Violence in the Barbarian Successor Kingdoms*

chapter 11 Violence in the Barbarian Successor Kingdoms*

Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, completed after 591 ce, is by far the most detailed account of life in a successor kingdom of the Roman Empire and, judging by this account, life in Frankish Gaul was very violent indeed. The Chronicle of Fredegar, mid-seventh century, leaves the same impression. From these two sources it has been concluded that life in Frankish Gaul was a “free for all,” in which the uncontrolled passions of barbarians had free rein and life was nasty, brutal, and short. To cite Dill: “The Roman peace which gave the world almost unexampled calm and prosperity has vanished . . . passion greed and bold disregard of moral tradition have followed great wars and triumphs of military strength. . . . The long tranquility of the Roman sway ended in the violence and darkness of the Middle Ages.”1 But more recent scholarship suggests that this conclusion is wrong or at least much too simple. For a very different picture is provided by some twenty- four documents, the so-called placita, which record the settlement of land disputes in the court of the Frankish king. These documents reveal that there existed well established judicial machinery for settling disputes without resort to force, based on detailed and pedantic procedures, laid down in manuals of formulae.2 This judicial machinery used written documents and required the survival of considerable Roman legal culture.3 The judicial rules were sanc- tioned not only by the power of the king but also by that of the magnates of the land, in whose interest it was that there should be functioning institutions, where land disputes could be settled peacefully. The procedure was therefore based on consensus. This meant that it could not easily be changed, even by royal edict. But it also meant that the courts could function even under a weak ruler.4

* This article was previously published as ‘Violence in the Barbarian Kingdoms,’ in Violence in Late Antiquity, eds. H.A. Drake with E. Albu, S. Elm, M. Maas, C. Rapp, M. Salzman, J. Latham, Aldershot / Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 37–46. 1 S. Dill, Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London, 1926) 306–7. 2 K. Zeumer (ed.), Formulae merowingici et karolini aevi, MGH leges 5 (Hannover, 1886). 3 P. Wormald, “The leges barbarorum,” in H.-W. Goetz, J. Jarnut, and W. Pohl (eds), Regna and Gentes (Leiden, 2003) 21–53, especially 42–4. 4 P. Fouracre, “Attitudes to violence in seventh- and eighth-century Francia,” in G. Halsall (ed.), Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge, 1998) 60–75; P. Fouracre, “Placita

Comparable developments are documented in the Lombard kingdom.5 There too we seem to have a conflict between the literary sources and the documentary evidence. For Visigothic Spain the conflict of evidence is less strong but perhaps only because we have practically no Visigothic documents and only very scanty literary evidence, certainly no narrative history remotely comparable to Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks. That Roman administra- tive and legal traditions continued to exercise a greater influence in Visigothic Spain than in the other regna is shown by the royal Code, modelled on that of Justinian. These laws also show that the Visigothic kings struggled to assert a Roman concept of royal power against the self-assertion of the powerful and armed nobility.6 Faced with the need to reconcile seemingly contradictory evidence, scholars currently argue that it is not useful to discuss whether one society was more violent than another or, more specifically, whether the society of the regna was more violent than the society of the Empire.7 So Fouracre writes, “We can nei- ther tell whether Merovingian society was becoming more or less violent, nor say whether it was more or less violent than any other early medieval society. What can be done is to comment on specific instances of violence in relation to the sources of information about conflict and its resolution.”8 No longer content simply to register, and perhaps condemn, violent acts, scholars now define situations in which violence is employed with a view to establishing the functions of different patterns of violent behavior in different societies.9 So it has been shown that in Merovingian Gaul, and in Lombard Italy, violence, or the threat of violence, paradoxically played a positive part in bringing disputes before the courts and thus helped to maintain social rela- tions which were on the whole quite peaceful and orderly. The tendency has therefore been to stress the peaceful and not the violent aspects of dispute settlement in Merovingian society.

and the settlement of disputes in later Merovingian Francia,” in W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986) 23–43. 5 C. Brühl, Studien zu den langobardischen Königsurkunden (Tübingen, 1971); C. Wickham, “Land Disputes and their Social Framework,” in Davies and Fouracre, The Settlement of Disputes, 105–24: 150 court cases. 6 L.A. Garcia Moreno, “Legitimate and illegitimate violence in Visigothic law,” in Halsall, Violence and Society, 46–59. 7 G. Halsall, “Violence and society: an introductory survey,” in Halsall, Violence and Society, 1–45. 8 P. Fouracre, “Attitudes to violence,” op. cit. (n. 4) 60–1. 9 Legitimate and illegitimate violence, public and private violence, perceived violence, violence as a call for help, ritual violence etc.