Empires and Barbarians (51 page)

One line of approach has located the answer to this conundrum in developments internal to Britain before the Anglo-Saxons arrived. Some have seen the British rebellion of 409 reported by Zosimus as a kind of peasants’ revolt which not only threw off central Roman control but overturned the established social domination of the villa landowning class. The villas, of course, would be a natural casualty of such an uprising. More recently, Guy Halsall has argued that the villa estate structure of lowland Britain crumbled as a direct consequence of its separation from the imperial system under whose umbrella it had emerged, but he identifies a different sequence of development. In his view, the position of the villa owners at the top of the social heap depended on the relationships they had forged with the Empire, and when those ties were broken after 410
AD
, they had to work much harder to maintain their elite status. The profits from their estates, which they had previously used to build and decorate their elaborate villas and for other forms of conspicuous consumption, or to trade for valuable items of Roman manufacture (Mediterranean foodstuffs, fine pottery and so on), now had to be distributed locally instead, as gifts to establish networks of supporters. These networks replaced the Empire in structural terms, allowing the landowners to maintain their position in the new conditions, but were relatively expensive, leaving little or no surplus for them to invest in the old forms of conspicuous expenditure. As a result, villas and trading patterns quickly disappeared, and a competitive burial ritual – ‘furnished inhumation’ – grew up among them in lowland Britain as these men staged lavish funerals, depositing much finery with the dead as part of the struggle to maintain their social position.
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The plain peasants’ revolt version of the argument is not convincing. Despite the prevailing chaos, the contemporary Roman west throws up almost no evidence of this kind of activity, but plenty of local elites taking power into their own hands, and precisely in contexts where central imperial authority had failed to answer local needs. In 409 or thereabouts, Constantine III had long since abandoned his British base and his attention was focused firmly on Italy and Spain, where he was trying simultaneously to supplant the Emperor Honorius and to deal with the Rhine invaders who were now established south
of the Pyrenees. To my mind, and here I am in full agreement with Halsall, the British rebellion is much more likely to have been of this standard kind, a response to Constantine’s neglect rather than a social revolution that was in any sense anti-Roman. Equally important, the
Life of St Germanus of Auxerre
portrays a distinctly Roman-looking elite of lowland Britain seeking help from a still Roman continent against both invasion and heresy in the 420s and 430s. Romance (simplified Latin) remained the spoken language of lowland British political life well into the fifth century, and I am also inclined to believe that Gildas’ famous reference to the British seeking help from the Roman generalissimo Aetius, ‘three times consul’, rests on something concrete. All this would mean that a Romanized British landed class was still looking in a Roman direction, and had held on to some of its Roman structures as late as the 440s. This makes the class-warfare argument unappealing.
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Halsall’s version of internal systems collapse is a much more possible explanation for two of the central phenomena in the fifth-century transformation of the British lowlands: that the villas disappeared and that inhumation furnished with graveoods came into fashion. In assessing the argument, however, it is only reasonable to point out why it exists. Halsall is the scholar we met in
Chapter 1
who has argued that to sidestep migration in explanations of archaeological change ‘is simply to dispose of an always simplistic and usually groundless supposition in order to enable its replacement with a more subtle interpretation of the period’. His explanation of developments in lowland Britain is entirely in line with this world view, since it is fundamentally internalist. The villas disappeared because of a crisis within lowland British society, which prompted hugely expensive competitive funerary display, and Anglo-Saxon immigrants are denuded of any major role in the action. But while the invasion hypothesis was certainly overused in the past, there can be problems with an a priori determination to deny migration any role of importance. The danger is that any argument will command assent among like believers just because it moves the historical spotlight away from migrants, whatever its intellectual and other qualities.
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And in this case, I would argue that there is a much more straightforward explanation for the disappearance of the villas available if you are not worried about being considered a simple-minded migrationist, and the virtues of economy
and Occam’s razor should not be forgotten. Equally important, the alternative explanation also does a better job of accounting for all the available data.

For one thing, it’s not clear that there was scope in the fifth century circumstances for Halsall’s vision – of the villas literally crumbling away through a purely British, internal political process – actually to have worked its way through in the decades after 409. According to the
Gallic Chronicle of 452
, Saxon attacks had already begun around the year 410, and the villas – large, isolated country houses of the wealthy – were both highly vulnerable to attack and obvious targets. We have encountered in
Chapter 2
the looted contents of one of their number which Alamannic raiders failed – for once – to get back across the Rhine. More generally, whenever Roman frontier security broke down in any region, villas were the first to suffer.
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There is every reason to expect, therefore, that any increase in outside attack would have affected the villa network immediately. To my mind, this makes it unlikely that a fairly lengthy process of internal erosion would have had time and space after 409 to unfold untouched by outside attack.

Equally important, the collapse of the villa network and the rise of furnished inhumation are not the only phenomena that need to be explained. What Halsall’s argument (or any version of internal-systems collapse) doesn’t easily explain is the degree of cultural change that accompanied the socioeconomic revolution of the fifth and sixth centuries. Not only did the villa estates of lowland Britain disappear, but by 600
AD
the region’s Latin-speaking Christian elite had been replaced by Germanic-speaking non-Christians. Halsall of course recognizes this, and accepts that there has to have been a significant degree of Anglo-Saxon migration to account for these shifts even if he provides no real mechanism to explain them, and is trying, overall, to decouple migration from what he sees as the more fundamental process of socioeconomic transformation. The profound nature of these cultural changes, however, needs to be taken fully into account.

For one thing, most of the items buried with the dead in the furnished graves were Germanic, but this is only part of the story of Germanization. What’s really striking about the written Anglo-Saxon language, which survives in a variety of texts dating from just after the year 600 all the way down to the Norman Conquest, is how little it was actually influenced by indigenous British Celtic. Loanwords are
few and far between, and there is almost no Celtic influence on its grammatical structures. This is telling us something important: that the spoken language in the various local dialects of the new landowning elite of lowland Britain as it had emerged by 600
AD
, the tongue that provided the basis for the extant written form of the language, was not only thoroughly Germanic, but also firmly insulated from contact with the native Celtic tongues of Britain. And in this era, language was transmitted within families, especially through mothers on whom most childcare devolved – one reason, as we have seen, why the Anglo-Saxon flow must have included large numbers of women. Incidentally, this also explains why, in later medieval examples where migration did generate large-scale language change, this occurred only when a peasant population (even an elite one of free, if fairly small-scale, landowners) was involved in the action, and was never generated by very small-scale aristocratic elite transfer along Norman Conquest lines alone.
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Similarly intense cultural transformation can be found in other areas too. Roman society was divided in the first instance into free and slave classes, with freemen subdivided further into
honestiores
(higher) and
humiliores
(lower). The
honestiores
were essentially the landowning class. Anglo-Saxon society as it emerges in our sources after c.600
AD
shared the categories of free and slave with the Roman system, but added to it a third: the half-free or freed class, a non-slave group which remained in permanent hereditary dependence on particular members of the freeman class. The free class was subdivided into gradations measured by different
wergilds
– social value as expressed in their ‘life price’, to be discussed in a moment – but all are envisaged as landowners, or at least landholders. This same triple division of society is found among all the continental Germanic groups of the post-Roman period, whereas the permanent freedman concept in particular was quite foreign to Roman society, where the offspring of freedmen became fully free. In all probability, therefore, this categorization of social classes had its origins among the Germanic immigrants. It’s not impossible to imagine each of these post-Roman Germanic-dominated societies evolving a tripartite division of society independently, but it seems unlikely.
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Taking full account of these cultural transformations allows us to redefine the problem. Clearly we need to explain the break-up of the villa estate network in the fifth and sixth centuries and the appearance
of burials containing Germanic clothing accessories and weaponry. But at the same time we need to account for the fact that the new elite of c.600
AD
spoke a Germanic language untouched by Celtic, and that society had been reordered along Germanic lines. Given this combination of phenomena, an altogether simpler explanation for the collapse of the villa structure suggests itself, one that raises no chronological problems and accounts for both socioeconomic and cultural revolution.

It starts by thinking a bit harder about that classic case of elite transfer, the Norman Conquest of England. What happened in the eleventh century, as we have seen, was that individual manors changed hands, as
Doomsday Book
graphically illustrates, but the prevailing network of manors was left undisturbed – the best outcome in both overall economic terms and for the individual manor owners. But the Norman Conquest could work in this fashion only because the incoming Norman elite was of the right order of magnitude to be able to take possession of the existing manor network without having to subdivide the estates. Thanks to
Doomsday Book
we can see what happened in some detail. By 1066, there were approximately nine and a half thousand manors in the English countryside, and the Norman settlement redistributed their ownership amongst an incoming elite of about five thousand families. The king, his tenants-in-chief, and various Church institutions each owned many manors by 1086, but this still left enough for each member of the new elite to receive his own estate. But what if William and his henchmen had had too many supporters to reward to give each his own manor? What if there had been fifteen or even ten thousand supporters of sufficient importance in the Conqueror’s following each to require a reward in the form of a property stake in the newly conquered kingdom? In that case, the political imperative to reward those supporters who had put William in control of England’s agricultural assets would have overriden the economically desirable outcome of leaving the highly productive estate network untouched. Kings and lords who did not satisfy the expectations of their most important supporters did not tend to stay kings and lords for very long. Not for nothing is generosity – measured in gifts of gold but also of land – highlighted as the key virtue of an early medieval lord.
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Had the incoming Norman elite been too large to be accommodated within the pre-existing estate structure, then the manors would have had to be broken up for political reasons, despite
the economic costs of doing so. The Norman Conquest can be seen as a very particular type of situation, where the incoming elite and the available agricultural production units broadly matched each other in scale.

The fact that, by comparison, the equally complex and productive Roman villa network was not left similarly undisturbed by the Anglo-Saxons is highly suggestive. Again, it would have been both much simpler and better in economic terms for the new arrivals to keep existing agricultural production units intact. The new Anglo-Saxon kings of lowland Britain would have had a more productive rural economy to tax, and the new elite would each have received a more valuable landed asset. But both of these considerations could only be secondary to the greater imperative of rewarding loyal supporters. As in the years after the Conquest, rewarding loyal service must have been the process that drove Anglo-Saxon land annexation forward, and in fact a king’s ability to find landed rewards remained a crucial dynamic in the longer-term development of the Anglo-Saxon world. As the seventh century progressed, it was the three kingdoms that could expand into open frontiers (Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria), and hence provide land that would attract a greater number of warriors, that eventually emerged as the great powers of the pre-Viking era.
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The fact that, despite the economic costs of doing so, the countryside was entirely reordered in the fifth century strongly suggests that the number of Anglo-Saxon followers to be accommodated in the landscape was too great for them simply to replace the existing Roman landowning class on a one-for-one basis.