What was history then?*

 

For our very first “from the sources” post, lets return to our old friend Gregory of Tours. He’s a real VIP of early medieval history Since the seventh century, his “History of the Franks”, which covers everything in Frankish history down to his death in 594, has been extensively used as a source for studying the early Frankish past. And since at least the sixteenth century he’s been held up as, in the words of the French renaissance humanist Claude Fauchet, “the father of French history” and “the oldest and most trustworthy author who spoke of the kings and the government of France.”

A statue of our friend Gregory wisely and kindly watches over the 9.6 million visitors who queue up to visit the Louvre every year. 

But did the venerable bishop of Tours see himself primarily as a historian of the Franks, that is to say, as a historian of them as an ethnic group or of their kings? The answer is almost certainly not. “The History of the Franks” as it’s been titled in all modern French, German and English translations of the text, is actually a misnomer. Gregory called his work the Libri Decem Historiarum – “the ten books of histories.” And his purpose was not to chronicle the deeds of one particular ethnic group (the Franks) – it was much broader than that. He wrote about contemporary events across the known world, including in places as far afield as Syria and Armenia. He gave just as much weight in his history to ecclesiastical affairs, saints and miracles as he did to the political intrigues and wars of the Merovingian kings. And he ultimately conceived of his project as a universal (or, as we’d now say, global) history, following the models given by the early Christian historians Eusebius (260 – 339), Jerome (342 – 420) and Orosius (385 – 420). He begins his history in Book One with the Creation and spends the rest of that book outlining the events from Old Testament history, the life of Jesus Christ, the spread of Christianity, the Roman imperial persecutions and early Christian martyrdoms, the conversion of Constantine the Great, the reigns of the first Christian Roman emperors and the early bishops of Clermont-Ferrand (Gregory’s home town), and finishes with the death of Saint Martin of Tours in 397. The Franks, the people who ruled supreme in Gaul in Gregory’s day but whom he did not himself identify with, only enter Gregory’s narrative in Book Two Chapter Nine. Here’s what he has to say about their origins:

Many people do not even know the name of the first King of the Franks. The “Historia” of Sulpicius Alexander gives many details about them, while Valentinus does not name their first King but says they were ruled by war-leaders. What Sulpicius Alexander says about the Franks seems to be worth quoting. He tells how Maximus gave up all hope of the imperial throne, lost his reason and went to live in Aquileia. Then he adds:

“At that time the Franks invaded the Roman province of Germania under their leaders Genobaud, Marcomer and Sunno. As the Franks crossed the frontier, many of the inhabitants were slaughtered and they ravaged the most fertile areas. The townsfolk of Cologne were terrified: and, when this news reached Trier, Nanninus and Quintinus, who commanded the Roman armies and to whom Maximus had entrusted the defence of Gaul, collected their troops together and marched to that city. The enemy, who were heavily laden with booty, for they had pillaged the richest parts of the province, crossed back over the Rhine, but left many of their men behind in Roman territory, where they were planning to continue their ravaging. The Romans found it easy to deal with these, and a great number of the Franks were cut down in the forest of Charbonniere. After this, the Roman leaders held a meeting to decide whether or not they should cross into Frankish territory. Nanninus refused to do so, for he knew that the Franks were waiting for them and that on their own soil they would undoubtedly be much the stronger. This did not meet the approval of Quintinus and the other military leaders, and so Nanninus retreated to Mainz. Quintinus crossed the Rhine somewhere near the fortress of Neuss with his army. After two days’ march away from the river, he attacked a number of dwellings abandoned by their inhabitants and a few townships of no mean size, which were, however, deserted. The Franks had pretended to retire in panic and had withdrawn into the remote woodland regions, all around which they had erected barricades of forest trees. The Roman soldiers burned down all the houses, imagining in their cowardly stupidity that by doing so they had gained a conclusive victory: then they spent an anxious night without daring to take off their heavy equipment. At first light they marched out into the woods, with Quintinus to lead them in battle. By about mid-day they had lost themselves completely in a maze of pathways and had no idea where they were. They ran up against an endless barricade solidly constructed from huge tree-trunks, and then they tried to break out over the marshy fields which bordered the forests. Here and there enemy troops showed themselves, standing on the boles of trees or climbing on the barricades as if on the ramparts of turrets. They kept shooting arrows as if from war-catapults, and these they smeared with poisons distilled from plants, so that wounds which did little more than graze the skin and touched no vital organ were followed by death against which there was no protection. Then the Roman army, now surrounded by the main force of the enemy, rushed desperately into the open meadows, which the Franks had left unoccupied. There the cavalry was bogged down in marshland and the bodies of men and animals, all mixed up together, were borne down into the ground in one common catastrophe. Such infantry as was not trodden under foot by the heavy horses was caught in thick mud from which the men had difficulty in lifting one foot after the other. With fear in their hearts they rushed back to hide in the very woodlands out of which they had marched only a short time before. As the legions were cut down the ranks were broken. Heraclius, tribune of the Jovinian legion, and almost all the other officers were wiped out. Darkness and the deepness of the forests offered safety and refuge to a few survivors.”

That is what Sulpicius Alexander had to say in Book III of his “Historia.”

In Book IV, when he is describing the murder of Victor, the son of the tyrant Maximus, he says:

“At that time Carietto and Sirus, appointed in the place of Nanninus, were stationed in the provinces of Germania with an army collected to oppose the Franks.”

A little further on, after stating that the Franks had gone home laden with booty from Germania, he goes on:

“Arbogast, who would brook no delay, urged the Emperor to inflict due punishment on the Franks unless they immediately restored all the plunder which they had seized the previous year when the legions were slaughtered, and unless they surrendered the warmongers who had been responsible for such a treacherous violation of the peace.”

He says that these events occurred at a time when the Franks were ruled by war-leaders. Then he continues:

“A few days later, there was a short parley with Marcomer and Sunno, the royal leaders of the Franks. Hostages were insisted upon, as was the custom, and then Arbogast retired into winter quarters in Trier.”

When he says “regales” or royal leaders, it is not clear if they were kings or if they merely exercised a kingly function. When he is recording the straits to which the Emperor Valentinian was reduced, he says:

“When these events were taking place in the East in Thrace, the government was in great difficulty in Gaul. The Emperor Valentinian was shut in the palace in Vienne and reduced almost to the status of a private citizen. The control of the army was handed over to Frankish mercenaries and the civil administration was in the control of Arbogast’s accomplices. There was not one among all of those who were bound by their military oath of obedience to him who dared obey the private orders let alone the public commands of the emperor.”

He goes on:

“That same year Arbogast, urged on by tribal hatred, went in search of Sunno and Marcomer, the kinglets of the Franks. He came to Cologne in the full blast of winter, for he knew well that all the retreats of Frankland could be penetrated and burned out now that the leaves were off the trees and that the bare and sapless forests could offer no concealment for an ambushed foe. He therefore collected an army together, crossed the River Rhine, and laid waste to the land nearest to the bank, where the Bructeri lived, and the region occupied by the Chamavi. He did this without meeting any opposition, except that a few Amsivarii and Chatti showed themselves on the far-distant ridges of the hills, with Marcomer as their war-leader.”

A few pages further on, having given up all talk of “duces” and “regales”, he states clearly that the Franks had a king, but he forgets to tell us what his name was.

“The next thing which happened was that the tyrant Eugenius led a military expedition as far as the frontier marked by the Rhine. He renewed the old tradition treaties with the kings of the Alamanni and the Franks, and he paraded his army, which was immense for that time, before their savage tribesmen.”

So much for the information which this chronicler Sulpicius Alexander has to give us about the Franks.

As for Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, whom I mentioned above, when he comes to tell us how Rome was captured and destroyed by the Goths, he writes:

“Meanwhile Goar had gone over to the Romans, and Respendial, the king of the Alani, therefore withdrew his forces from the Rhine. The Vandals were hard-pressed in their war against the Franks, their King Godigisel was killed and about twenty-thousand of their frontline troops had been slaughtered, so that, if the army of the Alani had not come to their rescue in time, the entire nation of the Vandals would have been wiped out.”

It is an extraordinary thing that, although he tells us about the kings of these various peoples, including the Franks, when he describes how Constantine, who had become a tyrant, summoned his son Constans to come from Spain to meet him, he goes on:

“The tyrant Constantine summoned his son Constans, who was also a tyrant, from Spain, so that they might confer together about affairs of state. As a result, Constans left his wife and the administrative affairs of his court in Saragossa, entrusted all his interests in Spain to Gerontius and hurried to meet his father by forced marches. They duly met. Quite a few days passed, but no news arrived from Italy to disturb Constantine. He therefore returned to his daily round of over-drinking and over-eating, and told his son that he might as well go back to Spain. No sooner had Constans sent his troops on ahead, while he himself lingered a little longer with his father, than messengers arrived from Spain to say that Gerontius had proclaimed Maximus, one of his own dependents, as Emperor. Maximus was supported by troops from a horde of barbarian tribes and was ready for any contingency. Constans and the Prefect Decimus Rusticus, one-time Master of Offices, were very frightened by the news. They sent Erdobech to contain the people of Germania and they themselves set out for Gaul, with the Franks, the Alamanni and a whole band of soldiery, intending to return to Constantine as soon as they could.”

Later on, when he describes how Constantine was besieged, he adds:

“Constantine had been beleaguered for about four months when messengers arrived all of a sudden from northern Gaul to announce that Jovinus had assumed the rank of Emperor and was about to attack the besieging forces with the Burgundes, the Alamanni, the Franks, the Alani and a large army. Things then moved very quickly. The city gates were opened and Constantine came out. He was immediately packed off to Italy, but the emperor sent a band of assassins to meet him and he was beheaded up on the River Mincio.”

After a few more sentences, Frigeridus goes on:

“At the same time, Decimus Rusticus, the Prefect of the tyrants, Agroetius, one-time Head of Chancery of Jovinus, and many other noblemen were captured by the army commanders of Honorius and cruelly put to death. The city of Trier was sacked and burned by the Franks in a second attack.”

He notes that Asterius was made a patrician by a patent signed by the emperor and then continues:

“At this time, Castinus, Master of the Imperial Household, was sent to Gaul, as a campaign had begun against the Franks.”

That concludes what these two historians have to say about the Franks.

In Book VII of his work the chronicler Orosius adds the following information:

“Stilicho took command of the army, crushed the Franks, crossed the Rhine, made his way across Gaul and came finally to the Pyrenees.”

The historians whose work we still have give us all this information about the Franks, but they never record the names of their kings. It is commonly said that the Franks came originally from Pannonia and first colonised the banks of the Rhine. Then they crossed the river, marched through Thuringia, and set up in each country district and in each city long-haired kings chosen from the foremost and most noble family of their race. As I shall show you later, this is proved by the victories won by Clovis. We read in the consular lists that Theudemer, King of the Franks, son of Richemer, and his mother Ascyla, were executed with the sword. They also say that Clodio, a man of high birth and marked ability among his people, was King of the Franks and that he lived in the castle of Duisburg in Thuringian territory. In those parts, that is towards the south, the Romans occupied the territory as far as the River Loire. Beyond the Loire the Goths were in command. The Burgundes, who believed in the Arian heresy, lived across the Rhone, which flows through the city of Lyons. Clodio sent spies to the town of Cambrai. When he had discovered all that they needed to know, he himself followed and crushed the Romans and captured the town. He lived there only a short time and then occupied the country up to the River Somme. Some say that Merovech, the father of Childeric, was descended from Clodio.

(“The History of the Franks” by Gregory of Tours, edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics, 1974, II.9, pp 120 – 125)

Now there is so much that is interesting about this chapter. Rather than talking about what it might tell us about late Roman warfare, the Germanic tribes or the imperial usurpers and civil wars of the 380s to 410s (the period covered by the sources Gregory is quoting), lets focus on what it tells us about Gregory as a historian.

One of the first things you’ll have noticed is that Gregory is quoting the Histories of Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus at length and those of Orosius briefly. All of these men were Christian Roman historians writing in the first half of the fifth century AD. However, while Orosius’ work survives to us today in several manuscripts, and enjoyed widespread popularity in the Middle Ages, the more secular political-oriented Histories of Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus have been lost. This is regrettable but shouldn’t be too surprising.

While the exact extent of the loss of ancient Greek and Roman literature is unknown, all reasonable estimates for the extent of literary survival between 800 BC and c.500 AD would place it somewhere in the ballpark of one percent. There are many ancient authors for whom none of their work survives at all. The reasons for this are various, but by far the most common one is simple neglect over the centuries. Ancient literary works were mostly written on papyrus. It was a fairly cheap material but not very durable, especially in the cold, damp climate of transalpine Europe. If a literary work was going to survive long term, it needed to be copied, and copying was a labour-intensive process that required professional scribes. Papyrus therefore ended up being supplanted by parchment, a process that had begun in the fourth century AD and was well underway in Gregory’s day, but very far off being complete – the papal chancery used papyrus until the eleventh century. Parchment was a much more durable medium of writing but much more expensive to produce – killing a cow as opposed to chopping down some reeds. And copying still remained labour intensive as ever. So, like with papyrus, choices had to be made about what to be preserved long term. The eighth and ninth centuries seem to have been the most critical period, in both Western Europe and Byzantium for the transition from papyrus to parchment and thereby deciding what to preserve long term – if an ancient text was written on a parchment codex by 900, then more likely than not it survives today.

Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus clearly didn’t make the cut. But fortunately for us, Gregory chose to directly quote them at length, allowing us to read snippets of them. This is comparatively better than the situation for a lot of other lost classical histories. For example, the contemporary/ near-contemporary accounts of the campaigns of Alexander the Great by Callisthenes, Cleitarchus and Ptolemy can only be very speculatively reconstructed from the works of Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Plutarch and Arrian, written several centuries later, which we know to have used them as sources. And all we know about histories of the Etruscans and Carthaginians written by the future emperor Claudius in the reign of Tiberius, is that they once existed because Suetonius briefly mentions them. But Gregory, following in the fashion of Eusebius, decided to be more transparent in his use of sources and thus preserve extracts from Roman histories which are otherwise lost.

Gregory himself also seems be very conscious of the limited and diminishing base of source material, hence why he says that Orosius, Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus are “the historians whose work we still have.” This suggests that he knew of other sources which might have been relevant to his enquiry here, but which were already lost or otherwise inaccessible. And to acknowledge the limited nature of the evidence for the past is the most important sign of a mature and critical historian in any age.

The way in which Gregory handles the evidence provides further indication of how skilled he was at historical enquiry. In this chapter, he carefully analyses the language that each of this fifth century sources use to refer to the leaders of the Franks in the decades around 400, and checks them for internal consistency i.e., he notes that Sulpicius Alexander mostly speaks of Frankish “duces” (war-leaders) and “regales” (kinglets), but later on explicitly says that the Franks had a single king. He then brings together the inferences from the different sources and compares them. From there he comes to the conclusion, supported by the sources, that we cannot know who the first king of the Franks was, because while there clearly were Frankish kings c.400, their names are not provided by the Roman historians.

It is also worth noting, and this holds true throughout the Ten Books of Histories, that whenever Gregory uses oral accounts he acknowledges them, and that folk memory, rumour or commonly held opinion cannot by themselves be taken as authoritative. Thus, the last paragraph of this chapter contains phrases like “it is commonly said that”, “they also say that” and “some say that” when dealing with such sources on the earliest history of the Franks.

Stuff like this proves that, contrary to what is sometimes said, the historical method – making enquiries into the past through the critical study of the primary sources – was not a sui generis invention of Renaissance humanism or the professionalisation of history in the nineteenth century. But, to roughly paraphrase what Matthew Kempshall says at the beginning of the introduction to his Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400 – 1500 (2011), while a classicist can simply laugh at such ignorant claims from their modernist colleagues that “proper serious history writing” didn’t begin until c.1500 or c.1850 – “seriously, have those snot-nosed modernists not heard of Thucydides!” – medievalists fear that their only way to prove such claims wrong for their period is to write a book. Here a blogpost will have to do. This, I hope, shows that early medieval historians did indeed possess something we would recognise as the historical method. While undoubtedly source criticism and historical enquiry have become more advanced post the Middle Ages, especially thanks to the development of auxiliary disciplines like philology, archaeology, palaeography, diplomatic, numismatics, statistics, database management and, most recently, climate science, let’s not forget Isaac Newton’s analogy (actually first made by Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century) about standing on the shoulders of giants.

*The title is a play on E.H Carr’s 1961 classic What is History?, which since its publication has been the entry point for many an undergraduate to the study of historiography and the historian’s craft.

One year blogoversary

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

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

Beowulf and the Merovingians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Tolkien and the Carolingians

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

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

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

 

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

Did Charlemagne have a beard?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have a famous physical description of Charlemagne from Einhard:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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