Empires and Barbarians (55 page)

The role of the Franks themselves in all this would appear to have been substantial, but not primary. As we have seen, Frankish forces become prominent only towards the end of the process, in the 460s. This pattern stands in marked contrast to the history of lowland Britain, where the disappearance of any imperial protection was quickly followed by the arrival of Anglo-Saxon raiders, mercenaries and migrants who displaced sitting Roman landowners in a pretty direct fashion. Unlike those Anglo-Saxons, therefore, the Franks cannot be fingered in any simple way for the destruction of Roman life north of the Loire, which began long before the Franks emerged as a major military power. Indeed, given that Roman interventions in Frankish politics had probably aimed, as with the Alamanni, at preventing the emergence of larger and more dangerous coalitions among them (
Chapter 2
), the unified Franks should themselves be thought of as basically a post-Roman phenomenon, in the sense that Clovis’ career would not have been possible had the Empire maintained its full military and political capacities.
⁷⁷
But if there is good reason to separate the erosion of Roman life in northern Gaul from the effects there of rising Frankish power, what role did Frankish immigration play there in the Merovingian sixth century?

In trying to answer this question, we are pretty much dependent upon archaeological evidence. Gregory of Tours does not deal with the issue of Frankish settlement, and the archaeology poses the same basic methodological problem that we have just encountered in lowland Britain. The new burial habit in northern Gaul coincides chronologically with the rise of Frankish power, but was everyone buried with gravegoods a Frankish immigrant? If so, we would be looking at something like a
Völkerwanderung
, since the new
Reihengräber
, replete with furnished burials, became widespread across northern and eastern Gaul (
Map 12
).
⁷⁸

There have been many attempts to resolve the problem. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century investigators were convinced that skull shapes could do the trick. Indigenous Celts, they argued, were brachycephalic (round-headed), whereas immigrant Germans were dolichocephalic (long-headed). Other scholars looked at details of burial rite. The use of sarcophagi was thought a uniquely Roman habit, and the same label was attached to burials without gravegoods, of which there are some in most
Reihengräber
. Sadly, none of these older methods works. There are no simple ethnic differences in skull shape, and explicitly documented Franks have been found in sarcophagi. Nor are the burials without gravegoods any more useful. These show a marked tendency to cluster on the edges of the
Reihengräber
, and modern excavation methods have shown that use of these cemeteries started in the middle and worked outwards. The real explanation for the absence of gravegoods is chronological. From the seventh century onwards (as was also the case in longer-lived Anglo-Saxon inhumation cemeteries – if cemeteries can have a long life), there was a marked decline in the use of gravegoods, probably under the influence of Christianity, until funerary rites returned to the unfurnished burial typical of the late Roman period.
⁷⁹

If no simple method has yet emerged for telling Romans from Franks, there is some entirely convincing evidence that some of the men buried with weapons in the sixth century were of indigenous Gallo-Roman stock. An excellent case study is the large, carefully excavated cemetery at Krefeld-Gellep on the Lower Rhine in northern Germany. This is one of few burial sites that remained in continuous
use from the late Roman into the Merovingian period. In c.500
AD
, close to an existing late Roman cemetery, a second cemetery was inaugurated with the interment of one richly furnished burial and subsequently continued in use with a pretty standard collection of Merovingian furnished burials. Opening the second cemetery, however, did not lead the first to close, and what happened there is striking. Furnished inhumation – with standard Merovingian collections of weapons and jewellery for males and females, respectively – quickly became the normal mode there too. The original excavator and secondary commentators have all concluded, surely correctly, that in the first cemetery an existing late- or now post-Roman population adapted itself to the new cultural norms inaugurated by the rich burial in cemetery two: a beautiful case of elite emulation at work. And what happened so demonstrably at Krefeld-Gellep is likely to have been happening right across northern Gaul, in other areas where existing late Roman cemeteries were entirely replaced by
Reihengräber
, and where, consequently, it is not possible to demonstrate a similar cultural evolution. Many of these new
Reihengräber
surely must include populations of Gallo-Roman descent who adapted themselves to the new Merovingian-era norms.
⁸⁰

A further body of evidence which seems, in part at least, to reflect this process consists of those cemeteries whose use began with one particularly rich burial, like that second cemetery at Krefeld-Gellep. Thanks to a half-century of careful work on the chronology of Merovingian material culture, this pattern has been documented at a whole string of sites: Mézières in the Ardennes, Lavoye on the Meuse, Pry, Gutlingen, Chaouilley in Lorraine, Rübenach, Héruvillette and Bale Berning. It might be tempting to think of many of the burials in such cemeteries as those of Frankish immigrants, but you can’t just assume so. This has been demonstrated at Frénouville in Calvados. Here, a freak genetic marker in the form of a cranial suture shows that substantially the same population remained in place before and after the rise there of furnished inhumation, even though the new rite appears in an entirely new Merovingian cemetery. The furnished-burial habit was imported into Frénouville, it would seem, by just the one elite family responsible for the rich ‘founding’ burial in the new cemetery, but by the mid-sixth century it had spread right across an indigenous population that now also used the new cemetery.
⁸¹
The evidence is unimpeachable, therefore, that, in part, the new habit of
furnished inhumation spread so widely over northern Gaul because the indigenous Gallo-Roman population adopted it with enthusiasm.

But what was the origin of this rite, and why was it adopted? One strand within modern archaeological theory tends, as we have seen, to interpret clusters of relatively rich burials as evidence of social insecurity and competition. Because status was not clear, families aimed to put on a competitive show for their neighbours. Such an interpretation is clearly possible in this instance. The rise of the Merovingian kingdom enforced, as we have seen, rules on social status that were new compared with its Roman predecessor, and you can see precisely why this might have sparked off social competition.
⁸²
But this is not the only possible explanation, nor in this case even the most persuasive one. For one thing, the same remaking of the social order happened south of the Loire, but this did not spark off burial competition. You could reasonably counter this with the fact that there the old elites survived with many more of the building blocks of their social distinction intact, so that there was no need for them to compete; but there are other more significant objections to the social-stress theory as well. Above all, the neatly laid-out
Reihengräber
look much more like highly organized communal spaces than arenas of intense social competition. Their carefully ordered lines strongly suggest that burial was being policed in some way. As indeed do the goods put in the burials: particular categories of dead – adult but not elderly males and young women at the height of childbearing – were consistently buried with more goods than others. Again, it has been suggested that this is because these deaths were more stressful, but the law codes tell us that this is when wergild was at its height, and that could just as well be the key point.

In more general terms, the legal evidence does indicate both that there were clearly marked-out status groups in Merovingian society – free, freed and slave (which interlinked with adjustments for age to give the precise value of any individual) – and that some clear functions were attached to the different groups. Free and freed could be called on to fight, for instance, but slaves were excluded from what was seen as a higher-status function. Other legal evidence also calls for public ceremonies to be held when an individual was promoted from one status group to another, and for the most part, these rural social communities were small enough for everyone to know one another.
⁸³
These observations suggest a significantly different interpretation, in
which burying males, particularly with weapons, certainly represented an assertion of status, but in which, at the same time, it was far from easy to claim an inappropriate status in small-scale, not to say claustrophobic, rural societies.

By itself, therefore, the social-stress argument is far from self-evidently correct, and the evidence we have for the spread of the furnished habit suggests another line of explanation, if one that retains an element of social stress within it. The richest of all the Merovingian furnished burials is in fact the oldest: that of Childeric himself. His burial (481/2) was followed in close order, perhaps very close order, by a series of rich, but not quite so staggeringly rich burials, known as the Flonheim-Gutlingen group – a name that doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. None of these graves can be dated with absolute precision. In stylistic terms, their gravegoods are so similar to those found with Childeric that the burials must be coincident with his, but they are located outside the limits of the old Roman province of Belgica Inferior, the territory that Childeric is traditionally thought to have bequeathed to Clovis. This suggests, on the face of it, that they followed at least Clovis’ initial conquests, but the argument is possibly circular, since, as we have seen, Childeric’s territories may have extended beyond Belgica Inferior. Either way, they clearly belong somewhere in the last quarter of the fifth century.
⁸⁴

There are no such chronological doubts about the further spread of the new burial habit. Next in line is a set of less rich though still strikingly well-furnished burials, Rainer Christlein’s so-called Group C burials – another far from exciting term, but at least easier to say. These burials provide both a chronological and a qualitative link between the small numbers of hugely rich burials dating to the late fifth century and the more numerous, if more modestly furnished, graves that are characteristic of the Merovingian period proper and which date in fact from the sixth century rather than the later fifth, and probably mostly from its second quarter rather than the first.
⁸⁵
On balance, this chronological progression of the habit suggests that the new burial rite gained general currency by trickle-down effect from the very grand funerals of Childeric and his immediate associates. The new rite represented a huge break from past Frankish practice – cremation followed by the scattering of the ashes – and hence it is perhaps not surprising that it took the best part of fifty years to take general hold.

It makes a kind of intuitive sense that Merovingian inhumation developed as the wider population started to emulate – on a more modest scale – the practices of its leaders. This effect is often seen, of course, but doesn’t add up to anything like a full explanation of the phenomenon. In the case of Childeric’s himself, the idea of mounting a really grand burial, dripping in gold, was probably a spin-off from the funerary habits of the Danubian style generated in Attila’s Empire at its height. The Germanic world had seen occasional clusters of rich burials before the fifth century, though none in properly Frankish areas, but as we saw in
Chapter 5
the Hunnic Empire marked a watershed in the deposition of wealth with the important dead. The staggering wealth of the Hunnic and immediately post-Hunnic horizons entirely eclipsed anything seen before in the amount of gold put in the ground. The Franks were not among the Huns’ most dominated subjects, but they did fall sufficiently within Attila’s orbit for him to have interfered in a succession dispute, and the Danubian style did generally change the norms of barbarian burial.

From that point on, the practice of rich burials for leaders became widely adopted, and lasted well into the sixth century. It would come as no surprise, then, for Frankish leaders of the generation after Attila to have adopted the practices of the greatest Empire that non-Roman Europe had ever seen. It is also true that Childeric and Clovis – it was the latter who presumably organized his father’s funeral – were busy changing the nature of Frankish politics. Both had every reason to mobilize Hunnic practice so as to mark out the fact – or claim – that Childeric had been a Frankish ruler quite beyond the ordinary. This certainly means that there was a strong element of competitive display in the revolutionary funeral Clovis arranged for him. Indeed, if the Flonheim-Gutlingen burials were of the same date, rather than a little later as is usually supposed, then the display would have become all the more competitive, since they could even have been the burials of rivals rather than lieutenants.

The subsequent spread of the habit more broadly down the social scale is not so easy to explain. What was powering it, obviously enough, was new wealth that became available within Frankish society thanks to the astonishing conquests particularly in the time of Clovis, but expansion did also carry on into the reigns of his sons. Against this background, it is perhaps reasonable to think of the later, but still comparatively rich, Group C burials as the crucial catalyst. These men
were presumably intermediate leaders whose families wanted to show off their high status by burying their dead along the chic new lines pioneered by their kings. This would be linked to a process of social competition, since Clovis’ conquests put a lot of new wealth into new hands, and what we are seeing here, it would seem, is the winners showing off. This reflex then worked its way down to a much more everyday social level, where, presumably, similar processes were at work, as the wealth generated by conquest percolated down the scale, generating winners who wanted to show themselves, and perhaps also losers who were desperate not to be seen as such, until the new order eventually solidified and produced the much more stable-looking
Reihengräber
cemeteries of the mid-sixth century.