This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The psychology of warrior culture in the post-Roman Frankish kingdoms Morris O'Connor, Patrick Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 01. Oct. 2021 The Psychology of Warrior Culture in the Post-Roman Frankish Kingdoms Patrick Morris O’Connor A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy King’s College London 2019 0 Abstract Warfare and violence in the post-Roman West have attracted much interest, and historians have used the insights of social anthropology and literary theory to interpret the evidence. To date, however, psychological and behavioural aspects of violence in late antiquity have been relatively neglected. As a result, the question of how ‘warrior cultures’ consistently produced individuals who were enthusiastic participants in ancient warfare, has not been properly explored. This thesis explores the warrior culture of the post-Roman Frankish kingdoms, through three sequential phases. First, by reviewing a range of modern literature on the causes and consequences of violence, the shortcomings of present assumptions about violence in this period – which tend to interpret it in strategic terms – are brought into relief. Violence is re-conceived as a uniquely powerful experience with lasting psychological effects on participants, victims and witnesses. And violent behaviour, including participation in warfare, is shown to be an outcome not just of culturally-bounded strategic thinking, but also of psychological and behavioural adaptation that comes about through experience. Second, the thesis puts the warrior culture of the Frankish kingdoms into historical perspective by looking at the the emergence of the Franks and other military groups of the late-Roman West. This section engages with the debates about the collapse of the Western Empire and the formation of the Frankish kingdoms, focusing on the evidence for violence and warrior subcultures in the fourth and fifth centuries. It is argued that the northern frontier was a hotbed of violent experiences and behavioural profiles, where militant subcultures, stimulated by Roman military activity and demands for manpower, were producing a surfeit of willing fighters prior to the Frankish takeover. Finally, the largest section of the thesis examines the evidence for the culture of violence in the post-Roman Frankish kingdoms through a detailed analysis of Lex Salica and the Histories of Gregory of Tours. It is argued that these are 1 valuable sources of information for understanding the warrior classes and their violence. Through close attention to the language and evaluations of violence in these sources, some aspects of contemporary attitudes and experiences of violence are reconstructed. And the mechanisms by which warriors were psychologically and behaviourally conditioned to embrace the horrors of battle are brought into relief. 2 Table of Contents Abstract 1 Abbreviations 5 General Introduction 6 Chapter 1: Violence, Medieval and Modern 20 1.1 – Present Assumptions and their Limitations 22 1.2 – Physiological and Psychological aspects of violent behaviour and combat motivation 31 Chapter 2: Franks and Roman armed forces around the Western Frontiers to c.395 44 2.1 – The Franks, Gaul, and the Gallic Armies to the Mid-Fourth Century 45 2.2 – Barbarians, Provincials and Frontier armies in the Later Fourth Century 57 2.3 – Frankish and Gallic armed forces in the Later Fourth Century: How ‘barbarian’, how ‘Roman’? 62 2.4 – Weapon Burials in Northern Gaul 73 Chapter 3: From Western Empire to Frankish kingdoms, c. 395-511 77 3.1 – The End of the Western Roman army, c. 375-475 79 3.2 – Discontinuity and Violence in fifth-century Northern Gaul, c.405-486 90 3.2.1 – Literary Evidence 91 3.2.2 – Archaeological Evidence 95 3.3 – The Political and Social character of the Frankish Kingdoms and their Armies 101 3 Chapter 4: Violence in the Salian Laws 115 4.1 – The Utility of Lex Salica 115 4.2 – The Economics of Violence in Lex Salica 125 4.3 – Non-lethal acts of Violence and their Equivalents 133 4.4 – Violence across Status Thresholds 139 Chapter 5: Interpreting the Violence in Gregory of Tours’ Histories 146 5.1 – The Presentation of Violence in the Histories 148 5.2 – Gregory’s Attitude to Violence 157 5.3 – Political Pressures and Omissions 162 Chapter 6: Violence and Violent Individuals in the Histories 171 6.1 – Evidence for Violence and Disorder in the Histories 175 6.2 – “Violence” and “Warriors” in the Histories 185 6.2.1 – “Violence”: interficere, spoliare, adpraehendere, caedere 186 6.2.2 – “Warriors”: viri and pueri 204 6.3 – Violently Socialised Individuals in the Histories 223 Overall Conclusion 245 Appendix: Graphs illustrating offence distribution in PLS 253 Bibliography 255 4 Abbreviations Histories Gregory of Tours, Decem Libri Historiarum, (eds. Krusch & Levison 1951) Pactus Pactus Legis Salicae, (ed. Ekhardt 1962) Ammianus Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae, (ed. Rolfe 1950) Lex.Bur. Lex Burgundionum, (ed. de Salis 1892) Lex.Vis. Lex Visigothorum (ed. Zeumer 1902) Ed.Roth. Edictum Rothari (ed. Bluhme 1868) Leg.Liut. Leges Liutprandi (ed. Bluhme 1868) Cod.Theo. Codex Theodosianus (ed. Mommsen & Meyer 1905) Pan.Lat. Panegyrici Latini, (eds. Nixon and Rodgers 1994) ND Notitia Dignitatum (ed. Böcking 1853) Vegetius Vegetius, Epitoma Rei Militaris (ed. Lang 1869) Zosimus Zosimus, Historia Nova (trans. Anonymous 1814) MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica SRM Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum CAH Cambridge Ancient History AHR American Historical Review 5 General Introduction “All arts and all works progress through daily practice and continual exercise... Even to this day the barbarians think this art alone deserves their attention... For those who have not for a long time, or never at all, seen men being wounded or killed are greatly shocked when they first catch sight of it, and confused by panic start thinking of flight instead of fighting.”1 - Vegetius, De Re Militari, c. 400 A.D. War – the ‘art’ of killing and forcibly subduing humans en masse – is a difficult business, and even more than in the modern world, ancient warfare could be an intimately and horrifically visceral experience.2 As Vegetius so lucidly explained, the difficulties entailed are not merely practical but psychological in nature, and the kind of ‘practice’ required to overcome such psychological difficulties cannot be reduced to dry, repetitive, technical exercise. In his opinion, competent warriors were also the outcome of a process of what modern psychologists might refer to as ‘conditioning’. While many of Vegetius’s claims are questionable, this one has proven to be well-founded, being confirmed and elaborated in recent generations by field research into violence in all kinds of contexts. And it calls our attention to two axioms which will underpin the present thesis: First, in any period, the treatment of soldiers as mere automatons at the disposal of their commanders, or of an army as a ‘military machine’3 which seems to act merely as an extension of the personal ambitions and proclivities of its leader, is inadvisably reductive.4 And second, psychological preparation for the battlefield comes about as much or more through prior experiences of violence as it does through regular training or discipline. 1 Milner, N. P. (trans.), Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science, (Liverpool 1993), III.10 [p. 86- 8] 2 Grossman, D. On killing: the psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society, (Boston 1996); Van Wees, H. Greek Warfare: myths and realities, (London 2004) 3 Contamine, P. (trans. M. Jones), War in the Middle Ages, (Oxford 1984), p. 23 4 Keegan, The face of battle (1976), p. 35-50. See Chapter 1, p. 29-30 6 Thus even the Roman empire, with its elaborate system of supply, reward and punishment, could not guarantee the efficacy of its soldiers in the field, and sought to compensate by recruiting bolder and more aggressive recruits from its frontier provinces and beyond the empire, who participated in what historians have sometimes referred to as ‘warrior cultures’.5 It was widely accepted, without question, that these wild people were ‘fecund’ sources of a product that the empire always needed, but struggled to manufacture, even with all the powers at its disposal: men who were