Barbarians- Secrets of the Dark Ages

by Richard Rudgley

  Their leaders are of two types – kings and military commanders. Kings belong to noble stock and are powerful but not absolute rulers. Generals are selected on the basis of their valour and leadership skills; their social background is not considered very important. The priesthood also has a significant role in society, leading worship in sacred groves; totems and emblems from these holy places are even taken on to the battlefield to inspire and support the soldiers.

  The people do not build temples to their gods, whose divinity makes the idea of trying to confine them to a building an absurdity. Nor do they consider it right to portray their gods in human form by way of paintings or sculptures. (Interestingly, the ancient Iranians, sometime easterly neighbours of the Germanic tribes, also had no temples or idols to represent their gods.) While gods such as Thor and Tiw (Tiu) accept animal sacrifices as sufficient, the rites surrounding the cult of the high god demand more, adding a more sinister element to their religious practices – using human sacrifices to propitiate the high god Wodan (also sometimes spelt Wotan or Woden – the Odin of Scandinavian tradition).

  Different tribes practise their own rites and observances that often result in such offerings. Among the Suevi group, the oldest and most prominent of them are the Semnones (who have been identified by some historians as the people who were known by the third century as the Alamanni). This noble position they underline with a barbaric ceremony in a sacred grove, attended by delegations from all the tribes of the same name. The proceedings open with a human sacrifice and all visitors must enter the grove only if they are bound by a cord to symbolise their domination by the supreme god (presumably Wodan). If anyone happens to fall down while they are in this sacred place, they may not get up again but must crawl or roll on the ground until they are outside the grove. The grove was believed to be both a place where the presence of Wodan could be felt and the birthplace of their people.

  Another group of tribes from Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland (including the Angles and possibly the Jutes) are described as worshippers of the goddess Nerthus or Mother Earth. They believe that she may ride out in her chariot, which is kept in a grove on a sacred island. The chariot is hidden from view by a cloth and only the priest may touch it. The chariot, accompanied by the priest, is drawn out of its shrine by cows and moves among the people. Days of rejoicing and celebration follow, public holidays in her honour when no conflict or fighting is permitted to take place. At the end of the festivities the cow-drawn chariot returns to its sacred place and then the chariot, its cloth and, so the story goes, the deity herself are washed in a secluded lake by slaves, who are drowned in the lake straight afterwards.

  On secular matters affecting the community, the people hold assemblies at appointed times. Among the roles played by the assembly is that of judge and jury: offences of various types are heard and sentencing takes place. The death penalty is in force and the means of execution varies according to the offence committed. Deserters and traitors are hanged from trees while cowards and sodomites are pushed down under a wicker hurdle into bogs. The discovery of the so-called 'bog bodies' has provided archaeologists with a grisly confirmation of Tacitus' account. The reason for the different types of execution was based on the principle that crimes that directly affected public life should be punished in a way that was open and visible to all, while shameful acts should be hidden away.

  Tacitus also describes the funerary rites. Prominent men are burnt on pyres, sometimes accompanied by their weapons and horses. They are buried under a mound of earth, the people not investing unnecessary labour by erecting stone monuments over the graves. It is not shameful for women to cry at funerals, but men are meant to keep their grief to themselves.

  Tacitus was particularly impressed with the people's basically monogamous marriage customs which, he notes, were quite a rarity among barbarians. A few important men may have more than one wife, but this is usually because of obligations to seal alliances through the bonds of marriage than any other reason. Adultery is almost unheard of but, if committed, the guilty wife is punished by flogging and subsequently ostracised by the community. Tacitus clearly uses his account of barbarian marriage and fidelity as a means to an end – to criticise the decadence of his own countrymen. He rather haughtily remarks: 'No one in Germany finds vice amusing, or calls it "up-to-date" to seduce or be seduced.'

  To limit the number of children – presumably a reference to contraception or other means of birth control – or to practise infanticide (at least of legitimate children) is not permitted. Germanic childcare also appeals to Tacitus, who cites with approval the fact that the children run around dirty and naked at home and so grow up to be vigorous and strong. He praises the women who, rather than leaving their children in the care of maids and nannies, all look after their own offspring and breastfeed them as well.

  Even outside the domestic sphere, the womenfolk have a powerful role in Germanic society. In Tacitus' own words:

  It stands on record that armies already wavering and on the point of collapse have been rallied by the women, pleading heroically with their men, thrusting forward their bared bosoms, and making them realise the imminent prospect of enslavement – a fate which the Germans fear more desperately for their women than for themselves. Indeed, you can secure a surer hold on these nations if you compel them to include among a consignment of hostages some girls of noble family. More than this they believe that there resides in women an element of holiness and a gift of prophecy; and so they do not scorn to ask their advice, or lightly disregard their replies.

  Divination and fortune-telling was a highly respected element of their spiritual life. Tacitus describes the procedures involved in the ancient art of prediction. A branch is cut from a nut-bearing tree and cut into strips. Signs or markings are then put on these strips, which are cast at random on a white cloth. If the query concerns the public good, then a priest will say a prayer; if it is a private matter, then the man of the house will say it instead. Then the questioner (whether priest or father) will, while looking up to the heavens, pick three of the strips, one after the other. He then looks at the markings on these particular strips. These signs give him his answer. If the answer is negative, then no further divination should take place that day. If the answer has been affirmative but requires further clarification, other methods of divining can be used (such as seeking omens from the flight and cries of birds or the neighing of horses).

  There has been a great deal of debate about whether the casting of lots described by Tacitus refers to the runes or not. It was once thought that the runes (the earliest form of Germanic writing) were not used at such an early date. Many people now believe that runes did exist at this time and that therefore Tacitus is almost certainly referring to them in this passage. The basis of this belief is that markings on what is known as the Meldorf brooch (found on the west coast of Jutland and dating from around AD 50) should be identified as runes – although other scholars would argue that this is open to question.

  A less spiritual kind of lot-casting was enjoyed by the Germans in the form of gambling: playing dice games was a serious business. They were always willing to up the ante and would even stake their status as a free man and risk becoming a slave on the fall of a single throw of the dice. So high were the stakes that they would play only when sober – in marked contrast to other social engagements. Hospitality was an essential feature of ancient Germanic life: stranger and friend alike must be offered hospitality according to the traditional code. Celebrations were focused around the social institution of the feast. Wine and beer flowed freely on such occasions; heavy drinking was (and still is!) an integral part of the feast. Drunkenness was perfectly acceptable at such gatherings and such sessions would go on all night long. Arguments, brawls and sometimes serious injuries and deaths would occur in this rowdy and alcohol-fuelled atmosphere.

  Whether they were staying sober and casting dice to let fate settle their future, or casting the runes to discover the will of the gods
, the Germanic people retained control over their own lands: Rome had never succeeded in destroying this particular barbarian hydra. The offspring of Mannus continued to flourish.

  Having viewed the story of the Germanic tribes and their origin through the pages of the history books, I shall now turn to the archaeological record. What do the relics from these 'dismal landscapes of Germany' – as Tacitus calls them – reveal about the unfolding story of the migration of its western tribes?

  Chapter Nine

  DWELLERS IN THE MARSH

  Those who wish for certainty in history and who like to feel the ground firmly under their feet are best advised to study some other period. For those who care to venture into a quagmire, the archaeological evidence, and the truly remarkable intellectual effort of archaeologists to make sense of it, are of basic importance.

  James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxons

  Germanic roots are entangled in the fabric of English culture. To track down the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons who lived in England, I travelled to Germany to see for myself their material remains in some of the key sites. My first port of call was the town of Bederkesa, which lies in a coastal area of northern Germany between the great Elbe and Weser rivers. The purpose of my visit was to see the collections of the castle museum where one of the curators, Dr Jorn Schuster, was able to show me artefacts from two crucially important sites for my quest: Feddersen Wierde and, the subject of the next chapter, Fallward.

  The Manor on the Mound

  Feddersen Wierde, which lies a few miles north of the major port of Bremenhaven, is the largest Saxon site found on the North Sea coast of Germany. Almost the entire settlement was excavated between 1955 and 1963, so a considerable amount is known about it. Today the sea has receded, leaving the site further inland today than it would have been in Saxon times. But even within the Saxon period, natural conditions changed dramatically.

  The settlement started around the middle of the first century BC with a solitary farmhouse on what was then a beach ridge. Some time in the first century AD the sea-level began to rise and the inhabitants of the village were obliged to build an artificial mound to live on (the word wierde is used by German archaeologists for 'man-made mound'). This was by no means a desperate act or an act of survival. There was no problem with the seasonal flooding of their fields for, provided the waters receded again, the settlement was able to function quite adequately – more than adequately, in fact, because the ebbing waters left behind a very fertile silt. For a few centuries this was highly sought-after farming land. Agricultural experiments by archaeologists in the region showed that although wheat did not grow well in these salty areas, oats and rye flourished under such conditions. But there would come a time when even these crops could not endure the saline soils and they too would wither and die.

  What had once been a tiny marshland village consisting of just four or five homesteads eventually grew at its zenith to having about twenty or thirty farms, with a total population estimated to be around 150 by the third century AD. The village seems to have been a peaceful place to live, for there are no signs of it being destroyed or badly damaged during its 500-year history. A few houses caught fire during the life of the village but even some of these were saved before they burnt to the ground.

  The size of the community and its continuity over a number of centuries seem to indicate that a more intensive and successful agricultural regime had begun to emerge in this region. Tacitus, writing at the end of the first century AD, portrays the agriculture at the time to be much more basic: they change the arable land yearly and thereby do not strain the soil to yield too much. He adds that they do not want to put in the extra effort to plant orchards, irrigate vegetable gardens or fence off meadows; they prefer to simply plant grain and be done with it. Clearly, if we are to take Tacitus' account as an accurate picture of German agriculture at the time, a different, more intensive, system must have developed shortly afterwards.

  This subsequent development involved elements of crop rotation and the use of livestock manure to replenish the soils. The end result of this seems to have been a significant rise in population. Although the inhabitants of Feddersen Wierde in particular were forced by the rising sea to move, in more general terms population increase in north-western Europe may well have been an impetus to migrate. In this scenario one can see similarities with the Gothic Wielbark culture, which expanded southwards from its origins in north-eastern Europe probably as a consequence of its burgeoning population.

  Not all the buildings were of the same size. There was a cluster of buildings that seem to have belonged to a house much bigger than the rest, and which could be described as a manor house or Herrenhof as the German archaeologists describe it. On this basis, we can conclude that there was definitely a social hierarchy in this community. Most of the homesteads were not just for housing family members but also livestock; typically, the eastern parts of the houses would have served this function. It was different in the case of the manor house, because one of the luxuries enjoyed by these richer families was that they did not have to share their living space with their animals.

  The kind of houses that these Saxon people built had much in common with those in the region both from earlier times (as far back as the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age) and continuing into the Middle Ages and beyond. One of the key features of their house construction was their inclusion of stalls in order that their animals could be kept inside in winter. When the Saxons and neighbouring peoples went to England, this feature of their house construction became less important as the climate was milder and did not require livestock to be protected from the elements.

  It seems that there is an important lesson to be learnt from this. House building is one of the most fundamental aspects of any culture. The ethnic or cultural origins of a people do not seem to be as important as the natural environment they live in. That is why the same basic designs recur in the same place (in this case northern Germany) over a period of time, despite the fact that the population and its ethnic make-up may have changed. This is not to say that the Saxons did not take their own building traditions with them when they went to settle in England; what they did do was modify or draw on native designs in order to adapt their knowledge to a new environment.

  Returning to the Herrenhofat Feddersen Wierde, there was also a dike (or perhaps a defensive rampart) along the north-east side of the manor, but it is not clear whether this was for keeping out water or whether it served some defensive purpose. There was also a palisade, the purpose of which is also obscure as it does not appear to have enclosed the perimeter of the house and so could have been of little use as a defensive measure. The possible solution to this problem that immediately springs to mind is that the dike (or rampart) was work in progress when the settlement was abandoned in the middle of the fifth century. However, this cannot have been the case as its construction dates to the second or third century – when the settlement was flourishing. Why it was unfinished therefore remains a puzzle.

  It is not just the size of the manor that marks it out as different to the other farms of the mound village of Feddersen Wierde – it is also what the archaeologists found in its grounds. Earlier in the life of the village, Roman material was scattered throughout the settlement, showing that at its height (in the second and third centuries) the whole community had contact with the Roman world. But as the Roman twilight turned to a deepening dusk, imperial coins and other flotsam and jetsam of the empire are confined to the manor and its people. Whether it was only the rich who could afford to keep contact with the Roman world, or whether they simply took control over incoming goods, is unknown.

  Local people from this region had been in Roman military service, as the material evidence from their graveyards proves. We should not think that these Saxon communities were populated by isolated country bumpkins without any knowledge of the outside world. Many men went off to the diverse regions of the Roman empire on military service, bringing back travellers' tal
es, trinkets, mementoes and perhaps, in some cases, even wives.

  I asked Dr Schuster, my host at the museum, why the Germanic peoples in this time lived almost exclusively in villages. This was despite the fact that they knew all about the Roman towns and even the big settlements of the Celts. He suggested it could have been something to do with the Germanic psyche – a desire for autonomy, privacy and independence: things less easy to get in a crowded, bustling town.

  Tacitus confirms that this was their preferred way of living. He tells us that in his day (around the same time that Feddersen Wierde was still a small village), it was well known that the people had no desire to live in cities and often did not even like their houses too close to those of their neighbours. To his Roman eyes, they selected their building plots at random, as the fancy took them. He remarks that each of the houses in their villages has open space around it (rather than being adjacent to each other as in the Roman way). Whether this is done as a fire precaution or simply through their lack of skill at building, he cannot say. We shall see later that the Germanic people were extremely adept woodworkers, drawing on thousands of years of experience in the craft. Tacitus was equally unimpressed with the rustic appearance of their wooden houses and remarks that they used neither stone nor wall tiles as a Roman would.

  No doubt life in the village of Feddersen Wierde was very close-knit, despite the links with the outside world. There was another building in the village that archaeologists have identified as a public meeting place. It would have been used rather like a village hall is today, for important community events and discussions. Each freeman would have had the right to speak his mind. With farming conditions by the fifth century beginning to steadily and quite quickly decline, the main topic of conversation at the village hall would have been the very survival of the community.