Controversies 2: the problem of early medieval literacy (the basics)

In this early tenth century manuscript illustration, thought to be based on a lost ninth century original, Charlemagne has a conversation with his son, Pippin of Italy. Meanwhile a scribe, not obviously a cleric (since he isn't tonsured), writes down the minutes of their meeting

You've almost certainly heard it said by someone, somewhere that only priests and monks were literate in the Middle Ages. Now I'm going to say this from the outset. Like so many other things that people think they know about the Middle Ages, from widespread belief in a flat earth and armoured knights being lifted onto their horses by cranes, to iron maidens, chastity belts and the droit de seigneur, this is a MYTH! But of course, the biggest myth about the Middle Ages is that for a whole millennium of history nothing much changed at all. In fact, I'd argue that the period 500 - 1500, give or take half a century on either side, makes absolutely no sense as a single historical epoch. So which segments of the Middle Ages are we talking about when we say that people other than clerics could read and write. 

As longtime readers of this blog will know, and as you might have figured from the title, I'm of course interested here in the early Middle Ages, by which I mean the period before the year 1000. Now while medievalists of all shapes and sizes can unite against ancient historians/ classicists, early modernists and modernists being ignorant or dismissive about the Middle Ages, that's where it ends. 

In the context of medieval literacy, a specialist on the high and late Middle Ages (1000 - 1500) could laugh at the assertion that only the clergy could read and write in the Middle Ages, and say "you what mate? Haven't you heard of Wolfram Von Eschenbach, Marco Polo, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Catherine of Siena, Christine de Pizan or Margaret Paston? Have you not considered the thousands of financial accounts, property deeds, tax records and other government documents, law books, books of hours, chivalric romances and other works vernacular literature that could hardly have been the preserve of a small clerical elite? Think before you speak again, you ignoramus!"  

But those same people might then say, "but for the period before the year 1000, you're probably right. I don't want to offend my early medievalist colleagues too much, but you might be right in calling those the real Dark Ages."

Indeed this is sort of the thrust of three classic studies of Medieval literacy (both of them now 40+ years old), namely Malcolm Parkes' "The Literacy of the Laity" (1973), Michael Clanchy's "From Memory to Written Record" (1979) and Brian Stock's "The Implications of Literacy" (1983). All three of them are rightly celebrated, as they essentially kickstarted the study of medieval literacy as a serious academic sub-field - they themselves took their cues from the pioneering anthropologically-inspired work of ancient historians and early modernists. While both of them argued that reading and writing had a huge level of importance to medieval government, society and culture, they were  focusing on the high and late middle ages. They saw all of this the product of a great transformation taking place in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. They had different views on what was at the root of this transformation. Malcolm Parkes thought it was Anglo-Norman barons, ladies and knights' growing appetite for fiction and historical romances written in the vernacular (King Arthur, chivalric adventures, you know what I mean) in the twelfth century that kickstarted the rise of lay literacy among the aristocracy. With the rise of commerce and towns and growing need for written financial accounts that came with it, the middle classes followed suit in the thirteenth century. Clanchy, on the other hand, argued it all started in 1066 with the distrust the Norman conquerors of England had for native oral testimony and their preference for written records and law, that began the shift from "memory to written record." Initially this mainly concerned churches and clerical functionaries in William the Conqueror's government. But by the reign of Edward I (1272 - 1307) written law, written instructions from the government, written property deeds and estate surveys, written financial accounts, written literature etc had become so important that the aristocracy and urban middle classes all had to receive at least elementary education in literacy in a bureaucratic world.

Meanwhile, all these authors argued that England and Western Europe in the pre-1000 period were essentially oral societies - laws, literature, history, property rights, customs, religion etc were all passed on by word of mouth with literacy only being used by a small, essentially clerical minority. For reasons that we'll soon see, that has provoked ire from early medievalists. Indeed, in the later editions of "From Memory to Written Record" published in 1997 and 2013, Clanchy was a lot more generous when it came to discussing literacy in Anglo-Saxon England in the opening chapters. And in terms of his central thesis, he's absolutely correct - literacy at a societal level did fundamentally change, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the Medieval West between 1066 and 1300. I wouldn't for one minute quibble with the argument that more people could read and write, and there was much greater use of documents for a much greater range of purposes, in Edward III's England than in Aethelred the Unready's England. But that great upsurge in literacy didn't come out of the blue either. So what was literacy really like before the eleventh century. 

So how do we determine early medieval literacy? Now that is a difficult question. I think there's two ways of looking at literacy, on a personal and a societal level. Personal level meaning who exactly could read and write. Societal level meaning the place of literacy in society. 

Personal literacy is probably the hardest to figure out. To state the most obvious, no one in the early middle ages was producing statistics about how many people could read or write. Indeed, prior to about 1850, all data on literacy in Western Europe has to be inferred from various kinds of evidence. For example, ancient historians have tried to infer a high degree of literacy in the Roman Empire, possibly as high as 30% of the adult male population, from things like the Pompeii graffiti, the Vindolanda tablets or the Egyptian papyri found in the Oxyrhynchus rubbish dumps. For historians of early modern Europe (1500 - 1800), the generally agreed baseline is how many people could sign their own names. Unfortunately, and this something I lament all the time, there's no early medieval Pompeii. Though the latter method could work for the early middle ages, its much less reliable than for the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries  given that much less survives by way of original documents, and not of the right type. 

There are individual lay people from the early Middle Ages who we know were literate. From the Carolingian Empire (751 - 888), we have some long-time friends of this blog like Einhard, Angilbert, Nithard and Dhuoda, all of whom wrote works in learned Latin whilst being lay nobles and courtiers. All Carolingian kings from Pippin the Short to Carloman II, we know were literate and had received a full education in Latin. Meanwhile, Margrave Eberhard of Friuli had a huge library of books he read and consulted, and showed an interest in theological debate, and Count Gerald of Aurillac read his psalter regularly. Most famously, Einhard says of Charlemagne that he could read and understand St Augustine's "City of God", a highly difficult theological text, though he never mastered learning to write, but not for want of trying.

From the Merovingian period before it we know that all the Merovingian kings from the generation of King Chilperic (r.561 - 584), whose Latin poems were dreadful according to Gregory of Tours, to that of  Childebert III (r.694 - 711), whose autograph survives on royal diplomas, were literate. We also know that various Merovingian saints like Desiderius of Cahors. Audoin of Rouen, Bonitus of Clermont and Leudegar of Autun had spent their earlier careers as lay civil servants at the Merovingian court and had received secular legal and literary educations. At a humbler level, we have the slave Andarchius who could read Virgil and the Theodosian Code. 

Signature of the Merovingian King Chlothar II (r.584 - 629) to the Edict of Paris in 614. People love to slag off Merovingian handwriting as clumsy and illegible, but this is a good deal more elegant than the signatures of modern politicians. See Donald Trump's signature below.

In Visigothic Spain, King Sisebut (r.612 - 629) and King Chinthila (r.636 - 639) are known to have written poems, and the former corresponded with the great Isidore of Seville on Classical Roman poetry and science. We also know from the letters of Isidore's pupil, Braulio of Zaragoza, that King Chindasuinth (r.642 - 653) and Count Laurentinus (otherwise undocumented) owned libraries in which all kinds of obscure texts that Braulio had difficulty obtaining were located. Another seventh century Visigothic nobleman, Count Bulgar, wrote letters to Frankish bishops in which he expressed anxiety about the Avar horde and their involvement in wars north of the Pyrenees.

For Anglo-Saxon England, we have King Sigeberht of East Anglia and King Aldfrith of Northumbria, who Bede informs us were able to read and write Latin. King Alfred the Great (most famously) translated the works of Gregory the Great and Boethius into Old English. And Ealdorman Aethelweard, a West Saxon aristocrat, wrote a Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for his cousin, a German abbess. 

Early medieval lay literacy in action: Alfred the Great's translation of Gregory the Great's pastoral care

From post-900 Germany and France, we know that emperors Otto II and Otto III were literate in Latin and German (Otto III knew Greek as well from his mother, Empress Theophanu). Likewise, Otto III's contemporary King Robert the Pious (r.996 - 1031) of West Francia/ France was literate in Latin too and enjoyed debating theology. Duke William V of Aquitaine (d.1030), had a huge library and corresponded in letters with Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, who called him a second Maecenas (after Augustus' chief adviser and patron of Virgil and Horace) for his literary interests. 

This immediately confronts us with a problem. Can these people be considered at all representative, or just exceptions to the general rule? Some certainly look more like exceptions than others. King Aldfrith of Northumbria, for example, looks like a fairly obvious candidate for being exceptional. He was trained at a monastery in Ireland and would have almost certainly become a cleric had it not been for his brother, King Egcfrith, dying in battle against the Picts in 685, creating a dynastic crisis which it was up to Aldfrith to resolve by returning home to take up his brother's throne. King Sigeberht of East Anglia likewise spent his childhood in exile in a Frankish monastery. Alfred the Great definitely belongs in a category of his own as well. And for some of the other royal examples, there's an argument that kings belong in a category of their own. But the Visigothic kings we know were literate, Sisebut, Chinthila and Chindasuinth, acquired their thrones either by usurpation or military coup and had had careers as generals and military governors before becoming kings. So we can probably actually take their personal literacy as a sign that literate education was common among the Visigothic nobility in seventh century Spain.

Indeed I'm reminded of a comment I once heard in one of master's seminars from a fellow student. I can't recall exactly what she said, but it was along the lines of "if you have to give the names of powerful women in history, then that indicates they're not very common or significant." Precisely this kind of argument is what the minimalists and sceptics would say about lay literacy in the early medieval West. Of course, there are obvious fallacies with this kind of argument when applied to both, but especially so for early medieval literacy. For the vast majority (90% and upwards) of known individuals from the early Middle Ages, we have no surviving writings and we can say nothing about their education. And for those that we do know about, like all the names I've mentioned, its not because they were the only ones who left writings or received a literate education. Rather its because their writings survive to us today, either by accident or survival, or because we have anecdotal and other circumstantial evidence of them being able to read and write from histories, hagiographies, letters etc. 

But where this kind of argument gets us somewhere is that we need to be focusing on qualitative evidence rather than quantitative evidence. To put it another way, if we want to know whether these individuals were exceptions or not, it makes more sense to try and find what were the general expectations surrounding lay literacy and education, as well as the range of purposes for which writing was used in government and society. What really matters is not finding out how many people outside the clergy could read and write, but to what extent did you need to be able to read and write or at the very least be able to use documents through intermediaries to do well for yourself as an elite (or indeed non-elite) lay person in early medieval society. This is after all, how ancient historians and later medievalists have approached the subject, and its no surprise that this exactly how early medievalists have been approaching the problem since the 1980s. Literacy and education, literacy and government, literacy and society, all of these I'm going to explore here some time to show how lay literacy was much more common than people think in the early Middle Ages. But I'm too constrained by time and space to look at them now. 

Before I finish with this post, we need to consider two things. Firstly, whether or not learning Latin was a barrier to literacy in the early middle ages. Secondly, whether it ever makes sense to speak of early medieval societies as oral cultures. 

As is well-known, the language of the vast majority of early medieval texts (outside of Anglo-Saxon England) was Latin. Traditionally, scholars presumed that only priests and monks would have known how to read Latin in the sixth to tenth century West, and even then not all of them. Let it of course be known that the existence of poorly educated illiterate clerics was a consistent source of complaint from St Boniface and Alcuin in the eighth century to Erasmus and John Colet on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. The presumption was that Latin was a foreign language, albeit a highly important, indeed sacred one, and that only those given a rigorous education could read it in the post-Roman West. This would obviously hold true in areas like Anglo-Saxon England, where the local language was a Germanic one, but even in Gaul, Spain and Italy where scholars used to think that sometime in the seventh or eighth centuries the spoken vernacular had completely evolved into early forms of French, Spanish and Italian and that Latin was no longer intelligible. But Rosamond McKitterick in "The Carolingians and the Written Word" (1989) challenged this and has argued that the spoken vernacular in the Romance regions wasn't actually all that different to Latin, except that it was spelled and pronounced differently.

This is an argument that makes a huge amount of sense when you make the analogy between Standard Chinese and regional dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Yue and Guangxi), Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects (Iraqi, Levantine, Egyptian, Maghrebi etc) and indeed English. English is an absolute nightmare for pronunciation, and I feel really sorry for my EAL (English as an Additional Language) pupils who have to go through their whole secondary schooling in it. This is also the reason why we had to do a short course on phonics as part of the PGCE. For example the grapheme (combination of written letters) -ough represents eight different phonemes (sounds) in spoken English i.e., borough, rough, cough, hiccough, lough, through, fought, dough and plough. Or the constant arguments between Northerners and Southerners in England over whether to pronounce a as a long vowel or a short vowel.

McKitterick also points out that the standard textbooks used for teaching Latin grammar, syntax, spelling and pronunciation in Carolingian monasteries in Gaul and Italy were ones written in the fourth century Roman Empire, and would not have made sense unless the students reading them already spoke Latin. Its revealing how Latin-vernacular interlinear glosses and dictionaries from the eighth and ninth centuries only appear in Germany, Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, where Latin really was being learned as a foreign language. A lot of this is going against what I wrote in my post on the Oaths of Strasbourg, but McKitterick's (and by that token, Roger Wright's) arguments are actually quite convincing. And besides the oaths of Strasbourg and the martyrdom of St Eulalia, which could be considered to be just the Latin dialects native to Gaul written phonetically. Its worth noting, as I did in that post, that besides those possible exceptions, we don't have any vernacular texts written in Romance languages until after 950. Its in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries that we start getting inscriptions, charters, short poems and documents of a practical nature (like a list of cheeses from a monastery in Northern Spain from 959) written in Old Italian and Old Castilian. Thus McKitterick, and before her Banniard and Wright, would argue that the real shift from Latin dialects to Romance languages happened around 900 rather than around 700 as per the traditional view. This is by no means settled scholarly consensus though. 

The geographic divide between regions where Latin/ Romance and Germanic languages were predominantly spoken speakers in 750 (green line) and 1914 (red line). Interestingly, the line hasn't changed much since the early Middle Ages, except in regions like the Pas de Calais in France or Tyrol in Italy. You can also see the origins of the Flemish-Walloon divide in Belgium. By Resnjari - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93789268

Thus, there's good reason to think that Latin was not a barrier to literacy in Gaul, Spain and Italy before the late ninth and early tenth centuries at the earliest. In the Germanic and Celtic-speaking lands it would have been more of one, though in those regions you also had vernacular texts. Can we really consider Anglo-Saxon noblemen who couldn't read Latin poems illiterate if they could read Old English poems like the Wanderer, Beowulf or the Battle of Maldon. Furthermore, we should take into account that there were many different levels to Latin literacy, especially how much the Latin language had evolved since Classical times and the range of different registers in which it was written. Virgil and Horace would have been difficult texts to the Carolingians, just like Chaucer and Shakespeare are difficult texts for people in the US and UK today.

As for the whole question of oral culture, I don't think it makes sense to call early medieval cultures oral even if we took the clerical monopoly view of early medieval literacy. The definition of oral culture used by experts like Walter Ong is a culture whose knowledge and worldviews have not been shaped by writing and texts at all. If we go by that definition, then early medieval Western societies cannot be considered to be true oral cultures because they were, after all, Christian.  Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, is a religion based around the written word, specifically its sacred text the Bible - indeed from as early as the seventh century, Muslim writers identified all three Abrahamic faiths as "peoples of the book." Likewise the very existence of written law codes, charters, histories, poems and treatises from Western Europe in the period 500 - 1000 show that writing was important to creating and preserving society's knowledge. And if only a minority could directly access it, even more would be affected by it i.e., as I've shown in previous texts, regardless of whether or not Carolingian peasants were literate, they were affected by the information recorded in the polyptychs and other documents drawn up by landlords. Sufficeth to say that while not everyone in the early middle ages was literate, virtually no one was insulated from the effects of the written word in society. 

On a final note, this blog has, as of a few weeks ago, been around for a year and half. Thank you everyone for reading my posts, whether you're a veteran reader or a first-timer, and to those who have given praise and constructive criticism - it means a great deal to me!

Let;s finish with one of my favourite early medieval artworks, St Matthew from the Ebbo Gospels (first quarter of the ninth century).

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!

 

 

One year blogoversary

 And so here we are. This blog has reached its first-year anniversary. And what a ride it has been. It has gone well beyond what I initially envisioned for this blog. Initially, I’d envisioned it as mostly somewhere for random thoughts and musings about the early middle ages I kept getting all the time (even in the shower, believe it or not), but never wrote down somewhere. But once it actually got going, it ended up becoming properly educational, and encouraged me to read more into certain topics I hadn’t really explored in much detail before. And I’m pleased to see that it has a lot more enthusiastic readership than I expected, though I do think I need to work harder to grow the community of readers – a Facebook page and, though this does make me grimace, a Twitter account may need to be set up sometime in the immediate future. Thank you so much to all of you for your support, whether you’re one of my long-time readers or this is the first post on this blog you’ve read.

I have also thought about some other necessary changes to this blog. The age of monster articles, what the Guardian would call “the long read,” are over. As a rule, going forward, no blogpost can exceed 1500 words in length. If its too long for you to read while you’re having your morning coffee, when you’re on the bus/ train to and from work or when you’re doing some internet browsing before bed, then really it’s a load of self-indulgent time-wasting on my part, lets be honest. I’ll also make it a commitment to release content more regularly. Until now there have been that there have been some periods of really intense blogging activity, followed by lengthy caesuras, much like the activity of many an early medieval chancery. But now its time to go full Angevin England mode and commit to a regular and predictable output, just like the calendars of the pipe rolls, close rolls and patent rolls but a lot less bureaucratic. I shall aim to release one every Monday morning at 7 am, though that may have to sometimes be every other Monday morning – I am starting a PGCE programme to train as a secondary school history teacher next month, after all. All subsequent posts will also be placed into one of five categories: from the sources; theory time; book review; controversies; first hand encounters with the medieval past. All of this I should have done a long time ago, but I was spurred into action after a computer glitch resulting from faulty Wi-Fi destroyed the first draft of this post, which I had spent two days working on – you can imagine how upset I was. I hope you’ll like these changes. But now let’s get on to some exciting special content.

Beowulf and the Merovingians

I’m sure you, my readers, are familiar with Beowulf. Ever since it was first translated into Modern English and published in 1815, it’s been recognised as one of the great foundational texts of English Literature. Historians now would generally see it as an invaluable source for Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian kingship, warrior masculinity and how early medieval Christians in Northern Europe approached their pre-Christian past. It’s a shame that nothing like it exists from the Frankish world, where I work on. Einhard tells us that Charlemagne “ordered that the very old German songs, in which the deeds and wars of ancient kings were celebrated, should be written down and preserved.” but posterity has handed down none of these Old Frankish epics to us in the present, with no small consequences for how differently historians view elite culture in Francia and Anglo-Saxon England.

Now, the plot of Beowulf should be familiar to many of my readers anyway but (spoiler alert) the eponymous hero, after succeeding his cousin Hygelac as king of the Geats (a people living in southwestern Sweden), dies fighting a dragon at the end. His faithful warrior companion, Wiglaf, then makes an ominous speech at Beowulf’s funeral. Here is an extract from it:

Now must our people look for time of war, as soon as afar to Frisian and to Frank the king’s fall is revealed. Bitter was the feud decreed against the Hugas (Franks), when Hygelac came sailing with his raiding fleet to Frisian land. There the Hetware in battle assailed him, and valiantly with overwhelming strength achieved that the warrior should lay him down: he fell amid the host, not one fair thing did that lord to his good men give. From us hath been ever since the favour of the Merovingian lord withheld.

(“Beowulf”, translated and with a commentary by J.R.R Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Harper Collins, 2014, lines 2446 – 2555, p 98)

Now in terms of being a source for the political history (in the traditional sense) of Scandinavia and the North Sea in the age of the barbarian great migrations, Beowulf is highly suspect. While most scholars would agree that it is at least partially based on authentic folk memories and oral histories of what was going on in Northern Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries, collective memory, like individual memory, can be very unreliable, with various things getting distorted, omitted or invented over time – anyone who has done family history research will likely be aware of this. But in the case of Hygelac’s disastrous proto-Viking raid on Frisia/ Frankish Gaul, we do have an independent primary source to verify it. Let’s turn to someone who is very much a friend of this blog, none other than Gregory of Tours:

The next thing which happened was that the Danes sent a fleet under their King Chlochilaich and invaded Gaul from the sea. They came ashore, laid waste to one of the regions ruled by Theuderic and captured some of the inhabitants. They loaded their ships with what they had stolen or seized, and then they set sail for home. Their king remained on the shore, waiting until the boats had gained the open sea, when he planned to go on board. When Theuderic heard that his land had been invaded by foreigners, he sent his son Theudebert to those parts with a powerful army and all the necessary equipment. The Danish king was killed, the enemy fleet was beaten in a naval battle and all the booty was brought back on shore once more.

(“The History of the Franks” by Gregory of Tours, edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics, 1974, III.3 pp 165 – 166)

Chlochilaich sounds like a very mangled rendering of Hygelac, and he’s mentioned as a king of the Danes, not the Geats. But otherwise, its exactly what is described in Wiglaf’s funeral oration for Beowulf. Since we know, from the events that come immediately before and after this passage in Gregory of Tours’ histories, that Hygelac’s raid must have taken place c.521, that means that the poem is set in the first third of the sixth century. Beowulf is therefore meant to be a contemporary of Boethius, St Benedict of Nursia, Clovis, Justinian and Theodora and, if he existed, King Arthur.

And just as this incident didn’t go forgotten in Anglo-Saxon England, the Franks remembered it as well. The Book of the History of the Franks of 727 describes it almost identically to Gregory of Tours, who was the source its anonymous author used, but unlike in Gregory’s account, Hygelac is rendered Cothelac and he’s referred to as a rex Gotorum – literally, king of the Goths. And of course, we can rely on Adhemar of Chabannes, writing in the early eleventh century, to remember it – he remembered almost every significant episode in Frankish history:

(Original Latin) In illo tempore Dani cum rege suo, nomine Cothelaico, cum navali hoste per altum mare Gallias petunt, devastantes et captivantes omnia, et, plenis navibus de captivis, altum mare intrant, rege eorum ad litus maris residante. Quod cum Theodorico nunciatum fuisset, Theodebertum filium suum cum magnum exercitu in illis partibus direxit. Qui, consecutus eos, pugnavit cum eis cede magna atque prostravit, regem eorum interfecit, predam tulit et in terram suam restituit.

(“Chronique” by Adhemar of Chabannes, edited by Jules Chavanon, 1897, p 23)

(My translation): At that time, the Danes with their king, called Hygelac, with a host of ships made for Gaul through the North Sea, devastating everything and taking everyone captive, and, with ships full of captives, entered the North Sea, with their king residing by the shore. When that was announced to Theuderic, he ordered his son Theudebert to go to those parts with a large army. Theudebert, having pursued the Danes, fought with them and after great losses brought them to heel, killed their king, carried away the plunder and restored it to his land.

Notably, Adhemar, like Gregory before him, refers to Hygelac as a king of the Danes, rather than a king of the Goths like the “Book of the History of the Franks”, thus indicating he consulted Gregory’s work. This goes against Jules Chavanon’s claim that, in the first fifty-one chapters of his Chronicle, Adhemar just copied the “Book of the History of the Franks” almost verbatim and inserted a few additions. He was much too good a historian for that!

Even in the late middle ages, the defeat of Hygelac's raid was still remembered. Here it is depicted in the Tours manuscript of the Grand Chroniques de France, illustrated between 1455 and 1460 by the great French Renaissance painter Jean Fouquet. 

Now the account of Hygelac’s raid, specifically the mentioning of the Merovingians, has a bearing on an important scholarly debate. When was Beowulf composed? Since its author, if its ever appropriate to attribute a traditional epic to the work of a single author (Classicists will recognise this problem for the Iliad and the Odyssey), is anonymous, we can’t date it according to when they lived. Old English vernacular literature begins to appear in the final third of the seventh century, when the poet Caedmon wrote down his Hymn of Creation under the patronage Abbess Hilda of Whitby (d.684). But Beowulf survives in only one manuscript dating from either the last quarter of the tenth century or the first quarter of the eleventh century. Thus, as a notorious conference of academic Anglo-Saxonists in 1981 known as the “Scandal in Toronto” hammered home, scholars have a whole range of different estimates for the date of the composition of Beowulf, with c.685 at one end and c.1000 at the other.

The first folio of Beowulf in the Southwick Codex (c.1000), the one manuscript in which the poem survives.

Tom Shippey, a respected scholar of Old English literature and the leading academic expert on J.R.R Tolkien, is in the very early date (c.685 – 750) for Beowulf camp. In 2007, reviving an argument made all the way back in 1849, he suggested that that the mentioning of the Merovingians in Wiglaf’s speech indicates that Beowulf couldn’t have been written any later than 750. His reasoning for this is that, after Pippin the Short deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, in 751, the new dynasty, the Carolingians, gave their predecessors damnatio memoriae treatment – like the ancient Roman emperors for whom that term was originally applied, they were vanished from the official histories.

Now Shippey’s argument was thoroughly criticised in a follow-up article that year by Walter Goffart. Goffart argued that the Carolingians did not give the previous dynasty damnatio memoriae treatment, and copies of the “Book of the History of the Franks” were present in Anglo-Saxon England. Goffart himself believes, for his own reasons, that Beowulf could not have been written any earlier than 923. Now, with regard to the whole damnatio memoriae thing I’m on Goffart’s side. While Carolingian historians, like the anonymous author of the Early Annals of Metz or Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne, did their best to portray the last Merovingian kings as lazy, degenerate and foolish, whose loss of real power to their mayors of the palace followed their eventual deposition was inevitable, they didn’t try to erase them from history at all. And in the 860s, Archbishop Wulfaldus of Bourges used Merovingian charters issued in the names of kings Childebert and Chilperic in a court case against Count Eccehard of Macon over ownership of the manor of Perrecy. Would King Charles the Bald’s judges have led that fly if it was no longer politically correct to speak of the Merovingians anymore? And, to state the obvious, England, while undoubtedly part of the wider Carolingian world, was never ruled by the Carolingians. So Shippey’s argument fails. But that doesn’t mean I agree with Goffart’s proposals for the dating of Beowulf either. And as someone with next to no knowledge of Old English philology, I can’t really take a position on the debate. But scholarly opinion, following the publication of Leonard Niedorf’s seminal The Dating of Beowulf: A Reconsideration (2014), is starting to gravitate towards the earliest date range.

 

Tolkien and the Carolingians

Since with the discussion of Beowulf we’ve ventured in the scholarly territory where J.R.R Tolkien was undisputed master (at least within the confines of Oxford) back in the day, where are the Carolingians to be found in Middle Earth? The northern early Middle Ages are there in abundance – the languages and place names of Middle Earth are modelled on Old English, Old Norse and Old Welsh, and many of the races that populate it are taken straight from Norse mythology (even the orcs, Tolkien’s trademark creation, get their name from an Old English word meaning hobgoblin or demon). Indeed, the Lord of the Rings is very consciously written to be like an Anglo-Saxon epic, and in many ways deviates from the literary conventions of the modern novel – fans like myself appreciate this, but other readers find it frustrating that more weight is given to lengthy descriptions of the exterior world over interior drama. But there doesn’t seem to be any place for the Carolingians in Tolkien’s majestic creation.

Or is there indeed? Concerning the hobbits (Tolkien’s other trademark creation and the only race that doesn’t have their provenance in Germanic folklore), some of them do have Frankish names – Pippin, Meriadoc, Fredegar, Adelard, Drogo, Dudo, Odo, Wilibald etc. But this is most likely intended for purely ironic effect. The Hobbits are famously idle, peaceable folks who just want eat and be left alone, while the Franks are famously vigorous, warlike and expansionist – can you imagine someone saying, to paraphrase a Byzantine proverb given by Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne, “have a hobbit as your friend, not as your neighbour”?

But there’s more. At the time Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry leave the Shire, the kingdom of Gondor is ruled by stewards, as it has been for 969 years since their branch of the royal house of Elendil died out – Aragorn is from the northern (Arnor) branch. The evolution of the office of the steward sounds remarkably identical to that of the mayors of the palace in the Merovingian realm. They started off as simple palace officials, responsible for managing the king’s household and doing the business of government during the king’s absence/ a royal minority. But gradually they assumed more and more de facto control of the executive, were able to make their office hereditary (in the Merovingian realm by the Pippinids/ Carolingians, in Gondor by the House of Hurin) and then after the royal line apparently terminated, ruled without a king – compare the Carolingians’ puny four years to the House of Hurin’s 969. But its here the comparison ends. After Charles Martel’s death in 741, the Carolingians found the last surviving Merovingian, Childeric III (what relation he was to his predecessor, Theuderic IV, we’ll never actually know) and made him king before deposing him in 751 due to his apparent uselessness. Meanwhile, the Stewards of Gondor soldier on until the one true king, Aragorn finally turns up. And in The Return of the King, Gandalf tells Pippin that Boromir once asked his father, Denethor, how long it would be until the stewards could make themselves kings. The penultimate steward of Gondor then replied “a few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty … in Gondor, ten thousand years would not suffice.” Perhaps Tolkien, who famously had a profound dislike of anything French, intended that as a bitchslap to the Carolingians and the Franks/ French for being less patient with their kings than the Gondorians.

 

"Francia has no king. Francia needs no king." So might Charles Martel have said in 740. But his son, Pippin the Short, evidently disagreed.

Did Charlemagne have a beard?

Certainly, its been artistic convention since the late middle ages to portray him with one. Albrecht Durer’s very famous 1512 portrait of the king of the Franks/ emperor in the west portrays him with a beard that wouldn’t look out of place on one of Tolkien’s wizards, and that’s kind of set the gold standard for artistic portrayals of Charlemagne since. But is it actually true to the historical record?

Definitely bearded here. The coronation of Charlemagne in 800 from the Saint Denis Manuscript of the Grand Chroniques de France (c.1325 - 1350)

The very famous Charlemagne reliquary bust (1349) at Aachen, photographed by me. Will do a post about this. There's more than first meets the eye.

The Frankish emperor depicted here in an French book of hours from the early fifteenth century, British Library MS Harley 2952 folio 62v

Panel painting of Charlemagne from the Aachen cathedral treasury dating to 1470, photographed by me. In the late middle ages, they had to invent coats of arms for all the historical figures who lived before heraldry came into being in the twelfth century. So they gave Charlemagne a coat of arms that was half the German eagle, half the French fleur de lys to reflect his status as a forefather to both the French and the Germans.

Durer's portrait of Charlemagne - absolutely majestic, but anachronistic on so many levels.

We have a famous physical description of Charlemagne from Einhard:

His body was large and strong. He was tall, but not unduly so, since his height was six times the length of his own foot. The top of his head was round, his eyes were large and lively, his nose was a little larger than average, he had fine white hair and a cheerful and attractive face. So, standing or sitting his presence was greatly increased in authority and dignity. His neck seemed short and thick and his stomach seemed to project, but the symmetry of the other parts hid those flaws. His pace was firm and the whole bearing of his body powerful. Indeed, his voice was clear but, given his size, not as strong as might have been expected. His health was good until four years before he died, when he suffered from constant fevers. Towards the end he would limp on one foot. Even then, he trusted his own judgement more than the advice of his doctors, whom he almost hated, since they urged him to stop eating roast meat, which he liked, and to start eating boiled meats.

(“Two Lives of Charlemagne” by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, translated with an introduction and notes by David Ganz, Penguin Classics, 2008, p 34)

Now, as I remember well from doing “The Transformation of the Ancient World, 370 – 900” with Conrad Leyser in my first year at Oxford, this is a classic extract that tutors in early medieval history give their students to teach them source criticism. You see, while Einhard is obviously a close friend of Charlemagne who knew him well, he has very consciously modelled his biography of Charlemagne on Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and at various points in this passage he directly quotes the ancient Roman author. Thus, you do have to ask: how much of this is the real Charlemagne, and how much of this is Einhard trying to present him as a deified Roman emperor? However, on closer examination you realise that he’s quoting Suetonius’ biographies of half a dozen different emperors, which suggests that Einhard is not attempting a comparison between Charlemagne and, say, Augustus, and that actually he is talking about the real Charlemagne and has simply lifted the quotes from Suetonius that fit Charlemagne’s description, so he can be true to fact whilst also showing off his Classical learning. But, more to the point, there is no mention of a beard here!

For contemporary written descriptions of the emperor’s physical appearance, that is all we have got. But we do have three artistic depictions from the time. The first are coins minted with Charlemagne’s image after his coronation as emperor in 800. The second is a tenth century copy of a ninth century manuscript illumination that depicts Charlemagne with one of his sons, Pippin of Italy, and a scribe. The third is an equestrian statue, which I saw in the Louvre when I visited it in May this year, dating between 800 and 875 that may be of Charlemagne or his grandson, Charles the Bald. There is a common pattern between all of them – Charlemagne is clean-shaven with short hair and a moustache. If we combine these with Einhard’s account, the overwhelming likelihood is that Charlemagne did not have a beard.

And indeed, if we look at other surviving artistic depictions of Carolingian rulers from the ninth century, we’ll see the same pattern yet again – they’re all clean-shaven with short hair and moustaches. What is the reason for this?

Paul Edward Dutton, a North America-based Carolingianist scholar, has an interesting theory for this. He argues that the Carolingians groomed themselves in such a matter in order to present themselves as a clean break from the previous dynasty, the Merovingians, who famously sported luxurious long hair and beards. Indeed, the Merovingians would be known to posterity as “the long-haired kings.” The whole long hair and beards vs short hair and moustaches may well therefore have been part of the Carolingians’ propaganda drive to present themselves as vigorous and morally upstanding in contrast to their lazy and degenerate predecessors. But that leaves another question unanswered – why did artists from the later Middle Ages onwards feel the need to depict Charlemagne with a beard? I cannot even begin to speculate about that.

At least by the late nineteenth century they got it right! The mosaics from the upper camera of Aachen cathedral depict Charlemagne with short hair and a moustache - clearly the prosperous bourgeoisie of Wilhelmine Germany who funded this had read their Einhard. Photograph by yours truly.

Being a macho man in the sixth century Thames Valley: a new glimpse at Britain in the age of Arthur

 A super exciting discovery

In October 2020, a remarkable discovery was made that completely escaped my notice at the time - I was busy starting my masters' degree, trying to manage the (very heavy) workload we were all hit with from the word go, because this is Oxford we're talking about after all, and the news was dominated by the Coronavirus pandemic. In a field in Berkshire, just south of Marlow-on-Thames, where two years earlier ancient bronze bowls had been discovered by metal detectorists, archaeologists unearthed the skeleton of a sixth century man buried with various weapons, including spears and a sword in its scabbard. 

Fairly self-explanatory what this is

Ditto that

The middle Thames Valley, the area in question, with the location of the find clearly highlighted

Subsequent osteoarchaeological analysis showed that this man was six feet tall - the average adult male height in Britain from c.450 - 700 was five foot seven inches, equivalent to that in the first half the twentieth century (two inches shorter than the average adult male height in the UK today)  - and had well-developed muscles, clear signs that he was quite a physically impressive and imposing specimen at the time. comparable to Dr Gabor Thomas, a medieval archaeologist from the University of Reading, describes him thus: "the word that comes to mind is pretty butch." I would add that in a world long before professional body-building, steroids and creatine, his contemporaries certainly wouldn't have said anything less about him. At this stage, the age at which this man died, or his cause of death remain unknown, though Thomas himself suspects he was probably in his thirties when he died. However, from the osteoarchaeological analysis, the team of archaeologists at the University of Reading found that his teeth showed signs of wear and that he was starting to develop arthritis. What we can therefore deduce is that while in many respects he was a healthy individual, being tall and muscular and all that, he did suffer from some forms of long-term chronic stress. The wear on his teeth (what is technically called dental enamel hypoplasia) is a good indication of that, as Robin Fleming points out in her absolutely excellent introduction to what skeletons can tell us about the lives of individuals roughly a millennium and a half ago, "Bones for Historians: Putting the Body back into Biography" in David Bates, Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton (eds), "Writing Medieval Biography, 750 - 1250: Essays in honour of Frank Barlow", pp 29 - 48. Fleming reminds us that since your tooth tissue is not remoulded during life - as soon as you lose your milk teeth and get your adult teeth, the tissue stays the same - worn enamel on teeth can serve as an indication of bouts of ill-health as a child. Fleming also describes a certain paradox - skeletons that show signs of stress are not necessarily those of most sickly and vulnerable people in their communities. Good quality skeletons not marked by signs of stress tend to be those of people who died early and swiftly. By contrast, skeletons that show signs of stress tend to be those of people who were hearty and hale enough to survive their illnesses, at least for the duration of time needed for for signs of stress to be visible on their bones. At the same time, she also demonstrates, based from the trends across the broad range of fifth to seventh century cemeteries in England she has studied, that individuals whose skeletons show signs of stress on the whole had shorter lives, because their immune systems were drastically weakened by stress from past illnesses. She points to how individuals with a single episode of dental hypoplasia died five and half years earlier on average than those with none and those with two episodes died eight years earlier on average than those with none. With all these things considered, we have a lot of mixed signals from this man's skeleton, which is presumably why Dr Thomas thinks that he died sometime in his thirties, on the cusp of middle age.

But this is osteoarchaeological stuff I'm absolutely not qualified to talk about aside, I'm going to move on to some things I'm slightly more qualified to talk about (I will remind you here that I didn't do British History Paper 1 at Oxford, so insular history before 1042 is a comparatively weak area for me, despite that being quite inconsistent with my blogging record here). Those are the implications of this for our understanding of what the hell was going on in Britain in the post-Roman period, lets say from roughly the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain c.410 and the Synod of Whitby c.664, which saw the triumph of Roman Christianity over Celtic Christianity in the now fully-fledged Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. 

A super boring yet necessary crash course on the political historiography of post-Roman Britain

All of the post-Roman period in Britain up until the turn of the seventh century is notoriously difficult period in terms of sources. We do have an abundance of archaeological material, that keeps growing year on year and from which we can infer a lot about the material culture, the landscape, the economy (wealth, standards of living, trade links etc) and even a bit about social structure. But written records are incredibly sparse for this period, even by the standards of post-Roman Europe. Nearly all of them emanate from the western part of the British Isles, and are limited to some inscriptions, St Patrick's fifth century Confession and Letter to Coroticus, a hell fire sermon by a Welsh priest called Gildas dated to c.550 and some late sixth century land grants from south Wales. Gildas and Patrick's writings focus mainly on the religious world and morality. Yet Patrick's Letter to Coroticus concerns the excommunication of a slave-raiding warlord operating in the Irish Sea area, while Gildas describes Saxon invasions, their setbacks at the hands of a heroic general called Aurelius Ambrosius, various battles including Badon Hill (later associated with King Arthur) and the Romano-Britons being ruled by many petty kings, including a "proud tyrant" thought to be Vortigern (one of the villains of Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth century History of the Kings of Britain - the foundation of Arthurian lore). Thus they seem, at least on the surface,Continental observers don't provide us with much help either. After the life of St Germanus of Auxerre (d.448), written c.480 by Constantius of Lyon, which does recount the Saint's visit to the former Roman province of Britannia in 429 - 430, which does describe the saint leading an army of Romano-Britons to victory over an army of Picts and Saxons but presents all kinds of difficulties of interpretation, most continental writers take no interest in Britain at all. The great writers of the sixth century West, the likes of Cassiodorus and Gregory of Tours, say virtually nothing of the British Isles. Procopius of Caesarea, the prolific sixth century East Roman historian, does have something to say about sixth century Britain (History of the wars, 8.20.6-10) here:

Three very populous nations inhabit the Island of Brittia, and one king is set over each of them. And the names of these nations are Angles, Frisians, and Britons who have the same name as the island. So great apparently is the multitude of these peoples that every year in large groups they migrate from there with their women and children and go to the Franks. And they [the Franks] are settling them in what seems to be the more desolate part of their land, and as a result of this they say they are gaining possession of the island. So that not long ago the king of the Franks actually sent some of his friends to the Emperor Justinian in Byzantium, and despatched with them the men of the Angles, claiming that this island [Britain], too, is ruled by him. Such then are the matters concerning the island called Brittia.

None of this sounds remotely plausible and it only gets weirder from there. Elsewhere (History of the Wars, 8.20.42-48), he says that:

Now in this island of Britain the men of ancient times built a long wall, cutting off a large part of it; and the climate and the soil and everything else is not alike on the two sides of it.  For to the south of the wall there is a salubrious air, changing with the seasons, being moderately warm in summer and cool in winter. But on the north side everything is the reverse of this, so that it is actually impossible for a man to survive there even a half-hour, but countless snakes and serpents and every other kind of wild creature occupy this area as their own.  And, strangest of all, the inhabitants say that if a man crosses this wall and goes to the other side, he dies straightway. They say, then, that the souls of men who die are always conveyed to this place.

Now you might be thinking, what the hell is going on here! How could Procopius forget that it was his own people, the Romans, who built Hadrian's wall (literally named after the Emperor Hadrian) and that the area beyond it had human habitation, albeit by barbarous Pictish tribes? Of course, elsewhere Procopius expresses his scepticism about these garbled, second hand accounts brought to him via barbarian travellers, and in the original Greek he distinguishes between Bretania and Brittia. Guy Halsall thinks the former denotes between the historical Roman province and the latter this terra incognita it has now become. In other words, according to Halsall, Procopius recounts these strange fairy tales as a really clever, ironic way of demonstrating that he can't ascertain any reliable knowledge about the island at all, that its completely fallen off the Roman map and its own inhabitants and near-neighbours tell you such strange and barely credible stories about it that you cannot believe it to be the same place as the former civilised Roman province. This is all in spite of  the enduring trade links between the East Romans and the former imperial province. 

So, if you're going to write a political history of Britain in the period c.450 - 600, what sources do you use? There are of course later, fully fleshed-out narrative account by Anglo-Saxon and Welsh authors - the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede (c.731), the History of the Britons by Nennius (c.830), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (begun c.890) and the Annals of Wales (tenth century). From the great pioneers of English national history, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, in the twelfth century until late-into the twentieth, these sources have been presumed to provide an essentially accurate account, albeit with errors and inconsistencies here and there (which William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon were good at spotting) of what happened in his period.

The story they tell is the one most historically-aware people in the UK are familiar with, which goes thus. In 410 AD the Western Roman Empire, beset by barbarian invasions and civil war, decides that it can no longer defend Britain any more, and the Roman legions withdraw to the Continent. Roman government and way of life break down within the span of two generations, while Picts from over Hadrian's Wall and Scots from over the Irish Sea start making a nuisance of themselves. Saxon mercenaries from northern Germany get invited over in 449 by Romano-British rulers to help deal with the invaders, yet they turn on the Romano-Britons, bring all their families over and start conquering Eastern Britain, brutally ethnic-cleansing the natives. Other Germanic tribes, like the Angles (also from northern Germany), the Frisians from Holland and the Jutes from Denmark, also start coming over. The Romano-Britons try and fight back and have some successes in stalling the advance of the Continental invaders (this is where Aurelius Ambrosius and the legendary King Arthur come in), but in the end its all no good and by the early seventh century they've been hemmed into the western edges of Great Britain - Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria. Meanwhile, these Angles, Saxons and Jutes have settled down in lowland Britain (what will one day become England) and gone on to form seven kingdoms - the Angles the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia; the Saxons the kingdoms of Wessex, Essex and Sussex and the Jutes the kingdom of Kent. Basically, we end up with something like this ...

However, since the 1970s, much of this has been challenged on the grounds of archaeological and genetic evidence, along with new critical approaches to the later written sources , which are now viewed by many scholars (at least as concerns their narratives up to 600) as attempts to explain the political situation of the eighth to tenth centuries and to help foster new identities (English and Welsh) through myth-making. The result is that there is very little by way of scholarly consensus. 

Chris Wickham, one of the leading practitioners of early medieval history in the Anglophone world, in "The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 - 1000" (2009) pp 155 - 159, a magisterial survey work in the Penguin history of Europe aimed at the general public but drawing from the first rate work of Anglo-Saxon specialists like Frank Stenton, James Campbell, Barbara Yorke and Steve Bassett, still essentially presents an modified, more nuanced and less teleological version of the narrative I've just outlined above. He sees very little by way of Roman or British continuity, extensive Germanic migration and lots of fighting between Romano-Britons and Anglo-Saxons. At the same time (and this is one of the few things on which almost all historians agree now), he doesn't see widespread ethnic cleansing as having occurred - rather he argues the Anglo-Saxon invaders assimilated the conquered Romano-Britons, making them adopt their language (Old English) and Germanic paganism. And he's highly sceptical of the accounts of the formation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms contained in the traditional narrative sources. Instead, following closely the work of historians like Steve Bassett and John Hines, he argues that the classic seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms took a very long time to form. As he sees it, lowland Britain even in the late sixth century was divided into nine and possibly many more kingdoms, each of them no bigger than the size of one or two modern English counties and roughly equivalent to the size of Roman civitates - much smaller than any of the post-Roman kingdoms on the Continent. These kingdoms themselves were built out of much smaller tribal building blocks called regiones (as they are referred to in some eighth century documents) which were on average 100 square kilometres in size - a quarter the size of the Isle of Wight, and a fortieth the size of modern day Kent. Some of these appear in a tribute list called the Tribal Hidage, produced between c.660 and c.750 for either the kings of Northumbria or the kings of Mercia, which mentions 35 tribute-paying political units in all, such as the North and South Gyrwa in Cambridgeshire or the Sweord Ora in Huntingdonshire. Units of these kind casually appear in many later documents and topographical research has revealed many more, and shall continue to do so.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the respected landscape archaeologist Susan Oosthuizen in "The Emergence of the English" (2019) arguing for a very extreme view, that the Anglo-Saxon invasions never took place at all. Instead, she argues, marshalling lots of archaeological evidence (including her own studies of the Cambridgeshire fenlands) , that there was deep continuity with the Romano-British past. She claims that systems of common property rights and local governance, farming systems, language (she claims Brythonic and Vulgar Latin were still being widely spoken in what is now England as late as the eighth and ninth centuries) and craftsmanship all stayed the same across the period 400 - 650, and even as late as 850. She also argues, as some scholars have done, that British Christianity survived in southern and eastern England through the fifth and sixth centuries with no less vigour than before the Romans left, and that both the early Welsh and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were based on the boundaries of Roman civitates (city territories) which in turn went back to Iron Age tribal territories. In arguing these things, she draws on the great French historian Fernand Braudel's concept of the long duree, which in his magnum opus "The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II" (1958), he defined thus: “history whose passage is almost imperceptible, of man in relationship to his environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.” She also draws on the theories of socio-cultural development by modern sociologists like Pierre Bordieu.  Oosthuizen does acknowledge that change happened - the people in the eastern parts of the former Roman province of Britannia came to speak a West Germanic language and identify as Angles and Saxons, while those living in the West went fully back to their Celtic roots and identified as Welsh - but argues that none of it was to do with invasions or movement of peoples from the Continent more generally. In accounting for how Eastern Britannia (what became England) came to identify with the peoples of the Germanic North Sea and speak Old English, Oosthuizen, sensibly steers clear of the fringe theory, believed by a tiny minority of eccentric linguists, that the Iron Age inhabitants of what is now Eastern and Southeast England were already speaking a West Germanic language before the Roman invasion in 43 AD. Instead she says that the mechanism is "opaque" but proceeds to draw a modern parallel: in Scandinavia and the Netherlands more than 70% of people speak good or fluent English; completely ignoring the fact that these countries have first rate state education systems with compulsory English classes from primary level and are bombarded by Anglo-American mass-media. She also takes a rather all-or-nothing view of the historiography - either you believe the Anglo-Saxon invasions took place over the course of one generation and that a complete genocide of the Romano-Britons living in Eastern England followed (which no serious scholar after Frank Stenton has argued), or you believe that the invasions didn't take place at all (a radical fringe position). 

While I will admit that Oosthuizen's argument is incredibly complex and sophisticated, and as I said before I am not an expert on this period and she undoubtedly is, there are undoubtedly so many obvious problems with taking this kind of view. Put it crudely, if the Anglo-Saxon invasions never happened, how can one really explain why I'm not writing this today in some hypothetical British Romance language? Personally, I think the Anglo-Saxon invasions did happen and that, while they did not systematically replace the indigenous inhabitants, migration and settlement was substantial. As a Continental early medievalist, I am all too aware that if it was just a warrior elite coming over, Britain would have just gone the way of Frankish Gaul (what would become France), Visigothic Spain and Lombard Italy. In those places, the native Romanised populations adopted some aspects of Germanic culture (especially in relation to personal names and being buried with grave goods). They also came to ethnically identify with their conquerors as Franks, Goths or Lombards rather than as Gallo-Romans, Hispano-Romans or Italians, mainly because of the legal advantages it offered them - higher wergild (compensation given to a victim of a crime/ their family under Germanic law), freedom from taxation and the right to perform military service and speak in royal assemblies. At the same time, the Franks, Goths and Lombards had, by c.700, largely abandoned their original Germanic languages for the local Vulgar Latin dialects that then evolved into Old French, Old Spanish etc. I find the explanations of Anglo-Saxon ethnogenesis offered by Bryan Ward-Perkins in "Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become more British", English Historical Review, (2000), pp513 - 533,  much more convincing, which goes very much with the grain of what the Continental parallels would suggest. For how other specialists on early medieval Britain have so far received Oosthuizen's work see the sympathetic yet critical review of Oosthuizen's book by Dr Francis Young, and the more incisive reviews by Alex Woolf  and John Hines.

In between all this is a whole range of different views that I've failed to properly account for - as I said before this is far from being my specialism. I'm sure a good few of my readers know more about this than I do and if I'm getting stuff wrong, please don't hesitate to call me out on it. I can direct you to Guy Halsall's excellent (and excellently named) blog for a better overview of what we can know about what was going on in lowland Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries than I've tried to provide here - his attitude is more no-nonsense than mine, and unlike me he's a specialist in post-Roman Britain with very intimate knowledge of the sources.

 The takeaway is that we really don't know what was going on in Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries - the written evidence is next to nothing; and while the archaeological evidence is quite rich, as Paul Cartledge, a leading historian of ancient Greece, memorably puts it "Spades don't lie to you, but you have to make them speak." Thus all kinds of different plausible theories as to what may and may not have happened. At the same time, every new archaeological discovery has the potential to give support to, challenge and overturn theories and open up new possibilities about what was going on in this mysterious yet formative period.

Implication number one: a sixth century tribal kingdom in the Middle Thames Valley

Now we've set up the historiographical background, you might be wondering what is the significance of the macho man of Marlow in all of this. Well, for starters, the man was buried not in a cemetery (and there are an awful lot of cemeteries from post-Roman Britain) but in a site on a hill set apart from the rest of the community. This means that, beyond reasonable doubt, he was of high social status. He's buried north-south in his orientation and facing towards the river Thames. As Dr Thomas suggests "He is deliberately positioned to look over that territory." Following from these observations, Dr Thomas argues that this macho man was probably a respected tribal leader who likely ruled over the Middle Thames Valley at some point in the sixth century. The Middle Thames Valley (Berkshire and Buckinghamshire) in this period is a region that's been very overlooked, both historically and archaeologically, in favour of the Lower Thames (what is now Greater London, Essex and Kent) and the Upper Thames (Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire). By 664, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire formed part of the disputed borderlands between the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, with the river Thames often serving as the border between the two kingdoms, a political set-up that would continue until the Viking invasions in the late ninth century. But would this have necessarily been the case in 564?

I think Gabor Thomas is right to draw the inferences that he does from this, which do overturn what we've previously assumed about the local area. However, this accords very well with current thinking - the views of Chris Wickham, John Hines, Steve Basset and many others that I mentioned earlier - that post-Roman Britain was an extremely politically fragmented place, uniquely so in the former Western Roman Empire, and that the formation of the seven classic Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, what historians used to call the Heptarchy (but now don't), was a long and tardy process spanning several centuries. The final third of the sixth century and the first third of the seventh have been identified as the critical period in this respect, though by 650 or even 700, the classic seven was far from being a foregone conclusion. Back in 1988, Steve Basset memorably gave a football league analogy, which goes something like this:

1. Some of the smaller tribal territories mentioned in the tribal hidage, like Lindsey (Lincolnshire), Surrey and the Hwicce (modern day Gloucestershire and Worcestershire), were probably still kingdoms of their own, albeit paying tribute to Northumbria/ Mercia (whichever kingdom produced the document).
2. Like the lesser, more exclusively local teams that participate in the UK FA Cup, they probably still had an outsider's chance in the late seventh century of making it into the Premier League of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (where Sussex, Essex, Kent and especially Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia and Wessex were). 
3. However, by the 750s they had been completely eliminated and the FA Cup of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, was reaching its quarter finals, in which it was just the Premier League kingdoms against each other, with Essex, Sussex and Kent soon to be eliminated by Mercia.

For reference here's a map of the tribal hidage I found, on David Crowther's History of England Podcast website (hides indicate the agricultural wealth of each tribe)

Football analogies aside (and I must admit I myself am not a fan of the sport), we have no reason to presume that there wasn't an independent tribal leader operating in the Middle Thames Valley prior to 600. After all, in the tribal hidage, as you can see on the map, Berkshire features as the territory of the Noxgaga, one of the most obscure (even to specialists) of the tribute-paying tribal polities listed there, and Buckinghamshire is the territory of the Chilternsaete - a tribe that historians can't make their mind up over whether they were West Saxons, Angles or (as Chris Wickham himself briefly suggests) Romano-Britons that kept their own independent enclave going until the early seventh century. Perhaps this macho man had been one of the rulers of either the Noxgaga or the Chilternsaete. Or perhaps he was the ruler of a tribe that is completely lost to history. But either way, his existence strongly suggests that there independent tribal warlords operating in this area up until the kings of Mercia or those of Wessex finally muscled into the area in the early seventh century and eliminated the local tribes/ made them tribute-paying vassals. 

We cannot be certain about his ethnicity. Grave goods, in and of themselves, cannot serve as an indication of someone's ethnic origin, as historians who've worked on the archaeological evidence from post-Roman Continental Europe, like Patrick Geary, Bonnie Effros and Guy Halsall for Merovingian Gaul, in that case determining Gallo-Romans from Franks, can confirm. I've had the pleasure of hearing Geary talk about his latest work on post-Roman ethnicity, in collaboration with paleo-geneticists, and there he reiterated the importance of not using grave goods to determine if someone was a Roman, a Goth, a Frank or whatever. At the same time, ethnic identity, like culture, in this period was very fluid, and individuals across the post-Roman West do seem to have been able to consciously change their ethnic identity. There is the possibility, for example, that this warlord, or his father or grandfather before him, might have started out as a Romano-Briton but then married the daughter of an Anglian or Saxon warlord and decided to identify with his immigrant in-laws. A similar theory exists with Cerdic (d.534), the shadowy, semi-legendary founder of the royal house of Wessex, as his name appears to be an Anglicisation of the Brythonic/ Welsh name Caradoc, and his grandson Ceawlin likewise appears to have a Welsh name, highly suggestive that Cerdic was of mixed Romano-British and Saxon ancestry.

The man was buried with bronze bowls and glass vessels, which likely came from Northern Gaul and the Rhineland (both part of the Merovingian Frankish realm), suggest that he was clearly powerful and important enough to get hold of these - a much smaller scale of the royal treasure hoards of the kings of Dumnonia and East Anglia found at Tintagel and Sutton Hoo respectively. All of this bling would have demonstrated his prestige, and he would have been able to give other luxury items as gifts to his followers to reward them for their loyal service. 

The fact the man was buried with weapons is also interesting. How much actual combat this man experienced in his life, and what that in turn can suggest about the level of warfare in sixth century Britain, we cannot really say. As of yet, there is absolutely no indication that this man died in battle. Weapons are a fairly common find in burials from the fifth and sixth centuries in lowland Britain. At the Buckland cemetery near Dover in Kent, five swords, four spears and a shield boss have been found. Similarly, 25 spears and 15 shield bosses were found in the 150 Anglo-Saxon graves excavated in the giant cemetery at Overstone in Northamptonshire, discovered in 2019. To give just one more example, at an Anglo-Saxon cemetery excavated at Morden Road in Mitcham, part of the borough of Merton in South London),between its discovery in 1888 and the 1920s, one fifth of the 230 burials dating to the period c.450 - 600 there contained weapons, with a total of twelve swords being found there.

Sword and shield boss from Merton cemetery

Does this mean that warfare was endemic in post-Roman Britain and that the average adult male living in the period c.450 - 600 was likely to experience armed combat? That's highly debatable. Some historians and archaeologists, especially those who, like Oosthuizen, are sceptical of the Anglo-Saxon invasions having happened at all, claim that there's very little evidence for large-scale or endemic warfare in this period. They claim this on the grounds that there is no archaeological evidence for battles and sieges having taken place in this period, and that the individuals whose graves contain weapons were buried so for symbolic reasons. Yet the truth is, if we had to go on archaeological evidence alone, we wouldn't be able to prove that most medieval wars happened. Beyond a few famous cases, like Visby in Gotland (1361) or Towton in Yorkshire (1461), medieval battlefield archaeology is rather underdeveloped. And, at a certain level, claiming that burial with weapons was largely symbolic misses a point. What was that symbolism anyway, and why was it important? This brings us to ...

Implication number two: one of the most important transformations in British and European gender history

The answer to the question presented earlier is that the weapons would have been symbolic of the deceased men's manhood, their status as free men and, in the case of the macho man buried at Marlow, his status as an elite free man. Thus, arguably, the actual levels of warfare in sixth century Britain are neither here or there and basically irrelevant. What really mattered is that it was important for free men, and elite men in particular, to identify themselves as arms-bearing men, fighting men - in a word, warriors. This was a phenomenon by no means unique to Britain. It was to be found everywhere across the former Western Roman Empire, from the Rhine frontier and Noricum (roughly modern day Austria) to Africa (roughly modern day Tunisia) and Mauretania (modern day northern Algeria and Morocco). All across the former Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries, erstwhile provincial societies became militarised and dominated by warrior elites.

That Western Europe should, by 600, end up dominated by male warrior elites, is arguably, in the grand span of the history of human civilisation, unremarkable. Most societies across the globe from the Bronze Age through to early modernity were dominated by some kind of militarised male elites - Homeric Greek kings, Iron Age European tribal leaders, the kshatriya caste of ancient Hindu India, the mamluk dynasties of the medieval Islamic world, Mongol khans, the samurai of Feudal Japan, Aztec jaguar warriors, Zulu chieftains, Sioux braves, I could go on. 

Yet in the history of Britain and Western Europe this is so significant for two reasons. The first is the long-term significance of what happened in the fifth and sixth centuries. Western Europe would remain dominated by a militarised (male) ruling class for the rest of the Middle Ages and even a little bit beyond (if we take 1500 for the end of the medieval period, as is conventional). This should not be news to anyone . The knight, an aristocratic warrior clad from head to foot in shining armour, armed with sword and lance and riding atop a splendid warhorse and subscribed to the elite code of chivalry, is one of the most iconic symbols of the European middle ages in the popular imagination. And in the UK, warrior kings like William the Conqueror, Richard the Lionheart, Edward I, Robert the Bruce and Henry V feature pretty large in how most people remember their medieval history. While obviously the nature of the warrior elite changed profoundly over the course of roughly a millennium, the basic concept proved incredibly durable. While its debatable whether the gentry of Elizabethan and Jacobean England were still warriors in any meaningful sense, and some historians like Mervyn James would argue yes, they seem to have continued to see themselves that way. 

A splendid English Renaissance alabaster tomb sculpture of Sir Henry Neville (1564 - 1615), lord of the manor of Billingbear, at St Lawrence's Church, Waltham St Lawrence, Berkshire, just 9.8 miles south of where our friend, the sixth century macho man of Marlow, was found. The fact he's decked out in a full suit of Greenwich plate armour tells us everything we need to know about his wealth, status and, most importantly for us, self-image.

A facsimile of the tomb monument of William Penne (1567 - 1639) depicting him in full armour with his wife Martha to his right and his son John (also in armour) and daughter Sibyl and Katharine below them, at Holy Trinity Church, Penn, Buckinghamshire, just 7 miles to the northeast of where our friend the Marlow macho man was found. The fact that William Penne himself actually spurned his one opportunity to do military service, ignoring the summons to the county militia in 1631 when the threat of foreign invasion loomed (in protest of Charles I's unconstitutional policies), shows that the way Penne wanted to have the engraver depict him had everything to do with his social status and self-image and nothing to do with what he actually did in life.

The second is where this stands in relation to what came before. So far I've been implying that a transformation in the nature of the male elite took place across the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries, but from what kind of elite? The answer is that the ruling class of the later Roman Empire was, first and foremost, a civilian one, consisting of two main components. On the one hand, there was the old senatorial aristocracy, politically marginalised at the imperial court for the most part yet still carrying much clout in Rome and many of the provinces. On the other hand, there was a class of elite provincial civil servants, who were also very rich landowners and enjoyed extensive patronage and close ties with the imperial court, that had risen with the administrative reforms of Diocletian (r.284 - 306) and Constantine the Great (r.306 - 337) after the Imperial Crisis of the Third Century (235 - 284). The army was almost completely separate from them, ever since an edict of Emperor Gallienus (r.260 - 268) banned members of the senatorial class from serving as military commanders and occupied a somewhat subordinate position socially, if not quite so politically. Army commanders tended to be from lower class provincials or of barbarian origin, and soldiers were widely despised/ regarded as inferior by civilian elites. The one big exception to this was the emperor, who tended to come to power through the army, who continued to make and unmake emperors every now and then like they did all the time in the third century, and thus in the later Roman Empire we get a lot of emperors from quite humble backgrounds. Diocletian himself was the son of a former slave from Illyria (modern day Croatia), for instance, and the East Roman emperors Justin (r.518 - 527) and Justinian the Great (r.527 - 565) were from a peasant family in Moesia (modern day Serbia).

Now, in patriarchal societies, as the later Roman Empire (and post-Roman Britain and every society I've mentioned in this post) undoubtedly was, a male elite needs to be able to boss around two different groups - women and lower status men. In order to do this, they need to be able to demonstrate that men are superior to women and that some men are superior to others. This is where masculinity come in - the idea that masculinity, however defined, is preferable to femininity justifies dominance over women, while the idea that certain kinds of masculinity that are attainable by only a small elite of men are better and purer than others, justifies dominance over other men, defined as lesser or inferior. Thus through notions of masculinity, elite men can justify bossing around men of other ranks, social statuses, classes, castes, vocations, ethnicities, races, religions etc or at different stages in the lifecycle to them (its all about intersectionality, innit!)

The kind of masculinity the Roman civilian aristocracy embraced was one based on many different components. One was their educations attained either in the public secondary schools that could be found in most major provincial towns or with a private tutor. This equipped them to be able to write poems in Latin hexameters like Virgil or Horace as well as being able to recite whole verses of the Aeneid or the Odes from memory, and deliver lengthy, eloquent and persuasive speeches like Cicero, amongst other things. Such an education served as the perfect marker of elite status that would at once demonstrate intellectual superiority and membership of an exclusive social club - being able to speak perfect first century BC high literary Latin would be the equivalent of speaking in Shakespearean English verse today, not that anyone really does. It was also what enabled new people to be recruited into the elite i.e. St Augustine (354 - 431) and Libanius (313 - 393) both came from lower middling provincial (African and Syrian respectively) backgrounds, but were able to rise high in the imperial civil service and gain favour at the imperial court because of their eloquence and literary talents. Another component was their leisured lifestyle - not having to work with their hands or fight against the barbarians on the frontiers, instead being able to chill-out for lengthy parts of the year in their plush country villas with beautiful gardens and mosaics, and enjoy all the good things in life while devoting as much of their leisure time (otium) to high-minded masculine pursuits like writing poems and letters, studying and philosophical contemplation. Yet another component was their masculine self-control (rooted in ancient Greek humoral theory and stoicism) in which they maintained the unique heat that men had from their foetuses being cooked for longer in the womb by avoiding excessive physical toil, eating, drinking and sex, in contrast to women and lower status men who were colder, wetter and more driven by their base appetites, and therefore were unfit to be in charge. The final component was holding public office, either in the imperial civil service, local magistracies or municipal assemblies, and participating in the civil life, by sponsoring the construction of public works and providing bread and circuses through their aristocratic largesse (generosity) for the plebs.

Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (345 - 402), a late Roman senatorial aristocrat, man of letters and outspoken pagan who served successively as governor of Africa (373), urban prefect of Rome (384 - 385) and consul (391), depicted here, in an ivory diptych, being brought up to the Sun god Sol Invictus by two winged genii. Symmachus was the quintessential Roman civilian aristocrat. He was fabulously wealthy, possessing twelve villas and extensive estates in Italy, Sicily and Mauretania. He devoted most of his free time to literary pursuits (he counted the poet and rhetorician Ausonius as one of his best friends) and produced an extensive letter collection that survives to this day. In one letter, Symmachus reveals that he organised some gladiatorial games, for which he managed to procure lions, crocodiles and bears, and got 29 Saxon prisoners of war to fight as gladiators - however, the Saxons opted to strangle themselves in their prison cell the night before the games could commence. He also famously got into a bit of a scrap with St Ambrose, bishop of Milan, over whether the altar of Victory should be restored the senate house after Emperor Gratian removed it in 382 - Symmachus did not succeed. 

Did this kind of elite exist in Roman-Britain? Unlike Gaul or Spain, Roman Britain doesn't seem to have had any senators, or produced any authors we know by name. This kind of goes with the grain of the traditional view that Romanisation in Britain only went skin-deep (see BBC In Our Time episode on Roman Britain for a very good discussion of this). In some regions, such as what would become Wales, Cornwall and the North of England, this does appear to have been true, and Roman rule was indeed mostly a military occupation, with the traditional Iron Age social structures being left intact. But the scholarship of the last fifty years has demonstrated that the lowland areas of Britannia (what is now Southern England, East Anglia and the Midlands), had become thoroughly Roman in terms of economy, social structure and culture by the fourth century AD. This is borne out by the archaeological record. Most important of all, is the hundreds of Roman villas that have been excavated since the 1810s - Wikipedia lists about 469 (I really did count them all) as being confirmed to exist, each with links to the summaries of their excavations on the Historic England Database, though the list is probably far from comprehensive. Gloucestershire, home to Cotswolds and the source of the Thames, has by far the greatest concentration of Roman villa sites - 52 in all, including two of the grandest - Chedworth and Great Witcombe, both of which you can visit. The Middle Thames Valley seems to have had its fair share of Roman villas, including 2 at Hambleden (5.5 miles to the west of where our friend the macho man rests), 1 at High Wycombe (4.7 miles to the north), one at Cox Green (7 miles to the south) and one at Maidenhead (4 miles to the southeast). Besides a few exceptions, such as Fishbourne in West Sussex (anyone who did the Cambridge Latin Course Book 2 will remember this one), absolutely none of the occupants of these villas are known to us by name. What we can know is that their inhabitants were very wealthy - luxurious mosaics, underfloor heating, bathhouses and coin-hoards are very common finds - and had similar cultural tastes to the elites in Gaul, Spain and elsewhere. At least some of them seem to have been, by the mid-fourth century, Christians, as reflected by the remains of a household church along with frescoes and mosaics depicting Christian symbols and themes discovered at Lullingstone. And even if Roman Britain didn't produce any notable writers, some of the inhabitants of these villas had definitely received extensive educations in Classical literature. For example, a mosaic in the dining-hall (triclinium) depicting Zeus behaving badly in typical Zeus-fashion, has a Latin couplet above it which translates to "If jealous Juno had seen the bull swimming she would have gone with greater justice to the halls of Aeolus." The patron, whoever he was, really is showing off his knowledge of Latin literature by playing a complex game here - the couplet alludes to Book One of Virgil's Aeneid, where Juno tries to get Aeolus to drown Aeneas, but its been transferred here to the Rape of Europa, recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses. And it wasn't just Augustan era Latin literature that the elites of Roman Britain were familiar with. Probably the most exciting archaeological excavation of last year was the discovery of a Roman villa in Rutland with a mosaic from the third or fourth century depicting the fight between Achilles and Hector in the Iliad - a clear indication that some of the elites in Roman Britain could read Greek too.

A surviving fresco from Lullingstone (now in the British Museum) depicts the Chi-Ro (the first two capital letters of the Greek proper noun Christos, adopted as a symbol by the Emperor Constantine after the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312) with the Alpha and Omega from the Book of Revelation 22:13.

Another fresco from Lullingstone appears to depict worshippers with their hands raised in prayer. Late Roman frescoes in this style are unknown outside of the Synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria.

The mosaic (dated to c.360 AD) depicting the Rape of Europa 

An artistic reconstruction of what the Roman villa at Lullingstone would have looked like c.360 AD by Allan Sorrell

The Rutland mosaic of Achilles and Hector

An aerial shot by English Heritage of the remains of the Roman villa at Great Witcombe looking west

So, in sum, Roman Britain's elites were much like the civilian aristocrats everywhere else in the Roman Empire. What happened to them, and how do we get from them to our sixth century macho man? Just like the immediate post-Roman period in Britain (450 - 600) is so mysterious, as discussed earlier, when and why Roman rule ended in Britain remains controversial among scholars. Above all, the question that divides them, is thus: did Roman imperial rule end in Britain because the central authorities could longer afford to keep it within the Empire any more due to civil wars and barbarian invasion going on on the Continent? Or did the Romano-Britons themselves choose to break away from the Roman Empire out of serious dissatisfaction with imperial government - in other words, was this a Brexit before Brexit? Some Marxist historians, such as E.A Thompson and Neil Faulkner, have even speculated, on the flimsiest evidence, that a peasant's revolt brought about the end of Roman rule in Britain. But what seems to be fairly clear is that between 383 and c.450, not only did Roman imperial government disappear from Britain, but so did almost all the distinctively Roman features of the Romano-British way of life. The majority of the Roman villas, including all the ones I've mentioned, were abandoned in this period. The ones in the Middle Thames Valley seem to have been abandoned around 400 AD i.e. at the Hambleden one, the last coin to appear there was one of Arcadius (383 - 408). Some were abandoned quite late, after any Roman troops or imperial administrators were likely to have still been present - for example, a new mosaic was created at Chedworth in 423, a sign that it likely carried on business as usual into the second quarter of the fifth century, and its unclear when in the first half of the fifth century the villas at Lullingstone and Great Witcombe were abandoned. But by 450 at the latest, none of the Roman villas in Britain were still in habitation, and their sites were starting to be quarried for building materials - something that was still going on as late as eleventh century, as reflected by recycled Roman bricks turning up in Anglo-Saxon churches. Major cities, including the capital Londinium, were abandoned by this point as well. Coins appear to have stopped being imported to Britain in large quantities after 402. And wheel-turned pottery and glassware stopped being manufactured in Britain by c.450. All of this points to a thoroughgoing political, economic and social crisis over the span of 2 - 3 generations.

Unlike on the Continent, where we have abundant writings from the old Roman civilian aristocracy throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, from men like Sidonius Apollinaris (c.430 - 489), Cassiodorus (c.490 - 583) and Gregory of Tours (535 - 594), we can really only guess the fate of the Romanised elites in Britain. The villa abandonment described earlier should be something of an indication. Examples like Chedworth, not abandoned until sometime after 423, show that  the Romano-British civilian aristocracy weren't all killed off in the wake of the rebellions of Magnus Maximus in 383 and Constantine III in 407, generals based in Britain who attempted to usurp the imperial throne, or by bloody-minded peasants. At least some, and for all we know the majority, of the personnel of the Romano-British civilian aristocracy survived and didn't flee to the Continent. But the effect of what went on in the first half of the fifth century was that most of what underpinned their power had disappeared and much of their culture seemed pretty redundant.. Above all, without the Roman legions, Romano-British communities needed some way to defend themselves.

Its in these circumstances that, I suspect, many erstwhile civilian aristocrats would have become warlords and established armed followings, thus solving their communities needs for military defence while creating around that new social and political bonds based around tribal loyalty and obligation. And of course, Continental migrants/ invaders with their own warrior elites were coming over as well. In these circumstances knowledge of Classical literature and taste in mosaics and fine wine was not going to get you very far, but being big, strong and athletic, having good quality weapons and military equipment and being proficient at cutting flesh, breaking bones and puncturing internal organs, all of these being qualities our friend the macho man had in spades, could help you qualify for leadership of a tribal community, whether Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon or mixed in its members. For much more concise and better general explanations at how male elites move from cultural to military dominance or the other way, and the limitations of both, see this post from Dr Rachel Stone's excellent blog - I owe a fair amount of intellectual debt to her, especially in the present blogpost. 

At this point, I've done my best to both locate the Marlow macho man in his proper context and draw out what implications I can and this post has probably exceeded any reasonable length. I'll wrap up with one final observation. Its interesting to note that so many of the key texts in helping define and shape late medieval aristocratic culture and masculinity looked back to the time of the Marlow macho man, be they the Old English poem Beowulf (written sometime between 604 and c.1000) or the Arthurian romances of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Of course these were heavily fictionalised depictions of the sixth century, and may have projected the values of the present age back on to the past (certainly with regard to the Arthurian romances).Perhaps it would be too ludicrous to suggest that some kind of residual folk memory of this period as formative in the creation of the warrior elites of what would become England and Wales led the poets to choose sixth century settings, or perhaps not. Yet, nonetheless, bringing them in here is helpful nonetheless, because it helps us think about change and continuity in the warrior elites of medieval Britain - how much had stayed the same between the Marlow macho man Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. 

I should also announce here that, since I am terrible at observing anniversaries, this blog has been up on the web for more than six months. Thank you to everyone for reading my posts and providing support and encouragement - you help keep me motivated in this.