The coronation of Charles III in long term historical perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do Anglo-Saxons make you think more of this?

Or this? 

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

 

 

From the sources 4: Carolingian peasants and their conspiracy theories

 

Can we know what these dudes doing the reaping and wine-pressing in the foreground really believed in? We're back with the Utrecht Psalter (c.825) here

Today's big question: are conspiracy theories really a modern phenomenon?

The power of conspiracy theories today experienced first hand: a protest against the "Great Reset" I saw in Vienna on 28 May 2022

So, having looked at the polyptychs and seen how differentrural society could be in different regions of the Carolingian Empire, we’re going to return to the theme of peasant life in the early ninth century. Now, as illuminating as the polyptychs can be, there are some big draw backs. The first and most important one is that these are documents written for landlords by their agents who did the surveying. Everything they tell us is based on the questions the landlords told their agents to enquire into with each peasant household. So, they tell us what each peasant householder owed in rent/ tax/ tribute/ labour services (which tells us a lot about what they farmed and how much access they had to cash), their legal status (free or unfree), how many children and other dependents he (more rarely she) had under his roof and their names (sometimes ages as well as we saw with the Marseille polyptych). Occasionally they might give us some super-interesting incidental information i.e., peasant boys away at school in the Marseille polyptych. But those are the limits of what landlords and their agents were interested in – other aspects of peasant life just weren’t of interest to them and weren’t worth enquiring into and recording.

So, what other sources do we have for the lives of Carolingian peasants. Archaeology is obviously one of them but that can only tell us about the material side of things. But what about the more intimate, interior, human side of things. What did Carolingian peasants think about day to day – what were their opinions about what was going in the world, their attitudes, anxieties, fears, dreams and aspirations? What were their beliefs about the cosmos and how well did they match up with official Christian teaching on this? What were their relationships with their neighbours and other figures in their communities like? And what did they do for fun (and all the other stuff near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)?

Unfortunately, we cannot get ready answers to these questions. We have nothing like the diaries, memoirs and other personal writings we have for the working classes in the late Georgian and Victorian eras – after 1760, more than half of the adult population of Great Britain was functionally literate. Pigs will fly if a Carolingian equivalent of this early nineteenth century Yorkshire farmer’s diary that made a bit of a media sensation a few years ago is found. Nor do we even have the kind of resources that are available to historians of late medieval and early modern Europe. We don’t have anything like the inquisition trial testimonies for the village of Montaillou in Southern France from 1294 – 1324 that enabled Emmanuel Le Roy Laudrie in his eponymous 1975 classic to look at the heretical beliefs and community conflicts among the villagers there (as well as discovering that Mountaillou’s village priest Pierre Clergue, from a local family of rich peasants, was a serial-philanderer who seduced a married countess no less). It was similarly inquisition trial testimonies that enabled Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms (1976) to discover Menocchio the Miller (1533 – 1599), a freethinking peasant intellectual and avid bookworm from Friuli in Italy. Or the witchcraft trial records from Essex that allowed Keith Thomas and Alan MacFarlane to do similar stuff to Montaillou for Elizabethan and Jacobean England. God the eighth and ninth centuries really were the dark ages! Unlike the more enlightened folks of Renaissance Europe, the Carolingians didn’t have the inquisition and witch burnings, and modern historians are all the more worse off for it because persecution generates documents that we can read against the grain to find out about the lives of the persecuted. Thus, most historians would argue that microhistory – the use of a small set of really intimate, localised documentation to recover the perspectives of ordinary people in the past – is redundant for the Carolingian era or any time before about 1250. Charles West, a historian whose work I really admire, disagrees, and has recently produced a very illuminating study ‘Visions in a Ninth-Century Village: an Early Medieval Microhistory’, History Workshop Journal (2016). Using a very different piece of evidence, I’ll attempt a sort of early medieval microhistory myself.

First, let’s meet Agobard of Lyon (779 – 840). His origins are obscure – he may have Visigoth refugee from Islamic Spain, like his compatriot Theodulf of Orleans, whom we’ve met before, as suggested by a brief passage in the Annals of Lyon, but some scholars dispute this. He came bishop of Lyon in 814, though because the previous office-holder, Leidrad, was still alive and in retirement in monastery, Agobard wasn’t universally recognised as bishop until the Council of Aachen in 816. Thereafter, he gained something of a reputation as a controversialist. He offered scathing critiques of Louis the Pious’ policy of guaranteeing religious freedom for Jews in the Carolingian Empire, and wrote five polemics in the 820s against Jews and Judaism, in one of them calling Jews “the devil’s spawn.” He also rushed eagerly into theological controversies about the use of icons in churches and the nature of the Trinity (where have we seen them before!) and wrote tracts on those. He dismissed the practice of allowing accused felons to clear their innocence through trial by combat, enshrined in the law of the Burgundians (the local law in Lyon), as irrational. He even criticised Louis the Pious for not following his initial royal/ imperial succession policy of 817, and supported Louis’ eldest son, Lothar in rebellion against him in 830. And he wrote a tract against popular superstitions called On Hail and Thunder (815), and it is to that we shall now turn:

The first printed edition of Agobard of Lyon's works, including the treatise we'll be discussing here, produced in Paris in 1605

In these regions [Burgundy] almost everyone – nobles and common folk, city folk and country folk, the old and the young – believe that hail and thunder can be caused by the will of humans. For as soon as they have heard thunder or seen lightning, they say “the wind has been raised.” When asked why it is [called] a raised wind, some with shame, their consciences troubling them a little, others boldly, as is the way of the ignorant, answer that the wind was raised by the incantations of people who are called storm-makers [tempestarii]. Hence it is called a raised wind.

Whether it is true, as is popularly believed, should be verified by the authority of Holy Scripture. If, however, it is false, as we believe without doubt, it ought to be emphasised just how great the crime is of him who attributes to humans the work of God …

We have seen and heard of many overcome by such great madness and deranged by such great foolishness that they believe and claim that there is a certain region called Magonia [Magic Land] from which ships travel in the clouds. These ships, [so they believe], carry crops that were knocked down by hail and perished in storms back to that same region. Those cloud-sailors [are thought to] give a fee to the storm-makers and to take back grain and other crops. So blinded are some by this great and foolish belief that they believe that these things can [actually] be done.

We [once] saw many people gathered together in a crowd who were showing off four captives, three men and a woman, as though they had fallen out of some such ships. These people had been held for some time in chains. But at last, as I said, they were exhibited to that crowd of people in our presence as [criminals] fit to be stoned to death. Nevertheless, the truth did come out. After much argument, those who exhibited those captives were, as the Prophet says, “confused, just as the thief is confused when apprehended [Jeremiah 2:26].”

Because of this error, which in the area possess the minds of almost everyone, ought to be judged by reason, let us offer up the witness of Scripture through which the matter can be judged. After inspecting those witnesses, it will not be us, but truth itself that will overcome this stupid error and everyone who recognises the truth will denounce the instruments of error and say with the Apostle “no lie is of the truth [1 John 2:21].” What is not from the truth is especially not from God, and because it is not from God, he hears not its words …

If therefore the almighty God through the power of his arm whips the wicked with new waters, hail, and rains and whose hand it is impossible to flee, then those people who are entirely ignorant of God who believe that humans can do these things. For if people can send hail, then they can make it rain anywhere, for no one ever sees hail without rain. They could also protect themselves from their enemies, not only by the theft of crops, but also by taking away a life. For when it happens that the enemies of the storm-makers are in a road or field, they could kill them; they could send down an entire hail-storm down upon them in one mass and bury them. Some claim that they themselves know some storm-makers who can make a diffuse pattern of hail that is falling throughout a region fall instead in a heap upon a river or a useless forest or on a tub under which the storm-maker himself is hiding.

Often, we have heard it said by many, that they knew such things were certainly done in [specific] places, but we have never heard yet anyone claim that they themselves had seen these things. Once it was reported to me that someone said that he himself had heard such things. With great interest I myself set out to see him, and I did. But when I was speaking with him and encouraging him, with many prayers and entreaties, to say whether he had seen such things, I [nevertheless] pressed him with divine threats not to say anything unless it were true. Then he declared that what he said was indeed true and he named the person, the time, and place, but nevertheless confessed that he himself had not been present at that time …

… Terrified by the sound of thunder and by flashes of lightning, the faithful, although sinners, call for the intercession of the holy prophet, but not our half-faithful people. Who, as soon as they hear thunder or feel a light puff of wind, say that “the wind has been raised,” and then issue a curse: “Let that cursing tongue be parched. May the tongue that makes [this storm] now be cut off.” Tell me, I beg you, whom do you curse, a just person or a sinner? For a sinner, cannot, as you often say out of your own infidelity, raise up the wind, because he has no power, nor can he command evil angels …

Also in our times we sometimes see that, with the crops and grapes harvested, farmers cannot sow [the next crop] on account of the dryness of the land. Why do you not ask your storm-makers to send their raised winds to wet the land so that you might sow them then? But because you do not do that, nor did you ever see or hear of anyone doing it, listen to what the Lord himself, the creator of all things, the ruler, governor, arranger, and provider says to his blessed servant Job about things of this sort …

Look at the great works of God, the existence of which the blessed Job himself was not able to admire fully and loftily. If the Lord has a treasure-trove of hail that He alone sees, and which even the blessed Job never saw, where do the storm-makers discover what the blessed Job never found? Neither can we find it nor can anyone guess where it is. The Lord inquires of his faithful servant if he knows who gave a path to the most violent rains and a passage to the resounding thunder. Those against whom this is directed show themselves to be puny men, devoid of holiness, justice, and wisdom, lacking in faith and truth, hateful even to their neighbours. [Yet] they say that is by the storm-makers that violent winds, crashing thunder, and raised winds are made …

This stupidity is not the least part of this unfaithfulness, for it has now grown into such a great evil, that in many places there are wretched people who say indeed that they do not know how to send storms, but nevertheless know how to defend the inhabitants of a place against storms. They have determined how much of a crop they should be given and call this a regular tribute [canonicum]. There are many people who never freely give tithes to priests, nor give alms to widows, orphans, and other poor people. Though the importance of alms-giving is preached to them, is repeatedly read out and encouraged, they still do not give any. They pay the canonicum, however, voluntarily to their defenders, by whom they are protected from storms. And all of this is accomplished without any preaching, any admonishment, any exhortation, except by the seduction of the Devil …

A few years ago [that is, in 810] a certain foolish story spread. Since at that time cattle were dying off, people said that Duke Grimoald of Benevento had sent people with a dust which they were to spread on the fields, mountains, meadows, and wells and that it was because of the dust they spread that the cattle died. He did this [they say] because he was an enemy of our most Christian Emperor Charles. For this reason we heard and saw that many people were captured and killed. Most of them, with plaques attached, were cast into the river and drowned. And, what is truly remarkable, those captured gave testimony against themselves, admitting that they had such dust and had spread it. For so the Devil, by the secret and just judgement of God, having received power over them, was able to succeed over them that they gave false witness against themselves and died. Neither learning, nor torture, nor death itself deterred them from daring to give false witness against themselves. This story was so widely believed that there were very few to whom it seemed absurd. They did not rationally consider how such dust could be made, how it could only kill cattle and not other animals, how could it be carried and spread over such a vast territory by humans. Nor did they consider whether there were enough Beneventan men and women, old and young, to go out from their region in wheeled carts loaded with dust. Such is the great foolishness that oppresses the wretched world …

Source: "Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition)" edited by Paul Edward Dutton, Toronto University Press (2009), pp 220 - 223

Clearly there were some cultural parallels to these tempestarii in Sweden and they was some interest in them in the early modern period. An engraving from Olaus Magnus' A History of the Northern Peoples (1555). Indeed, learned early moderns were a lot less sceptical of this stuff than Agobard. In 1591, King James VI of Scotland had 70 people, including the midwife Agnes Sampson, the schoolmaster John Fian and Francis Stuart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, put on trial in North Berwick for trying to sink his ship on Halloween night 1590 as he sailed home from Copenhagen with his newlywed wife. Yet no one would suggest that James VI of Scotland and I of England was a rustic crypto-pagan.

Now in this source we two systems of thought/ mentalities at play. That of Agobard and that of the peasants. Sam Ottewill-Soulsby at the Historians’ Sketchpad has done a brilliant blogpost on Agobard’s mode of thinking and I don’t think I’ll do it more justice than he does, so rather than covering the same ground I highly recommend you read his blogpost. Instead, I’ll focus on the perspectives of these Burgundian countryfolks. First it must be said that we have absolutely no good reason, given the nature of the source, as a reform minded polemical treatise, to think Agobard made this all up. At the same time, we should bear in mind that this isn't written with the voices of these Burgundian peasants, and that Agobard may have ventriloquised them just as a lot of writers of saints' lives did when writing about the humble-born witnesses of miracles i.e., whether the miracle stories recorded in Gregory of Tours' Ten Books of Histories, Glory of the Confessors, Glory of the Martyrs and Lives of the Fathers can be used to create Merovingian microhistories, or simply reflect the preoccupations of their author and the ecclesiastical elite culture in sixth century Gaul to which he belonged, is debated.

Now a major undercurrent behind this, which should not be overlooked, is that life for a Carolingian peasant was, in a word, harsh. Their belief in these storm-making wizards and sky pirates is described by Agobard as appearing in the context of crop failure caused by bad weather. Likewise, the conspiracy theory about foreign agents spreading dust to kill cattle was provoked by a cattle plague (most likely an outbreak of rinderpest) in Burgundy in 810. Although Agobard doesn’t mention this, for perspective it is worth noting there had been three major famines in Francia in living memory – one in 779, another in 792 and another still in 805. The COVID-19 pandemic and this year’s extreme heatwave and drought have given us a small taste of something that a Carolingian peasant would have experienced all the time – feeling at the mercy of natural forces beyond your control. It is worth saying that there were some organised forms of relief available for the most vulnerable in the Carolingian empire. The statutes of Abbot Adalhard of Corbie (751 - 826) reveal the role of monasteries in providing food for the poor and needy through large scale charity, and some parish churches in Francia kept matricula, lists of needy people to be given assistance with daily living, a system perhaps not wholly dissimilar to the systems of parish poor relief in seventeenth century England. None of these are in evidence here and the churches in Burgundy seem to have been unremitting in their collection of tithes, hence why some of the wealthier members of the community seem to have turned away from tithe-payment and charity towards paying the canonicum (an evil twin of the tithe) to good wizards believed to be able to stop the tempestarii from destroying crops.

Sky pirates? You mean like these guys?

We are able to see a certain parallel between Carolingian peasants reacting to crop failure and cattle plagues and twenty-first century citizen’s reacting to COVID-19. This is the tendency to assign blame to something that’s not a part of the natural order of things as the authorities, be they clerics or scientists, would have them believe but instead blame them on malevolent human forces that we can combat using our own willpower and agency. Hence Agobard tells us of cases in which supposed sky pirates and Beneventan agents were lynched or narrowly saved from being so by his interventions as a result of these paranoid beliefs – where have we seen that kind of thing again? Of course we should apply some caution here before drawing parallels between Carolingian peasants and modern day conspiracy theorists. Modern day devotees of conspiracy theories, or as they would call themselves “sceptics” or “truth-seekers” mostly acquire knowledge of and develop belief in such theories through their dissemination in books, alternative media and on the internet, especially social media. Carolingian peasants, however, were overwhelmingly illiterate and lived in an age before print culture, rapid communications and modern mass media. Furthermore, modern conspiracy theories are often seen as a product of a culture of distrust in authority, which likely had no parallel in the Carolingian era. Thus, it might be possible to argue that these peasants were not dabbling in conspiracy theories at all. Instead, some might argue that with all this talk of weather magicians, what we’re seeing is ancient Indo-European folkloric beliefs, untouched by Christian teaching, in action. As this school of historical thought, which you can find most clearly expressed in Jean Delumeau’s “Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire” (1977), would have it, Agobard inveighing against here is inveighing against peasants who were “Christians in name only”, and that paganism had basically survived unscathed in the countryside. And its easy to find a few sources that appear to support this view. The Anglo-Saxon monk, missionary and church reformer St Boniface when he came to Francia in the time of Charles Martel was horrified at the pagan superstitions he found there, and in the 740s a church official in his service condemned, amongst other things, performing sacred rites to Mercury and Jupiter, auguries of the dung of horses and cattle, diviners and sorcerers, celebrating undetermined places as holy, offering sacrifices to saints and making idols out of dough and rags. And Rabanus Maurus (780 – 856), in a very similar fashion to Agobard, debunked the widely held popular belief (first attested by Pliny the Elder in the first century AD) that lunar eclipses were a result of monsters trying to gobble up the moon and could be stopped by throwing stones and javelins at them. What the true religious beliefs of Carolingian peasants generally were we can never truly know, not least because when we do get to hear about (certain aspects of) them it’s coming from hostile religious reformers like Boniface, Agobard and Rabanus. But there are plenty of problems with the view of medieval popular Christianity as essentially being a crypto-pagan folk religion, though that’s too big a topic in itself to go into here. It will suffice for now for me to point you to this excellent article by Dr Francis Young.

And we can find in Agobard’s text evidence to suggest that this wasn’t all the product of ancient and static beliefs, namely that the cattle plague was blamed of Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento – a Lombard principality in Southern Italy, which Charlemagne and the Franks were at war with at the time of the plague in 810. Beyond its obvious parallels with COVID-19 conspiracy theories – Americans and Chinese accusing each other of creating the pandemic with a bioweapon – it shows that Carolingian peasants were actually quite well aware of the affairs of the world beyond their village or home region. Indeed, it even shows that they had some interest in Frankish foreign policy – there’s a lot of good work by historians of early modern England about how rumour should be seen as a sign of political consciousness among the politically disenfranchised i.e. Ethan Shagan’s essay on rumour in the reign of Henry VIII in “The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500 – 1850” (2001), edited by Tim Harris. And it of course goes almost without saying that it shows that medieval peasants could be, by our standards, extremely xenophobic. We can see parallels in the treatment of these suspected Beneventan agents with the attacks on Flemings and Italians in London during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.

A denarius of Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento (assassinated in 817) from the British Museum Coin Collection

So perhaps its not the best approach to see the beliefs of these Burgundian peasants in light of static pagan mentalities but instead to see them as more dynamic and akin to modern conspiracy theories. This ties into one of the greatest meta-debates in early medieval history: should we see early medieval people as essentially people just like us but with swords, horses, parchment, very slow communications, poor healthcare and no electricity, or as these strange people completely remote from ourselves whose ways of thinking can only be understood on their own terms. Some, influenced by postmodernism, would go even further the other way and argue that the past is not simply “another country” (to give that much quoted phrase from LP Hartley’s “The Go-between”) but another planet and that we basically can’t really hope to understand why medieval people thought and acted the way they did at all. Both extremes of thinking can lead to us misunderstanding medieval people and falling back into old, condescending stereotypes of them as stupid, primitive or incapable of rational thinking. Agobard’s own thought very clearly disproves notions of medieval people being incapable of rational thinking, even if his kind of rationality is in many ways different from that of post-enlightenment thought and could sometimes be deployed for very disturbing purposes that marked him out as unusual at the time, like his diatribes against Judaism. Like with a lot of medieval people who seem to hold at once enlightened and unenlightened attitudes to us twenty-first century people, these were not contradictory but rather two sides of the same coin. And through comparisons between the beliefs of early medieval peasants and modern conspiracy theorists we can see that the twenty-first century is far from being a supremely rational age. Just take a look at one of the most influential, most dangerous (not to mention most unintentionally hilarious) conspiracy theorists of our times, Alex Jones. This man believes that the US government can create tornadoes and other natural disasters at will and is putting chemicals in the water that “turn the frickin’ frogs gay”, that Hillary Clinton is a sulphur-smelling demon in disguise who runs elite paedophile rings and that all the global elite are in thrall to these interdimensional elvesthey see when they take hallucinogenic drugs who promise them immortality ifthey enslave and exterminate the majority of humanity after creating a globaltotalitarian dictatorship. And this man is a highly successful multi-media pundit, has made millions of dollars and fuelled the rise of Donald Trump. We can only guess at what Agobard and other Carolingian intellectuals would make of the phenomenal influence of crackpot conspiracy theorists in the present.

Alex Jones just minding his business as usual

An eleventh century monk's take on the migration era and the origins of the Merovingian dynasty - the Historia Francorum of Adhemar of Chabannes chapters 2 - 5 (c.1200 BC - 460 AD)

More than a week has passed and progress has been made with the translation of Adhemar of Chabannes. I must say that I've been really enjoying it, even if Adhemar's generally straightforward and unpolished Latin has thrown up a few difficulties in places. Everything up to the beginning of chapter 6 has now been translated and is here for you to read at your leisure. 

(Above: an image befitting the general theme of this post)

It is here that the content of Adhemar of Chabannes' History of the Franks moves from myth (see my last post) - though having revisited the Percy Jackson books this summer (one of my favourite series' of novels when I was a kid), which really rekindled my passion for all things Greek mythology, I say "myth" with just the slightest bit of disappointment - more towards what might be called history. Or maybe more accurately a kind of middle ground. Some of the figures who feature in these chapters definitely existed, like Emperor Valentinian I, Marcomer, Chlodio, Attila the Hun and Aegidius. Others such as the very early Frankish rulers with the very un-Germanic names of Priam and Antenor are definitely fictitious, and Faramund and Merovech are also shrouded in later legends - remember, though the contemporary documentary sources for fifth century Gaul are much better than those for post-Roman Britain (where they're almost non-existent save for that notorious sermon of Gildas'), we are still approaching the age of "King Arthur." Regarding the origins of the Franks, we can safely say that Adhemar's account of Frankish migration and ethnogenesis is wrong. There is absolutely no evidence, save for eighth century legend, to suggest that the Franks migrated from the sea of Azov in modern day Ukraine to the German Rhineland in the reign of the Roman emperor Valentinian I (r.364 - 375). The Franks seem to have originated instead as a confederation of West Germanic tribes in the modern day Franconia region of central Germany who first appear fighting the Romans during the Imperial Crisis/ "Military Anarchy" of the Third Century (235 - 284) - these tribes, including the Chamavi, the Chattuari, the Bructeri and the Salians, were all continued to have fairly distinct identities, but they banded together for military purposes and called themselves the Franks, meaning "the hardy", "the brave" or "the free", depending on who you asked. In the third century, the Franks were fairly successful in leading raids across the Rhine and devastating Roman Gaul, but Constantine the Great (r.306 - 337) defeated them, having their chieftains thrown to the wild beasts and the free men pressed into service in the Roman army. The Salian Franks were made Roman foederati (allies/ auxiliaries) and given a client state just over the Rhenish frontier in the south of what is now the Netherlands to rule and act as a buffer against the Frisians to the north, one of the barbarian tribes that could not be drawn in to the remit of imperial control by the gravitational pull of Roman civilisation but wanted some sweet, sweet Roman gold and other highly items that could be plundered. As the Western Empire began to be confronted with a new wave of barbarian invasions in the fifth century, the Franks provided them with some assistance against the Visigoths, Alans, and Burgundians early in the century and against Attila and the Huns at the battle of the Catalaunian fields near modern day Chalons-en-Champagne in 451. They also became increasingly more politically unified under Merovech (d.458) and Childeric (d.481) - I obtained all this information from Patrick Geary, "Before France and Germany: the Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World", Princeton (1988), pp 77 - 80, more than thirty years old yet still authoritative and by one of the foremost living experts on the migration era and early Frankish history, certainly as concerns Anglophone academia.

But, I hear you cry "aren't myths precisely the stuff of history? Positivism, in which historians preoccupy themselves with narrowly defined 'facts' and what happened, is dead. Aren't narratives and perspectives what historians mostly deal with these days?" And you'd be right, and my own academic work (especially my masters' thesis) would confirm it to some degree. What makes it interesting is not whether Adhemar got his facts about what went on in late antiquity right - though it is interesting to find out what things people in the eleventh century knew about that time period that are still factually accepted by modern scholars, especially to counteract the tired old enlightenment stereotypes of those ignorant medievals. Instead, what is interesting here is how Adhemar, and the late seventh and early eighth century sources he drew from, the Fourth Book of Fredegar and Liber Historiae Francorum, tried to make sense of their ethnic past, or rather how they helped construct one to help strengthen a sense of Frankish identity. Ethnic histories like this abounded in the early middle ages - the most famous ones including Bede's "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" (731), Paul the Deacon's "History of the Lombards" (796) or Nennius' "History of the Britons" (828), which was an important foundation for Geoffrey of Mounmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain" (1136), including in its account of King Arthur.  Undoubtedly identity, is something that is often defined negatively - "we are from group x because we are not like group y or group z": it really isn't hard to think up historical or contemporary exempla for this, if you've been following the news at all for the last five years. But it can also be defined positively - by what brings us together rather than what divides us - through the development of shared interests, cultural practices and traditions, symbols, history and myths, on which there has been a lot of work done by historians, including ones of much more modern ones than this blog concerns. The exempla of this kind of identity formation include not just nations, social classes and political movements/ parties but also urban and rural communities, corporate organisations, schools, universities, sports clubs, friendship groups and, perhaps above all else, families. One can wonder what being a Frank meant in the early decades of the eleventh century. The Carolingian empire was long-gone, having fragmented into multiple kingdoms, some of which (like Adhemar's West Francia) had further fragmented into duchies (like Adhemar's native Aquitaine), counties and secular and ecclesiastical lordships, so there was no political unity to give "Frankish identity" any intuitive coherence. Meanwhile, the First Crusade, which would breathe new life into Frankish identity, largely because the Byzantines and Muslims used it as an ethnic slur to refer to all Westerners, whom they saw as barbarians that were good at courageous fighting and nothing else, was still a good few generations away. So what I think was going on here is that Adhemar, looking back at earlier origin stories for the Franks from the Merovingian/ early Carolingian eras, when Frankish political unity and ethnic consciousness was an ongoing project, and incorporated them into his history in order to give the Franks a heroic past that people in the politically fragmented present would want to identify with.

Moreover, what Adhemar has to about the fourth and fifth centuries AD still resonates with the debates about the Migration Era and the Fall of the Western Roman Empire still going on among scholars today. Above all, he appears to stress confrontation between Romans and barbarians (and between other barbarian groups) and a great deal of violence and destruction, exemplified in Chlodio's rampages through north-eastern Gaul - indeed, what happens at Cambrai sounds eerily like ethnic-cleansing. Whether the collapse of the Western Roman Empire really was the result of exogenous shock created by migration and confrontation between Romans and barbarians and whether it was catastrophically violent and destructive - and here I shall respectfully disagree with my former tutor at Worcester College, Oxford, Conrad Leyser, who claims that such a view of the fall of Rome, indeed the notion that such an event had taken place at all, was the invention of Italian Renaissance writers traumatised by the new wave of barbarian invaders from north of the Alps in the Italian Wars (1494 - 1559) - has been a source of great controversy since the 1970s. You'll find such diametrically opposed views on this matter coming from, on the one hand, Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins (see the interview with them together by Oxford University Press) and, on the other hand, Walter Goffart and Guy Halsall - Bryan Ward Perkins himself provides a good, but undoubtedly partial, overview of it all here. These debates aren't only academic controversies par excellence, they've also seeped into popular political discourse and inevitably things have gotten quite nasty. Broadly speaking, those who try to minimise the role of barbarian migration in the fall of Rome (indeed come close to denying it altogether, like Goffart) and emphasise accommodation between Romans and barbarians and fluid cultural and ethnic identities have been unfairly accused of pushing a politically-correct (we might now say "woke") agenda, while those who emphasise the catastrophic impact of the migrations and violent confrontation between Romans and barbarians have been hysterically accused of enabling the alt-right. But let's not get too side-tracked. What is clear is that whatever happened in the western regions of the Roman world in the fifth century AD mattered to intellectuals in the eleventh century, and still matters to us today in the twenty first, in how they made sense of the world and how they saw themselves. But now, time to let Adhemar, or rather my best attempts to translate him (I accept all errors as my own), take over.

Chapter 2 – concerning how the race of Alans rebelled against Emperor Valentinian, the Franks defeated them and the Franks were given tribute

(Above: Second Century AD Roman relief of an Alannic warrior)

After that time, the race of Alans, a perverse and very bad people, rebelled against Valentinian, emperor of the Romans. Thereupon, a most huge army moved from Rome and proceeded against that enemy, initiated battle, and overcame and defeated them. Consequently, the defeated Alans fled over the river Danube, and entered into the sea of Azov. However, the emperor said “whoever will be able to enter into these swamps and eject this wicked race, I will give them tribute for ten years.” Then the Trojans gathered together and devised stratagems, just as they were learned and noted for, and entered into the sea of Azov with others from the Roman people, and thence drove out the Alans and pierced them through with the blades of their swords. Thenceforth, Emperor Valentinian called them “Franks” in the Attic language, on account of their ferocity, rigour and courageous hearts.

 

Chapter 3 – where the emperor sent tax collectors in order that the Franks would pay tribute

(Above: statue of Emperor Valentinian I)

Therefore, after the aforementioned tribute was sent for ten years, the emperor [Valentinian] sent tax collectors with a first-rank commander from the Roman senate, in order to levy customary tribute from the Frankish people. These men also, as it were, were cruel and very monstrous, and after they had accepted their worthless delegation, the Franks said to them in turn “the emperor with the Roman army was not able to cast out the Alans, the brave and rebellious people, from the refuge of the swamps; indeed, was it not us who overcame them, why do we pay tribute? We stand here, therefore, against the first-rank man or rather these tax collectors, and we will kill them, and we will carry off all that they have with themselves, and we will not give the Romans tribute, and we will be free men in perpetuity.” Indeed, having prepared an ambush, they killed the tax collectors.

 

Chapter 4 – from when the same emperor set in motion an army against the Franks and up to their arrival in the Rhineland and their first king

(Above: a modern illustration of a fourth - sixth century Frankish warrior)

Hearing of this, the emperor [Valentinian], set alight with fury and anger, ordered that Aristarcus, his foremost general, move with an army against the enemies of the Romans and other peoples, and they directed battle lines against the Franks. Although there was a great slaughter on both sides, it was greater on that of the [Frankish] people. Certainly, regarding this, the Franks, because they could not sustain so great an army, were killed and yielded. In that place Priam, the bravest of them all, fell and they fled [the battlefield]. They also fled from Sicambria and came to the furthest parts of the river Rhine, to the towns of the Germans, and there they settled with their princes, Marcomer, son of Priam, and Sunno, son of Antenor; and they lived there for many years. After the death of Sunno, they heard a judgement in order to designate a king for them, like the other peoples. Marchomiris also gave them this advice, and they elected Faramund, his son, and they elevated him, their long-haired king, above themselves. At that very time they obtained laws and they managed to possess the superior ones of those peoples whose names were foreign to them: Wisogast, Arogast, Salegast, in the town beyond the Rhine: Inbotagin, Salecagin and Widecagin.

 

Chapter 5 – concerning the death of King Faramund and [the reign of] his son Chlodio, even the Hunnic invasion of Gaul

(Above: the Roman walls of Tongeren, which though they clearly served their purpose over the grand scheme of history, could not withstand Chlodio's forces)

Naturally, following the death of King Faramund, Chlodio, his long-haired son, was elevated to the royal dignity of his father. During that time, they [the Franks] chose to have long-haired kings, and they shrewdly came to the borders of Thuringia, and resided there. And so, King Chlodio lived in the stronghold of Duigsberg on the borders of Thuringia. On account of the peoples of Germania, all the regions that were east of the Rhine were called German, because their bodies were mountainous, their nations most vast and savage and they were hardened and always indomitable and very, very ferocious; an ancient text recounts that there were a hundred clans of these people. At that time, the Romans lived in those regions between the Rhine and the Loire; the lands south of the Loire were also ruled by them. And thus, the Burgundians, most heathen in that they held to the wicked doctrines of Arianism, were living on the opposite side of the Rhine, next to the city of Lyon. Consequently, Chlodio sent scouts from Duigsberg, stronghold of the Thuringians, all the way to the city of Cambrai. After that he crossed the Rhine with a great army, and he killed many of the Roman people and forced them to flee. Having come in through the charcoal-grey wood, he occupied the city of Tournai. Next, he came back to Cambrai, and he resided there for a short period of time; the Romans which he found there, he killed. Then he came all the way to the river Somme and occupied all of it.

(Above: where all the drama takes place)

(Yeah, this bad boy makes an appearance)

Following the death of King Chlodio, Merovech, his descendant, received the kingdom. Chlodio had reigned for twenty years. From the time of that useful king Merovech, the kings of the Franks were called Merovingians. At that time the Huns crossed the Rhine. They set Metz ablaze, destroyed Trier, passed through Tongeren, and came through all the way to Orleans. At that same time, the famous holy bishop Anianus was illustrious with miracles, and Aegidius, patrician of the Romans, and Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, came to him, and with the help of the Lord, as the Huns came to that city, as soon as St Anianus had prayed, Attila, their king, was subdued and thrown to the ground. At that very time, Merovech begat a son named Childeric, who was the father of Clovis, an illustrious and most courageous king. Indeed, at that time the Franks were pagan and frenzied, worshipping idols and images, and they did not yet know of the Lord who created the heavens and the earth. It was also at that time that Aegidius was sent away from the emperor, and was king in accordance with the Romans in that part of Gaul. And so it came to pass that King Childeric, son of Merovech, when he was becoming overweening in his rule over the Franks, he seduced their daughters to humiliate and degrade them. But, on account of this, they were enraged with great fury, and the vowed to kill him and deprive him of the royal dignity. Childeric, having heard of this, spoke to his friend, prudent in his counsel, called Wiomad, and begged with him for advice as to how he could be able to calm the furious spirits of the Franks. Thereupon, they gave between themselves the sign by which they would indicate what they needed to learn if at some time or other if the peace were to be restored. Afterwards, they divided between themselves one golden thing for a sign. One half was carried by King Childeric himself, the other half was kept by Wiomad, and he said, “when I will give this part to you, you should know that the Franks are with you and have been pacified by me, and serene peace will be restored.” Therefore, Childeric left for Thuringia and took refuge with its king, named Bisinus.