Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Kings and kingship 593
activity would meanwhile fracture tribal structures into a flotsam which new
leadership could reconstitute as new peoples. This would in turn explain the
emergence of a royal terminology whose point is precisely that a ruler embodies
his people’s entity.
119
Sucha modeldoes make sense of some of the evidence from late antiquity and
even the time when Germanic kings already controlled much of the West.
120
Ammianus Marcellinus is one of a set of fourth-century authors who call
Athanaric, ruler of the Goths, iudex, not rex.Athanaric was certainly a war-
leader and a member of a dynasty. He was also, if the Roman label has any
meaning, responsible for law, and perhaps in a sense for religion. However, he
was not what Goths gave Romans to understand that they meant by ‘king’.
121
Procopius has a remarkable story about the Heruli. They decided to dispense
with their rhex whom they anyway treated with little respect. Second thoughts
persuaded them that they were badly off ‘without ruler or general’, so they
sent a deputation all the way to ‘Thule’ (apparently Scandinavia) to find a
replacement among those with ‘royal blood’, of whom there turned out to
be a handsome number. Like any good ancient historian, Procopius was an
afficionado of the tall tale where barbarians were concerned. But this story may
serve to confirm that royal nobilitas was something Germans took seriously,
even if not quite sure why.
122
Finally, Bede says that the eighth-century Old
Saxons ‘have no rex but only a number of satraps...andwhen...warisabout
to break out, they cast lots . . . and all...obey the one on whom the lot falls
for the duration of the war’.
123
This is like the system among Germans of the
first centuries bc and ad, which was yet compatible with reges distinguished
by nobilitas.Itisafair guess that, like Caesar, Bede just could not recognise
kings who did not square with his own experience. His ‘satraps’ were quite
probably what other sources called regales; and his temporary Saxon duces were
what could develop into the sort of rex he did understand. How much of this
model of emerging Germanic kingship is really valid can never be known.
Monarchy would be recast all over again on Roman soil. What seems safe to
say is that kingship was hardly less native to Germans than to Celts. That, in
119
For fuller statements of this (hypothetical) schema, see Wormald (1982), pp. 145–6, and (1986a),
pp. 163–4.
120
For what follows, cf. Wallace-Hadrill (1971), pp. 8–20, and the especially penetrating survey by
James (1989).
121
Thompson (1966), pp. 44–6;Wolfram (1975); but for the true meaning of Themistius’ much-
quoted passage, see Heather and Matthews (1991), pp. 42–3,n.91; also Heather (1991), pp. 98–107,
120–1.
122
Procopius, Wars vi.14–15;cf. Av. Cameron (1985), p. 219.Onthis episode, see also Hedeager, chapter
18 above.
123
Bede, HE v.10.Bede also supplies dispassionate evidence that Anglo-Saxon kings were descended
from Woden, i.15; for the genealogical corpus, see Sisam (1953); Dumville (1976).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
594 patrick wormald
the last resort, must be why it was kingship, not emperorship, that was the
West’s central political institution for the next millennium and more.
Kings in power
124
In working the transformation of rex into rex/dux,Roman example as well as
Roman money and Roman policy was surely decisive. It was in battle that bar-
barians most often met an emperor. As time went on they were also likely to be
found in the ranks of his army. Imperial victory, humbled barbarians, generos-
ity to troops, were constant iconographical motifs, sounded not only by dozens
of triumphal arches all over the provinces, but also by coins and medals circulat-
ing beyond as well as within the Empire’s borders.
125
Forthat vast majority on
either side of the frontier whose experience of emperors remained exclusively
pictorial, the image of ruler as generalissimo must have been almost sublim-
inal. A strong case can be made that the Anglo-Saxon potentate honoured at
Sutton Hoo was meant to represent a Roman emperor, from gorgeous parade-
ground armour to rod of consular office.
126
YetSutton Hoo gives notice that
however necessary is Roman example in explaining the styles assumed by post-
Roman rulers, it is not in itself sufficient. Two similar military artefacts make
the point. In the helmet-plate showing the Lombard King Agilulf enthroned
between winged victories and suppliants emerging from towered cities, there
is much beyond crude workmanship to announce a post-Roman world. Agilulf
has flowing hair and beard and carries a sword, as emperors are rarely if ever
seen to do. Yet this is still a Roman victory ritual.
127
The Sutton Hoo helmet
also has ancient-world prototypes, but its closest analogues lie in headgear from
similar burials in sixth- or seventh-century Sweden. The late antique echoes
here hardly have the resonance they had for Agilulf’s smith.
128
Whatever its
Roman roots, the warrior ethic had been thoroughly assimilated.
Sutton Hoo Mound One contains treasures, weapons, and weapons that
are themselves treasures: it is demonstrably a warlord’s monument, testimony
to a more specifically military power than that of emperors. However, it is
not demonstrably a king’s monument. Sutton Hoo could be the cemetery of
124
Succession to kingship is overlooked here, as for the Irish. The important discussion of the Merovin-
gian position by Wood (1994), pp. 58–60, 91–101, 123–36, 234–8, may well hold good, mutatis
mutandis, for Visigothic, Lombard and perhaps even West Saxon monarchies.
125
Campbell (1984), pp. 35–6, 72–85, 142–8, 182–4;McCormick (1986), pp. 24–8, 32–4, 57–8; and, for
more on penetration of the Germanic hinterland by these images, Hedeager (1978).
126
W. Filmer-Sankey (1996).
127
Illustration, analysis and bibliography in McCormick (1986), pp. 289–93.
128
Bruce Mitford et al.(1975–83), ii,pp.186–97, 205–25; Campbell (1992), pp. 92–3:Sasanian pre-
figurations do not exclude the dance’s connection with the cult of Woden: Ellis Davidson (1988),
pp. 88–9.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Kings and kingship 595
a dynasty of duces on its way to what would later be recognised as regalitas.
129
However, a grave of a century and a half earlier, which heralds military power
as lustily as Sutton Hoo, was that of the known Frankish king Childeric I,
and its contents included his seal-ring. The worlds of barbarian warlord and
sub-Roman official had met when Clovis’ father was buried at Tournai in
481.
130
Tournai and Sutton Hoo are merely the most spectacular specimens
of warrior burials distributed throughout sixth- and seventh-century Europe
(except in Gothic areas).
131
Onereason why late Roman emperors were decreas-
ingly military in style and record was probably the resolutely civilian timbre of
upper-class life. The elite of the sub-Roman West looked more unambiguously
for leadership in battle.
It is most unlikely that all those buried as warriors belonged ethnically to
the Germanic-speaking peoples who had crossed the Roman frontier.
132
But
the personal names that aristocrats were beginning to give themselves point
to a more specifically Germanic legacy. As soon as they occur in significant
quantity, one or other of the two elements making up Germanic names is
likely to have warlike overtones:
Ag(il/n)/Ecg: (sword) blade (C)Hild: battle
Ang: (spear) point Gais, Gar: spear
Asc/Æsc: spear Grim: mask, helmet
B(e)adu: fight Gunt/Gu/yth: fight
Brand: sword Hath/Head: battle
Brunn: breastplate Sige: victory
(C)Hari/Here: army Vig: war, warrior
Other name-elements have equally pertinent connotations. ‘Wulf (Wolf)’ and
‘(C)hramn (raven)’ are the battlefield beasts of prey in heroic saga.
133
Evidence
of this sort of course needs careful handling. But there are cases of sixth- and
seventh-century individuals thinking about their names’ military meaning.
134
Another important etymological point is that a word for king used in Germanic
languages by the sixth century was in Anglo-Saxon form dryhten, meaning
129
This point, originally argued by Wallace-Hadrill (1960), and later abandoned by him ((1971),
pp. 69–71, and (1975), pp. 53–6), has recently been restated by Campbell (1992). Even if this was
the graveyard of those who led the East Anglians in battle, one might still argue that Bede’s HE
ii.12, iii.18 read back the vocabulary of his own day into the early seventh century, much as he may
have seen Old Saxon conditions in the light of his own experience (above, p. 593).
130
Description: James (1988), pp. 58–67; and further discussion, James (1992).
131
See the map in Engel (1970), p. 64; and for the Goths, cf. James (1980b), pp. 23–37.
132
James (1978).
133
F
¨
orstemann (1900).
134
Venantius Fortunatus, Ad Chilpericum Regem, lines 27–8 (a partly false etymology, however!); Felix,
Life of Guthlac c.10.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
596 patrick wormald
‘warband-leader’.
135
Its use is not confined to the literature of war. Its semantic
core contributes to the formation of a term for the king’s picked followers,
antrustiones,inFrankish law-codes.
136
The relevance of warrior society’sstaccato
rhythms to the hectic geopolitics of the ‘Heroic Age’ is clear enough, whatever
the date assigned to heroic poetry like Beowulf. Clovis for one did not doubt
it: when Ragnachar’s followers complained that he had won them to his side
with arm-rings of false gold, he observed that as betrayers of their lord they
deserved no better.
137
Again, however, battlefield experience is what says most about the war-
leadership of Germanic rulers and its attendant risks. Of eight Northumbrian
kings down to 685, onlyOswiu died in hisbed. The East Anglians had four kings
killed in battle. The case of Sigeberht is instructive. He had taken monastic
retirement, and on his refusal to emerge in face of Mercian attack, the East
Anglians ‘dragged him to the fight...inthehope that soldiers would be
less . . . ready to flee if they had . . . one who was once their most vigorous . . .
leader. But remembering his profession . . . he refused to carry anything but a
rod...Hewaskilled.’
138
It is no surprise that those who erected Sutton Hoo
Mound One should believe in a king’s effect on a battle regardless of his will to
participate. Sigibert’s Frankish contemporary and namesake, by contrast, did
not doubt his duty to take the field against Thuringian rebels even though he
was a mere child. But Sigibert III’s army was slaughtered; he was left ‘seated on
his horse weeping unrestrainedly for those he had lost’.
139
This was arguably the
beginning of the end for Merovingian kingship in Austrasia. Military leadership
increasingly passed to mayors of the palace, whose warrior record finally bore
fruit in the decision that those who held real power should also be called
kings.
Early Germanic kings were no more makers of law than their Irish equiv-
alents. Royal law-giving in the sub-Roman West arose, as in the early Roman
Empire, from subjects’ expectations.
140
The Variae of Cassiodorus are belles-
lettres by an Italian aristocrat who, as Quaestor and Praetorian Prefect for
the Ostrogothic kings of Italy, continued a family office-holding tradition
135
Green (1965), part ii.
136
Lex Salica xlii.1–2; lxx–lxxi, lxxiii;cf.Pactus pro Tenore Pacis lxxxiv, xci.Cf. also Wood (1994)on
the Frankish king’s ‘leudes’. Both dryhten and leudis appear in royal contexts in the seventh-century
Kentish laws: Laws of Æthelberht 2; Laws of Wihtred 5, 9–10, ed. Liebermann.
137
Gregory, Hist. ii.42; Campbell (1982), pp. 53–5.
138
Bede, HE iii.18; Campbell (1982), p. 56.
139
Fredegar, Chronicle iv.87.See Fouracre, chapter 14 above.
140
What follows takes much the same line as Wormald (1977), but aims to amplify and clarify what
was not then adequately brought out, and these objectives are further pursued in Wormald (1998),
ch. 2, and (1999).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Kings and kingship 597
stretching at least two generations back to imperial times.
141
The Variae are not
laws, but many are (suitably florid) replies to legal grievances. Topics on which
Italy’s new masters were invited to pronounce were, to use Cassiodorus’ word,
breaches of civilitas: judicial sharp practice; crimes, and escape of slaves; sex-
ual misdemeanours, sorcery and homicide; property rights in long-established
tenure; and not least, use of Gothic military leverage both by territorially
acquisitive Goths and by Romans in search of powerful patrons.
142
The let-
ters and poems of Sidonius suggest that Gallic counterparts to Cassiodorus
actively encouraged their Visigothic and Burgundian rulers to accept simi-
lar responsibilities.
143
Barbarian kings were being kitted out to take on the
legal role of emperors and praetorian prefects.
144
That they should go on to
issue codes like their major legislative model, the Theodosian Code (438), was
the next logical step. Isidore wrote that under King Euric the Goths began
to have ‘institutes of law in writing, for before they were governed by tra-
dition and custom alone’.
145
He did not say that Euric legislated for Goths
only. Nor need Alaric II’s issue of a Breviarium of Roman law imply that his
father was unconcerned with Romans.
146
Cassiodorus’ formula for a comes
Gothorum distinguished suits between Goths, ‘terminated according to our
edicts’, from those of Goth and Roman, ‘decided by fair reason in associa-
tion with a Roman juris-consult’, and those of Romans, ‘whose decision rests
with Roman examiners’. Goths came under the remit of ‘civilised’ written law.
Romans were by and large left to their own legal devices. But Cassiodorus’
whole output shows that this was far from a bipartite legal regime.
147
The new
kingdoms were governed by the king’s written pronouncements as necessary,
by written Roman or unwritten barbarian custom as otherwise appropriate.
141
Cassiodorus, Variae i.3–4: his encomia in the king’s name on his father’s and grandfather’s records:
for his own, see Variae ix.24–5.
142
See especially Variae ix.18–20 (the Edict of Theoderic’s grandson, Athalaric); and, for Romano-
Gothic relations, i.18; ii.16–17; iii.13; iv.28; vii.39, 42; viii.28 (on which Boethius, Consolation
i.4).
143
Sidonius, Poems vii.311–13; v.562; xxiii.447–9; Letters ii.3.3; v.5.3; viii.4.3.Cf. also Gregory, Hist.
ii.33.
144
So cogently Collins (1983a), pp. 27–9.
145
Isidore, Historia Gothorum xxxv.For a different view of this endlessly masticated problem, see
Wolfram (1988), pp. 194–7 and notes.
146
Arguments for the ‘personality’ of Euric’s code tend to be (good) arguments against the ‘territoriality’
of Alaric’s: King (1980). The Breviary is as likely to reflect the support of Romans who themselves
feared the Franks (Gregory, Hist. ii.36–7), as a concession from a government haunted by Catholic
fifth columns.
147
Variae vii.3. The much-debated ‘Edict of Theoderic’ was, as Dr Sam Barnish persuades me, the
work of Theoderic the Ostrogoth, though not without Cassiodoran ornament; it is a code for Goths
and Romans, even though Anonymus Valesianus ii.12.60 might be read as evidence of Theoderic
legislating for Goths exclusively.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
598 patrick wormald
The crucial point is that Germanic kings replaced emperors as makers of
new law.
The main statement of Visigothic law was issued by Chindasuinth and
Reccesuinth in the mid-seventh century. This was the purest post-Roman
manifestation of Roman legislative priorities. Arranged in twelve books like
the Twelve Tables, it was meant to supplant all previous legislation. It did.
148
This most Romanised of early medieval law books was, logically enough, the
only one to abolish Roman law, but Roman inspiration was no longer all that
was at work. Councils of the whole Spanish church at Toledo published both
Reccesuinth’s code and Ervig’s revision. Reccesuinth was lectured on a law-
giver’s business. Ervig invited the assembled fathers to vet his decrees.
149
The
code’s first book draws on the theories of Isidore. Law is ‘the soul of the whole
body politic’. As that body’s head, the king is source of its guiding principles,
but head and body follow the one programme.
150
In their close association of
church and king, Visigothic law-makers not only echoed Theodosius but also
anticipated Charlemagne.
The Lombard Edict of Rothari was issued at much the same time as the
Visigothic Code. In contrast to Visigothic legislation, it explicitly claims to
state ‘the ancient law of the Lombards’. There is quite enough in it that can
hardlybe Roman, notably laws about feud, for this claim to be taken seriously.
151
YetifRothari was codifying Lombard law for Lombards, he was committing
to writing what the ‘leading judges’ and ‘most happy army’ invoked in his
epilogue should already have known. It is hard to resist the conclusion that
his code is first and foremost a symbol of his people’s new place in a civilised
world. At the same time, there is much that is ‘civilised’ about it. Marks of
Roman influence shared with the Visigoths are scale and comprehensiveness.
It is authenticated and dated, as Roman law should be. For all its ‘barbarism’,
it is conceivable only in terms of the extensive survival of Roman legal culture
in Italy.
152
The best proof of this is that it would ultimately be cited in court
proceedings more often than any post-Roman laws bar the Visigothic.
Something comparable, but in important ways distinct, happened in north-
ern Europe. Lex Salica, the primary law of the Franks, was later ascribed to
Clovis, almost certainly correctly.
153
But its earliest prologue attributes it to
148
LV ii.1.10; for the viability of Visigothic legislation in an age when there is evidence to check it, see
Nehlsen (1977), pp. 483–502, and Collins (1985).
149
Council of Toledo viii, x,p.265, xii,p.383.Onall this see King (1972), pp. 23–39, but also Collins
(1983a), pp. 115–29, for political considerations that weighed as heavily as ideological.
150
LV i.2.2, ii.1.4.For a good case that the author (or at least editor) of the code was Isidore’s pupil,
Bishop Braulio of Saragossa, see Lynch (1938), pp. 137–40.
151
Edictum Rothari, 386.
152
Bognetti (1939); Wickham (1981), pp. 36–9, 69–70.
153
Wood (1994), pp. 108–13 –anotably hard-headed analysis.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Kings and kingship 599
four otherwise unknown men ‘from beyond the Rhine’, so presumably from
the pre-invasion past.
154
Royal sponsors are also lacking in its seventh-century
sister code, Lex Ribuaria, and in the first English code.
155
This confirms that
Germanic political culture was initially as hesitant as Celtic about royal law-
giving. Kings as explicit legislators are one more symptom of Romanisation.
But Clovis’ successors and Anglo-Saxon kings after Æthelberht were increas-
ingly preoccupied with the concerns of the church and with law and order as
such. The Frankish Childebert II and Ine of Wessex punished Sunday work.
The former even forbade taking of revenge.
156
Frankish kings made subject
peoples ‘civilised’ by giving them written law.
157
As kings came to seem war-
dens of social peace, earlier kings were retrospectively credited with a legislative
role they perhaps could not claim at first. Romanisation never went so far in
northern as in southern Europe. References to ‘lex’ in law suits often have no
basis in written law, since by no means all law had been written down.
158
Yet
Germanic kings became law-makers under the sort of pressure from their new
subjects that Hellenistic cities had exerted on Roman emperors. Even where
written law remained more an object of aspiration than an accomplished fact,
there was intensification of the idea, perhaps already residual in Germanic as
in Celtic society, that kings stood for justice. It was an idea that would achieve
enhanced intensity under the Carolingians.
Early medieval western kings inherited what was, by the standardsof the time
when Germans first became familiar with Rome, a massive palace mechanism.
Among the themes of their rule was its scaling down until it again resembled
what had been at Augustus’ disposal. The charters whereby Merovingian and
Lombard kings gave judgement represent them formulaically as ‘residing at
their palace’ amidst an array of court personnel.
159
The protocol of Toledo
Councils was attested by ‘comites’ from the officium palatinum,
160
but the real-
ity of the position is well conveyed by the word gardingus also used for these
counts. Of Gothic origin, it means ‘house-man’ (compare Anglo-Norse garth),
154
Lex Salica (65 tit.), Prologue. The ‘Epilogue’, Lex Salica (65 tit.), p. 253,alater Merovingian text of
questionable authority, ascribes the code only to ‘primus rex francorum’. But if the early Carolingian
‘Longer Prologue’, Lex Salica (100 tit.), Prologue, understood Clovis to be meant, we need not
hesitate to do the same.
155
Bede was the first to say that Æthelberht issued the code that has come to stand in his name,
HE ii.5; the introductory clause printed in Gesetze i,p.3 is a manuscript rubric: Wormald (1995),
p. 983.
156
Decretio Childerberti iii.7, ii.3; Laws of Ine 3–3.2 (and Laws of Wihtred 9, 11); cf. Wormald (1995),
pp. 977–87.For the development of Frankish royal measures against theft, see Murray (1988).
157
Pact, Lex Alamannorum Prologue; Lex Baiwariorum,Prologue. Cf. Wood (1994), pp. 115–17.
158
Nehlsen (1977), pp. 453–83;Fouracre (1986), pp. 29–37;Wormald (1986b), pp. 152–7.
159
Diplomata Regum Francorum, nos. 48–9, 60, 64, 66, etc.; Codice Diplomatico Longobardo iii (1), 12,
14–15, etc. The documentary evidence is assessed by Br
¨
uhl (1968).
160
Council of Toledo viii,p.289; ix,p.307; xii,pp.402–3; xiii,pp.434–5; xvi,p.521.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
600 patrick wormald
and is the strict equivalent of the Merovingian domesticus.
161
Awestern king’s
home in this era and for long afterwards was his ‘hall’. Anglo-Saxon histo-
rians have become familiar with the diptych of Sutton Hoo and Yeavering.
The one testifies to the technology with and for which warriors fought and
died; the other to the environment where they sang and drank and had their
being.
162
Again, then, it is no matter if Beowulf’s vivid festivities in the royal hall
of Heorot are not contemporary evidence. Yeavering’s hall, which measured
25 by 12 metres, is eloquent enough of the early medieval royal lifestyle.
It is not that Byzantine models struck no echoes in the West. The Visi-
gothic and Lombard monarchies had what they clearly considered capitals at
Toledo and Pavia.
163
The Visigoth Leovigild (568–586) was said by Isidore to
have been ‘first to sit openly in royal garb upon a throne’, when ‘before...
both costume and seat were the same for people and king alike’. This probably
involved wearing a crown; votive crowns of Visigothic kings survive.
164
He
was certainly the first Visigothic king to issue gold coins in his own name and
image, and in evident imitation of Byzantine models.
165
When a Frankish king
did this, Procopius thought it a blatant trespass on an imperial preserve.
166
A fascinating and near-ubiquitous echo is of Hippodrome ritual. Agilulf pro-
claimed his son’s succession in the Milan theatre. King Chilperic of the Franks
built amphitheatres at Soissons and Paris, and his cousin staged chariot-races
at Arles.
167
It has been shown that the street-plan of Canterbury was modified
so that all roads led to the theatre. And one of the most striking Yeavering
structures is a building of theatrical design.
168
In the end, though, so much
aping of Byzantine styles does no more than offset the irreducible East–West
contrast.
Sub-Roman government of course had officials; and not only in Germanic-
speaking England but also in Francia, Italy and Spain some of these officials
had Germanic titles.
169
The point is that the apparatus of government was
now quite different, in spirit as much as size. Cassiodorus’ Variae show that
Theoderic’s regime made a systematic attempt to prolong late Roman palace
government, in the interests of the senatorial class that had found a new elixir
161
Claude (1971), p. 15.
162
Hope Taylor (1977).
163
Ewig (1963).
164
Isidore, Historia Gothorum li;Talbot Rice (1966), pp. 180–1.Julian’s Historia Wambae c.26 seems
to describe the rebellious Count Paul using one of these to crown himself, which would tell us that
kings normally wore something of the sort.
165
Grierson and Blackburn (1986), pp. 49–51.
166
Procopius, Wars vii.33.2–6;cf. Collins (1983b), pp. 27–30.
167
Paul, HL iv.30;Gregory, Hist. v.17;Procopius, Wars vii.33.5.Cf. McCormick (1986), pp. 312–14,
for a ruthlessly theatrical Visigothic evocation of Roman triumphalism.
168
Brooks (1984), pp. 24–5;Hope Taylor (1977), pp. 119–22.
169
Most obviously the Frankish graphio (cf. Anglo-Saxon gerefa = reeve), the counterpart to the comes
civitatis: see Murray (1986).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Kings and kingship 601
from participating in it. Theoderic still had palaces to accommodate it.
170
But
most post-Roman governments, like that of early emperors, were regularly on
the move, and mobility is not conducive to heavy government machinery.
171
The roll-call of Visigothic, Lombard or Frankish officialdom is attenuated
almost beyond recognition. There is a bleak discrepancy between the luxuriant
lists of office-holders in the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire and those
of its successor states.
172
For all the Roman relics in the Frankish government
system, the impression that lingers is of a barely differentiated personnel.
173
A‘provost of the sacred bedchamber’ was replaced by a ‘mayor of the palace’:
no eunuch, but an aristocrat of military background and increasingly military
function. Society was returning to the days when a ruler’s chief assistant was his
second-in-command. A significant twist was also affecting the terminology of
service. The future great title of ‘seneschal’ is a Germanic word whose suffix (as
in ‘marshal’) has menial connotations. Young nobles served apprenticeships in
the king’s entourage, specifically at table or in his stable, before moving (it may
be) to more responsible posts in local government.
174
Attendance in the privacy
of a ruler’s bedroom had made way for servicing his wholly public feasts and
hunts. However else it is described, post-Roman government cannot be called
bureaucratic. Hence, kings were no longer equipped to tax as emperors had,
and were beholden to an aristocracy whose idea of patronage was not office
but land.
175
Acrucial difference between post-Roman regimes that foundered like the
Ostrogothic, and those that ultimately flourished, above all the Frankish, was
not that the one was heretically Arian and the other orthodox, but something
crystallised by the religious difference: the maintenance of a gulf between
barbarian and Roman in the name of the basic late antique divorce of military
and civilian. The kingdoms that prospered were those that integrated their
elite. The price of integration was the ascendancy of military values that had
little use for governmental hierarchies and that made the hospitality of a lord’s
hall the fulcrum of upper-class solidarity.
176
As rulers who with few exceptions absorbed Christianity as part of the
imperial legacy, barbarian kings were bound to aspire to Constantinian status.
170
Cassiodorus, Variae vii;cf. Barnwell (1992), part iii:Ward-Perkins (1984), pp. 158–66;Johnson
(1988).
171
Cf. Millar (1992), pp. 28–53, 203–72.
172
Jones, Martindale and Morris (1971–92); Jarnut (1972); Ebling (1974); Garc
´
ıa Moreno (1974).
173
Ganz (1983); Barnwell (1992), pp. 101–8;Wood (1994), pp. 262–3.
174
Cf. Claude (1971), p. 208,onthe destiny of Visigoth gardingi. The Visigothic comes scanciarum in
officium palatinum lists appears to be an official charged with dispensation of liquid refreshment.
175
This ever-controversial issue cannot be debated here. But I find unanswerable the case put by
Wickham (1984) and (1993)(rebutting the most ambitious attempt to give Roman taxation pro-
longed afterlife).
176
Seenow Heather (1994b), especially pp. 192–7.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
602 patrick wormald
It is no accident that Clovis’ first foundation was a Church of the Holy Apostles
at Paris, or that he was buried there; nor indeed that this was where his great-
grandson, Chlothar II, held the greatest of Merovingian church councils in
614.
177
The western scene was complicated by ideological cross-currents. The
Latin church learned from Augustine, its one great theoretician, to look more
askance than easterners at secular power’s spiritual role. Germanic kings joined
the church when emperors were Arian, and several dynasties stayed that way
for much longer. In Augustine’s North Africa, Vandal kings evoked memories
of a Diocletianic persecutor, not a thirteenth apostle.
178
None the less, kings
furnished the post-Roman West with its best-known martyrs. The cult of the
Burgundian king Sigismund, killed in 523 by the Franks, looks like the kind of
devotion that clustered around the victims of medieval politics until the days
of Simon de Montfort and beyond.
179
However, the sanctification of Oswald
was another matter. Oswald could be seen, however dubiously, as a king who
had died for Christ in battle with a pagan enemy. As a martyr, he was a hero of
Christian warfare. His fame thus deserved, as Bede stressed, to eclipse that of
any of his race’s other martial heroes.
180
It may not be too much to see here a
conscious counterpart to the heroic fame which the Beowulf poet thought the
sole reward for a life of spectacular endeavour.
Germanic kings were in general ready to give their churches a lead. The
evidence is uneven, but it can be argued that the councils of the Merovin-
gian church should be seen in the same light as the more familiar assemblies
of church and state under Visigothic kings.
181
A curious poem implies that
Cunipert should be credited for the synod that ended the ‘Aquileian’ schism
in Italy.
182
Oswiu of Northumbria, not the assembled ecclesiastics, took the
crucial decision at the Synod of Whitby.
183
But the Visigothic kings remain the
best exemplifications of the Constantinian role, here again anticipating the
Carolingians. From the moment when a newly converted Reccared was hailed
by the third Toledo Council (589)as‘anew Constantine, a new Marcian’,
Visigothic kingship was set firmly into a Byzantine mould. That may be one
thing that turned them almost at once into persecutors of the Jews. Another,
already implied, was that rising Christian interest in Old Testament example
might well, as Isidore argued, be at the expense of the ex-beneficiaries of God’s
special relationship.
184
Spaniards were ahead of all Westerners in seeing that
177
P
´
erin (1992); Wood (1994), p. 154.
178
Moorhead (1992); but compare the realities as reflected in Clover (1986).
179
Wood (1994), p. 52; the cult of later episcopal casualties of Merovingian politics provides a parallel:
pp. 142, 230.
180
Bede, HE iii.9–13.
181
Wood (1994), pp. 105–6.
182
Carmen de Synodo Ticinensi,pp.189–91.
183
Bede, HE iii.25.
184
Collins (1983a), pp. 129–42.Note that the Carmen of the Pavia Synod (n. 171) says that Perctarit
had forced baptism on the Jews.