Encounters with the medieval past 1: The early middle ages in ten objects Part 1 (400 - 800)

 Hello everyone. As 2022 draws to a close, I thought I'd do something a little bit different. You see, most of my posts have focused overwhelmingly on textual sources because they're what I've mostly worked with and very rich and fascinating they are too. But they're only a fraction of what's out there in terms of the whole sum of what survives from the early medieval period. And since all societies across Europe, Asia and Africa in the early medieval period were at best partially literate, with only a minority (sometimes a very small one at that) being able to read and write documents, texts arguably provide quite a distorted view of how most early medieval people saw and experienced their world. And in all ages of human history, the way we have experienced the world has been, first and foremost, through some or all of the five senses - hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting. Of all these, the visual is the most easy for us to access because a fairly substantial number (though not as large as we'd like) of buildings, images and objects do survive from the early medieval period. Though no landscape has remained unaltered since the early medieval period traces of it do nonetheless remain - from grand projects like Offa's Dyke on the border between England and Wales and the Nahrawan Canal in central Iraq to more mundane things like field boundaries and woodland clearings. Touching what early medieval people touched is also somewhat possible, though most museums, heritage sites, libraries and archives do not take kindly to random members of the public doing such things for good reasons. Hearing, smelling and tasting are a lot more difficult. That is very much the domain of experimental archaeologists, who will painstakingly try and reconstruct what an early medieval Latin mass would have sounded like, what a busy commercial street in tenth century Constantinople, Cairo or Cordoba would have smelt like (no one has done anything like that yet, to my knowledge, but maybe that'll be the new frontier of the future) or how Anglo-Saxon bread would have tasted (you can actually try this at home yourself).

I've decided on the visual, since that's probably the one I'm most qualified to talk about, though I'm sure those of you reading this who are actually cognisant in archaeology, art history and epigraphy will find plenty of fault in what I say. I've decided to try and do a foolhardy task - to tell the history of early medieval Afro-Eurasia (the Old World you might say) in ten objects. This is obviously going to be a very selective history - not all aspects of early medieval life will have justice done to them. Nor will all the regions of the Old World. The Iberian Peninsula, Eastern Europe (unless Byzantium counts), Iran, Central Asia, China, Japan and Sub-Saharan Africa are all going to be conspicuous by their absence here. Meanwhile, the very label early medieval is being stretched to its limits here as these objects span the whole period this blog produces posts on - the fifth to twelfth centuries. I don't want to get into a long discussion about periodisation, but 400 - 1200 is the most generous periodisation for the early medieval that still has some sense in it. And of course, for a lot of the regions that we will be talking about here, notably South and Southeast Asia, a lot of people would argue that the label "early medieval" is inappropriate no matter what the periodisation and that we should throw out all that Eurocentric baggage. I must say that I'm not in that camp, which strikes me as postcolonialism gone too far. All it really does is keep premodern African and Asian studies, which are themselves quite small self-contained fields in Europe and North America given that they require the mastery of some very difficult languages and source material, isolated from the mainstream of medieval history. Basically, just so long as we don't hold up Europe as the gold standard for historical development we're good, and by doing some comparisons we can see what's similar and shared and what's particular and unique about what we study. But now let's get on the exciting part - meet our ten objects!

Object number one: a child's tombstone from Trier, 400 - 500 AD (Trier Cathedral Museum, Germany, visited 11 May 2022)

The inscription on this Roman tombstone, found in the grounds of the abbey of Saint Maximin at Trier, in the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany, reads (according to my own faulty translation:

Valentina lies here in peace. She lived for three years, six months and five days. Her kinsmen placed this inscription here. 

Below it are two doves. The doves are an important Christian symbol - it was a dove carrying an olive branch that Noah saw when the Great Flood ended. The gospels of Matthew and Luke also claim that the Holy Spirit appeared as a dove at the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan. Because of this, doves symbolised peace, hope and the soul, and thus were more than appropriate to have on a tombstone - they became a very common motif on late Roman tombstones from Edict of Milan in 313, which officially made Christian worship legal in the Roman Empire, onwards. Indeed, there are plenty of tombstones just this one in Trier alone, to say nothing of other places where late Roman cemeteries have been found. 

The location of the cemetery this was found in is worth noting as well. This grave was found in the grounds of the Abbey of Saint Maximin in Trier, founded in the sixth century, destroyed by the Vikings in 882, rebuilt in the tenth century and again, after a fire, in the thirteenth. I passed by it when I was walking from Trier Hauptbahnhof to my accommodation in a village in the hills of the Moselle valley outside Trier. Before the abbey, there was an early Christian basilica and cemetery that had grown up around the tomb of Saint Maximin (d.346), one of the earliest known Christian bishops of Trier, a courtier at the courts of Constantine II and Constans (sons of Constantine the Great) and a renowned defender of the doctrine of the Trinity against the Arian heresy which we have talked about here briefly before. This cemetery was located in what was essentially a suburb of Trier, or Augusta Treverorum as it was then known. You see, Roman law forbade the dead from being buried inside the city walls. So the location of this burial is very much in keeping with ancient Roman tradition, going back at least to the days of the Early Republic. The Christian symbols, however, represent a more recently established tradition, as does the decision to have this toddler buried in close proximity to a saint - the cult of the saints itself being a very recent development. Saints were believed to be able to intercede for those who had recently departed to help them get to heaven, which was why as we get into the early middle ages proper, kings and aristocrats chose to be buried in monasteries. 

But above all, it reveals one of the few things that stayed completely same throughout our period (400 - 1200). That is, high infant mortality. We have no concrete statistics for it in this period, but in all ages before modern medicine almost a third of children did not live past the age of five. That's why life expectancy in this period was so low. Its not because everyone was dropping dead in their thirties (I've encountered more than enough early medieval octogenarians and nonagenarians to disprove that), but because more than 30% of all the people born in this period would have never lived to see adulthood at all. This continued to be more or less the case even into the Industrial Age. For example, in England and Wales in 1850, 16.2% of babies born died before their first birthday and approximately a further 11.2% did not live to see their fifth - cumulatively, that's about 27.4% of children dying before the age of five in early Victorian England. By contrast, in 2020, just 0.4% of children in England and Wales did not live to see their fifth birthday. For this we have to thank the huge quantum leaps in medicine and healthcare that were made in the twentieth century. Still, huge disparities remain around the world i.e. the infant mortality rate (deaths before the age of one) is still 1.1% in Ecuador, 4.7% in Mozambique and 5.7% in Pakistan. This tombstone really reminds us of how harsh life could be across this period. 

Of course, going on in the backdrop when this tombstone was placed there was indeed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Trier had been an absolutely thriving place in the fourth century AD, when it was the de facto imperial capital in the West. Having the imperial court that far north is part of what explains why so many deluxe Roman villas survive from the fourth century in Britain. However, after the rebellion of Magnus Maximus in the 380s, who we've met a few times before, the western imperial court moved permanently back to Milan, and later Rome and Ravenna. In 406, the Roman magister militum (head of the armed forces) Stilicho, decided to remove all field armies from the Rhine frontier to deal with Radagaisus, an Ostrogothic leader who wanted to sack Rome and sacrifice all the senators to Odin and Thor. Radagaisus was defeated and executed near Fiesole in Tuscany, but in the winter the Rhine froze over and the Burgundians, Vandals, Swabians and Alans, who were all fleeing the coming of the Huns from Mongolia to the Great Hungarian Plain, crossed into Gaul. 

The countryside around Trier will have been ravaged a lot by the barbarians in 407, though the city itself doesn't seem to have been sacked that year - a fate that befell Metz and Rheims to the west. Shortly after this, half a dozen usurpers appeared in Gaul and one of them, Constantine III (later believed to be King Arthur's grandfather), withdrew all Roman field armies from Britain later in 407. The end of the Western Roman Empire was still far from inevitable at this point, and no one could have foreseen it then, but this can with some justification be called the beginning of the end. Trier and the Moselle valley still remained firmly under Roman imperial authority, though it was attacked by the Franks several times in the early fifth century, and was sacked by Attila the Hun during his invasion of Gaul in 451. 

After 461, the imperial centre lost control of Gaul north of the Loire. The emerging Visigothic kingdom in Aquitaine and the Burgundian kingdom in Savoy cut off the corridor between it and the still centrally controlled and very Roman Provence. To add to this, Aegidius, the commander of the Roman field armies in Gaul, whom we've met so many times before because our friend Adhemar of Chabannes remembered him almost 600 years later and talked a lot about him, refused to recognise the western emperor Libius Severus (r.461 - 465). But its unclear if Aegidius, who was based in Soissons, actually controlled Trier. 

Trier after 461 was under the control of Count Arbogast, a descendant of the Frankish leader by the same name who had served as magister militum for the western Roman Empire in the late fourth century. Count Arbogast himself, like many Roman generals of barbarian ancestry (Stilicho and Flavius Aetius to name a few) was thoroughly Roman himself and like any good Roman aristocrat he had received an excellent literary education. Our only sources for his life are his correspondence with the Gallo-Roman aristocrat and bishop Sidonius Apollinaris and with his cousin Bishop Auspicius of Toul, preserved in a ninth century Carolingian manuscript called the Austrasian Letters (once again, thank the Carolingians for preserving all our ancient sources). Count Arbogast relied on the surviving units of Roman limitanei (garrison and border defence troops) and Frankish mercenaries for military defence. We do not know when his rule ended, but it was sometime after 470. Adhemar of Chabannes, writing in the eleventh century but using much earlier sources (though from well after the time of the events themselves), claims that Childeric, the father of Clovis, took Trier for the Franks and sacked and burned the city to the ground sometime in the 470s. But there's no contemporary source that says this, and by Adhemar's day the all-out destructiveness of the barbarian invasions was already being played up in the standard histories - the cataclysmic vision of the fall of Rome didn't have to wait until the Renaissance. Some instead think that Arbogast simply gave his allegiance to Childeric, again without much foundation. At any rate, as far as the archaeology is concerned, Frankish style graves do not appear in the area around Trier until after 500. So, as this gravestone itself attests, Trier remained firmly Roman during the turbulent fifth century and, like in many other parts of the erstwhile Western Roman Empire, the early middle ages took a long while to arrive there. 

Object number two: socks from Roman Egypt, 400 - 500 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)

Lets now take a look at the other side of the Roman world, to the eastern Roman Empire. This pair of red woollen socks was knitted with needles in Egypt sometime in the fifth century, though they might actually be fourth century - like with a lot of archaeological material, dating is difficult (I shall resist any temptation to make awful puns). Their odd, cloven shape can be explained by the fact that they were meant to be worn with sandals - a hugely unfashionable look now, though I may be a little behind the curve on current cultural trends, but the height of fashion then. They were excavated in the 1890s in a burial ground in Oxyrhynchus, a town founded in the Ptolemaic Era (323 - 31 BC) by Hellenistic Greek settlers in the Middle Nile Valley. Many other finds from there are also displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as in other museums in Europe and North America.

Why does clothing survive so easily from Egypt but not from other parts of the Roman Empire? The answer to that is that all source material survives better in Egypt than in any other part of the Roman Empire. The extremely dry climate, except by the Nile itself which is incredibly fertile, means that most organic material doesn't perish so easily as it does in places with wetter, more temperate climates. Given that papyrus, which rots very easily in temperate climates, was the main writing material of the ancient Romans in Classical times and in Late Antiquity, we have more surviving documentation from Egypt than we do anywhere else in the Roman Empire, and thus we know more about ordinary provincial Egyptian society than for any other region of the Roman Empire. Indeed, its possible to say that we know more about ancient Roman life from Egyptian rubbish dumps, including those at Oxyrhynchus, than we do from all the works of Cicero, the Vindolanda Tablets or even the remains of Pompeii. Amidst these Egyptian rubbish dumps we have lots of ordinary documents which survive in quantities unparalleled anywhere else in the Roman Empire - soldiers' letters home, wills, land purchases, shopping lists, petitions etc. At Oxyrhynchus, even lost poems of Sappho and plays of Sophocles, and some of the earliest ever copies of the Gospels, have been found there. Thus, Roman Egypt has the potential to cast quite a distorting mirror on the Roman world, as the ancient historian Brett Devereaux explores here (I do highly recommend his excellent blog). 

We have no idea who these socks belonged to, though they most likely belonged to a peasant. The Egyptian peasantry in the late Roman period (third to seventh centuries in Egypt) were fairly prosperous and largely independent of aristocratic landlords, though they did have to pay high taxes to the Roman state. Surviving land registers from (surprise, surprise) Oxyrhynchus, show that taxes were paid routinely and proportionately in Egypt, even by the Apion family - one of the wealthiest families in the Eastern Roman Empire, whose home base was in Oxyrhynchus itself. They were also becoming more culturally Roman in this period - during fourth and fifth centuries, temple complexes to native Egyptian deities started to be abandoned (in part due to Christianisation), hieroglyphics ceased to be used for writing inscriptions and the Egyptians ditched their venerable taste for beer and started drinking Palestinian wine instead.

In Egypt the experience of the fifth century was very different to in Gaul, where we were for object one, and the other western provinces. In part that was because the Eastern Mediterranean had always been richer than the West, and had been urbanised for much longer (indeed by millennia). But it was also in part thanks to the imperial capital, Constantinople being supremely well-defended, the eastern frontier with Persia being largely peaceful as the two empires faced the Hunnic threat together, which meant that the most economically productive, tax-rich provinces of Anatolia, Syria, Cyprus, Palestine and Egypt were kept safe from external attack. The Eastern Roman Emperors pursued shrewd diplomacy, which kept potential barbarian invaders like Alaric the Visigoth, Atilla the Hun, Geiseric the Vandal and Theodoric the Ostrogoth from being too troublesome for them. Indeed, the Eastern Roman Empire experienced something of an economic boom in the fifth and early sixth centuries, which made Justinian's reconquest of Africa, Italy and Southern Spain for the Roman Empire in the mid-sixth century possible, as well as Constantinople growing to at least half a million inhabitants and architecturally ground-breaking churches like Hagia Sophia being built. Perhaps these socks are somehow reflective of this late antique prosperity in Egypt.

Notably, these socks are the only item in this group of ten objects I've chosen which are completely secular - they have nothing about them which relates to gods, myths, saints, worship or anything religious. They are also the only item which is at all representative of the lived experiences of 80 - 90% of the population of the early medieval world. In part that's due to biases of survival, in part due to my own personal choices and preferences. Much as I have respect for the work of the Annales school historians, especially Georges Duby (I'm not so fussed about Fernand Braudel), and the less dogmatic British and French Marxist historians like Pierre Bonnassie, Guy Bois and most of all Chris Wickham, elite culture really is my cup of tea. I just don't find peasants as interesting as aristocrats, clerics and scholars, which also links to the fact I've always preferred studying texts to archaeological material, though that's not to say I don't think peasants and agriculture boring and unimportant - my blogging record says otherwise. Thus I felt I had to bring them in there, somewhere, to remind us of the lived experiences of the great majority, even if in a token way.

Object number three: The Isola Rizza Dish, 550 - 600 AD (Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy, visited 10 June 2022)

This magnificent silver dish was found amidst a late sixth century treasure hoard, excavated in a churchyard in Isola Rizza, a village near Verona in the Veneto region of Italy, in 1873. At the bottom of the bowl is an engraved relief medallion showing a clean-shaven cavalryman wearing a lamellar cuirass and a plumed Spangenhelm-type helmet and carrying a kontos spear charging over a fallen enemy soldier. Another who, like his fallen comrade, is bearded, wears no armour and carries an oval-shaped shield and a longsword called a spatha, appears to be fleeing the cavalryman. 

Where this was made, and for whom, is uncertain. Historians such as Neil Christie have thought on stylistic grounds that it is an East Roman work, produced in Italy shortly after the completion of Justinian's reconquest in 554. They assume that it commemorates the defeat of the Ostrogoths by the East Roman armies of Justinian,  and that the cavalryman is a Germanic (possibly a Goth or Gepid from Pannonia, modern day Hungary) or Steppe (possibly an Alan from the Caucasus) mercenary in Roman service. Meanwhile, the infantrymen are presumed to be Ostrogoths, though they could plausibly be Franks, who also tried to wrestle control of Northern Italy in the 550s but were repelled by the East Roman eunuch general, Narses. Their lack of armour indicates that they are fairly low-ranking free men serving their king as levies, not professional soldiers or aristocratic retainers. It is thus presumed that the dish was buried in 569, when another Germanic people, the Lombards, invaded Italy from across the Alps under their king, Alboin, and successfully took Verona after a siege. The assumption is that a worried local bigwig didn't want the Lombards getting their dirty hands on his nice shiny household silverware. But as is so often the case, the dating and provenance can be questioned. It could have been made by the Lombards and show an elite Lombard warrior on horseback running down some invading Franks or Slavs. Alternatively, a Lombard warrior may have acquired it in battle, with the East Romans. Or he might have been given it by the Avars, a Steppe nomad people from Central Asia who settled on the Great Hungarian Plain from the 560s and who definitely had mounted warriors that looked exactly like the one shown here - it was the Avars and Lombards who together destroyed the Gepid kingdom in Hungary in 566, before the Lombards invaded Italy. We will never have the answer.

Nonetheless, it does undoubtedly represent an even bigger sixth century change. That is the militarisation of society and the rise of warrior elites. Lots of silverwares from the fourth and fifth century Roman Empire survive, but they don't show scenes of contemporary warfare. Instead they overwhelmingly show scenes from classical mythology and literature and the pleasures of the imagination, and are overwhelmingly non-martial in nature. This reflects the educated and cultured civilian aristocracy, including senators, career bureaucrats in the imperial administration and local municipal officeholders, they were produced for. While it disappeared earlier in many other regions of the Empire, notably fifth century Britain which we discussed on this blog earlier this year, it survived in Italy into the first half of the sixth century under the Ostrogothic kings, where one would have been entirely forgiven for thinking the Western Roman Empire hadn't fallen at all. But Justinian's wars to recover Italy for the actual Roman Empire ended up being a messy and protracted affair, which resulted in the Italian economy being left in ruins, cities being depopulated and villas being abandoned for fortified hilltop villages (read: not proto-castles!). The invasion of the Lombards both took full advantage of this and made the situation worse. As elsewhere in the former Western Empire, economic and urban collapse combined with increased warfare and political instability led to the replacement of civilian aristocracies with warrior elites. In those circumstances, being able to quote Virgil from memory was less important than being able to wield a sword proficiently. And this new warrior elite, while they still loved luxury would have had a less of a taste for scenes of playful cupids, dancing girls, temples and bucolic dreamscapes and more of a taste for scenes of war and martial valour. None of this was to do with "Germanic influence." The rise of military aristocracies can be similarly seen in the areas of late sixth and seventh century Italy still under Roman control, just like it can be seen in both Anglo-Saxon England and Romano-British Wales as any comparison between Beowulf and Y Goddodin shows. In some ways all the different regions of the former Western Roman Empire were all headed down fairly similar cultural trajectories, whether they fell to Germanic invaders or not. Above all, the very uncertainties about this object's provenance are indicative of one thing about it - that it belonged to an unstable militarised frontier society. 

And that links to our final point. The burial of weapons, jewellery and luxury items like silver bowls, which is so common in the former Western Roman Empire the fifth to seventh centuries but so much less common after. A lot of historians used to think that had something to do with paganism or ancient Germanic customs. All except, as Chris Wickham and Guy Halsall amongst others have ably demonstrated, actually it doesn't. Getting rid of moveable property to prepare for death was common in Roman times, and not just pagans but also Christians did it. Rather, what it shows is aristocrats and elites who were uncertain about their local power and status. The later sixth and seventh centuries in Italy was undoubtedly a time for elites to feel thus, due to all the constant warfare and political instability and upheaval. Elites in Anglo-Saxon England, where politics and society were much more primitive and unstable than in Lombard Italy, basically tribal, would have felt the same, which is why we find such rich hoards there like Sutton Hoo, or indeed the Harpole treasure discovered less than a month ago. But once aristocrats felt much more secure in their positions, as they did in Francia and Visigothic Spain by around 650 and in Anglo-Saxon England and Lombard Italy after 700, they started investing in more permanent displays of their wealth and local power by building churches and donating to monasteries. Its from this point on that grave goods disappear and treasure hoards become increasingly scarce. So the Isola Rizza dish we've discussed here, like the macho man of Marlow we discussed back in February, reflects the transition away from the late Roman civilian aristocracy to the early medieval warrior elite. 

Object number four: a coin of Emperor Heraclius, 629 - 630 AD, Eastern Roman Empire (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 10 December 2022)

Moving east again, we at last have an item with a concrete, clearly identifiable date. This is the reverse of a gold solidus coin of the Roman emperor Heraclius (r.610 - 641), minted in Constantinople. The obverse of the coin, not shown here, has images of Heraclius and his two sons. But the reverse shows an image of the True Cross, believed to be the very cross on which Jesus Christ himself was crucified. Now coins are more than just items of monetary exchange, especially in late antique/ early medieval context. They could be a powerful vehicle for political propaganda. And this couldn't be clearer than in this case. In 628, as I've written about here in much more detail before, Heraclius had defeated Rome's eternal nemesis, Persia, and recovered the True Cross which the Persians had taken from Jerusalem in 614. The inclusion of the True Cross on a coin, a year later, was doubtless meant to celebrate Heraclius' triumph and portray him as a great Roman soldier emperor in the mould of Trajan and Constantine, as well as a defender of the Christian faith against the heathen Zoroastrian Persian foe. Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. Within the next decade Islam would spread out of the Arabian Peninsula and the Romans would lose Syria, Palestine and Egypt, which they had fought to hard to regain from the Persians, to the Arabs, and this time it would be forever. Nonetheless, Heraclius' victory immediately caught the attention of contemporaries not just in the Roman Empire but across the Christian world, and was a very well-known and celebrated moment in history for more than a thousand years after. Adhemar of Chabannes of course wrote about it in his Aquitanian monastic cell in the early eleventh century. And William Caxton wrote about it in Middle English in the late fifteenth century, and had Heraclius' story printed on his London printing press - his audiences in Yorkist and early Tudor England hugely enjoyed reading it. And a few decades earlier, the story of Heraclius and the True Cross had been immortalised in paint by the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. Linking to my first PGCE written assignment on teaching historical significance to schoolchildren, this is a nice illustration of how historical events can resonate both with people at the time and subsequently.

Object 5: a plaster cast of a relief showing a scene from the Gandavyuha Sutra, Borodbudur, Java, 700 - 800 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 10 December 2022)

This plaster cast of a high stone relief from the temple complex of Borobudur near Yogyakarta in central Java in Indonesia shows a scene from the Gandavyuha Sutra, a Buddhist text written in sixth century India. It shows how a pilgrim, Prince Sudhana, achieved enlightenment with the help of several Buddhist holy men, known as bodhisattvas. On the left, the prince receives instruction from the bodhisattva Samantabhadra (the large seated figure), and on the centre-right of the picture with his palms put together in reverence the Prince meditates and comes close to achieving full nirvana. 

Now I must admit I know little about the history of Indonesia in this period. But there are many reasons why I chose it. Firstly, notice how, by showing the ascetic holy men Samantabhadra as a figure more than twice as large as Prince Sudhana, the artist is making him out as much more important. This image thus nicely illustrates how the universalising religions that emerged across Eurasia in  like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam could potentially challenge the prevailing social hierarchies with their new ideas about morals and spirituality, even if the established elites willingly embraced them. Pagan Roman writers sometimes accused Christianity of being a religion of women and slaves. And while so many early medieval saints, bishops, abbots and abbesses were of aristocratic and royal backgrounds, to the point that German scholars speak of adelsheilige (noble saintliness) like its a concrete phenomenon, all early medieval people knew that the poor peasant could go to heaven at least as easily as a rich count. Meanwhile, on the other side of Eurasia, the Chinese imperial authorities were often afraid of Buddhism as socially and politically subversive, and the Tang emperors cracked down on it with full-scale persecutions  It also reflects the power of holy men, especially those who practiced asceticism, to advise and educate rulers and even correct them for bad behaviours. A Carolingianist like myself can more than easily see the eighth and ninth century Frankish parallels here. Likewise, the importance of pilgrimage in this story would have resonated with people in the early medieval Christian West just as much as in the Buddhist world. 

Secondly, what makes it interesting is indeed the most obvious. That it shows the spread of Indian culture and religions across south and southeast Asia. As I mentioned before, the first millennium AD sees the momentous spread of the three great universalising world religions, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, across Afro-Eurasia. Buddhism had already reached southeast Asia in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, around the same time as the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. Around the time this temple was being built, Islam had reached Spain and Central Asia and Saint Boniface was converting Frisia and Central Germany on behalf of Charles Martel and Pippin the Short. Its possible to find many parallels between the establishment of Hindu and Buddhist temples in peninsular India, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia and the creation of Christian monasteries in Northwest Europe, not just in the religious changes they brought but also the social and economic ones. Comparing Borobudur with the bishopric of Wurzburg and the nearby abbey of Fulda, founded by St Boniface and his disciples around the same time it was built, would be intriguing indeed. Likewise, the spread of Indian culture to Southeast Asia would have meant the spread of literacy, of the Vedas and the Indian epic cycles like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and of the Sanskrit language. Similarly, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century and of Central and Northern Germany in the eighth century brought Latin, the Bible and the Roman Classics, which transformed elite culture there too. I must confess that while I know so little about Southeast Asia, I find the potential parallels between it and the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon worlds in the seventh to tenth centuries so intriguing that I'd love to explore them more. 

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.