The early Anglo-Saxons are much less clearly documented, but their emphasis on dynastic legitimacy could in principle have had an impact on royal mothers; loose succession rules meant that there were few child kings in England before the tenth century, but, when there were, their mothers would be important (below, Chapter 19). The early prominence of powerful abbesses in several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms also implies some parallels to the Merovingian situation. The Visigoths and Lombards put less stress on female politics, however. This is again partly a problem of our sources, which include few narratives, and which are also prone to depict women’s political action even more negatively than in the kingdoms further north: the Arian queen of Spain Goiswintha (d. 589), for example, widow of King Athanagild (and also mother of Brunhild of Francia), who conspired against Leovigild and Reccared in turn, and sought to undermine Reccared’s conversion to Catholicism, as John of Biclar recounts; or, in Italy, Queen Rosimunda (d. c. 573), who engineered the assassination of her husband Alboin in 572 but came to a bad end, according to Paul the Deacon. Paul is indeed consistent in depicting female political protagonism, by queens or duchesses, in the most negative light, with the exception of his heroine, Theodelinda, wife of two successive kings, correspondent of Gregory the Great, and probably queen-regent to her son Adaloald (616-26). Her example at least shows that given the right circumstances a woman could have considerable authority in Italy. These circumstances were repeated in the autonomous duchy of Benevento in 751-5, when Scauniperga, Gisulf II’s widow, ruled with her young son Liutprand, calling herself dux together with him, and was listed first in documents. Benevento had a stable ruling family, which must have helped Scauniperga into that role. At other times, adult kings succeeded, often by coup, and the absence of a dynastic principle did not help female protagonism; but attitudes like those of Paul, if widely felt, would have made their space still more limited. The Lombards certainly did not value the sort of independent political action that was sometimes available to aristocratic women in the Byzantine parts of the peninsula, as with the patricia Clementina in the Naples of the 590s, who appears in Gregory the Great’s letters as a sometimes controversial political figure in Naples, both an ally and an enemy to local clerical leaders (her unfree dependants staged a small peasants’ revolt against a papal envoy; she tried to stop the election of Bishop Amandus of Sorrento because she wanted him to stay in her entourage). Indeed, aristocratic female dealers like Clementina, powerful because of their own wealth without any explicit family context, look back to the late empire rather than forward into the early Middle Ages, anywhere in the West, including the Byzantine lands. Later, the bonds of family, whether by birth or by marriage, would be everywhere.
I stress high politics here, not because the exercise of political power is necessarily the most important thing anyone did, but rather because this is where the evidence is located. It was argued in Chapter 3 that gender assumptions, although universally more constraining for women than for men in the later Roman period (and all the constraints listed there applied in the early Middle Ages too), gave more space for a range of female activity than they did later. In general, female protagonism in the early Middle Ages was more clearly tied in to the lifecycle and to family strategies than it had been under the empire. It was also more constrained by legal norms. Even though ‘barbarian’ laws, even less than those of Rome, did not circumscribe social action much in practice, they at least reflected the mind-sets of legislators; and they universally assume legal disabilities for women. Women were expected to be under male legal protection in most of our societies, that of their father, brothers, husband in turn, until they were widowed. In some early medieval societies they were then legally independent, but they were in a weak position, and the control of the lands they by then had access to (dowry from their father, a ‘morning-gift’ from their husband - the latter could amount to a lot, a quarter of his property in Lombard Italy, sometimes a third in Francia) was under threat from their children and from male relatives of all sorts. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of this sort of threat to widows: for example, in Italy, Rottruda of Pisa, whose attempts to found a pilgrim-hostel according to her dead husband’s wishes were opposed by his brother in 762, or Taneldis of Clemenziano in the Sabina, who disinherited her son’s heirs in 768, for the ‘many injuries and bitter trouble and damage’ that he did to her. Morning-gifts in land seem also to have been more often sold than any other family property in central Italy, which implies that the land women might inherit was seen as less essential to retain.
Lombard Italy was, indeed, out of all these societies, the one where the legal constraints on women seem to have been greatest; it was probably matched only by Ireland. In Italy, women remained under legal protection, that of their male children, even as widows. Lombard legislation spends a good deal of space setting out the obligations of men to treat women properly, which testifies to a general culture of constraint. In 731 Liutprand listed the mistreatments that would cause a man to forfeit his rights of legal protection over a woman: if he let her go hungry, did not clothe her according to his own wealth, had sex with her or married her to a slave, or struck her (unless ‘in honest discipline’). Lombard law also so totally assumed that women did not bear arms that it made no provision for what happened if they committed violent acts, as Liutprand discovered with horror in 734; in future they were to be publicly humiliated, and their husbands, presumed to be the real perpetrators, should pay compensation. This was a law directed at peasants, not aristocrats, but it testifies to a set of gendered assumptions that were particularly Lombard, and are reflected also in the writings of Paul the Deacon. They would have been recognizable north of the Alps, too, but they were most consistently applied in Italy.
The early Middle Ages have traditionally been seen as more ‘Germanic’ than late Rome, the product of invasion, and also as the location of a cultural ‘Romano-Germanic’ fusion, which would be developed and perfected under the Carolingians. As I have implied in previous chapters, this does not seem to me an accurate characterization. For a start, early medieval societies in the West had common features whether there had been invasion or not: Byzantine Italy and Wales were in many ways parallel to Lombard Italy and England respectively. Ireland, too, with little contact with the ‘Germanic’ world, had similarities with it (although, of the societies we have looked at, this was in many respects the most atypical). The real contrast inside the ex-Roman provinces was not between societies that had been invaded or conquered and the others, but between the Continent and Britain: in the former, the basic Roman political and social structures survived (though they were in most places ramshackle and underfunded), and in the latter they did not; tribal societies were a feature of both the Anglo-Saxon and the Welsh parts of post-Roman Britain. Overall, in fact, the major change in political culture was not Germanization but militarization: the age of a dominant military aristocracy began in the fifth and sixth centuries, and continued throughout the West for more than a millennium. As we shall see in Part III, this was a feature of the Byzantine empire, and to a lesser extent the caliphate, as well.
All the same, identities did change. Fewer and fewer people in the West called themselves Romani; the others found new ethnic markers: Goths, Lombards, Bavarians, Alemans, Franks, different varieties of Angles and Saxons, Britons - the name the non-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain had given themselves by 550, the Romani having left, and a word itself due soon to be replaced by a Welsh term, Cymry, ‘fellow countrymen’. Even in a part of the former empire unconquered by invaders, that is to say, the Romans were not the Britons themselves, but other people, earlier invaders, who had come and gone. And although of course the huge majority of the ancestors of all these peoples were men and women who would have called themselves Roman in 400, the Roman world had indeed gone, and Roman-ness with it.
The early Middle Ages was materially a much simpler period than the late empire, and Roman buildings and ruins were all around, generally dwarfing
more recent constructions, and generally also more carefully built. Did early medieval peoples feel insecure or nostalgic about the Roman past? There is very little sign of it. Gregory of Tours, although of an aristocratic Roman family, seems hardly aware the empire has gone at all; his founding hero was Clovis, and all his loyalties Frankish. Paul the Deacon wrote up Romans and Lombards alike, and, although he knew well how violent the Lombard invasion was, it seemed to him inevitable, and he was proud of his Lombard antecedents. To those who did not warm to the image of Scandinavia as the ‘womb of [Germanic] nations’, there was Troy as another non-Roman origin myth, and also the Israel of the Old Testament (the Franks in particular came to use the latter imagery frequently: see Chapter 16). And if writers did not focus their identity exclusively on ethnic origin, they identified with their province instead, as with Isidore of Seville’s praise of Spain in the 620s: ‘Rightly did golden Rome, the head of nations, desire you long ago. And . . . now it is the most flourishing people of the Goths, who in their turn, after many victories all over the world, have easily seized you and loved you: they enjoy you up to the present time amidst royal emblems and great wealth, secure in the good fortune of empire.’ For Isidore, the man of the whole early medieval period most imbued with a pre-Constantinian literary culture, that was the past, and the present was equally glorious.
The ‘myth of Rome’ was indeed, more and more, the new Christian Rome of basilicas and martyrs’ tombs. The guidebooks for pilgrims do not put particular stress on the huge pre-Constantinian buildings still standing in the city (as often, thirteen centuries further on, they still are); these were at best a monumental backdrop to the new numinous foci of the Christian world. Tombs were a metonym for Rome: in Ireland, the word ruaim, ‘Rome’, actually came to mean a monastic cemetery. This Rome persisted; the imperial image of Rome and its empire, by contrast, was increasingly abandoned. Carolingian rulers and their entourage would be much more interested in the Roman empire, reviving the title of emperor, using Suetonius on Augustus as a model for a biography of Charlemagne, copying classical texts, recommending Roman histories to each other; but they did so in a framework of a Frankish/Carolingian self-confidence so gigantic that they had to draw on all the models that existed, imperial Rome, Troy and Israel all together, so that they could surpass them. For them, too, however, the Rome they most valued was the Christian one, of basilicas, tombs, and, increasingly, popes.
The final point that needs to be made is that the beliefs and practices discussed here did not change much after 750. For the most part, pre-Carolingian examples have been used here, but instances from any century up to 1000, and indeed beyond, could as easily be given. The Carolingians (Louis the Pious in particular) largely unified monastic regulation, and the scale of their political control brought churchmen from all of the West into more regular contact. They developed a more regular educational system, especially for the élite, which reversed the intellectual isolation of figures like Bede, and which allowed theological debate and even heresy to reappear (see Chapter 17). But the basic presuppositions about religious practices described in this chapter continued to underpin the Carolingian reform programme, and indeed survived its partial eclipse at the end of the ninth century. As for aristocratic attitudes, and concepts of gender difference, these barely shifted at all in the Carolingian period. The political and cultural changes that will be discussed in Part IV of this book rested on a foundation of values that remained stable for a long time.
9
Wealth, Exchange and Peasant Society
In 721 Anstruda of Piacenza in northern Italy made an unusual charter. She sold her own legal independence to the brothers Sigirad and Arochis, because she had married their unfree dependant (servus). She and they agreed that her future sons should remain the brothers’ dependants in perpetuity, but her daughters could buy their independence at marriage for the same money, 3 solidi, that Anstruda herself had received. Although Lombard Italy was a relatively legally aware country (and Piacenza is not far from the capital), this charter breaks at least three laws: the law forbidding free-slave marriages; the law, or at least assumption, that the unfree were not legal persons, so Anstruda’s daughters could not be assigned future rights; and the law prohibiting female legal autonomy. Anstruda’s father Authari, a vir honestus or small landowner, consented to the document, but the money for Anstruda’s legal rights went to her directly, and she is the actor throughout. There is an ironic sense in which this account of a young peasant woman, even though she was selling her own freedom, shows how she could make her own rules, create her own social context, even in as restrictive a society for female autonomy as Lombard Italy. This may say something about Anstruda as a person; it also says something about the fluidity of peasant society in Italy.
So also do Sigirad and Arochis, who were some way from home. They were medium landowners and small-scale village leaders in Campione near Lugano in the Alpine foothills, 140 kilometres to the north of Piacenza. They kept charters about their servile dependants; a parallel text for 735 shows them buying control over a second free woman who married one of their dependants, in Campione itself, this time (in more orthodox fashion) from her brother. Their kinsman Toto successfully claimed the ownership of another dependant, Lucius of Campione, in a court case of the 720s, against Lucius’ firm opposition; Toto is also found buying a slave from Gaul called Satrelanus from a woman, Ermedruda, in Milan in 725. The members of this family got about, that is to say, and were interested in obtaining or keeping hold of dependants in a variety of different contexts. They were tough to deal with, as Lucius found; perhaps Anstruda’s daughters would have found it hard to get out of their control in the future. But this dealing in itself marks a certain fluidity; social relationships in and around Campione seem to have been quite complex.
I begin here with Anstruda and Campione as a way into understanding the complexity of early medieval peasant societies. But it has to be said at once that we do not know much about most of them; peasant social practices were too far from the aristocratic and ecclesiastical interests of the great bulk of our written sources. For the most part, our evidence for peasants in the pre-Carolingian West is archaeological; the relatively small number of western villages which give us enough documents to allow us to discuss real peasant actions tend, with only a few exceptions, to be ninth-century rather than earlier, and this chapter will indeed stray into the ninth century as a result. Otherwise, peasants are seen resolutely from the outside, by legislators and hagiographers, who have very moralistic reasons for mentioning them, and little sympathy for their values. But these hostile external observers were also in all our societies from social groups who were rather more powerful than the peasantry, and who were entirely prepared to coerce them if it was in their interests to do so. If we want to understand peasant society in the round in our period, we have to see it in the framework of an understanding of how much wealth and thus power other social groups had as well. This is why this chapter links general problems of economic structure with peasant society. We have to understand the issue of the distribution of wealth before we can understand how much peasant social action really was constrained, in all the different local realities of the West. But the distribution of wealth also has implications for every sector of the economy, which we shall look at in the second half of the chapter.
We saw in Chapters 5-7 that aristocrats varied substantially in their wealth across western societies. In Merovingian Francia, there were some really rich landowners, with dozens of landed estates each, and a highly militarized factional politics. Bavaria was like Francia, although probably on a smaller scale; only a handful of families (apart from the ruling dukes) seem to have been important owners. In Lombard Italy, however, the wealth of the aristocratic strata was much more modest, and the political dominance of kings was overwhelming. Visigothic Spain was more like Italy in that respect, as it seems from thinner data. And the wealth of aristocrats in Britain and Ireland was, as far as can be seen, ma
rkedly less; societies there were on a much smaller scale, and the economic difference between the aristocracy and the peasantry was much less marked. In all these cases, too, except for northern Francia (and Ireland, which the Romans never ruled), levels of aristocratic wealth were far lower in the early Middle Ages than they had been under the Roman empire.
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