Rome: A history of Europe from 400 - 1000." The hierarchical, walled structure of this ninth century Tuscan peasant village encapsulates the direction of travel of social change in the ninth century - the upper walled enclosure is probably an estate centre occupied by the landlord's agents.

This was however, not a caste society. People could and did rise above their station. As we saw in the Marseille polyptych, a few peasant boys left their homes to attend school. Those who did could join the clergy and rise high in society. The best example of this phenomenon is Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims, the son of an unfree goatherd from northern Germany, who gained the favour of Charlemagne and was educated at his court. Yet the likes of Ebbo could not leave their backgrounds completely behind and faced snobbery at court – an official once said to Ebbo “[the emperor] made you free, not noble, which is impossible.” 

St Mark from the Gospel Book of Ebbo of Rheims (now kept in the municipal library of Epernay in Champagne, France), one of the most beautiful examples of Carolingian painting out there

Likewise, peasants could still serve in the royal army and win lands and other riches on the expanding frontier, at least until the end of Charlemagne’s reign, and as we saw in the Edict of Pitres, kings doubled down on their right to have all free men provide military service during the Viking invasions. And peasants (including the unfree) could also become warriors in the retinues of churchmen and aristocrats. Nonetheless, warfare was becoming an increasingly elite occupation in the ninth century, especially with the slow shift towards heavy cavalry warfare, which was expensive to equip oneself for. The idea that it was the right and duty of all free Frankish men to carry weapons and serve king and country in war was slowly dying out, as this repugnant incident (infamous amongst Carolingianists) from the Annals of Saint Bertin recounts:

859. The Danes ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt. Some of the common people [vulgus] living between the Seine and Loire formed a sworn association [coniuratio] amongst themselves, and fought bravely against the Danes on the Seine. But because their association had not been made without due consideration [incaute], they were easily slain by our more powerful people.

(The Annals of Saint Bertin, edited and translated by Janet Nelson, Manchester University Press (1992), quoted in Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 – 1000, Penguin (2009) p 529)

In the modern historiography, the ninth century is seen as a crucial period in the growth of aristocratic power in the Frankish lands, which meant the ebbing away of the relative freedom and autonomy that the peasantry had enjoyed in the three centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The work of Chris Wickham, who I’ve just cited, and “Reframing the Feudal Revolution” by Charles West are instructive here. To what extent were the peasantry completely passive players in all of this? And could the church and the state be of any avail to them. This is what we will investigate in the final part of our “from the sources” mini-series on Carolingian peasants.

Our first source takes the form of a record of a judgement issued in 828 by the royal court of King Pippin I of Aquitaine, one of the middle sons of Emperor Louis the Pious who was given a sub-kingdom to rule in his father’s lifetime. It concerns a dispute between the Abbey of Saint-Paul de Cormery in the Loire Valley and some of its free tenants from an estate in Poitou. Let’s have a read:

A silver denarius of Pippin I of Aquitaine (d.838)

Pepin by the Grace of God king of Aquitaine. When we in God’s name, on a Tuesday, in our palace at the villa of Chasseneuil in the county of Poitou near the River Clain, were sitting to hear the cases of many persons and to determine just judgements, there came certain men, named Aganbert, Aganfred, Frotfar, and Martin, they as well as their fellows (pares) being coloni of Saint Paul from the villa of Antoigne belonging to the monastery of Cormery and its abbot Jacob. There they brought a complaint against the abbot and his advocate, named Agenus, on the grounds that the abbot and his officers had demanded and exacted from them more in rent and renders than they ought to pay and hand over, and more than their predecessors for a long time before them had handed over, and that they [the abbot and his officers] were not keeping for them such law as their predecessors had had.

Agenus the advocate and Magenar the provost of the monastery were present, and made a statement rebutting that claim as follows: neither the abbot nor themselves had exacted, or ordered to be exacted, any dues or renders other than those their predecessors had paid to the monastery’s representatives for thirty years. They forthwith presented an estate survey (descriptio) to be read out, wherein it was detailed how, in the time of Alcuin’s abbacy, the coloni of that villa who were there present, and also their fellows, had declared on oath that what they owed in renders, and what was still to pay, for each manse on that estate. That survey was dated to the thirty-fourth year of Charles’ reign [802].

The coloni there present were then asked if they had declared [the statements in] that survey and actually paid the renders stated in that survey for a period of years, and if that survey had been true and good, or did they wish to say anything against it or object to it, or not? They said and acknowledged that the survey was true and good, and they were quite unable to deny that they had paid the render for a period of years, or that they themselves, or their predecessors, had declared [the statements in] that survey.

Therefore we, together with our faithful men, namely Count Haimo [and twenty-three named men ending with John, count of the palace] and many others, have seen fit to judge that, since those coloni themselves gave the acknowledgement as stated above that the survey was as they had declared it, and as it was written down in that document there before them, and that they had paid the said renders for a period of years, so also must they pay and hand over the same each year and every year to the representatives of that house of God.

Therefore we order that, since we have seen the case thus heard and concluded, the above Agenus the advocate and Magenar [sic] the provost should on behalf of the house of God receive a record of it, showing that it has been done in this way and at this time.

I Deotimus, deputising for John count of the palace, have recognised and subscribed.

Given on 9 June in the fifteenth year of our lord Louis the serene emperor. Nectarius wrote out and subscribed it.

(Adapted from Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press (2009), pp 229 – 230)

What we can see here is a case of Frankish free peasants, albeit ones in a dependent relationship to a monastic landlord, using their right as free men to use the public law courts. In their case, they chose not to go through the local county court (placitum or mallum publicum) but go instead to the second highest court in the land, that of their regional sub-king. The only one higher than that would be the emperor’s court, and they weren’t exactly going to trek all the way to Aachen or Ingelheim. As the source subsequently recounts, they lost the case. Perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising. The peasants were at a huge disadvantage. The text tells us quite clearly that they didn’t have the written records to back up their claims. Meanwhile the monastery had its survey (descriptio) from a generation earlier (the time of Charlemagne and Alcuin), which it was able to use to demonstrate that the rents and other exactions it imposed on the peasantry weren’t any more burdensome than in the time of their fathers. Linking back to earlier posts, this reminds us why the polyptychs were created – they were documents designed to defend the rights of landlords in disputes with their tenants just like this by carefully recording what each peasant family owed in rents and services. This very document would give them more archival ammunition. The peasants themselves, however, could only rely on the vagueness of individual/ collective memory and testifying in good faith. The fact that the jury of Pippin of Aquitaine’s palace officials were all landlords themselves probably didn’t work in the peasants’ favour either. Finally, though we have no indication of this, Agenus the advocate and Magenar the provost were almost certainly better public speakers than the peasants, and as had been well-known in the Roman Empire, the better rhetoricians always won the case.

At the same time, the fact the peasants still bothered to argue their case in the law courts is still significant. And they weren’t alone in this. We have similar cases from northern Francia, Septimania (Languedoc) and Italy in the ninth century, in which peasants appealed to public law courts at county or kingdom level over personal legal status, rent or seized lands. In most, but not all, cases they lost. But it didn’t matter. Even if the judicial system was run by the aristocracy, to a greater extent than it had been in the seventh and early eighth centuries, when the county court had been a bottom-up assembly of local free men, the peasants still believed that it worked for them and that they could get justice like anyone else. After 900, peasants attending public law courts become much rarer, and by the mid-eleventh century local justice had become completely privatised by territorial lords in most of the former Carolingian Empire – Germany differed somewhat.

But now on to our next source. It takes the form of an extract from a collection of miracle stories written in 878 by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, who I’ve mentioned here many times before. Hincmar was a very enthusiastic promoter of the cult of his see’s patron saint, Remigius (who we’ve also met before), And he wasn’t afraid to make a few things up to that end – his claim that Clovis was anointed with a chalice of holy oils carried down to Saint Remigius from by a dove heaven had no pre-existing foundation (Merovingian kings were notanointed, remember!) Thus, some might want to approach the following story with extreme scepticism as just a bishop doing some PR. Traditionally, that’s how historians saw miracle stories and saint’s lives. But now, historians have come to realise that the stories in this genre (hagiography) does significantly reflect popular culture. While they’re not a direct window on to the peasant world, they do more to tell us about the lives and beliefs of ordinary people than any other kind of narrative source from the early Middle Ages. So, let’s have a read:

Rheims Cathedral (author's own photograph) looking nothing like how Hincmar would have known it, but magnificent all the same - its one of the most beautiful cathedrals I have ever visited.

The abbey of Saint Remigius of Rheims (author's own photograph). Again, none of the Carolingian building survives - what's there is from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.

In our age a peasant from the village of the episcopate of Rheims which is called Plumbea Fontana lived next to the royal estate which is called Rozoy-[sur-Serre], but he was not able to use his land peacefully either for harvest or for grazing because of the harassment of the residents on the royal estates. He frequently sought justice from the royal officials, but he was not able to obtain it. Then he took for himself some beneficial counsel. He cooked loaves and meat and he placed beer into jars, as much as he was able. All these he placed into a container which is called in the vernacular a benna, and he placed it upon a cart. Hitching up his oxen, he hurried with a candle in his hand to the basilica of Saint Remi. When he arrived, he presently surprised the poor with the bread, meat, and beer; he placed a candle at the sepulchre of the saint; he placed a candle at the sepulchre of the saint and beseeched him for help against the men of the royal estate who were harassing him. He also gathered the dust from the floor of the church, as much as he was able, tied it in a cloth, and placed it in the same container. He placed a shroud above it, as is usually put upon the corpse of a dead person. With his cart he returned home. Persons he met on the way inquired what he was bringing on the cart, and he responded that he was bringing Saint Remi. They all wondered at his words and deed, and thought that he had lost his mind. He called on Saint Remi to help him against his oppressors. The bulls and cows began with the loudest bellows to attack one another with their horns, and the he-goats to attack the she-goats with their horns, the pigs to fight with the pigs, the rams with the ewes, and the herdsmen dealt each other blows with sticks and arms. As the riot grew greater, both the screaming herdsmen and the animals according to their type began to flee towards Rozoy with the loudest noise and racket, as if a huge multitude of pursuers were beating them with sticks. The men of the royal estate, when they saw and heard these things, were struck with great terror and believed that they had no more than an hour to live. Thus reprehended for their arrogance, they abandoned the harassment of this poor man of St-Remi, and thereafter the poor man held his belongings in peace and without disturbance. And since he lived near the Serre River in a muddy place, he put up with a great bother in his dwelling from snakes. Taking the dust, which he had brought with him from the floor of the church of Saint Remi, he sprinkled it throughout his house, and thereafter a snake did not appear in those places, where the dust had been scattered. By the evidence of miracles, we can accept as certainly proved that, if firm in the faith, we ask from the heart for the help of Saint Remi, we shall be freed from the attacks of the angels of Satan, who as a serpent deceived the mother of the human race in addressing her; and by merit and intercession of Saint Remi we shall be freed from the wicked deeds of bad men.

(From Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press (2009), pp 484 – 485)

A modern status of Saint Remigius in Rheims (author's own photograph) commemorating the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis in 1996.

Scepticism of the supernatural and Hincmar’s motives aside, this story does nonetheless reflect beliefs and practices that Frankish peasants could have held, and there are plenty of other stories like it. The story reflects a widely held view that if one was pious, charitable and lived a good Christian life, as the peasant in the story was by feeding the beggars at the church with his spare food, and venerated the saints, one could gain their protection against oppression from the powerful. This kind of attitudes would find their ultimate fruition in the post-Carolingian period, with the Peace and Truce of God movement, which we’ll explore another time once I’ve finally translated the relevant bits of Adhemar of Chabannes. Likewise, Hincmar’s sympathetic attitude to the plight of peasants on the lands of Saint-Remi shows that ecclesiastical landlords weren’t always inimical to the interests of their tenants.

To wrap things up, it is worth noting that there were virtually no peasants’ revolts in the Carolingian era. One exception is the Saxon Stellinga of 841, yet there are many reasons why Saxony was atypical of the rest of the Carolingian Empire and some historians doubt whether the Stellingahad a genuinely lower-class character. Now there are many other reasons why peasants’ revolts were almost completely absent from the Carolingian era and were essentially a late medieval/ early modern phenomenon. But we must not ignore the possibility that one of them was that the majority of peasants viewed the social and political system as just and legitimate. Partly that would have been due to lack of alternative set-ups, except in Saxony which had until a time in living memory been a loose confederation of pagan tribal societies. But clearly there were various ways in which the state, as we saw with the first source, and the Church, as we saw in the second, could at least in theory be made to work for them in the face of oppression and exploitation from certain elite individuals and institutions. Frankish peasants were not passive victims and broad acceptance of the status quo didn’t mean constantly tugging the proverbial forelock even in the face of maltreatment.