Encounters with the medieval past 1: the early middle ages in ten objects part 2 (800 - 1200)

Happy New Year! Its now 2023 and we're back for the next half of the early middle ages in ten objects. When we left off we had reached the eighth century and were in Indonesia. Let's see where our journey will take us next.

Object number six: the hunting knife of Charlemagne, made in Anglo-Saxon England or Scandinavia, 750 - 800 AD (Aachen Cathedral Treasury, Germany, visited 13 May 2022)

Moving away from Indonesia to the other end of the Eurasian supercontinent, to the area I actually have expertise in, lets look an object from the same century. This is the so-called "hunting knife of Charlemagne." We don't actually know if it belonged to Charlemagne, since its existence is not documented, but we do know that the knife is at least contemporary to him and somehow found its way to Aachen. Its got a simple horn handle with a silver hilt. But where the craftsmanship that produced it really comes into its own is with the blade. It is made from steel that has been pattern-welded. Pattern-welding is a metallurgical technique that the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples living around the North Sea had mastered by the early seventh century - quite a lot of the weapons found in the Sutton Hoo hoard were made using this technique.

Pattern-welding involved the use of steel (an iron alloy typically containing 0.2 - 1% carbon) and another iron alloy (typically phosphoric iron). The bars of the two alloys then got hammered together, twisted and welded into the body of the artefact. After this, the artefact would be grinded and polished on a whetstone (there was a thriving trade in these in the eighth century) and the metal would be etched with acid, revealing the decorative patterns - typically they would appear rope-like. Stuff like this really brings home the basic truth that people in the "Dark Ages" weren't stupid.

So how did the knife get to Charlemagne? Well, it could have been purchased through trade or given as a diplomatic gift. What has become abundantly clear, ever since the publication of Richard Hodges' seminal work "Dark Age Economics" (1982), is that from the seventh century onwards there was a thriving North Sea trading zone that linked up the emerging Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in lowland Britain with northern Francia, Frisia, Denmark, Norway and southern Sweden. Anglo-Saxon ports like Hamwic (Southampton) in Wessex, Lundenwic (London) which came under Mercian control by the 730s, Gipeswic (Ipswich) in East Anglia and Eoforwic (York) in Northumbria traded with Continental trading towns or emporia like Quentovic in Francia, Dorestad in Frisia, Ribe in Denmark, Kaupang in Norway and Birka in Sweden. There were also diplomatic ties between Anglo-Saxon and Continental rulers. Indeed, in 796, Charlemagne had sent a letter to King Offa of Mercia. The Mercians had by this point conquered Kent and Sussex, while the kings of Wessex and East Anglia recognised Mercian overlordship, making Offa the most powerful ruler in Britain and a near neighbour to Charlemagne's Empire separated only by the English Channel. Before the letter was sent, a diplomatic incident had occurred in which Mercian merchants were barred from all the ports in Charlemagne's Empire because Offa had refused Charlemagne's offer of a marriage alliance in which one of his daughters would marry into the Mercian royal family. The letter was sent to remedy the situation and itself discusses the following:

1. Mercian pilgrims coming into Frankish ports, presumably on their way to Rome, are to be granted complete free movement. 
2. Mercian merchants have to pay tolls on their goods when they arrive in Frankish ports, but will also enjoy full legal protection on Frankish soil and can have any business disputes with the locals resolved in the Frankish courts. 
3. On behalf of the late Pope Hadrian I, all the Mercian bishops will receive gifts of ecclesiastical vestments, and Charlemagne himself presents Offa with a gift of a ceremonial belt, two silk cloaks and an Avar sword (the Frankish conquest of the Avar Khaganate was taking place at exactly this time).

While the letter of 796 doesn't provide us with an answer as to how the knife got from Anglo-Saxon England to Francia and into Charlemagne's possession. But it does provide us with the necessary context and some possibilities as to how it might have - it could have been acquired through trade, or it could have been given as a diplomatic gift by Offa or another Anglo-Saxon ruler to Charlemagne. Like with a lot of other objects from this period, we simply can't know anything conclusive about its provenance or early history unless it found its way into the documentary sources. And a lot of the objects mentioned in the documentary sources sadly no longer survive - like the Avar sword Charlemagne gave to Offa.

Charlemagne would have undoubtedly been pleased to receive the knife. One of the things we can most clearly establish about Charlemagne's personality is that he enjoyed hunting. Einhard, his friend and biographer, of course talks quite a bit about Charlemagne's love of hunting. Notker the Stammerer, writing three generations after Einhard, tells a number of anecdotes about Charlemagne's love of hunting, including one about how he shamed his courtiers for dressing in fancy silks and satins on a hunting trip while he himself dressed in simple wool and sheepskin. At the same time, hunting was a sensible thing for any early medieval king to do. It provided fresh game for dinner. It gave opportunities to display masculine strength and courage such as when taking down a wild boar. It also allowed the king to bond with his aristocrats over a shared experience (much like a corporate teambuilding event in today's world) whilst at the same time reinforcing rank and precedence. The hunt was a formal and ritualised affair (much like foxhunting still is in the UK today), and as Notker's anecdote suggests things like dress (or indeed weaponry) could be very important in showing social distinctions. Charlemagne's decision to reside permanently at his new palace at Aachen from the mid-790s may well have been influenced by his love of hunting - it was very close to the forests of the Ardennes, teaming with wild beasts of all kinds. Though it probably also had something to do with his love of swimming (the thermal springs there had been used for bathing since at least Roman times), and the fact that it was located in the original powerbase of the Carolingian family (roughly where France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany intersect with each other).

Yet it is worth noting that the sheath, which is made of leather, gold, precious stones and glass, was actually made later, sometime in the eleventh century. This shows that the knife had a history of use after Charlemagne's death in 814. And with any historical artefact, you have to ask the question: how and why does it survive to us today?

The answer to this comes with later politics. In the year 1000, the nineteen-year-old Emperor Otto III opened up Charlemagne's tomb in Aachen and found that the Carolingian monarch's body had not decayed and was in perfect condition - commonly identified as a sign of holiness and potential sainthood since at least the sixth century. Otto III trimmed Charlemagne's nails and replaced his nose with a gold one, but may have fiddled around with the emperor's tomb in other ways. Why Otto III did this has created much debate and controversy among historians, as has just about everything else he did during his remarkably short life (he died before his twenty-second birthday). He's quite possibly the most controversial ruler in medieval German history, and there's some stiff competition there. For this particular incident, its a question of whether Otto was planning to make a case for Charlemagne's sainthood as part of his political programme, or whether this was just an episode of teenaged silliness. We don't really know either way, because Otto did not last very long after that. But more than a century and a half down the line, another German emperor actually did do what Otto might have been planning. 

On 29th December 1165, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa held a magnificent ceremony at Aachen, and Charlemagne was officially declared (canonised) as a saint. That this was done to make a very explicit political point, there's no reasonable doubt. You see, Frederick I Barbarossa had refused to support Rolando of Siena in the papal election of 1159, because he was anti-imperial. Indeed, as papal legate in 1157, Rolando had suggested to Barbarossa that the Empire was nothing but a fief of the papacy, and that the emperor therefore owed homage to the pope as his feudal lord, and for that was nearly run-through with a sword by Otto von Wittelsbach, Barbarossa's right-hand man, narrowly saved by the emperor's timely intervention.  Frederick Barbarossa thus backed his own candidate, Cardinal Octavian, known for his pro-German and imperial sympathies, and thus in 1159 two popes (Alexander III and Victor IV) were elected, who then promptly excommunicated each other. The Empire thus entered a state of cold war with the papacy, and when Victor IV (Cardinal Octavian) died in 1164, Barbarossa proceeded to elect another pope of his own - Paschal III. Barbarossa thus desperately needed to show that the authority of the German emperors came directly from God, not from being crowned by the popes. Already in 1158, his chief propagandist, Rainald Von Dassel, archbishop of Cologne, had claimed that the emperors ruled in direct succession from Augustus Caesar. Before then the Romans had enjoyed a special place in God's plan for humanity since the foundation of the city of Rome itself by Romulus. The Empire, the imperial office and its sacred authority were thus older than Christianity itself. But Barbarossa needed more than that. He needed to show that Charlemagne, the first emperor to be crowned by the pope, didn't actually need the pope to make him holy and give him sacred authority. And what better way to do that than make Charlemagne a saint!

Now every saint needs their relics. So Frederick Barbarossa and his advisers got them together. Like with a lot of saints' relics, many of the ones they chose were completely fake - the so-called "hunting horn of Charlemagne" was actually made in tenth century Egypt and so it couldn't possibly have ever been in Charlemagne's possession. But the hunting knife of Charlemagne was indeed from his lifetime, and so far as we can tell today it did actually belong to him. Still, many people at the time remained totally unconvinced. And in 1177, Frederick Barbarossa gave up with his struggle against Pope Alexander III and came to terms with him at the Peace of Venice. Two years later, at the Third Lateran Council, Pope Alexander III declared Charlemagne's sainthood invalid, along with all other decisions made by Barbarossa's anti-popes Victor IV and Paschal III. Alexander's successor, Innocent III (r.1198 - 1216), softened his position somewhat and allowed Charlemagne to be a figure of purely local veneration in Aachen and four other German towns. 

The ultimate failure of the German emperors to canonise Charlemagne is a huge contrast to what happened elsewhere. Other European monarchies were much more successful in getting a royal saint and thus proving that their authority was sacred. Norway acquired its royal saint, Olaf Haraldsson (r.1015 - 1028), within a generation of its conversion to Christianity when Bishop Grimketel of Nidaros canonised the recently deceased king as a saint. Though this was of course before the papal revolution, the papacy did not retrospectively quibble with it. Hungary got its royal saint, King Istvan I (r.1000 - 1038), when Stephen's grandson King Laszlo I got his wish on 15th August 1083 from none other than Pope Gregory VII. Around the same time as Frederick Barbarossa was locked in his cold war with the papacy, King Henry II of England, who had backed Pope Alexander III in the election, got his wish (and that of the monks of Westminster Abbey) granted on 7th February 1161 when Alexander issued a papal bull declaring Edward the Confessor to be a saint. And past the end of our period, the French monarchy got St Louis IX (r.1226 - 1270) canonised in 1297 as part of a compromise over church-state relations between King Philip IV the Fair and Pope Boniface VIII. So really, how well you got on with the legitimate pope was what decided everything. Its a huge myth that the papal revolution of the eleventh century secularised kingship, and that royal authority only became sacred and God-given again with the Reformation and the rise of absolutism in the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, of course, the knife of Charlemagne was preserved in the cathedral treasury at Aachen, where it still is to this very day. 

Object number seven: a monumental lapidary inscription of Abbot Audibert, 838 AD (Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy, visited 10 June 2022) 

This monumental inscription on a large medallion of white marble was made in the year 838 by Abbot Audibert. That Audibert chose a circular shaped block of stone rather than the traditional rectangular one is itself noteworthy, though as is so often the case we can't know his reasoning. Following in the tradition of ancient Roman monumental inscription, such as the one we saw on the tomb in part 1, it is written in square capitals. Some basic religious imagery also features in that the image of the cross has been carved onto the stone medallion and part of the inscription is written inside it. The inscription itself is fairly simple and reads (again, all faults with the translation are my own):

Abbot Audibert renovated this oratory of Saint Donatus in the twenty-fifth year of the lord emperor Louis [838].

Apart from this, we know nothing about Abbot Audibert. Unlike Alcuin, Theodulf of Orleans, Adalhard of Corbie, Benedict of Aniane, Rabanus Maurus, Lupus of Ferrieres, Hincmar of Rheims and a whole host of other Carolingian churchmen I haven't cared to name, this Veronese abbot didn't write any books and stayed well-clear of court politics. Nor is there any mention of him in any published ninth century charters (from a quick google search). By his work shall ye know him!

What we can tell is that Audibert obviously wanted to be remembered for posterity as a builder and restorer of churches, otherwise he wouldn't have put up this inscription. In this sense, he followed expectations of what made a good bishop or abbot that went back to at least the fifth century Roman Empire. We can also tell that his education was not up to the standards expected of a senior cleric in the Carolingian period. For example, he uses the ablative oratorio where the accusative oratorium would be more appropriate and domino where the genitive domini should go. Alcuin or Lupus of Ferrieres would be senseless with rage if they saw these grammatical mistakes. This taps into the question that historians have debated a lot since the 1970s - how far down did Carolingian educational reform really go? 

As a final thing to note, Audibert dated his inscription according to the year of the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 - 840) he wrote it in. Emperor Louis the Pious had been crowned as co-emperor and Charlemagne's successor in 813, so twenty-fifth year of his reign mentioned on the inscription would have been 838. All official documents of the Carolingian monarchs were dated according to regnal year, as indeed are those of British monarchs today - Elizabeth II passed away in her 71st regnal year and we are currently in year 1 of the reign of Charles III. That a relatively minor, local figure not connected to the Carolingian court and not living in a Carolingian powerbase would date his inscription like this is indicative of the strong royal authority and legitimacy the Carolingians had across their empire by the 830s. By contrast, the use of AD dating, which began to enter mainstream use in Western Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries, or other alternative methods of reckoning the years on an official document or inscription would indicate an ebbing-away of royal power or that an attempt to replace the reigning dynasty was on the cards. Indeed, some regions, like Catalonia in the years after 987, continued to date their charters according to the regnal years of the Carolingian monarchs even after Carolingians ceased to reign anywhere. 

Object number eight: an ivory casket panel of the rape of Europa, made in Constantinople, 980 - 1010 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)

Moving eastwards and towards the end of the first millennium, the next object I've chosen is an ivory panel which belonged to a casket made in Constantinople sometime in the closing decades of the tenth century, or possibly at the beginning of the eleventh. It depicts the Greek and Roman myth of the Rape of Europa. In the centre of the panel is Europa riding on the back of Zeus/ Jupiter, who is disguised as a white bull. Europa is clinging on to the bull's neck as he swims through the sea whilst waving her scarf. A cupid flies down to crown her with a laurel wreath, while another cupid wades into the sea with a flaming torch before the bull. On the left, Europa's female companions watch in amazement with their arms outstretched. On the right, Ares/ Mars and Aphrodite/ Venus begin to embrace each other on the further shore where Europa and the bull are headed, perhaps a foreshadowing of what is to come - Zeus, being Zeus, would go on to have sex with Europa, and King Minos was born.

This isn't the only ivory casket panel from the tenth and eleventh century Roman Empire (what most historians would now call the Byzantine Empire) to show scenes from Classical mythology. Just opposite this object in the exact same room in the V&A, you can find the much more intact Veroli Casket, also made in Constantinople and in roughly the same timeframe. The panels on the Veroli Casket show various images of the god Dionysus/ Bacchus, as well as scenes from the stories of Bellerophon and Iphigenia. We're clearly dealing with a cultural environment in which knowledge of the Greek and Roman myths was highly prized. Wealthy people would thus have stories from them displayed on their more luxurious household objects, to demonstrate how learned and cultured they were. The fact that the casket panel is made from carved elephant ivory, imported to Constantinople from Africa at great expense, shows that it was also meant to demonstrate the owner's wealth. Whoever it belonged to must have been a very wealthy member of the Roman elite, possibly a high-ranking bureaucrat or military officer at the imperial court in Constantinople or a senator - the Roman senate still existed in the East until the thirteenth century. 

Of all the objects in this series, this is the second-most secular. This is because, while it depicts gods, these were gods that no one believed in by the time this object was made. The Roman East had been thoroughly Christianised in the fourth to sixth centuries. Some isolated pockets of paganism survived until quite late. The Maniotes, who lived in the middle finger of the Peloponnese and claimed descent from the ancient Spartans themselves, weren't converted until the reign of Emperor Basil I (r.867 - 886) according to the manual on statecraft and foreign policy written by his grandson Emperor Constantine VII (r.913 - 959). Needless to say, the Mani peninsula was an exceptional case, being a remote, mountainous, wild and effectively ungovernable region. Later on, French crusaders, Venetians and Ottoman Turks alike had only the most shaky control over the Mani, and the bandit clans and pirates that still dominated the region in the nineteenth century gave the modern Greek state a massive headache. It suffices to say that by the 980s, worship of Zeus and the other Olympian gods was no longer in anyone's living memory. Asides from a small Jewish minority, who were generally free of persecution, everyone in the Roman Empire was a Christian. 

Indeed, Christianity, specifically Greek Orthodox Christianity, is such a big part of how we view the medieval Roman Empire, or as we now prefer to call it, Byzantium. When "Byzantine Art" comes to mind, we tend to think of mosaics and icons with ethereal gold backgrounds, of the Theotokos (the Virgin Mary) in shapeless robes of lapis lazuli, of stern-looking and majestic-looking Christ Pantokrator (literally as ruler of the universe) and saints and emperors wearing timeless garments. Yet, like with a lot of what we think we know about Byzantium, this view of Byzantine art is ultimately misleading. Plenty of secular art of a very different style existed in the Roman Empire of the tenth to twelfth centuries.

Around the time this casket was made, the Roman Empire was going through what historians call "The Macedonian Renaissance." Under the so-called Macedonian dynasty of emperors (867 - 1056), contemporaries to Alfred the Great and the West Saxon kings of England, the Roman Empire enjoyed a new period of military success and cultural revival. A series of reconquests against the Arabs and Bulgarians led to Cilicia, Armenia, Northern Syria, Cyprus, Crete and the Balkans being reconquered. By 1025, at the death of Emperor Basil II, one of the greatest soldier emperors, the Roman imperial frontier was once again at the Danube and Euphrates for the first time since the seventh century. Just like in the time of Augustus, Trajan and Constantine, the Roman army was still the strongest, most disciplined and professional fighting force in all of Europe, and its generals had such a strong grasp of military tactics and strategy, they even wrote treatises on them.  A new building-boom for churches, both in the capital and in the provinces, was in motion and would continue into the twelfth century. And the study of Classical Roman literature and history was thriving. Great encyclopaedias of ancient Greek and Roman authors like the Excerpta Constantiniana and the Suda were compiled in the mid-tenth century under the orders of Emperor Constantine VII. Meanwhile, good working knowledge of Homer, Plato and Dio Cassius were essential parts of education for anyone who wanted to be a member of the governing class, as a civil servant, bishop or general. It was this kind of cultural milieu that produced art like this. Indeed, judging from the artistic style of the ivory panel, which pays a great deal of anatomical detail to the human figure and shows Europa, her companions, Ares and Aphrodite wearing recognisably Classical garb, its clear that the craftsmen who made it had some familiarity with Hellenistic and early Imperial Roman art. Indeed, Constantinople in this period was something of a veritable art museum that contained the best of ancient sculpture, almost all of which has since vanished without a trace. Thus this artwork represents a revival of Classical culture, and how the now thoroughly Christian Roman Empire still looked back fondly on its pagan past.

Object number nine: A coppery alloy statue of the Hindu god Ganesha, made in Thanjavur in southern India, 1000 - 1200 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, visited 10 December 2022)

Now for the penultimate object, we will be going yet further east and to a region, or should I really say, a subcontinent, whose history I know very little about. Of course, this ignorance of Indian history is far more widespread. Indeed, the recent move towards a "Global Middle Ages" hasn't done a particularly good job of integrating India into it, as opposed to China or West Africa. Often those who try to include the Subcontinent in global comparative histories make a frankly token effort and read just one book. Yet, from my perspective as a western early medievalist, India definitely belongs to a "Global Middle Ages." India was very much in the minds of early medieval westerners in ways that China and West Africa were not. The ancient Greeks and Romans had almost nothing to say about those latter two regions, and Western Europeans had no direct contact with them until the thirteenth century. The Islamic world, on the other hand, did have direct contacts with both China and West Africa through trade by the ninth century. Thus some would interpret this as simply indicative of Western Europe being a peripheral, backwater region in the early medieval period. That argument can be had, though as you can guess I'm not particularly sympathetic to it.

But India definitely was on the minds of early medieval Western Europeans. It was often mentioned by the Classical authors who were read in the fifth to twelfth century West. Early medieval Christians believed that in 53 AD St Thomas the Apostle had sailed over to Kerala in southern India and established a Christian church there. Our old friend Gregory Tours, writing in 590, describes how a certain passing acquaintance of his called Theodorus had visited the shrine of St Thomas in India and told him about it. Indian pepper was consumed at the Merovingian royal court in the seventh century and was known to the Venerable Bede in the early eighth. And in 883, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred the Great sent two envoys to India to provide gifts for the shrine of St Bartholomew - Caitlin Green has made a strong case for this being an event that actually happened. India also appears on an eleventh century Anglo-Saxon world map, whereas China doesn't. 

This object came from the Chola kingdom, located in the tip of the Indian peninsula. The Cholas wrote and spoke the Tamil language, one of the official languages of southern India and Sri Lanka. Tamil is a Dravidian language, which means its a language that was historically spoken by the indigenous pre-Indo-European inhabitants of the Indian Subcontinent, and still is spoken by their descendants today. By contrast, in northern India, the lingua franca was Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, related distantly to Latin and Greek, which occupied a similar position to Latin in the early medieval West, as a language of religion, administration, classical literature and elite culture. From my very limited outsider knowledge, the Cholas are fascinating but not easy to study. They have very different sources that we do for early medieval Western Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic World or China. We have no narrative histories for them, though we do have Tamil poems, king-lists and royal sagas. We also have lots of surviving copper-plate inscriptions in Tamil, which mostly record land transactions and other economic arrangements. We also have an abundance of temples and artworks surviving from the Chola period, though they're very difficult to precisely date. 

The history of the Cholas goes back a very long way indeed. Indeed, they're first mentioned in northern Indian sources in the third century BC, as southern neighbours of Ashoka (304 - 232 BC), the ruler of the Mauryan Empire (321 - 185 BC). The Mauryan Empire was the first proper empire in Indian history, which controlled almost the entire subcontinent except the southern tip (where the Cholas were) but only for two generations before it broke up. Graeco-Roman sources also briefly mention the Cholas, such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and the Geography of Ptolemy. However, the Cholas only really start to generate writings of their own from the seventh century AD. Alfred the Great's envoys, Sigehelm and Aethelstan, probably visited the Chola court if they ever made it to the Shrine of St Thomas in India in the first place - if they did, its a shame no records of it survive as I really want to know what it would have felt like to be Anglo-Saxon visiting India in the ninth century. In the late ninth and tenth centuries, the so-called Imperial Cholas formed a powerful Empire in southern India that by 1000 covered all of the modern Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Naddu and most of Karnatka and Andhra Pradesh, as well as the northern half of Sri Lanka. Their most powerful ruler was Rajaraja I (r.985 - 1014 AD), a contemporary of Aethelred the Unready, Basil II, Hugh Capet, Otto III and so many of the other people I'm interested in. He was an very skilled military commander who expanded the Chola Empire to its furthest extent and centralised government, turning the local tribute-paying vassals, autonomous chieftains and client kings into appointed officials dependent on the state. In the early decades of the eleventh century, Rajaraja created anthologies of all the great early Tamil poets, much like Constantine VII had done in the Roman Empire a few generations earlier. And In 1000 he organised a massive land survey of his entire empire, and reorganised all the administrative districts - its too tempting to make comparisons between Rajaraja and William the Conqueror (both of whom did live in the same century) here. Finally, Rajaraja also established trade links with Song China and Chola embassies were received at the Chinese imperial court in Kaifeng on multiple occasions in the eleventh century. After the mid-twelfth century, the Cholas went into decline but their dynasty didn't end until 1279. One has to be impressed with how long they lasted - more than a millennium and a half. Only the Imperial House of Japan (the Yamato), in continuous existence since 660 BC, can compare with them for sheer longevity. 

The Cholas were a staunchly Hindu dynasty and this is reflected in this artefact. It depicts the Hindu god Ganesh, and it was produced in Thanjavur, one of the most important Chola cities where Rajaraja I founded the great 66 metres tall Brihadisvara temple in 1010 AD. The statue shows Ganesh standing. In his four hands, he holds a noose, an elephant goad, a wood apple and a broken tusk. He wears a coronet, a necklace, armlets, anklets and a loincloth and has a regal bearing about him. His plump belly reflects his fondness for sweetmeats. According to some Hindu texts, Ganesh was beheaded by his father, Lord Shiva, when he accidentally mistook him for a rival. He promised to his wife, Parvati, to replace Ganesh's head with that of the first animal that would come along, and that happened to be an elephant. This statue of Ganesh would be used for religious processions, in which he would be carried on the parade up to the temple on a palanquin behind the statues of his mother, Parvati, and father, Lord Shiva. The statue would also receive prayers and offerings from people about to embark of business ventures. You see, Ganesh had originally been a God of agriculture, but by the eleventh century he was starting to be seen as a patron of merchants and commerce. Indeed, Chola India was experiencing an economic and commercial takeoff in the period this statue was created, much like the one going on simultaneously in Western Europe. Just like in eleventh and twelfth century Western Christendom in Chola southern India the explosion of religious devotion, artistic production and economic growth all went hand in hand. 

Object ten: Champleve enamel reliquary box of the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket from Limoges, France, 1180 - 1190 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)

Our final object continues the previous object's theme of religious devotion, but brings me back to much more familiar historical territory and much closer to home. It is a reliquary casket, made to house the relics of the saint for veneration. which shows the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral by four knights (though only three are depicted here) on 29th December 1170. The drama of the whole scene is very well-captured by the artist who designed it here. A knight decapitates the Archbishop of Canterbury while he nonchalantly picks up a chalice from the altar, appropriately laid out for religious services, as part of his duty of performing the mass. This makes him appear both if he has no care at all about what is going on around him and is just going to carry on with his duties to God (performing the mass was and is literally called "divine service"), and like he has heroically accepted martyrdom. There's no indication that he's trying to fight back, run away or bargain with the knights. He thus appears the perfect martyr for Christ. The knights, who are not wearing their armour like they are often depicted, appear suitably thuggish and menacing. The first knight decapitates Becket, while the other two advance with drawn axes and swords. Meanwhile two monks of Canterbury cathedral priory stand with their faces aghast and their arms held up in terror. On the rectangular roof panel above, we see on the left the dead archbishop of Canterbury in his funeral shroud while a bishop and a number of other clerics perform the customary funeral rites. On the right we see Thomas Becket's soul ascending straight up to Heaven, flanked by two angels carrying his shroud.

This reliquary box was one of 52 showing the same scenes (the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, his funeral and ascent up to heaven) made in Limoges in the Duchy of Aquitaine in France, using the champleve enamelling technique. Limoges was one of the three leading production centres of champleve enamel objects in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, along with Cologne in the German Rhineland and Liege in what is now Belgium. Its been estimated that 7,500 champleve enamel objects manufactured in Limoges survive from the period 1160 - 1370; Limoges enamels went into swift decline following the Black Prince's sack of Limoges during the Hundred Years' War, though some were still being produced as late as 1630. The technique required to make champleve enamel caskets like this involves the following steps (you can also watch the video of it being done here):

1. A regular wooden casket is made.
2. Plaques are cut out from a larger sheet of copper and designs are drawn onto them using a mathematical compass or pointed tool.
3. Holes are drilled using a bow drill in the borders of the plaques to allow them to be nailed onto the wooden core.
4. Troughs are cut into the metal to hold the enamel.
5. The enamel is made by grinding glass with mortar and pestle, and mixed with water. 
6. The wet enamel is then laid on the plaques using a quill.
7. Once all the colours have been laid on to the copper plaque, the kiln is then fired up to 1000 degrees Celsius and the plaques are placed inside it - a medieval enameller would have needed to rely on his own judgement as to when the kiln was hot enough.
8. The plaques get fired in the kiln for a few minutes, then left to cool before the process gets repeated two or three times.
9. The plaques are then cleaned with a special stone, additional engravings for decoration are added and the exposed bits of copper get gilded.
10. The enamel plaques get hammered onto the wooden casket with nails.

Those medieval craftsmen were truly capable of some incredible things weren't they!

Its artworks like this reliquary box (and the fact that there are 52 others almost exactly like it) which really illustrate the historical significance of Thomas Becket's murder. In 1178, less than a decade after it happened, William II (r.1166 - 1189), the Norman king of Sicily, had a mosaic of Thomas Becket created in the cathedral-monastery complex he was building at Monreale in the hills just outside Palermo. I had the pleasure of visiting Monreale last July - its a wonderful place. In 1191, 21 years after Becket's murder took place, it was carved onto a baptismal font in a church in Skane in southern Sweden (then a part of the kingdom of Denmark). Across the next three hundred years, Thomas Becket's story would be told in countless artworks not just from England and France but also from Spain, Germany, Italy and Norway, and in 1232 in Poland a new Cistercian abbey church was dedicated to him. King Henry II of England, whose anger at the archbishop was generally acknowledged by contemporaries to be the root cause of Becket's murder, decided to make amends for it by building masses of new churches. These required vast amount of lead for pipes, roofs and stained glass windows, which were mined and smelted in the Peak District and Cumbria. The atmospheric lead pollution created by all this lead-smelting shows up in the cores of glaciers in the Swiss Alps. Close analysis of these by modern researchers has shown that this building boom in response to Thomas Becket's murder caused levels of lead pollution not seen since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, and which would not be equalled again until the start of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. Thomas Becket's murder was thus a significant event in environmental history.

Significant is generally a word one would choose to apply to Thomas Becket. Becket's martyrdom provided the main inspiration for one of the few clauses of Magna Carta that is still on the UK statute books today "the English Church is to be free in perpetuity and to have its rights in full and its liberties intact." Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury eclipsed that of St Cuthbert at Durham as the most popular pilgrimage site in England, and had it not been for that then one of the greatest works of English literature (Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) would likely never have been written. As pointed out earlier, he was venerated in churches across Western Europe. Thomas Becket became such a powerful symbol of resistance to royal authority that Henry VIII had the saint's shrine destroyed and his bones pulverised to dust in 1538. And as a trainee secondary school history teacher, I can confirm that he's one of the most popular topics to teach in secondary schools at Key Stage 3 level (11 - 14 years old). Even schools with the most minimal commitment to teaching medieval history at Key Stage 3, as per the broad-brush, inspecific requirements of the National Curriculum, and which teach none at GCSE (14 - 16 years old) and A Level (16 - 18 years old), will teach Thomas Becket's murder. The other topics typically included within the bare minimum of medieval history taught at Key Stage 3 are the Norman Conquest, the Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt and some more general stuff on medieval life, religion and justice. Its interesting to consider why Becket is such a popular topic to be taught to schoolchildren, typically in year 7 (11 - 12 years old). I have yet to teach it myself, though I suspect that among the reasons are that its an inherently gripping and dramatic story with some big personalities involved (Henry II and Becket) and lots of gore. Its a good topic for introducing Key Stage 3 pupils to the second order concepts of historical significance (ditto) and evidence and enquiry (we have plenty of contemporary sources and even an eyewitness account from Edward Grim, one of the monks who saw the murder). Finally, its the perfect case study for exploring the key theme of the relationship between the crown and the church in the Middle Ages. 

Which brings us on to the final thing for us to think about. Why did I choose to end the series of ten objects with this one? And does Thomas Becket belong in the early middle ages at all? I've tried to evade the question of periodisation until this point. But I don't think I can any longer. What I can say is that most historians would not consider Thomas Becket as early medieval. The general agreement among academic historians is that the Middle Ages, conventionally spanning about a thousand years of European history, make no sense as a single period and have to be broken up into smaller sub-periods. But what are those sub-periods and where do we draw the cut-off points. French and Italian medievalists generally divide the Middle Ages in two - into an "upper" and lower" medieval period, with the cut-off point typically being somewhere in the eleventh century. Meanwhile, British and German medievalists typically divide it into three - into an early medieval period, a high or central medieval period and a late medieval period. As to where exactly the early middle ages becomes the high or central middle ages, there is no agreement. Some would go as early as 900, with the final breakup of the Carolingian Empire giving birth to the early forerunners of the European states we now know and love (France, Germany and Italy), as well as generally pointing the way to a post-imperial future for the European Continent (tell that to Frederick Barbarossa, Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler). Others would go as late as c.1100, with similarly earth-shattering events like the Investiture Controversy and the First Crusade. Parochially, most English historians can't resist the power of 1066 as a marker for the great divide. But generally, from a European perspective, most Anglophone historians would go for sometime in the half centuries on either side of the year 1000 as the dividing line between early and high middle ages. Its between 950 and 1050 that the last of the barbarian invasions (Vikings and Magyars) cease and the final remnants of ancient Roman society disappear from Europe (i.e., agricultural chattel slavery). Its also when general signs that Europe is really entering the "real" Middle Ages start appearing - monastic orders, castles, knights, serfdom, primogeniture, giant Romanesque cathedrals and popular heresy. Very few historians, however, would take the early middle ages into the twelfth century. Partly because, if your early middle ages go beyond 1100, then you haven't got much of a high middle ages left before you have to move on to the late middle ages sometime around 1300 - unless, of course, you believe the middle ages really end in the eighteenth century (as some do). Also, can you really call the century that sees the invention of tournaments, Gothic architecture, the scholastic method, universities, Arthurian romances and windmills, as well as the earliest beginnings of merchant capitalism, the middle class and modern bureaucratic government, "early medieval" by any sane definition? 

Personally, I would go for 1000 as the end of the early middle ages - it really is as good an end-point as any. But I include the eleventh and twelfth centuries within my remit, just like how I include the fifth and sixth centuries there too despite some people's protests that that's still late antiquity. Change doesn't happen overnight and everything comes from somehow. And the period 400 - 1200, the timeframe covered by this series and more broadly by this blog, is quite simply what fits in all the bits of history that I love the most.

But for more than just completely subjective reasons, I think Thomas Becket deserves a place here in the story of the early middle ages in ten objects. In part, its to show that we have well and truly left the early middle ages. Lurking in the background of Thomas Becket's story is the papal revolution. The original dispute that led to Henry II and Thomas Becket falling out in 1164, over whether or not the clergy should be put under the jurisdiction of secular courts, was a direct result of the papal revolutionaries' sustained attempts since the mid-eleventh century to decrease the control of kings over the clergy. And the fact that Becket was canonised by the Pope in 1173, only three years after his death, is indicative of how the papacy was taking control of the process of making saints, one which would be complete by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Becket's story thus illustrates how the papal revolution of the eleventh century had irreversibly changed medieval power relations and the church. The fact that Becket became venerated in places as far apart from each other as Scandinavia, Spain and Sicily also demonstrates how much Latin Christendom had both expanded and become more unified in the post-1000 period.

But some of Becket's story would have still been familiar to people from the early middle ages. In particular, what came towards the very end of it. On 12th July 1174, Henry II walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury, entered the cathedral, ordered the very monks who had witnessed Becket's murder to whip him and received 300 lashings from them. The next morning he heard that the Scottish king, William the Lion, had been captured and northern England was finally safe from invasion. Shortly after that, his rebellious barons sued for peace and his sons, Henry and Richard, and wife Eleanor also surrendered, thus ending the three year political crisis and civil war that had engulfed England after Becket's death. Now this kind of phenomenon, of a king performing penance for the health and salvation of the state, would be completely recognisable to the Carolingians. There are echoes of Emperor Louis the Pious' penance at Attigny in 822 for the blinding of his nephew Bernard of Italy here. Political penance was generally a very early medieval thing as went with the grain of a very early medieval conception of kingship, originating in the seventh century, that the king was personally accountable to God for the moral and spiritual welfare of his people. Before the Carolingians, Visigothic kings had pioneered political penance, and after them the Ottonians and Anglo-Saxons made use of it too - Otto III and Aethelred the Unready would have congratulated Henry II on what he did in 1174. But as it turned out, Henry II's pilgrimage to Canterbury was the last great act of political penance done by a medieval king. In that sense, if in that sense only, the Becket controversy did indeed mark the end of an era. 

And so ends our story of the early middle ages through ten objects. I apologise for it not providing a coherent narrative. But what I have tried to do is at least provide some common themes and show the sheer richness of Eurasian history and material culture in this period. I hope that at least in that endeavour, I have succeeded. And as this is the first post of 2023, I would like to wish a Happy New Year to you all. 

Getting a glimpse of the origins of castles in not quite the middle of nowhere

For the first post on the many amazing things I saw on my continental tour from 3 May to 17 June, I shall be a little unconventional and start near the end. On 15 June, when I was staying in Chalon-sur-Saone in Burgundy, I went for a day trip to see the abbey of Cluny (an incredible place), which will be the subject of a future post. However it was from Cluny itself that I ventured out into the very picturesque countryside in the blazing late afternoon heat to see this place ...

The Chateau de Lourdon viewed from a hill opposite

A view from just below the hill with yours truly

The Chateau de Lourdon had been made known to me when, as a second year undergraduate, I read "The Transformation of the Year 1000: The Village of Lournand from Antiquity to Feudalism" (1991; originally published in French, 1989) by Guy Bois. Its a super-controversial and provocative book that I've pondered and reflected on a lot ever since I first read it. I would never say its a great work of historical scholarship or that its had a big influence on how I do history, but its resonated with me because it asks the questions that many simply take for granted - when, why and how does medieval society, as most of us are familiar with it anyway, come into being? And what immediately came before it? This is part of what ultimately pushed me towards deciding to specialise in pre-1200 medieval history, as late medievalists can essentially take the existence of religious orders, knights, serfs and the like for granted.  The Chateau de Lourdon is mentioned in it several times and indeed features on its front cover. Seeing it in the flesh after all this time, therefore, felt slightly surreal. 

But the Chateau de Lourdon is interesting for more than just that. It is one of the oldest, purpose-built castles in France, being first mentioned in a title deed of 888 as the castrum Lordo. When William the Pious (875 - 918), count of Auvergne and duke of Aquitaine, founded the abbey of Cluny in 910 as a flagship for a new kind of monasticism, he gave the castrum Lordo to the monks of Cluny along with his unfortified villa three miles to the southeast in the valley of the Grosne - the site of the abbey of Cluny itself. The monks maintained it and continued to fortify it, using it to administer and defend their far flung agricultural estates in the surrounding area. It had a somewhat dramatic history, experiencing armed takeovers and sieges in 1166, 1250, 1470, 1471, 1574 and 1593. Finally, in 1632, King Louis XIII of France (r.1610 - 1643) and his chief minister Cardinal Richelieu (1585 - 1642), following the advice of the Bishop of Macon, proclaimed that the Chateau de Lourdon was hazardous to maintaining public order and civil peace in the region and had it demolished. Hence why it survives in the condition it does today, as a gutted ruin. 

But enough with the Chateau de Lourdon itself. Lets move on to a bigger question. Why did the the earliest castles, like the Chateau de Lourdon, emerge when they did? This is obviously not a trivial question. Castles are one of most emblematic features of medieval society, up there with knights in armour with which they are regularly paired with. As that immortal duo, they're often what gets children (especially boys) first interested in the Middle Ages. That's how I started out my trajectory towards becoming a medievalist, as all the castle-themed books, toys and games I owned by the age of six can surely attest. People of all ages love visiting castles. To give one example, Tower of London is the most visited paid-for attraction in the UK which, as of 2019, was attracting more than 2.8 million visitors annually. Edinburgh castle similarly saw 2.2 million visitors that year and Cardiff castle 502,000. In the wake of the post-pandemic rise in domestic tourism, English Heritage, which counts 66 castles among its 400 sites, saw a record-breaking 375,000 new members join in 2021. People undoubtedly visit castles for the sense of adventure, romance and mystery they get from visiting these enduring, imposing and (sometimes) very ruined monuments from 500+ years ago as has been the case since at least the eighteenth century. But we also know all too well their twofold historical importance. Firstly, their use in war, as mechanisms of defence against enemy attack or as tools of conquest and subjugation. Secondly, as the dwellings of the great and the good of medieval society that served as symbols of their power and prestige and from which they (literally) lorded it over the surrounding landscape. But their great importance to medieval society and how we connect with the medieval past today, does not mean that we can take that for granted. When did they come about, and why?

The white tower (completed 1077) in the Tower of London. In  the late eleventh century, it was the largest fortress palace north of the Alps, and is now part of the UK's most visited pay-to-enter historical tourist attraction. A true symbol of William the Conqueror's power and prestige, and a means of keeping the citizens of London in line. Photo Credit: By Panoramic_view_from_Tower_of_London.jpg: MatthiasKabelderivative work: Nev1 (talk) - Panoramic_view_from_Tower_of_London.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10565675

If we're being parochial and thinking about it from an English/ British perspective, the answer will most likely be these three words - "1066, Norman Conquest." Now, as we'll discuss further later, there are some scholars (especially archaeologists) who would argue that both parts of that answer are wrong. But for the time being, lets just assume its correct. After all, this is what historians studying Anglo-Saxon and Norman England and medieval British castles have traditionally thought, and many still do, and it is also what secondary school history textbooks in the UK still present as fact. 

So, if we're going by the traditional view, then anyone who is at all inquisitive or whose historical horizons stretch beyond the English Channel is going to be asking "well then, how did the Normans and their French allies get into this whole castle thing? When did they figure out that building them was a good idea?

Well, as the Chateau de Lourdon demonstrates, castles of a kind had existed in France for more than a century and a half before William the Conqueror set sail for England in September 1066. The exact "when" for the genesis of the castle is, however, murky and controversial, as we'll see. But everyone would agree that by the mid-eleventh century, castles were a well-entrenched and widespread phenomenon in France broadly defined, not to mention also in Italy and Christian Spain - Germany was a different matter. Therefore, we're mainly going to be thinking about France in the broadest sense here, with passing considerations of Italy and Northern Spain and the proviso that England and Germany (so often forgotten in these discussions) show that things can be different. 

So what's behind it all ...

... Not the white heat of technology ...

So what was responsible for this "rise of the castle" in Continental Europe west of the Rhine between c.880 and 1060? Certainly not because of a a revolutionary technological breakthrough, as the technologies used in the building of castles really were ancient. In Northern France and post-1066 England, the most common type of castle was the motte and bailey. The technologies required to build a motte and bailey - defensive ditches, earthen ramparts, timber palisades and artificial mounds - had been around since Prehistory. An Iron Age fortified settlement like Maiden "Castle" in Dorset is testament to this, and there are plenty of sites like it from the middle to late first millennium BC across Western and Central Europe. And lets not get started on the Romans. The durability of Roman masonry meant that it was inside the still intact wall-circuit of the old Roman fort at Pevensey in Sussex that William the Conqueror built his first castle in England immediately after he landed on 25 September 1066. And closer to the period of the emergence of the first castles, both Offa's Dyke and the Danevirke demonstrate that eighth century northern European rulers were able to mobilise the manpower and resources necessary to build timber and earthwork fortifications spanning tens or indeed hundreds of kilometres. And for the ninth century, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Annals of Saint Bertin show the West Saxon, Viking and Carolingian Frankish armies hastily throwing up all kinds of fortifications like it were no biggie. So why do things that we can legitimately call castles (fortresses-cum-private residences) appear so late on the scene?

An aerial photograph from the west of the Iron Age hillfort at Maiden Castle in Dorset made shortly after is excavation in 1937 by Major George Allen (1891 - 1940), a hero of the lost age of gentleman amateur archaeologists.

Pevensey Castle, West Sussex. The walls of the Roman fort, built in the 290s under Emperor Diocletian to defend against Saxon pirates, form the outer circuit. In the top right corner of the fort is the medieval castle, which was built in its present form by Peter II of Savoy, the uncle of Eleanor of Provence (Henry III's queen consort). The castle's Roman and medieval defences combined were strong enough to withstand a siege by Montfortian rebels in 1264 - 1265. Photo credit: By Pevensey_Castle_aerial_view.jpg: Lieven Smitsderivative work: Hchc2009 (talk) - Pevensey_Castle_aerial_view.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17155846

The Danevirke. Back in 800, a timber palisade would have stood on its crest, but wood doesn't survive the centuries as well as stone, as anyone vaguely interested in archaeology knows. Photo credit: By Joachim Müllerchen, CC BY-SA 2.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2473885 

The military hypothesis 

So why do castles come about when they do if its clearly nothing to do with technological innovation. You might be thinking "well it must have been for military reasons. Fortifications are an essential part of what makes something a castle, aren't they not?" This is essentially taps into one of the biggest controversies in castle studies. Were castles, first and foremost, fortresses designed to protect their occupants and their property from attack? From about 1900 through to 1970, most historians and archaeologists looked at castles in terms of their defensive features and military functions. These were fairly easy to prove for, say, the Norman castles in England, the Crusader castles in Syria and Palestine (studied by Lawrence of Arabia himself, amongst others) or the Welsh castles of Edward I. In the last fifty years, however, the pendulum has swung the other way. Charles Coulson and his archaeologist disciples have argued that the military function of castles has been massively overstated - most European castles built between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries never actually experienced a siege - and that they were first and foremost about the display of power and status. Historians, in turn, have argued against this approach, leading to the so-called "battle for Bodiam" in the nineties and noughties. 

Bodiam Castle, East Sussex, built in 1385 by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge after receiving a licence to crenelate from Richard II, looking absolutely stunning. Whether it was built to defend against the threat of French invasion, or so an upwardly mobile old soldier could live out chivalric fantasies and impress the local gentry, is the subject of much debate, and much too late to concern us here. Photo credit: By WyrdLight.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7910287

But for the early history of the castle, there can be little doubt that castles had plenty of military potential in the early period (c.850 - 1150 let's say), in an age when trebuchets and professional military engineers, let alone gunpowder and standing armies, had yet to enter the scene. Conversely, an eleventh century motte and bailey or stone donjon lacked much potential for leisure and courtly display. And nostalgia and the pleasures of the imagination could have no part in the creation of the early castles, for the ideology of chivalry was still in its prehistory.

A well-trodden path for explaining the origins of the castle goes thus: castles emerge on the Continent in the late ninth and early tenth centuries as defensive measures during the chaos wrought by the invasions of non-Christian peoples - the Vikings, the Saracens and the Magyars. People thus put their confidence in local aristocrats for leadership and protection, instead of a royal centre too distant and ineffective to be of much help to them against the invaders. After the invasions stop, castles find a new purpose - protecting these territorial aristocrats from each other. The result is a "fragmentation of powers (fractionnement des pouvoirs as the highly influential French medievalist Marc Bloch wrote it back in 1939), which gives rise to feudalism - a society with a landed warrior aristocracy, a subordinated peasantry and vertical ties, which at once unequal and reciprocal, being the key guiding principle behind everything. 

On the surface of it, this explanation appears to work for France. The Annals of Saint Bertin, written by Prudentius of Troyes (d.861) and Hincmar of Rheims (d.882), don't mention castles at all. Only public fortifications built by kings and their agents feature, and politics revolves around assemblies, episcopal synods and royal visits to palaces and hunting lodges (implied to be unfortified). By contrast, in the Annals of Flodoard, covering the period 919 - 966, these sinister things, variously called castrum, castellum or arx, that barely register in the ninth century Frankish sources, just keep cropping up all the time, often in the context of kings and aristocrats laying siege to each other in them. What explains this, if not an increased sense of insecurity? To give another example, in 820 Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims quarried stone from the old Roman city walls to repair his cathedral. Come 885, as a Viking army laid siege to Paris, Archbishop Fulk of Rheims reinforced those same city walls using stones from a derelict church. The formula is simple - as the world became a scarier place, societal attitudes to fortification changed and people sought protection not by the king's armies but by whatever means they could come up with. 

At a push, this might work for Italy as well. But for England, Germany and Christian Spain, it runs into complications. England is the one most often used as a counter-example. After all, as is well-known, England suffered just as badly from Viking invasions as did West Francia/ France. Yet it did not see any castle-building. Instead, the state kept the initiative and the West Saxon kings from Alfred the Great onwards built a network of fortified towns called burhs across their kingdom, with each burh being within a five mile radius of another burh, and expanded this network as they reconquered the Danelaw. These remained tightly under the control of the king and his officials and so, as the well-hashed comparison goes, while France fragmented over the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries a unified English kingdom was made. Germany provides a fairly similar case to that of England. Ottonian kings of East Francia/ Germany managed to provide a formidable, unified response to the Magyar threat and prevent political fragmentation. There fortress-building remained under royal supervision, exemplified in the so-called burgenordnung King Henry the Fowler issued in 926. The kingdom of Leon-Asturias in Northern Spain is likewise one which didn't follow the French pattern and kings remained much more in control of both defence and reconquest against the Muslims, even if some regions like Castile (coincidentally named for its many border castles) did enjoy a long period of de facto independence in the tenth century. 

A section of the surviving defences of the burh at Wareham in Dorset, built by Alfred the Great (probably in the 880s) to defend against the Vikings. Photo Credit:By Nigel Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13443049. Below is a map, created in 1888 by G.T Clark, of the surviving burghal defences, with the Norman castle later built within them dotted in red.

A modern digital reconstruction of the fortified royal palace of Werla in Lower Saxony, built by King Henry the Fowler. In 924 or 926, he and his army hid there during a Magyar invasion, and then as the Magyars retreated, slowed down by all the loot, he led a force of cavalry to ambush the baggage train, and took a Magyar prince called Zoltan prisoner. With his hostage, Henry the Fowler was then able to agree to a nine year truce with Arpad, the Magyar grand prince. Taking advantage of the time this bought him to strengthen the East Frankish/ German kingdom's defences, the Burgenordnung was issued shortly afterwards.

From such comparisons, one has good reason to wonder whether there was anything inevitable about the French situation, given that other Western European kingdoms went down such different trajectories in response to similarly serious threats from non-Christian invading peoples. It also makes one wonder whether military defence was really the reason for the rise of the castle in France. There are, indeed, very few surviving examples of private castles (as opposed to fortifications in general) that were built in greater France between c.880 and 960 with the explicit aim of repelling Viking, Saracen or Maguar attacks. And au contraire, by the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the threats of Viking, Saracen and Magyar invasion had been seen off, yet castles were proliferating at a higher rate than ever before. For example, in Provence a hundred castles were built in the century after 930, and in the Auvergne and Limousin regions more than 150 were erected between 970 and 1020. Anjou experienced its biggest castle-building wave in the first third of the eleventh century under Count Fulk III Nerra (970 - 1040), who had no Viking invaders to fear and was busy expanding his power into Touraine against his archnemesis, Count Odo II of Blois-Champagne. Perhaps, therefore, military defence, at least against heathen invaders, was not the primary factor behind the rise of the castle, but rather power and authority, which brings us to ...

Loches Castle, the classic stone donjon of the eleventh century built by Fulk Nerra. Photo Credit: By Lieven Smits - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8239026

Castles and the Early Medieval State

So now it is apparent to us that the first castles were able to thrive when the central government was not up to its job, that brings us to a question - was there anything that was actively stopping castles from emerging before they did? The answer that seems obvious is the state, by which we mean the royal court and its officers and agents in the localities. For West Francia/ France, it is made even more obvious by the fact that we have the Edict of Pitres of 864, which we explored last time. You may recall (and if you don't, scroll down to the very bottom of the linked post) that the Edict says that anyone who has built "castles (castella), walls (munitiones) or palisades (valla)" without being granted the king's express permission to do so, will have them demolished by the king's officials in the next thirty five days, with loss of office threatened for any count who neglects this command and harsh penalties for anyone trying to obstruct it.

 The thinking goes that under a fairly strong, competent and energetic king like Charles the Bald, this state monopoly on building fortifications that the Edict implies could remain effective. But after the death of Charles the Bald in 877, his successors were less effective. His eldest son, Louis II the Stammerer, lasted only two years, and his younger sons, Louis III and Carloman, together only lasted another five. Then in 884, Charles the Bald's East Frankish nephew, Charles the Fat, took leadership of the kingdom. Yet Charles proved himself to be not quite up to the task of ruling three realms (West Francia, East Francia and Italy) at once, especially when the Viking challenge was entering its most intense phase, and in 888 he died of a (likely) stress-induced stroke after news reached him of the rebellion of his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia. The West Frankish nobility then elected, Margrave Odo of Neustria, the first non-Carolingian king in almost 150 years. Odo ended up fighting a civil war from 893 to 897 with Charles the Simple, the son of Louis the Stammerer who had been born one month after his father's death in 879, and died a broken man in 898. Charles the Simple was then deposed in 922 by Odo's brother, Margrave Robert of Neustria. Charles then defeated and killed the usurper, Robert I, at the battle of Soissons on 15 June 923, only to then be betrayed and imprisoned by his cousin, Count Herbert of Vermandois. The West Frankish nobility then elected Duke Raoul of Burgundy as their king, who spent a significant portion of his thirteen year reign in open warfare with that same Herbert of Vermandois because the latter was trying to deprive him of his right to appoint the most important cleric in the realm - the Archbishop of Rheims. 

As the conventional narrative runs, by the time of Raoul's death in 936, there had been a drastic shift in the balance of power between kings and aristocrats. Charles the Simple's son, King Louis IV, who returned that year from living in exile with his maternal uncle, King Athelstan of England, spent more than half of his eighteen year reign in open civil war with his most powerful subject, Hugh the Great, the son of Robert of Neustria. Only with the help of his brother-in-law, King Otto the Great of East Francia/ Germany, was Louis IV able to finally bring Hugh the Great to heel. Louis' son, Lothar (r.954 - 986), and grandson, Louis V, though the latter only lasted a year as king before his premature death, fared somewhat better. After the Carolingian line of West Frankish kings terminated in 987 and nobility elected Hugh Capet, the son of Hugh the Great and grandson of Robert of Neustria, as king. The new king struggled to arbitrate disputes between his magnates like Count Odo II of Blois, who claimed he had no authority to intervene in their private feuds, and a lippy count once said to him "who put you in charge." Hugh's son, King Robert II the Pious (r.996 - 1031) spent most of his reign fighting to assert direct rule in Burgundy. By the time of his death, the kingdom of West Francia/ France was nothing more than a confederacy of semi-independent principalities, many which had themselves fragmented into much smaller autonomous lordships, and the king only exercised direct authority over the Paris region which he seldom left. For almost 150 years, West Frankish/ French royal authority was on a constant downwards spiral until it hit rock bottom, so the traditional way of telling it goes. 

Map of France in 1030 - areas in turquoise are the only ones the king had any direct control over.

It is thus therefore assumed that as royal power became progressively enfeebled grasping magnates took advantage of the growing power vacuum by building castles, which the central government could no longer stop them from doing, thus tipping the balance of power even further towards their end. From these castles, so this school of thought goes, they were able to secure iron control over large hereditary territories, subordinate and exploit the free peasantry, wage endemic warfare against neighbouring magnates and defy royal authority as and when they saw fit. The fact that the subordinates of these magnates were given control over castles and were capable of building their own meant that effective political power was able to devolve down to the level of castellans and simple knights in charge of a few villages. 

The castle of Chateau Doue de la Fontaine in western France, built c.950 on the site of an unfortified Carolingian era aristocratic residence, once owned by King Robert I (d.923), by Count Theobald I of Blois, one of Hugh the Great's vassals.

A remarkable document produced in Aquitaine in c.1020 called the Complaint of Hugh the Chiliarch, exemplifies this well. Almost all the action takes place within the county of Poitou, making it an extremely localised world. The count of Anjou, Fulk III Nerra (970 - 1040), appears to be essentially a foreign power, and the king of France, Robert the Pious, is never mentioned at all. The political actors that feature in it, including the certain Hugh de Lusignan for whom it was written, are almost all minor castle-holding lords constantly locked in disputes and vendettas with each other, which they pursue by building new castles and laying siege to and capturing/ destroying their opponents castles. The Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine, William V (d.1030), tries to impose some measure of order over his fractious vassals, but in order to do this he has to essentially play divide and rule with them. Whichever party he sides against has to have their castles demolished or besieged.

The Chateau de Lusignan, first built in the tenth century and the principal residence of Hugh de Lusignan, representing the month of March in the Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry (c.1414). By the early fifteenth century, the castle had been rebuilt and modernised beyond all recognition from whatever it would have looked like in Hugh de Lusignan's day, though it still occupied the same site, and it was now in the possession of Duke Jean de Berry, uncle of Charles VI of France (r.1380 - 1422), the mad king of Shakespeare's Henry V. In the intervening period, the Lusignans had moved on to bigger and better things, like being one-time kings of Jerusalem (if you've watched Kingdom of Heaven you'll know who I'm referring to), earls of Pembroke and kings and queens of Cyprus. 

Around the same time, the counts of Barcelona, who had managed to keep public order and justice going in their principality and launch successful military expeditions as far as Cordoba, the capital of the Caliphate itself, under Count Ramon Borrell (d.1017), had their power undone by the castle-holding dependents along the Muslim frontier that they themselves had created. While by the 1060s, the counts of Barcelona had recovered some measure of control over their principality under Count Ramon Berenguer I (d.1076), all the old motors of public government they had back in the 1010s were lost. Instead, they derived their power and authority by receiving oath-takings and homage from these castle-holding lords, whose activities they could not police - the lords would be their faithful vassals and give them military service in return for their fiefs and castles. Indeed, it was in Catalonia, in the time of Ramon Berenguer that the first book of "Feudal Law" was created - the Usages of Barcelona. 

The tenth century Castell de Miralles near Barcelona. Photo credit: 

By Antoni Grifol - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18264882

Scene from the Usages of Barcelona showing Count Ramon Berenguer I and his wife Almodis de la Marche counting out 2000 ounces of gold as payment to Count William Raymond of Cerdanya in return for rights over the castle of Carcassonne. Ramon Berenguer's son, Count Berenguer Ramon the Fratricidal (d.1097), notably fought against one of the most famous knights ever, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, also known as El Cid, and was captured twice - indeed, I've known about Berenguer since I was 8, when I played the El Cid campaign in the 2000 Real Time Strategy game Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors where he's one of the major baddies and you have to destroy his castle in one mission.

In the north of France, Duke William the Bastard of Normandy, who famously built a number of castles of his own, spent much of his youth laying siege to rebels' castles, destroying the castles that the Norman barons had built during his troubled years of his minority (1035 - 1047) and attacking, capturing and destroying castles belonging to enemy frontier lords. The first book of the Deeds of William the Conqueror, written by William of Poitiers in the 1070s, is full of this stuff. 

Remains of the early eleventh century stone donjon at Brionne in Normandy, home to William the Bastard's first guardian during his minority, Count Gilbert of Brionne (d.1040). Photo credit: By Eponimm - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51117438

William the Conqueror's forces besiege the Breton border castle of Dinan in the Bayeux Tapestry. The castle appears to have a wooden keep, a motte and an outer rampart connected by a bridge, but apparently no bailey!

And these are all the regions that were still lucky enough to have an overarching leader. In a region like Normandy's near neighbour, Picardy, power went to whoever had the most castles, as Hariulf (1060 - 1143), a monk of the abbey of St Riquier, wrote:

"Because they were not all lords of castles, he [Hugh of Abbeville] became more powerful than the rest of his peers. For he could do what he liked without fear, relying on the protection of the castle, while others, if they tried anything, were easily overcome as they had no refuge."

A similar situation existed in the region of Berry. There the Bishop of Bourges in 1038 had to create a militia of free peasants to go around destroying castles in order to restore peace to the region. In the end it was of no avail, as the local aristocracy retaliated by sending a force of mounted knights, which the peasant militia was no match for and they all ended up slaughtered.

These kinds of anarchic situations are essentially the worst nightmare of Charles the Bald, Hincmar of Rheims and the other leading luminaries of the West Frankish kingdom involved in the making of the Edict of Pitres. Indeed, the Edict itself complains of the "many difficulties and robberies" that these mid-ninth century prototype castles are creating. To many scholars, therefore, the Edict of Pitres seems like a remarkably prescient warning of the storm that was to come, and that had Charles the Bald's successors been stronger kings, maybe the Edict of Pitres would have held, the state would have kept its monopoly on fortifications and all this mess would have been avoided. Simple processes of comparison outside France seem to validate this as well. When kingship (or whatever public power there was in the region) failed, as it did in Italy and Lotharingia at so many different points in the tenth and eleventh centuries, in Germany in the 1070s, in Galicia and Leon in the 1110s and finally in England in the 1140s, the realm would descend into a spiral of unfettered castle-building as aristocrats strove to out-do each other and achieve greater local domination. 

Baronial anarchy in the Home Counties: Abinger Motte, Surrey, first built c.1100 by William FitzAnsculf, rebuilt in the 1140s and abandoned in 1153.

Its even been argued that the memory of the Edict of Pitres was clung on to in some quarters, and inspired putative various attempts to regulate fortifications. A clause in the Customs and Judgements of the Dukes of Normandy, issued in the 1090s, appears to suggest that the Dukes claimed the right to garrison the castles belonging to their barons. Two clauses in the Laws of King Henry I, issued c.1115, forbid castellatio without licence. However, the text's author mysteriously glossed that word as "fortification of three walls", which would imply not an attempt to regulate fortified dwellings per se, but one to prevent them from being activated for war by building an additional outer rampart or ditch. Nonetheless, both of these have been interpreted as signs of Carolingian nostalgia in the Anglo-Norman realm. The Edict of Pitres is also thought to be the ultimate inspiration behind the systems of royal and princely licencing of fortifications, which first properly appear in the sources for England, France, Germany and the Low Countries in the decades around 1200. Thus, as Simon MacLean puts it, the Edict of Pitres has so often been seen by twentieth and twenty-first century historians as something of a "skeleton key" or "Rosetta Stone" to cracking the early history of the medieval castle.

Attractively simple as all of this might seem, sadly its not. For one, it rests on an incredibly dated, essentially pre-WW1, school of historical thought in which strong kings are inherently a "good thing" and powerful aristocrats are inherently a "bad thing." It is thus presumed that the two were mutually antagonistic - kings strove for a weak and pliant aristocracy so they could bring peace and order to the realm, while aristocrats wanted a weak and distant monarchy if not going it alone all together so they could rule the localities like petty tyrants. Probably the biggest revolution of in our understanding of how medieval politics worked prior to the thirteenth century has been the development, mostly in the last fifty years, of the consensus model. 

Where the traditional approach to medieval political history met its ludicrous parody - in Sellars and Yeatman's tongue-in-cheek humorous narrative, everything was either a "good thing" or a "bad thing", and it was the barons'grand design to revive the "feudal amenities of sackage, carnage and wreckage", which they got in the Wars of the Roses and "staved off the Tudors for a while."

Under this school of thought, rather than being locked in eternal struggle, kings and aristocrats needed each other. Aristocrats needed to kings to provide them with war leadership, justice and dispute arbitration, patronage and the like, while kings needed the local power, knowledge and connections of aristocrats in order to further their state-building activities. Indeed, as we saw in the post on the Edict of Pitres, which was formulated at a royal assembly - the ultimate physical manifestation of consensus politics - Charles needed the advice and close co-operation of his aristocracy for his governmental reforms to succeed, and many of those government reforms provided solutions to the problems aristocrats wanted solved. And as can be argued of both the rebellions and civil conflicts that Charles the Bald himself and his successors experienced, they were not so much because the aristocracy wanted to enfeeble the system but instead have it work better for them. 

There's also the issue of whether the Edict of Pitres has itself been misinterpreted. Nowhere else in the ninth century sources do we find Carolingian kings claiming a monopoly on the right to build fortifications. Nor do any rulers after Charles the Bald claim such a right until towards the end of the twelfth century, by which the dangers of unfettered castle-building really were obvious from centuries of experience. Even then, some historians like Charles Coulson have argued that late medieval English licences to crenellate weren't so much about maintaining public order and civil peace, as they were a form of political patronage granted by the Plantagenet kings to middling landowners and their favoured servants so that they could lay claim to noble status. 

Simon MacLean argues that, in fact, if the edict is read closely and in proper context, its not actually asserting the state's right to a monopoly on fortifications, or warning against impending feudal anarchy if castles continue to be built without royal permission. As he sees it, the Edict reads more like an attempt by the state to build consensus among the aristocracy and mobilise as much manpower and resources as it can towards governmental reform and common defence against the Vikings. Private building projects distracted aristocratic officials and the peasant labour force from what they really should be working on - public fortifications to defend against the Vikings. MacLean points to how Charles the Bald had to threaten to call on divine retribution in order for the fortified bridge at Pont de l'Arche to be completed in 862, and how when he claims that the state has the right to call on peasants to work on public fortifications he has to appeal to "the custom of other nations" and the Theodosian Code, not the capitularies of any previous ruler. What was going on here, MacLean suggests, were extraordinary measures that required a lot of heavy-lifting through appeals to the Roman past and consensus-building.

MacLean's arguments, contained in his very recent article "The Edict of Pitres, Carolingian Defence Against the Vikings and the Origins of the Medieval Castle", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, (2020), might be a little too sceptical and against the grain for some, and we have yet to see how other historians will respond. But he does quite successfully demonstrate how circular much of the reasoning is on this issue. While its true that the written sources from the ninth century, seldom ever mention castles, archaeology gives a different picture. MacLean points to how many fortified sites of varying sizes that can be dated with some precision to the ninth century have been found in northern and western France. However, because of the Edict of Pitres, it is presumed that these must have been public fortifications built by the king and his officials, otherwise they would have been destroyed and left no trace. A classic example to demonstrate the adage, well known among ancient and early medieval historians, about using archaeological evidence: "Texts can lie to you. Spades don't lie, but you have to make them speak."

Similarly, the archaeological evidence tells a different story for Anglo-Saxon England, where it is thought that there were no castles until after the Norman Conquest because the West Saxon kings kept a monopoly on fortifications. This view is reinforced by a small number of canonical written sources. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle uses Castell (evidently a word of Latin and French import, not an Old English one) to refer to the fortifications on the Welsh borders that were built in the 1040s and 1050s by Earl Ralph the Timid of Hereford, Edward the Confessor's French nephew, and his followers, and generally seems to view them as dangerous foreign innovations. Orderic Vitalis likewise says in a passage famous among Anglo-Normanists that there were "very few" castles in England before 1066. What exactly he meant by these "very few" castles is, however, not entirely certain. Did he just mean the castles that Edward the Confessor's French followers had built in the two decades before the Conquest, in which case there were very few indeed on the eve of the Battle of Hastings. Or was he perhaps alluding, with pardonable exaggeration, to something else. You see, archaeologists in the last fifty years have excavated a number of manor houses with ditches and earthwork ramparts dating to the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The most notable examples are those at Goltho in Lincolnshire, Fowlmere in Cambridgeshire and Sulgrave in Northamptonshire. 

The very overgrown earthworks of Richard's Castle in Herefordshire, a motte and bailey built by Richard Scrob, one of the Norman knights that Edward the Confessor had invited over and given lands in England to sometime before 1051. Very much one of those castles you could easily not notice on a country walk in the vicinity, unless you were actively looking for it. Photo Credit: By Raymond Perry, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9179141

Ewyas Harold castle in Herefordshire, a motte and bailey built in 1048 by Osbern Pentecost. Photo Credit:  By Philip Halling, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15194102

A highly imaginative reconstruction of what the late Anglo-Saxon manor house at Goltho looked like, made by Guy Beresford, the archaeologist who excavated it in the 1970s. Photo credit: Jonathan Jarrett. Minus the motte, it would indeed look remarkably like an early Norman castle.

Map of Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire, in 1847 showing the ditch and bank enclosure (like that at Goltho), created sometime between c.1000 and 1050, which was excavated in 2002. Image credit: John Blair.

Some might quibble at the interpretation of these sites as proto-castles and question how typical they are. We don't know a great deal amount about pre-conquest English aristocratic residences, as indeed is also the case with ninth century Carolingian Frankish ones. But what we do know is that they were expected to be quite grand indeed. The laws of King Cnut (c.1018), as glossed by Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d.1023), say that in order for a ceorl (free peasant) to be considered a thegn (lesser nobleman), he must own five hides of land, a hall, a kitchen, a proprietary church, a bell-house and a burhgeat. The meaning of the latter two is somewhat ambiguous. But Ann Williams has convincingly suggested that the term burhgeat means fortress gate, a pretty solid indication that late Anglo-Saxon manor houses were expected to be fortified by ditches, ramparts and gates, some of which may have been built in stone. And while the number of these early eleventh century Anglo-Saxon fortified manor houses that have been excavated is currently fairly small, more may yet be discovered underneath early Norman castles, as the ones at Goltho, Fowlmere and Sulgrave were. Indeed, as Simon Forder has helpfully suggested, the fact that the Normans were able to put up so many castles in such a short space of time, with such limited manpower during a military conquest means that they must have been making extensive use of pre-existing fortified sites. Some of these obviously included Alfredian burhs (like at Wareham and Oxford), Roman forts (Pevensey) and even Iron Age hillforts (Old Sarum), but they can't have been the only ones. Thus, archaeologists, who tend to be suspicious of grand narratives (except for prehistory, where they're the ones who write them), have argued that there was a steady growth in fortified sites of all kinds in England in the period 900 - 1050, as there was everywhere else in Western and Northern Europe, and that all the Normans did in 1066 was bring in mottes and donjons, which would have made their way over to England anyway if given another generation or two. How much of this tenth and early eleventh century growth of fortifications in England was encouraged or opposed by the late Anglo-Saxon state, we are simply not in a position to know.

The late Anglo-Saxon stone tower of the city defences at Oxford (founded as a royal burh by Edward the Elder sometime before 918) in the background to the left of the Norman motte (constructed in 1071 by Robert d'Oilly, sheriff of Oxfordshire), taken on a November evening back in 2019.

Other regions we haven't spoken of much were also busy building fortified enclosures as the first millennium drew to a close. Above is a reconstructed tenth century Slavic refuge castle at Raddusch in Brandenburg, near the the present day German-Polish border. Photo Credit: By A.Savin (WikiCommons) - Own work, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64118216. Below is a "ring castle (trelleborg)", near Slagelse on the Danish island of Zealand built c.980, possibly at the orders of King Harald Bluetooth though we can't be sure of it. Photo Credit: By Thue C. Leibrandt - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30522746

"Its the economy, stupid", or the culture of power?

So maybe the frontiers of the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon states need to be rolled back a bit. But at the same time, there's no proof that castles were part of any grand conspiracy on the part of the aristocracy to undermine the state, even if castles did ultimately contribute to temporary collapse of all public authority and the emergence of revolutionary, new forms of political organisation (what textbooks still call feudalism) everywhere in Europe by the mid-twelfth century at the latest.

One suggestion is that it comes down to how the economy works really. Under the Roman Empire, the elite prospers from owning vast landed estates worked by hordes of slaves, from holding public office in the provinces and from the patronage of the imperial court. This keeps the aristocracy very much in favour of a strong state. The Western Roman Empire of course falls apart in the fifth century and taxation has largely dried up by the early seventh century (unless you're in Spain) - whatever happens to the slave system in continental western Europe deserves a post in itself. So why aren't castles already a thing in the late Merovingian period, when kings were arguably much weaker than they were in tenth century West Francia and some of their mayors of the palace, like Ebroin, were seriously close to destroying consensus politics. The simple answer is that, after centuries economic and demographic decline arguably going back as far as the Antonine Plague (165 - 180 AD) and the Crisis of the Third Century (235 - 284), the rural economy is too poor and underdeveloped for aristocrats to go it alone. Instead, they need the state, which still has lots by way of land, moveable treasure and offices to give out as patronage. Indeed, most of the factional struggles and civil wars of the period from 656 - 721 in the Merovingian kingdoms can be explained away as different groups of aristocrats trying to gain access/ control of the patronage system. Eventually the Carolingians and their faction completely won out and took over from the Merovingians, and they went about leading the Franks into a series of expansionist wars that would give them a bigger patronage base from plunder and confiscated land. Frisia, Burgundy and Provence are conquered under Charles Martel. Alemannia, Septimania and Aquitaine follow under Pepin the Short. Then Saxony, Italy, Bavaria and the Spanish March under Charlemagne. After 803, however, pretty much all conquests come to a halt, and the Carolingians become faced with the problem of managing increasingly finite resources and the patronage base shrinks. Meanwhile, the rural economy starts to experience an upswing - there's a growth in agricultural production and population, rural and urban markets are proliferating (the Edict of Pitres would support this), there's a lot more cash going around and rural settlements are starting to become less dispersed and more concentrated around nuclei like parish churches. The conditions for building local powerbases are thus set, and there's everything to be gained from subjugating and exploiting the peasantry, which are as it stands legally free and relatively unburdened either by the state or by landlords. The aristocracy thus need the political structures of the kingdom increasingly less to guarantee their wealth and position. Therefore, they can instead start to shift towards becoming territorial princes and local lords, and castles, which they can definitely now afford, are both end and means in this quest for local domination. And so, by the middle of the eleventh century, the rural economy is booming, castles have proliferated and the formerly free peasantry are now serfs. 

Perhaps one could also posit another socio-economic factor behind the rise of castles - the need for upwardly mobile local bigwigs, prospering from economic growth, to demonstrate their status against better established elites. After all, Archbishop Wulfstan made his comments about the "bell-house and burhgeat" in the context of what a prospering free peasant needed to do to claim thegnly (lesser noble) status and perhaps it worked similar on the Continent in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Indeed, one of our biggest weaknesses in all of this is that so little is known about elites in the ninth century Carolingian kingdoms below the level of the high aristocracy.

Fresco of a donor from the church of St Benedict at Mals in the South Tyrol region of Italy, dated to c.800. This man was clearly elite, but how elite exactly we can't be sure.

Yet the problem with these kinds of explanations are many. The first, at the most abstract, theoretical level, being accusations of economic determinism. The second is that the data for economic and social change is very localised and fragmentary. For example, rural social structures for northern France very well documented in the early ninth century polyptychs, whereas in Catalonia the evidence for this stuff only really gets going after 880 but then it becomes the most prodigiously documented region of western Europe in the tenth century. With something like early medieval grain yields, our data is so inadequate that all we can really say with confidence that grain yields were higher in the twelfth century than what they'd been in the second century AD, but whatever happened in between is highly disputable. Likewise some people see economic growth and the beginnings of peasant subjection to aristocratic lordship starting as early as the seventh and eighth centuries in some regions, including the Frankish heartlands between the Loire - way too early for them to be connected in any way to the rise of castles. Likewise, we have not much real data to prove the depletion of the Carolingian state's aggregate fiscal resources. And indeed its possible to argue that the Carolingian state was a lot more dynamic in acquiring state resources than we give it credit for. It seems to have been trying to redevelop centralised taxation from the Edict of Pitres, and certainly hard to imagine that the lands a ninth century king like Charles the Bald granted out as patronage were simply the final remnants of the fiscal estates of the Western Roman emperors. Indeed, as the Edict of Pitres' coinage reform and other economic measures show, with the right kinds of mechanisms and regulations in place the Carolingian state could have successfully ridden the tiger of economic growth. And if the drying up of plunder sowed the seeds of the Carolingian state's demise, why did it take multiple generations after militarily expansion ceased at the beginning of the ninth century for it to happen. Undoubtedly local economic growth and changing social structures facilitated the rise of the castle, but fitting it all into a grand narrative creates a great many complications and pitfalls.

Finally, there's culture to consider. The martial self image of the aristocracy itself certainly doesn't explain it, as the aristocracy had been pretty thoroughly militarised since the fifth, sixth or seventh centuries, depending on where in western Europe we're talking about, and yet castles don't appear until the ninth century at the earliest. And while other societies with warrior elites have produced castles, like Feudal Japan, many others have not. 

Himeji Castle in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, built in 1333 by the samurai Akamatsu Norimura. Photo Credit: By Niko Kitsakis - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40135622. I must confess I know absolutely nothing about how Japanese incastellamento worked. But since we're being encouraged global, I thought I'd put this there without even a hint of tokenism.

What's maybe more to the point is specifically a change in political culture. Where do the elites see themselves as getting their power from, where do they think is the appropriate forum for exercising it and to what end? And here we might have something of an answer. The Carolingian, Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon elites (can't claim to know anything about their Asturian, Leonese and Castilian counterparts), I would argue, saw their power as coming from loyal service to kings, public office holding, participating in assemblies and the royal court, ancestry, widely spread landed interests and pushing forward the wider Carolingian project of religious and moral reform. In the case of Carolingian aristocrats, we have good evidence to show that the majority of them were literate - they were definitely not hairy, mead-swilling primitives. And while the aristocracy did often rebel against the Carolingian kings from the reign of Louis the Pious on, it was always done with the aim of either correcting the ruler or replacing him with another member of the Carolingian family. Rebellion was never about trying to weaken the power of/ break away from the royal centre. Similar patterns can also be seen with the various rebellions against the Ottonians, and, for Anglo-Saxon England, with the rebellions of the House of Godwine and the House of Leofric in the reign of Edward the Confessor. Notably, retreating into private fortified sites was an option seldom ever taken in these rebellions. Indeed, as Simon MacLean has pointed out, Carolingian aristocrats seem to have associated hiding away in fortresses with losers and cowards, and Carolingian writers very frequently describe Slavic chieftains and the leaders of other foreign peoples doing this, to contrast them unfavourably with the Franks. 

It is therefore arguable that the rise of castles stemmed from a greater sense of aristocratic independence - that their power came not from the state but from something else, tied to territory, family and their status as warriors, for which the castle was the physical manifestation. Yet what exactly caused this shift in cultural mentalities we have no clear answer yet. Meanwhile, there's another factor we still haven't considered.

Military hypothesis 2.0 

A final suggestion might be that the shift towards castles might have been facilitated by changes in warfare and military organisation. Castles work very well when you're dealing with fairly small enemy forces, as they're not in a good position to besiege and overwhelm you - after ravaging the countryside for a bit, they'll be forced to return home (a classic pattern in high medieval warfare). Larger forces can present more problems if you don't have a strong garrison yourself and depending on the size and defensive structures of the castle. So could armies becoming smaller and more elitist have had something to do with the rise of the castle?

Unfortunately, attempting a solution to the problem like this creates too many of its own. The period in western military history between the fall of the Western Roman Empire (c.450) and the High Middle Ages (1000 - 1300) is one of the murkiest and most neglected of them all. Among the most controversial questions in this field are "how big were armies" and "how were they raised?" Obviously the exact nature of the question, and the answers to it, depend on what bit of the period and which part of Europe we're talking about. But for the Carolingian kingdoms, the question is essentially this: "was the  Carolingian army for the most part a militia of yeomen farmers, or was it all leisured landlords and their household goons." These positions are in turn closely linked to views on army size - those who think armies were typically in the low thousands will favour the latter position, while those who think they could reach the tens of thousands will favour the former. The former position would appear to be supported by the Edict of Pitres, and earlier military legislation issued under Charlemagne in the last quarter of his reign and Louis the Pious. The problem is, however, that such legislation only appears at the beginning of the ninth century, and many historians such as Guy Halsall, argue that it cannot be backprojected onto the eighth century and the time of Charlemagne's wars of expansion. They are also sceptical about the legislation's effectiveness. Historians like Matthew Innes and Timothy Reuter see Carolingian armies as small, elitist groups raised through aristocratic patronage networks, while Halsall sees the Carolingians as trying various kinds of experiments to get away from this kind of set-up that ultimately don't succeed. On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum historians like Bernard Bachrach argue that the Carolingians had substantial professional standing forces and even larger ones of free peasant conscripts from a manpower pool of two million able-bodied adult men, and thus he sees the Carolingian kings very regularly commanding military forces of 20,000, 40,000 or even 100,000. Of course, these positions in the debate are highly dependent on how one views how the Carolingian state worked. And the debate can get very nasty and ideological - Bachrach accuses the likes of Innes, Halsall and Reuter of being "Procrustean Marxists" and "doctrinaire slaves to a primitivist agenda", while Halsall accuses Bachrach back of having neoconservative political sympathies and writing speculative fiction, not history. I haven't yet formulated positions of my own on these issues, so I'm not going to pass judgement on whether either side is right or wrong, which gets us nowhere in using trying to use changes in military organisation as an explanation for the rise of the castle. 

All that can be said, is that a large, well-armed free peasant militia could indeed be highly dangerous to early castles. We already mentioned the Peace League of Bourges in 1038. But similarly, when the Saxon nobles rebelled against Emperor Henry IV of Germany in 1073, they attacked his castle of the Harzburg that he had built in 1066 with a very large force of Saxon free peasant militiamen and managed to utterly overrun and destroy it. When Henry IV defeated the Saxon rebels in 1075, his knights and mercenaries terrorised the Saxon peasantry in revenge, and the Saxon nobility became hesitant to raise such militia forces again. 

A reconstruction of one of the towers of the Harzburg. Photo Credit: 

By User Schmull on de.wikipedia - Schmull, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=899439

Conclusion

Overall, after having this long debate with myself, I'm afraid to say that I've come to no firm conclusions about the origins of the castle but exhausted a lot of possibilities. Certainly, the Chateau de Lourdon doesn't appear to fit clearly into any of those theories about the origins of the castle, and itself points to a glaring problem - the scantiness of what the written sources can tell us about when, why and by whom the earliest castles were built. What we can be sure about is how important the Chateau de Lourdon was to the monks of Cluny in the display and exercise of their power and lordship in the Burgundian countryside, as well as defending their estates, a role similar to that which their other fortifications played. It was for those purposes, combined also with the demonstration of aristocratic status, that castles would have such a vital role to play in medieval society right the way through to the end of the Middle Ages. 

The Tour des Fromages (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) in the Bourg de Cluny. Built by the monks to remind the townspeople who was boss around here.

The fortified monastery precinct of Cluny

The Castelvecchio at Verona, Italy - one of my favourite of the castles I saw on my travels. Built by Mastino II della Scala, the lord of Verona, in 1351 when he felt too unsafe to live in an unfortified urban palazzo due to his unpopularity with the citizenry.