Empires and Barbarians (46 page)

As mentioned earlier, in the last decade or so it has become fashionable in some quarters to argue that the rise and fall of the Hunnic Empire shows that group identity in the period was highly malleable, and that the process involved little in the way of migration. This is certainly an area where the evidence base is less than we would like it to be. There are enough solid pointers, however, to indicate that both of these stands require modification. The historical evidence, first of all, makes it clear that becoming part of the Hunnic Empire did not mean that one became a Hun. The Empire was an essentially unequal, involuntary confederation. All the participating non-Huns we know about were forced to join, were systematically exploited under its auspices, and eventually fought their way free of its domination. In light of this, it becomes less surprising that larger group identities were not broken apart by participation in its structures. The Huns themselves had a basic interest in maintaining these identities, since being a Hun was to occupy a position of privilege over others, while from the subjects’ perspective holding on to a larger group identity offered the likeliest route, when opportunity arose, of throwing off Hunnic domination.

For many of the groups mentioned in our sources, the information available to us is not good, and for some, particularly the Lombards, seriously deficient; but these observations on identiy sit entirely comfortably alongside the better information, such as there is, about the migratory processes involved in the Empire’s creation and destruction. The Amal-led Goths are consistently described as a large, mixed population, comprising ten thousand-plus warriors on the move with dependent women and children and a wagon train several thousand
strong. This description is derived from a variety of contemporary historical sources whose reports are consistent, detailed and circumstantial. It is also the image of these Goths on the move given at the court of their king in Italy. Any evidence can be disputed, but the grounds have to be reasonable, and in this case objections are largely based on only a partial reading of the modern scientific literature on the workings of group identity. In broadest terms, the demographic effect of the Hunnic Empire was to suck large numbers of militarized groups into the heart of central Europe, whether as part of its build-up of power or to take advantage of the chaos of its collapse. Once the constraining influence of Hunnic power had disappeared, such a concentration of military potential could not but generate intense competition in which some of the smaller entities lost their independence, but which, overall, prompted many of the groups to leave the region quite as quickly as they had entered it.

At first sight, the role played by different degrees of development in all this action is not so obvious as, say, in the third-century Germanic expansions. Most of the migratory action examined in this chapter looks initially very political, associated either with Hunnic empire-building or the fallout from that Empire’s collapse. But first impressions can be misleading. The Huns built their war machine in the Middle Danube region precisely because of unequal degrees of development. It was a conveniently situated base from which to launch the raids and protection rackets that would give them a share of the wealth of the Mediterranean as mobilized by the taxation structures of the Roman Empire. And Attila’s demands, recorded for us in detail by Priscus, really were all about cash. Holding the Huns’ war machine together at all, moreover, would have been quite impossible without Roman wealth to lubricate its mechanisms. Variations in the prevailing levels of economic development also dictated, after Attila’s death, the general directions of the moves made by the various groups who wanted to opt out of the competition. The vast majority, as we have seen, moved south, attracted, again, by the wealth of the Mediterranean; but political structures then again enter the frame. Only if a group was content to be broken up and lose its political independence, following the path trodden by the last son of Attila and some of the smaller former satellites, could it move permanently south and east towards the Byzantine Empire, whose military strength remained largely intact. Theoderic’s Amal-led Goths were numerous enough to survive there
in the short term, but not numerous enough to force Constantinople into a lasting agreement, so that this seeming exception in fact reinforces the point.

For those with grander ambitions, then, south and west were the directions to take. The obstacle posed to western migration in previous eras by west Roman frontier fortifications and the troops that manned them had been removed, and there was no repeat of third-century patterns of expansion, which had seen Germanic groups spill eastwards to become dominant in areas north of the Black Sea (
Chapter 4
). During the Hunnic imperial period, central and southern Europe periodically witnessed great concentrations of warriors and their families clogging the roads of the region. At more or less the same time, different kinds of migration were affecting the northwestern fringes of the Roman Empire. To complete our survey of the traditional
Völkerwanderung
, we need now to turn the spotlight on the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks.

T
HE PROVINCES OF
B
RITAIN
fell out of the Roman system round about the year 410. They then largely disappear from view for the next two hundred years, one modern historian rightly calling these the ‘lost centuries’ of British history.
¹
When they came back into view in c.600
AD
, much of the rich farmland of lowland Britain (the area covered essentially by modern England, the heartland of the old Roman province) had on the face of it fallen into the hands of outside invaders. Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons had replaced indigenous Celtic- and Latin-speakers as the dominant social elite. Two hundred years before, Angles and Saxons had been roaming lands the other side of the North Sea. Within the same timeframe, the provinces of Roman Gaul suffered a similar fate, falling under the political domination of intrusive Germanic-speaking Franks, whose previous haunts had been east of the Rhine. The degree of cultural change in Gaul was nothing like so complete as north of the Channel. South of the River Loire, many of the sixth-century descendants of the old Roman elites of the region were still enjoying the landed estates accumulated by their ancestors under imperial rule, and much of their material and non-material culture retained a distinctly sub-Roman flavour. Even in Gaul, however, things were very different north of the Paris basin. There, the use of Germanic languages spread westwards at the expense of Latin and Celtic, and neither historical nor archaeological evidence gives much sign that the Roman gentry and aristocracy of this region was still recognizably in place by 600
AD
.

The Frankish takeover of northern Gaul poses many of the same questions as the Anglo-Saxon seizure of lowland Britain. How central was migration to the political and cultural changes observable in these
north-western corners of the Roman world? And what form did that migration take? In the past, Anglo-Saxon and Frankish expansions have both been seen as western expressions of the great and pan-Germanic phenomenon of
Völkerwanderung
which burst into action at the end of the Roman imperial period. More recently, they have been recast as examples of the more limited migration model known as elite transfer. The classic archetype of elite transfer, as we saw in
Chapter 1
, is the eleventh-century Norman conquest of England. Its outlines are comprehensively documented in
Doomsday Book
, which tells us who owned what land in the country both before the Normans arrived – on 5 January 1066, to be precise: ‘the day that King Edward [the Confessor] lived and died’, in its own evocative language – and twenty years later. Its evidence leaves us in no doubt that the incoming Normans in small but politically significant numbers had inserted themselves as the new landowning class of England in between. Can the same limited form of migration satisfactorily explain the transformations that unfolded in lowland Britain and northern Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries? A more comparative approach suggests that they can’t, and taking the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon cases together, instead of separately, as is usual, helps explain exactly why not.

It can’t seriously be doubted that migration played some part in transforming Roman Britain into Anglo-Saxon England, but visions of its extent have varied dramatically. In the nineteenth century, it was generally thought that large numbers of immigrants had, in England at least, more or less entirely displaced the indigenous Romano-British population of Celtic origin, driving any survivors westwards into Wales, Devon and Cornwall, or across the sea to Brittany. Victorian, Edwardian and even later schoolchildren were brought up to believe in an Anglo-Saxon invasion which started with Hengist and Horsa in Kent and rolled triumphantly onwards. This vision of the past rested substantially on surviving narrative sources, particularly Gildas’
Ruin of Britain
and the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. These were always recognized as
a touch on the thin side, but could be mined for a story of unremitting hostility between Anglo-Saxon invader and indigenous Celt, and of the invader’s eventual success. By 1900, it rested on much larger blocks of evidence too: language and place names. The overwhelming majority of the place names of modern England were by then known to descend from the Germanic tongue of the Anglo-Saxons, not the Celtic of the Romano-British, and the latter had also left little obvious trace on the modern English language. Celtic roots could be detected only in the names of some main rivers. The great age of Victorian railway-building had added a third plank to the argument. A whole series of cemeteries excavated in the later nineteenth century, as branch lines multiplied, provided plentiful evidence of a post-Roman material culture brought by the invaders from the continent, and very little of any surviving Romano-British population. The term hadn’t yet been coined, but, in traditional views, the Anglo-Saxons were considered to have engaged in a highly effective process of ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Since the 1960s, broad consensus has broken down into sometimes vitriolic disagreement. No one now believes in mass ethnic cleansing, and no one believes that there was absolutely no migration, either. The range of opinions in between is vast, but two broad clusters can be identified. Many historians and some archaeologists perceive the evident Anglo-Saxonization of lowland Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries to have been brought about through a hostile takeover, which involved large numbers of migrants from northern Germany and the Low Countries. A second group of opinion, on the other hand, sees the process as having been effected by many fewer continental European immigrants, whose cultural norms then spread broadly and essentially voluntarily through the existing population: elite transfer followed by cultural emulation. This is subscribed to by some historians but many more archaeologists, and is obviously heavily influenced by the general rejection of the old mass-migration models inherent to culture history.
²
Why is there so much disagreement?

Here again, as with so many of the subject areas tackled in this book, the escape from nationalist visions of the past has had a profoundly liberating effect. No one would now suppose that Celts and Anglo-Saxons
must have been hostile to one another simply because they were Celts and Anglo-Saxons. And, in fact, after 600
AD
, historical sources show that the different kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England were just as likely to fight each other as their surviving sub-Romano-British counterparts, and would sometimes even ally with the latter against their fellow Anglo-Saxons. The post-Roman world of largely western and northern Britain also varied enormously within itself. One of the most exciting discoveries of recent years has been the revelation, from close analysis of the language used in inscribed standing stones, that there survived in western Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries a Romance-speaking substantially Roman elite, while their more northern British counterparts were always Celtic-speaking.
³

But if shifting world views have allowed existing evidence to be read in new ways, reinterpretation has also been driven forward by real gains in knowledge. Another great advance of the last fifty years has been an increased understanding of exactly how developed Roman Britain actually was. The study of pottery sherds gathered by surface collection has combined with strategically placed excavation to show that the population of late Roman Britain was in fact extremely large. An absolute figure cannot be generated (recent estimates run between 3 and 7 million, a massive margin for error), but it is now generally accepted that the English countryside was being exploited with greater intensity in the fourth century than at any subsequent point before the fourteenth. Roman Britain was no backwater, as Victorian scholars tended to suppose, but a thriving part of the Roman world. The idea that virtually its entire population could be driven westwards by invaders is thus much more difficult to sustain than when H. R. Loyn wrote, ‘The story of Anglo-Saxon settlement, when looked at in depth, yields more of the saga of man against forest than of Saxon against Celt.’
⁴

The fact that modern English place names are so overwhelmingly of Anglo-Saxon origin has also been reinterpreted. Most of them – it has emerged – were formed only several centuries after the initial Anglo-Saxon takeover, when rural settlement structures finally became more permanent. The crucial moment was the linked emergence of stable landed estates – manors – and villages, a development that gathered pace only after c.800
AD
and lasted through to the eleventh century. By that date, Anglo-Saxon had long been the dominant tongue of the landowning class, so it was hardly surprising that its new estates
received Anglo-Saxon names. By the same token, however, since this naming process began two to three hundred years after the initial Anglo-Saxon settlement, place names have become much less good evidence that their Celtic and Roman antecedents had been swept away by a deluge of Germanic settlers. More than two centuries of intervening history is plenty of time, potentially, for the Germanic language to spread through an indigenous population by processes of cultural assimilation.
⁵