Empires and Barbarians (54 page)

North of the Loire, the situation could not have been more different. Somewhere between c.400 and c.600
AD
, life moved decisively away from the established norms of the Roman era, in ways that were not dissimilar in material cultural terms to what we have already observed in Anglo-Saxon England. As in lowland Britain, the
civitas
, that stalwart of Roman administration, disappeared from view. There is no evidence that military service was organized here in the sixth century on the basis of
civitas
contingents, as it was in the rest of the kingdom. Social and economic structures were likewise transformed. Legal sources portray a society recategorized, again as in Anglo-Saxon England, into three social groups: the free, a class of permanent freedmen, and slaves. The second of these, it is worth remembering, was unknown to the Roman world. There is also much qualitative evidence that a Roman-style restricted aristocracy was replaced with a broader social elite of less entrenched pre-eminence – again, as in Anglo-Saxon England. The legal sources do not differentiate by different wergilds, for instance, between the mass of freemen and a smaller nobility; Gregory of Tours does not refer to any major figure
from the north as a ‘noble’ in the course of his massive narrative of sixth-century events (where many, from old Roman families south of the Loire, are so designated); and large, compact landed estates, the essential building block of socioeconomic dominance for a true aristocracy, only began to re-emerge in this region in the seventh century. Up to that point, the term
villa
simply meant a geographical area, not a centrally run unit of agricultural production.
⁶⁷

This does not mean that there weren’t significant variations in wealth in these northern territories, or even that their old Roman elites had completely disappeared. Well into the seventh century, leading landowners of the former Roman regional capital at Trier determinedly styled themselves ‘senator’ in inscriptions. One surviving Roman landowner from the early Merovingian period has even left us a will: no less a figure than Bishop Remigius of Rheims himself, whose congratulatory letter to Clovis on his accession provides us with key information about the rise of the Merovingians. But Trier was clearly exceptional. Over eight hundred, or about a third, of all the post-Roman inscriptions of northern Gaul have been found in its environs, with none of the other old Roman cities of the region producing any comparable cache. And while Remigius’ will is decent enough evidence that some kind of Roman elite survived, it does show him to have been only a very modest landowner compared either with his properly Roman ancestors of the fourth century or his later Frankish successors of the seventh and beyond.

None of this evidence fundamentally contradicts the broader picture, then, that the social structure of northern Gaul would not be dominated by a small aristocratic elite until after 600
AD
, unlike the regions south of the Loire where descendants of the old Roman aristocrats remained firmly in place. Culturally too, discontinuity was manifest. In wide areas of the north-east, episcopal succession was not continuous from the late Roman period into early medieval times (
Map 12
). So a period of positive paganism, or at least Christian interruption, must be envisaged in these lands. At the same time, the language line was also on the move. Germanic dialects became prevalent to the west of the old Roman frontier on the Rhine.
⁶⁸

Material culture, too, north of the Loire was significantly different from southern areas of the kingdom. In the late fifth and the sixth century, inhumation that was furnished – sometimes spectacularly – became the vogue, replacing Roman-style burial. Men were buried not
only with some personal items, but also with weapons: normally a long sword (
spatha
), javelin (
angon
), axe (
francisca
) and shield (of which only the conical boss usually survives). Women were buried fully clothed with their jewellery, their clothing fastened with a brooch at each shoulder. The brooches themselves were often framed in cloisonné work, with semi-precious stones mounted in individual settings. This was a Roman form of decoration in origin, but had become widely popular in barbarian Europe as a characteristic element of the ‘Danubian style’ that evolved in the Hunnic Empire. Even burial sites changed. In the sixth century, many of these new furnished burials were within new cemeteries well away from old habitation sites, the graves arranged in ordered lines (hence their technical German term
Reihengräber
, ‘row-grave cemeteries’).
⁶⁹
These centralized cemeteries presumably reflect some sense of community among an otherwise more dispersed rural population, rather like the large cremation cemeteries of East Anglia. All this firmly indicates that a new, non-Roman social order had come into being, and there is no doubting the degree of discontinuity it represents. What were its causes?

Parts of north-eastern Gaul had suffered heavily in the raids of the later third century, and, unlike most of the Roman west, rural prosperity in some of its zones seems not to have recovered. But this was true only of a relatively restricted area to the west of the Lower Rhine. Throughout the fourth century, by contrast, Trier and the entire Moselle valley remained a hub of prosperous
romanitas
: in town, country and culture. The city itself was an imperial capital for many years. Further to the north-west in Picardy, likewise, an active villa culture seems to have survived the disasters of the third century, while the frontier continued to be heavily and actively defended by extensive fortifications and large numbers of troops. While the third-century crisis had caused some lasting disruption, the region between the Rhine and the Loire as a whole was by no means abandoned by the Empire, and active Roman life continued across much of it.
⁷⁰
Substantial structures of Roman life remained to be toppled here, therefore, before any new order could emerge.

One body of evidence has sometimes been thought to show that a bout of pre-Merovingian Frankish immigration played a direct role in the process of imperial dissolution in these territories. Excavations of some late Roman cemeteries in the region have thrown up furnished inhumation burials ranging in date from c.350 to 450
AD
. Unlike their
Merovingian counterparts, these earlier inhumations are relatively few, just small clusters in cemeteries where the mass of burials entirely lacks any gravegoods. Males – whose graves predominate in these clusters – were buried with weapons and Roman military belt sets; a smaller number of females were buried alongside some of the men, with jewellery and personal items such as glass and pottery. These burials were first identified as a group by Hans-Joachim Werner, who argued that they were the graves of Franks known from historical sources to have been forcibly resettled on Roman territory in the 290s, as so-called
laeti
. He also saw the continued distinctiveness of these men and their descendants as an important contributory factor to the later Frankish conquest of the region in the time of Clovis: a sign that a first phase of Frankish settlement had disrupted the normal patterns of Roman life. As was pointed out by H.-W. Böhme, however, the graves date from a generation or two after the settlements of
laeti
mentioned in written sources, and, more importantly, are the remains of individuals of reasonably high status, whereas
laeti
were not even fully free. Böhme suggested, therefore, that the graves belong to the category of higher-status barbarian immigrant called
foederati
, linking them to a succession of Frankish officers known to have risen to high Roman rank in the fourth century.
⁷¹
The graves, he argued, belonged to their slightly less distinguished peers. Nonetheless, Böhme’s argument kept the overall connection between the burials and an important group of immigrant Franks.

Recently, however, Guy Halsall has challenged the whole idea that these graves belonged to immigrants at all, on the reasonable grounds that furnished inhumation was not the funerary rite practised by Franks beyond the frontier in the late Roman period. In fact, Frankish burials of the period c.350 to 450 (and, indeed, earlier) are undetectable in the confederation’s heartlands between the Rhine and the Weser. Enough work has been done in these areas to suggest that this is not just a gap in the evidence. Almost certainly, Franks in the wild disposed of their dead in an archaeologically invisible manner, quite likely cremation followed by a scattering of the ashes. It is also the case that the belt sets and weaponry contained in the furnished male burials on Roman soil were all of Roman manufacture. The idea that burial with weapons was a Germanic habit, Halsall argues, is an anachronistic back-projection from later Merovingian practice, when furnished inhumation did spread through the Frankish world. Rather than indicating that these
graves were occupied by non-Romans, this fourth- and fifth-century group of furnished inhumations shows that a new, competitive burial practice was spreading among the would-be social leaders of the region. As imperial structures offered increasingly less support to those whom they had previously benefited, competition for social superiority began, and a new furnished burial ritual was one element in the process.
⁷²
This is obviously a variant of the same argument used in the case of fifth-century Britain, but in Gaul the new burial rite certainly came in long before there was any large-scale Frankish immigration.

On balance, neither of these interpretations seems entirely convincing. The disparate nature of the find spots of these graves – cemeteries attached to military installations, rural settings, and even some in urban graveyards – indicates that, in life, the people being buried in this fashion were not a unified group, but individuals operating in a variety of contexts. It is certainly very difficult to see them, therefore, as any kind of Frankish fifth column. Both the chronology of the burials and the nature of the male gravegoods also suggest, more generally, that they were individuals working within and not against Roman imperial structures. But nor is the social-stress argument completely convincing either. For one thing, the furnished burials start too early (c.350
AD
) to be associated with any major decline in Roman imperial power in the region, which even Halsall would not date before the late 380s, and I and others would actually date to the aftermath of the crisis of 405–8.

The burials are also relatively few. If they were the products of a process of social competition, it was a very low-key one. And that the individuals concerned might just possibly have been Germanic immigrants of some kind (though not necessarily Franks) is suggested by the female graves that accompany some of the males. Not every male has a female counterpart, but in Picardy as many as half do, which is a strikingly healthy proportion. And while the goods buried with the men are undoubtedly Roman-made, their accompanying womenfolk were buried with ‘tutulus’-style brooches, which are otherwise found only in a group of rich Germanic burials from the Lower Elbe, far beyond the Rhine in Saxon country. The Elbe brooches are mostly of slightly different types from those found in northern Gaul, and the latter may be earlier in date. In that case, the brooches would not provide any reason for thinking these burials Germanic, since Roman fashions were often adopted by Germanic elites beyond the frontier.
But, for the moment at least, the jury appears still to be out on these more technical matters, and if this brooch type does prove to be basically non-Roman we may still be looking at the burials of migrants who did well in the Roman system. Either way, Halsall is entirely convincing both that the burials have nothing obvious to do with later Merovingian-era burial habits and that, even if Germanic, they would provide no compelling evidence for a large-scale late Roman settlement of Franks between the Rhine and the Loire that facilitated Clovis’ later triumphs.
⁷³

If the north–south divide within the sixth-century Merovingian kingdom cannot be traced back to a preceding Frankish settlement north of the Loire in the late Roman period, part of the explanation lies in the fifth-century political history of the region, in which Franks played a part. Arguments for a large-scale withdrawal of Roman power before the crisis of 405–8 are no more convincing here than they are in the case of Britain.
⁷⁴
But as the potent mixture of invasion and usurpation began to work havoc with the power base of the western Empire, then parts at least of northern Gaul, like Britain another fringe region of the Empire, began to feel a similar loss of protection. Thus Armorica – north-western Gaul (now Brittany) – revolted at the same time as Britain in 409/10, likewise perhaps from the control of the usurping Emperor Constantine III. But whereas Britain was cut permanently adrift from the Empire at this point, serious efforts were made in the 410s to bring northern Gaul back under the imperial umbrella, when the worst of the initial crisis had been weathered. And throughout the first half of the fifth century, periodic efforts were made to maintain imperial control north of the Loire: a mixture of direct interventions against breakaway groups, maintaining some regular Roman forces in the region, and occasionally implanting irregular ones.
⁷⁵

In the longer term, however, these ongoing attempts to project imperial authority in northern Gaul were steadily undermined by the knock-on effects of the crisis of 405–8. As we shall see in the next chapter, the imperial centre progressively lost control of its key revenue-producing districts, and with them its capacity to maintain significant military forces and control its regional commanders. As a direct result, it could no longer protect the key structures of Roman civilian life. This all came to a head in the mid-450s in the additional chaos generated by the collapse of Attila’s Empire (
Chapter 5
) – the
context in which Childeric rose to prominence in the 460s. Northern Gaul thus navigated its way from Roman past to Frankish future via a political process that was both long-drawn-out and highly contested. It began with the Rhine crossing of 31 December 406, and didn’t really come to an end until Clovis consolidated his power in the decades either side of the year 500. In the meantime, the region had seen many contestants for power: Roman central authorities, local self-help groups (often labelled
Bagaudae
after third-century bandit groups), barbarian invaders and settlers, and, eventually, Frankish military forces. The process was also essentially a violent one. So we should not wonder that the region’s Roman landowning elite suffered huge disruption. Their villas were rich and vulnerable, and here, as everywhere else where the capacity of Rome’s armies to provide security withered away, the villa network failed to survive the process of imperial collapse.
⁷⁶