Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (15 page)

Fig. 10. Böhner’s table showing development of pottery, glass and metalwork in Merovingian Gaul. The marked decline which Böhner sees from the seventh century onwards (Stufe IV) needs to be understood as beginning not in the year 600, which, as a cultural and historical marker is meaningless, but from the real watershed, which was somewhere between 625 and 640. All authorities now agree that the decline of Merovingian glasswork only began after the Arab blockade of the Mediterranean terminated the supply of raw materials from the Middle East. (After Edward James,
The Franks
.)

[1]
Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit, p. 88-90

[2]
Ibid., p. 90

[3]
Ibid., pp. 90-1

[4]
Ibid., p. 91

[5]
Patrick J. Geary,
Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World
(Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 8-9

[6]
See Robert Folz, op cit., p. 5

[7]
Patrick Geary, op cit., p. 98

[8]
Robert Folz, op cit., p. 5

[9]
Ibid.

[10]
Ward-Perkins, op cit., pp. 132 and 136-7

[11]
See P. Demolon,
Le village mérovingian de Brebières, Vie-VIIe siècles
(Commission départementale des monuments historiques du Pas-De-Calais, Arras, 1972)

[12]
Peter Wells,
Barbarians to Angels
(New York, 2008), p. 134

[13]
Ibid., p. 148

[14]
Geary, op cit., p. 101

[15]
Edward James,
The Franks
(Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1988), pp. 202-3

[16]
Wells, op cit., p. 134. That peasants of the time, at least in some areas, were taller than late medieval and early modern inhabitants of Europe is confirmed by studies from Anglo-Saxon England and south-western Germany. See Wells, op cit., p. 139. The stature achieved at this time (sixth/seventh century) was not again attained in these parts of Europe until the twentieth century.

[17]
Ibid., pp. 144-5

[18]
Ibid., p. 145

[19]
See eg. G. Halsall, “Childeric’s Grave, Clovis’ Succession, and the Origins of the Merovingian Kingdom,” in R. W. Mathisen and D. Shanzer, eds.,
Society and Culture in Late Antique Gaul
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 116-33

[20]
O. Doppelfled, “Das fränkische Frauengrab unter dem Chor des Kölner Doms,”
Germania
, 38 (1960), pp. 89-113

[21]
J. Werner, “Der goldene Armring des Frankenkönigs Childerich und die germanischen Handgelenkringe der jüngeren Kaiserzeit,”
Frühmittelalterlicke Studien
, 14 (1980), pp. 1-41

[22]
Ibid.

[23]
Ibid.

[24]
Ibid.

[25]
Edward James, op cit., p. 157

[26]
F. Daim and M. Mehofer, “Poysdorf,” in
Reallexikon der germanischen Alterumskunde
, 23 (2003), pp. 327-31

[27]
J. Werner, “Zur Verbreitung frügeschichtlicher Metallarbeiten (Werkstatt-Wanderhandwerk-Handel-Familienverbindung),”
Early Medieval Studies, I
(Antikvarist Arkiv, 38) (1970), pp. 65-81

[28]
Folz, op cit

[29]
See eg. B. Hårdh and L. Larsson, eds.,
Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods
(Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Lund, 2002)

[30]
Edward James, op cit., p. 151

[31]
Ibid.

[32]
Gregory of Tours, ii, 16

[33]
Quoted from the
Vita S. Droctovie
by Jean Hubert in
L’Art Préroman
(Paris, 1938), p. 9

[34]
Gregory of Tours, v, 17.

[35]
Patrick Geary, op cit., p. 101

[36]
Ibid., p. 151

[37]
Ibid., p. 178

[38]
Edward James, op cit., p. 230

[39]
Sidney Painter, op cit., p. 68

[40]
See Heribert Illig’s detailed examination of the Aachen Chapel, in
Das erfundene Mittelalter
(Econ Verlag, 1996). Here Illig shows, in literally dozens of architectural and artistic details, that the Aachen Chapel could not have been built before the mid-eleventh century.

T
he revival of the late Roman world after the adoption of Christianity is nowhere better illustrated than in Britain and Ireland. Both these regions saw a veritable “renaissance” of learning and prosperity between the fifth and seventh centuries. One of them, southern Britain, had been part of the Roman Empire, but had seen Roman civilization decline and almost disappear in the years between the third and sixth centuries. Other territories, such as Scotland (Caledonia) and Ireland, which had never been part of the Empire, were effectively incorporated into Latin civilization between the fifth and seventh centuries. Here Christianity took strong root and produced an astonishing flowering of culture. So striking was this in the case of Ireland that the island gained, in the sixth and seventh centuries, the reputation as the “Land of Saints and Scholars.”

Although the two adjacent islands shared much in common, there were important differences; so it is perhaps best to deal with each separately. Let’s look first at southern Britain; modern England.

* * *

We know that, of all the provinces of the Western Empire, the Province of Britannia was worst affected by the barbarian invasions of the fifth century. Here at least there is no question that Roman civilization was terminated, and that the entire region regressed into a more primitive state. Pirenne acknowledged this, and noted too that the Anglo-Saxons, unlike the Franks, Visigoths, and various other Germanic incomers, arrived as real invaders and destroyed the whole fabric of Roman life in the island. Uniquely, they transplanted their Germanic language to a new territory, completely supplanting Latin and the native Celtic language which yet survived in the countryside. The fact that very few Celtic or Latin words made their way into Anglo-Saxon also suggested a major clear-out of the native population. In addition, whilst the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks and Vandals presided over a late classical civilization with urban settlements, Mediterranean trade and gold coinage, in Britain the towns largely disappeared and a barter economy, with only a little silver coinage, prevailed.

Yet in Britain, as in all other areas of the Roman Empire, the real “decline” began long before the invasions of the fifth century. It started two hundred years earlier. This has been illustrated most dramatically by the archaeology of London. We hear that, “Beginning in the third century and continuing into the fourth, there is clear evidence for major changes in what people were doing in the city [London]. Two changes are particularly evident, one involving the reuse of stone architectural elements, the other the deposition of soil over much of the formerly built-up areas.”
[1]

The above writer continues:

“During the third and fourth centuries, some large public structures built of stone were allowed to fall into disrepair, whereas others were carefully taken down, apparently for reuse of the stone elsewhere. Some of the stone was employed for building a new wall along the north bank of the Thames. Excavations in the 1970s in Upper Thames Street, along the course of the Roman river wall and the bank of the Thames at that time … recovered sculpted stones and fifty-two blocks of cut stone that had been parts of standing structures. Some of the sculpted stones, carved with floral ornament and images of deities, had formed parts of monumental arch. Others, also with images of deities carved in relief, were parts of a tableau, or screen, twenty feet in length …

“Some of the stones removed from large public structures were used for building houses for wealthy individuals during the third and fourth centuries. … Even sculptures such as statues and tombstones were recycled as building stone. This practice of dismantling buildings to procure the stone blocks, and removing statues and gravestones to use the material for construction, seems strange to us, but it was common practice in the late Roman period and is well documented at many cities during the fourth century.”
[2]

Concomitant with this demolition and recycling of existing monuments, there appeared in London, as well as many other cities of the Roman world during the third and fourth centuries, a layer of dark humic soil, sometimes more than a meter thick, containing cultural debris – pottery, bones of butchered animals, glass fragments, etc – mixed into it, covering occupational remains of earlier centuries. This “dark earth,” as it is popularly known (not to be confused with the Younger Fill of the Mediterranean regions), was once regarded as evidence of decline and abandonment of Roman urban centers. However, for a variety of reasons, this interpretation has been dropped. It is now thought to represent not abandonment so much as a change in the urban environment. “The dark earth,” says Wells, “has been found to contain remains of timber-framed, wattle-and-daub huts, along with sherds of pottery and metal ornaments datable to the late Roman period. These observations demonstrate that people who were living on the site were building their houses in the traditional British style rather than in the stone and cement fashion of elite and public Roman architecture.”
[3]
“What are we to make of these two major changes reflected in the archaeology?” he asks. “After a rapid growth in the latter part of the first century, London emerged as a stunning center of the Roman Empire on its northern edge, with the monumental architecture, a thriving commercial center, and a military base characteristic of the greatest Roman cities. The third and fourth centuries at London are marked by a stoppage in major public architecture and a reverse of that process, the dismantling of major stone monuments, at the same time that much of the formerly urban area seems to have reverted to a non-urban character.”
[4]

We thus have ample evidence in the province of Britannia of the great crisis and contraction of Empire in the third century that we have noted elsewhere in Europe. Whatever may have happened on the European mainland in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, when the spread of Christianity may have revived the birth rate and halted population decline, there was to be no recovery in Britain. Here the barbarians began a war of annihilation against the native Romano-Britons, with the consequent complete disappearance of Latin civilization in the region. The five centuries which followed were a true Dark Age, with all urban settlement gone and its replacement by an illiterate and warlike culture so primitive that it even forgot how to make pottery.
[5]
Or so we have been told until recently. This narrative has always jarred somewhat with the written sources, which seemed to speak of a flourishing Christian society, from the mid-seventh century onwards, complete with prosperous towns like London (known as Lundenwic) and monastic institutes of learning producing artistic and literary masterpieces.

Fig. 11. Reconstruction of seventh century English Winchester Cathedral. (after M. Biddle). By the year 600 such structures, based on Roman and Byzantine architectural models, were being constructed in England. These were the first stone structures to appear in southern Britain for over two centuries.

The most recent discoveries of archaeology have tended to support the literary sources, in a rather dramatic way.
[6]
Excavations in London at the site of the Royal Opera House, carried out between 1989 and 1999, have revealed for the first time an extensive settlement area occupied during the early Anglo-Saxon epoch, from the sixth century onwards. “The community,” we are told, “was actively involved in manufacture and trade. Ironworking was practiced, as was the manufacture of jewelry of silver and gold. Wine bottles from abroad attest to the importation of wine. Workshops of butchers, hide tanners, and bone and horn carvers have been identified. The area of modern London around Covent Garden is now known to have been the site of a major settlement during this early medieval period. Excavations have revealed numerous house foundations, ditches, and storage pits and substantial evidence of manufacturing and commercial activity. Indications of industry include kilns for firing pottery, decorative pins of different kinds, combs made of antler, and loom weights attesting to weaving on the site. West of Covent Garden, where Trafalgar Square now is located, were farms that produced the foodstuffs for the crafts workers and merchants. Food remains in the Covent Garden settlement indicate that wheat, barley, and rye were particularly important in the diet of the people there, along with the meat from cattle, sheep, and pigs. Other foods included beans, hazelnuts, and berries and other fruits. Particularly well represented among trade goods are imported pottery from the continent and other parts of Britain, grindstones made of basalt from the middle Rhineland, and coins from many different places.”
[7]

The wine bottles, pottery and coinage found in London indicate trade with Mediterranean lands; and this impression is reinforced by finds throughout southern Britain. We have seen, for example, how Hodges and Whitehouse accepted that the discovery of amphorae and other pottery from Carthage and the eastern Mediterranean in sites along the south coast of England pointed to, in their words, a limited trade with the Mediterranean regions in the fifth and sixth centuries. But the most recent evidence, especially from Tintagel in Cornwall, points to a vigorous rather than a limited commerce. We now hear of “masses of luxury imports from Spain, northern Africa, and the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.”
[8]
These luxury objects, we are told, which included “large ceramic amphoras for transporting wine and olive oil, finely crafted bowls and plates, and ornate glass beakers,” arrived throughout “the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries.”
[9]
Cornwall, we know, was economically important to the Mediterranean civilizations from the Early Bronze Age onwards, owing to its high quality tin, essential for producing bronze. Evidently the region retained its importance into late Roman and Byzantine times.

The luxury products arriving here were traded throughout Britain and Ireland, and found their way to the feasting halls and fortresses of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic princes.

The wealth of these princes, who began (in England) to convert to Christianity and to foster Latin civilization from the late sixth century onwards, has been dramatically illustrated by great numbers of archaeological finds. Perhaps the most spectacular of these was at Sutton Hoo in East Anglia (south-east England). Here excavators in 1939 discovered an immensely wealthy royal ship burial, dating from around 600, complete with some of the most astonishing artwork and jewelry ever unearthed in the British Isles.

The fine quality and design of the metalwork, which shall be discussed more fully in a later chapter, indicated that it was the product of skilled and competent craftsmen, whilst the discovery of ten magnificent Byzantine silver bowls, together with two silver spoons, of the sixth century, are eloquent testimony to the vibrancy of trading and other cultural relations between Britain and the eastern Mediterranean at this time, supposedly the darkest of Britain’s Dark Age.

Sutton Hoo, according to one writer, has shown that “… historians have underestimated, or at least understressed, the amount of moveable wealth that was at the disposal of a great seventh-century English king. … It is no longer possible to regard the culture of the Anglo-Saxon courts as a stunted and poverty-stricken version of the environment which surrounded the barbarian kings of larger peoples.”
[10]
Again, says the same writer, “the discoveries greatly enlarge the range of contacts known to be possible to Englishmen of the early seventh century. … The discoveries at Sutton Hoo, like the traces of eastern influence on early English sculpture, should probably be taken as indications of peaceful, if sporadic, intercourse between England and the countries of the further Mediterranean.”
[11]