Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

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The sources and their interpretation 63

again a new set of questions arises. Why was this source written at that date,

pretending to be something else? Why was such a document perceived to

be necessary? Why did an early medieval writer feel the need to disguise his

identity beneath that of a well-known author from the past? A signiﬁcant

number of forged charters exists, for example, claiming to be donations to

various churches by the Merovingian king Chlothar II (584–628). There are,

indeed, far more forged charters of Chlothar II than of Clovis I, the ﬁrst king

of the Merovingian dynasty and seen as founder of the kingdom. Why was

Chlothar a more common choice than Clovis, whom one might have expected

would be a more obvious candidate as a prestigious king with whom to associate

oneself? Answering this question can have important implications.

Writing and copying were thus expensive and deliberate processes. Just as the

artistic illumination of early medieval documents can be of breath-taking com-

plexity, so too could the narrative strategies and word-games used by writers. It

may be true that there were no great philosophical or theological thinkers in the

period between 500 and 700 –Isidore of Seville and Gregory the Great hardly

rank alongside Augustine or Aquinas – but this does not mean that sixth- and

seventh-century writers were necessarily crude or unsubtle. They enjoyed puns

and word-play and could and did make use of complex patterning of words to

draw attention to key points. They employed, for example, chiastic patterning,

where a passage is structured so that phrases mirror each other about a crux,

at which lies the key point or image; such patterning was used in the Bible,

obviously one of the prime models for early medieval writing. Authors could

adopt complicated and subtle strategies of inter- or intra-textual cross-reference

to make their points, and they thought in sophisticated typological fashion.

In other words, they used symbols which, in their minds and those of their

readers, summoned up biblical images and the exegesis associated with them.

genre

That authors could use such imagery and expect its implications to be under-

stood without explication stems from the fact that early medieval writers usually

worked within the conﬁnes of particular genres, which it is important to under-

stand if one is to make sense of the written sources from the period. Somewhat

simpliﬁed: to work within a genre is to add to an established body of material

rather than to create something entirely original. Writer and audience know

what is to be expected, in terms of structure, subject matter and style. Compo-

sition takes place within certain rules or guidelines. An author working within

agenre can therefore take a number of things for granted and need not explain

particular choices or deﬁne terms. Cross-references can be made with other

works, especially the classic works within the genre, without any need to make

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64 guy halsall

clear or explain them: the audience will pick up on them and know the reso-

nance of particular words and phrases. Genres exist in many creative milieux,

such as painting, sculpture, ﬁction writing and classical music, but to explain

the concept further we might draw a parallel with modern popular music. An

artiste who records within the tradition of, for example, soul music does not

aim to create something radically new or different, but to add to a corpus of

work with an established canon and an informed audience. Song structure,

rhythm and to some extent instrumentation are set out by the norms of genre

and so might more subtle aspects. A songwriter may borrow a lyric from a

classic song by one of the genre’s ‘greats’ and know that the audience will pick

up the reference; a musical phrase may also be so used. None of this, however,

means that a work within a genre is necessarily hackneyed or unoriginal. A

work may be composed ﬁrmly within the guidelines of a particular stylistic

form and still be justly praised as great. The existence of accepted norms for

works within a genre does not, furthermore, imply either that those norms

are immutably ﬁxed or that a work of a particular genre has to possess every

deﬁning characteristic of that form. There are probably very few if any such

‘ideal types’, and genres can shade into each other. Writers can play with the

rules of composition as well as within them. An addition to or variation on

the norms, regarded as unusual when ﬁrst made, may simply enter the canon

of accepted possibilities. If an audience can be expected to know the accepted

norms and their signiﬁcance, it can also be expected to pick up on deliberate

inversion of those rules, and on the point – satirical or ironic for example – of

such a strategy. Finally, some writers in the period did invent or rediscover new

ways of writing; some, like Gregory of Tours, seem to have started off writing

within a particular tradition but then to have abandoned its structures to do

something else. Early medieval writers were active agents and not, even in the

Byzantine East where, as we shall see, the rules of composition were partic-

ularly strict, prisoners of established tradition. This brief discussion of genre

allows us to understand why some subjects were written about in the period

and others ignored, and why the diverse forms of writing differed from each

other and from what one might expect, from a twenty-ﬁrst-century viewpoint,

of historical writing. With this in mind we can now turn to the different genres

of early medieval written source.

historical writing

In the Latin West, the tradition of historical writing in the classical tradition had

gone into decline before the start of our period. This tradition, based upon the

models providedby Livy, Sallust and Tacitus, focussed upon wars and ‘high pol-

itics’, and, when making use of other sources, even verbatim, did not explicitly

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The sources and their interpretation 65

acknowledgethem except in the most general terms. Although the classics of the

genre were still read and had an inﬂuence upon historical writing, its last great

practitioner in the West (although he was, ironically, an Antiochene Greek) was

the late fourth-century author Ammianus Marcellinus,

though the work of

some apparently early ﬁfth-century writers in this genre has unfortunately been

lost. In the West between 500 and 700, possibly the closest work to this form

of history is Julian of Toledo’s unusual History of King Wamba, written in the

late seventh century.

In the Greek East, however, the tradition did continue

through the sixth century and into the seventh, in the histories of Procopius,

Agathias and Theophylact Simocatta.

The norms of the genre were much the

same as in Latin classical narrative history: a concentration upon wars, battles,

the diplomacy and other doings of kings, generals and emperors, and some

attention to prodigies, astronomy and other things seen as portents. In the

early medieval Greek world, however, the classics of the genre – Herodotus,

Thucydides and Polybius – were followed to an unusually close degree. Writers

in the Byzantine world composed in a form of Greek quite different from the

spoken. They were expected to write in the language of the great writers of

the past, usually referred to as Attic Greek. Phrases and whole passages could

be excerpted from them, and their speciﬁc vocabulary was also imported into

discussions of the early medieval world. Thus, for example, when writing of

peoples, Byzantine writers borrowed fourth-century bc names for generally

similar peoples from roughly the same part of the world. Procopius called the

Huns Scythians or Massagetae, for example – both names of peoples who lived

long before the sixth century. Similarly, other technical terms were borrowed

from past writers. Procopius talks about the guards of sixth-century kings and

generals as doryphoroi and hypaspistai, both terms borrowed from Attic Greek

models (the hypaspistai were the bodyguards of Alexander the Great). When

using language not employed by their models, Greek writers were expected

to excuse themselves with wordy circumlocutions: ‘the excubatores (for such

the Romans call their guards)’.

There were, of course, no bishops, monks or

churches in the world of Thucydides, so where archaic words were not used

(such as ‘temple’ for church), again writers had to make a pretence of having to

explain this unwanted neologism: ‘men who are very exact in their practice of

religion, whom we have always been accustomed to call “monks”’.

This has

sometimes misleadingly given the impression that Procopius was something

of a sceptic, or even a pagan. None the less, we should not assume that the

works of these authors were simply slavish patchworks of quotes and borrowed

Matthews (1989); Drijvers and Hunt (1999).

For discussion of which, see, for example Collins (1977).

Procopius: Cameron (1985); Agathias: Cameron (1970); Theophylact: Whitby (1988).

Procopius, Wars iv.12.17.

Procopius, Wars iv.26.17.

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66 guy halsall

terminology. Again, even these tight structures of composition allowed writers

to employ the rules to make their own points.

Historical writing nevertheless continued, taking new forms and developing

old ones. Probably the form of written narrative most commonly associated

with the period 500–700 is so-called ‘national history’: Jordanes’ Getica (mid-

sixth century), Gregory of Tours’ so-called History of the Franks,Isidore of

Seville’s History of the Goths, Sueves and Vandals,ofthe early seventh century,

Bede’s early eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and Paul

the Deacon’s History of the Lombards (late eighth century), to which one should

add the anonymous early eighth-century Liber Historiae Francorum, the early

ninth-century History of the Britons attributed to Nennius and the late ninth-

century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and other works. Most of these works were

written after the close of the time-span covered by this volume but, as they

claim to relate the history of our period, they deserve treatment here. These

sources were at ﬁrst considered to be repositories of the age-old traditions of the

different peoples of early medieval Europe. Since, in the nineteenth and earlier

twentieth century these peoples were regarded as distinct racial units, in line

with the ideas of the nation-state developed at that time, such works were seen

to represent the foundations of the histories of modern European nations,

their authors portrayed as the founders of national historical traditions.

The information they contained was held to be reliable, transmitted down the

generations, it was assumed, by oral tradition. As attitudes towards the nature of

the barbarian ‘peoples’ themselves changed, so the ways in which these sources

were viewed changed too.

Most have been the subject of intense debate. The

nature of Jordanes’ history has come under close scrutiny,

and Gregory of

Tours’ writing has become the focus of an even larger ﬁeld of proﬁtable debate,

hardly any of which now sees his writings as forming any sort of ‘History of

the Franks’ (as discussed above).

Meanwhile, controversy has been provoked

by the interesting suggestion that Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards

might have been composed for a Frankish audience.

The other sources have

also attracted debate and revaluation.

Not only are many of these works no longer seen as ‘national histories’, it

is also recognised that they may represent instances of other genres entirely:

the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,obviously enough, takes the form of a set of annals

SeeHalsall, chapter 2 above.

Scharer and Scheibelreiter (1994): Ethnogenese und

Uberlieferung.

Momigliano (1955); O’Donnell (1982); Goffart (1988); Heather (1991); Amory (1997).

Thurlemann (1974); De Nie (1987); Goffart (1988); Breukelaar (1994); Heinzelmann (2001); Mitchell

and Wood (2002).

McKitterick (1999).

Nennius: Dumville (1986); Liber Historiae Francorum:Gerberding (1987); Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

there are numerous studies, but particularly interesting for the period covered by this volume are

Sims-Williams (1983) and Yorke (1989).

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The sources and their interpretation 67

(Isidore’s History is also written to an annalistic structure); Bede’s is an ecclesias-

tical history; and so on. Gregory’s, as mentioned, was not written as a national

history at all, though quite which – if any – genre Gregory was composing in is

a matter of debate. At the same time, the purposes to which these sources were

put, using the past to serve political needs of later centuries, were also served

by works of many other kinds, never viewed as particularly ‘nationalistic’.

The lesson of the scholarship of recent decades has essentially been that to

understand these sources they have to be replaced in the contexts of their com-

position. The political motives behind their composition make them far more

contingent, and concomitantly far less valuable as treasuries of ancient fact,

than hitherto believed. At the same time, however, they become very valuable

sources for the examination of the political culture and ideology of the times

and places where they were written: mid-sixth-century Constantinople; early

seventh-century Spain; late ninth-century Wessex, for example. These lessons

apply to most other sources written in our period.

The most common form of historical narrative in this period was that based

around an annalistic structure: entries, chapters or groups of chapters ordered

to deal with particular years. In the late ﬁfth and sixth centuries a large number

of so-called Chronica Minora (‘lesser chronicles’) were composed: the so-called

‘Gallic Chronicles’ of 452 and 507 (named from the year of their last entry); the

Chronicle of Saragossa; the Chronicle of John of Biclar (who may indeed have

been the author of the Chronicle of Saragossa); the similarly late sixth-century

Chronicle of Marius of Avenches. Bede began his career as a historian by writing

two sets of annals, the Chronica Minora and the Chronica Majora; and so on.

There is reason to suppose that others still must have been lost. In the East

this kind of historical writing was represented by works such as the Chronicon

Paschale, based, as the name suggests, around a series of Easter tables.

The genre of annalistic writing, in general, required the subject matter to be

limited to the major events of political history: the occurrence and outcome

of wars and battles, the successions of kings and emperors and so on. In the

Christian world it was unsurprising that comparable events of ecclesiastical

note were soon added to the correct subject matter: the death and succession of

bishops; theological controversies; great church councils. Astronomical events

(eclipses, meteors) continued to be noted, alongside other possibly portentous

events: ﬂoods; famines; prodigies. Of course some sets of annals were ﬂeshed

out to become very full narratives with only a loose resemblance to the bald

lists of years from which they emerged – these are usually called chronicles: the

Chronicle of Fredegar for example – and the dividing line between them and

other forms of historical narrative can be rather blurred. The somewhat terse

structure of some sets of annals should not, however, blind the reader to the

See, e.g., Garrison (2000).

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68 guy halsall

potential complexities of their composition. Although some were indeed kept

on a year by year basis, others were deliberately composed as unitary pieces

of work, but in an annalistic form. This meant that, although these works

look like a transparent account of events recorded yearly, the writers could

manipulate the story to serve particular agendas. It has been argued that the

grouping of particular events in the ‘Gallic Chronicles’ (including, alas, some

of the sparse references to ﬁfth-century Britain) was done artiﬁcially to make a

certain case.

Equally, the entries of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relating to the

ﬁfth and sixth centuries are also complex later compositions making political

claims and not, as was once believed, accurate records of the political history

of the period derived from now-lost sources.

Another historical genre was that of ecclesiastical history, founded by Euse-

bius of Caesarea in the early fourth century. Ecclesiastical history, as the name

implies, differed from other classical forms of narrative principally by con-

centrating upon the affairs of the church, although, especially as the church

became a signiﬁcant force in the politics of the Roman Empire, these became

interwoven with more secular political events. Another difference from tradi-

tional narrative history, however, was the extensive verbatim and acknowledged

citation of sources. This aspect of the genre was derived principally from theo-

logical exegesis and debate, where a point was supported by quotation of

scriptural sources. Islamic historical writing evolved a very similar tradition.

Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History was translated into Latin and continued by

Ruﬁnus of Aquileia in the West, and a series of eastern writers, Sozomen,

Socrates, Theodoret and Evagrius, continued the genre through the ﬁfth cen-

tury in the East. The practitioners of ecclesiastical history between 500 and

700 were rather fewer, however. There are some manuscript indications that

Gregory of Tours began his work as an ecclesiastical history, and in the early

books of the Histories he certainly adhered to some of the rules of the genre,

such as the extensive quotation of sources. However, the work turned into

something rather different: an extended history of and commentary upon the

events of his own times. That apart, probably the most famous ecclesiastical

history is Bede’s, written just after the close of this period.

hagiography

The most common form of historical writing, broadly deﬁned, was related to

ecclesiastical history: hagiography (writing about the holy).

Hagiography is

Wood (1987).

See, e.g., Sims-Williams (1983); Yorke (1989); for the old view, see Myres (1986).

Dubois and Lemaitre (1993) give a useful introduction and bibliography, of use also to the study of

the ‘religious writings’ discussed below.

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The sources and their interpretation 69

not technically history at all, though it can be seen to share some features with

the latter and can be (and has been) employed to help write narrative political

history. A number of different types of source can be gathered under the title

of hagiography. There are the lives (vitae)ofthe saints themselves, in the case

of martyrs sometimes called accounts of their suffering (passiones); collections

of post-mortem miracles; collections of short biographies of abbots or bishops;

and so on. These types of written source proliferated across Europe and the

Mediterranean world throughout the period covered by this volume, from

Ireland to Armenia and from the northern reaches of the Frankish world to

Africa. Saints’ lives tend to be broadly similar in structure and content wherever

they were produced, though there are of course regional variations. The point

of the saint’s life was didactic: to show the wondrous working of God in the

world. The miracles which God worked through the saint demonstrated the

Lord’s continued active presence and interest in the world, and those which

took place after the saint’s death were the ultimate proof that the holy man

had triumphed over death and now resided and could intercede with God. A

charlatan, magician or man possessed by the devil could work what looked like

miracles during his life, but only the truly saintly had their tombs blessed by

the occurrence of cures and other miracles.

The models for saints’ lives were, obviously, primarily the Gospels, although

Jerome’s LivesofFamous Men provided another source of inspiration. The

Life of Anthony (the founding father of monasticism) by Athanasius, and

Palladius’ Lausiac History provided further models, although in the West the

most important model was Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Martin (written, most

unusually, before the death of its subject, St Martin of Tours). The extent

to which saints’ lives followed the normal conventions of biography could

vary considerably. Some, Eddius Stephanus’ Life of Wilfrid for example, were

written to a fairly tight chronological structure. With other lives, between

the poles of the saint’s birth and childhood on the one hand and his or her

death on the other, the extent to which the chapters are arranged chronolog-

ically or thematically, or based around the model provided by the Gospels, is

unclear.

As a body of material, hagiography has probably received more attention

from historians since 1911 than any other corpus, and approaches to it have

certainly changed the most.

As noted, in the nineteenth century attitudes

towards saints’ lives were governed essentially by the extent to which they were

seen as useful for the writing of political/institutional history. Alternatively,

Without doubt, the œuvre of P. R. L. Brown has been most inﬂuential here: e.g. Brown (1971);

(1977); (1978); (1981); (1982a); (1982b); (2000); (2002). For development and response, see, e.g.,

Van Dam (1985); (1993); Howard-Johnston and Hayward (1999); Lifshitz (1994) has provoked much

discussion.

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70 guy halsall

in older editing projects such as those of the Bollandists or the Maurists,

carried out by members of religious orders, the study of saints’ lives and debate

over their authenticity were made to serve ecclesiastical political ends. But no

longer are historians only interested in early medieval Lives written about early

medieval people; they are also interested in early medieval writing about long-

dead (or even ﬁctitious) martyrs and other holy people. Hagiographical works

are now seen as invaluable sources for the discussion of social history in the

narrowsense (through their discussion of social structures and relationships,the

diseases that struck people down and so on), for the history of popular belief and

culture,

mentalit

es (through discussion of the ways in which healing miracles

worked

) and the history of ideas as well as religious and political history.

In the latter area, though, what constitutes political history has broadened

considerably from the simple search to establish and explain a grand narrative.

In studies of hagiography throughout the early medieval world, one of the

most important features to emerge in recent decades is the extent to which

saints’ lives were themselves employed politically. The production of miracle

collections furthered the reputation of a saint, obviously, perhaps at the expense

of other cults, but other political agendas could be served by the writing of

hagiography. The production of seventh-century bishops’ lives in Francia has

been shown to have been driven by the concerns of particular factions, at local

and higher levels.

Some Vitae were written to rehabilitate awkward or even

unpopular bishops within local tradition. The writing of saints’ lives in early

Anglo-Saxon England has also been said to have taken the form of something

of a pamphlet war.

Some of Gregory of Tours’ hagiography was probably

written to defend members of his family.

Even changes in the type of saint

whose cult was promoted or even accepted could be related to high political

developments.

Our knowledge and understanding of the early medieval holy

and their veneration has perhaps been the area of greatest change and expansion

during the last hundred years.

laws and legal documents

A common source for post-Roman social history is the series of law-codes

issued in the period. Corpora of law exist for this period in the west from

Visigothic Spain, Burgundian Gaul, the Frankish kingdoms, Lombard Italy

Again, see Knowles (1963) for discussion.

Gurevich (1988).

See, especially, Brown (1981); Van Dam (1985); (1993).

Fouracre (1990).

Goffart (1988).

The Life of Nicetius of Lyon (chapter 8 of Gregory’s Life of the Fathers), for example, with its extensive

discussion of post-mortem miracles.

Fouracre (1999).

The sources and their interpretation 71

and Anglo-Saxon England. In addition to the great codiﬁcation of Roman law

ordered by Justinian I at about the same time as the legislation of western rulers,

there were also abbreviated codiﬁcations of Roman law made in the Visigothic

kingdom of Toulouse and in the Burgundian kingdom. Most western law,

however, takes the form of collections of short chapters outlining offences and

the compensation to be paid by the guilty party to the victims. The clauses

relate primarily to crimes against property or the person, though there is also

some detailed concern with matters of inheritance. Some law-codes are very

lengthy and detailed, most notably the Justinianic code (issued alongside a

Digest, an organised compilation of imperial Roman laws still held to be of

legal value) in the East and the Visigothic code in the West. Others are rather

brief (notably the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon codes) and apparently very

selective in coverage, whilst a number of other codes (the Salian and Ripuarian

Frankish codes, for example, or the earliest Lombard code, the Edict of Rothari)

lie somewhere in between.

Historiographically, there have been two main areas of debate: ﬁrst on the

extent to which these laws represent actual legal practice (and, if not, what

their purpose actually was),

and second the extent to which the post-Roman

western laws represent the codiﬁcation of imported Germanic practice. The

two areas of discussion are not entirely unrelated and the debates upon them

have not been entirely resolved. It does seem clear, however, that the details

recorded in the western law-codes do not represent the totality of legal prac-

tice. Law could and did include the customary practice of innumerable local

communities. It is, furthermore, very difﬁcult to ﬁnd evidence, especially in

the sixth and seventh centuries, of the written laws being used in practice. For

example, the ﬁne for neglecting military service in Frankish Gaul is speciﬁed

as being 60 solidi.

However, the only reference to a legal case involving this

crime, and the punishment of the guilty, refers to a 600 solidus ﬁne.

It is to the seventh century that we can date the beginning of the survival

of ever increasing numbers of legal and other administrative documents. Of

course, such documents existed in earlier centuries. Because of the hot and

dry anaerobic conditions, very many papyrus documents have survived from

Egypt and North Africa, dating from the Roman period and before. The writ-

ten tablets from the Roman fort of Vindolanda in Northumberland,

which

Mordek (1984).

ARoman coin valued at 1/72 of a pound of gold, although it later, as a silver coin, became the

precursor of the shilling. Another issue concerning the practicality of the law is how ﬁnes and

compensation speciﬁed in solidi could have had any value, as the solidus was not in any common

use in the West (see below).

Diplomata Regum Francorum, ed. K

olzer, no. 143.

Bowman and Thomas (1984); Bowman (1994).

72 guy halsall

have survived because of their preservation in quite opposite – waterlogged –

anaerobic conditions, are well-known. Fifth- and sixth-century papyri survive

from Ravenna,

and a fascinating archive known as the Albertini Tablets was

discovered in southern Tunisia, shedding invaluable light on everyday life in

Vandal Africa.

Some documents, called pizarras,

were written on slate in

Visigothic Spain, and these too are of great interest. However, it cannot be

denied that legal documents, for the most part detailing gifts of lands or priv-

ileges to churches and monasteries, wills and bequests, sometimes sales, and

the results of legal hearings, again most often concerning lands, increase signif-

icantly after about 600 and numbers continue to rise exponentially thereafter.

Collectively these documents are usually (often technically incorrectly) known

as charters and they take several forms depending upon time and place. Need-

less to say, only a fraction survives as originals, sometimes on papyrus but more

usually on parchment, and the authenticity of those charters existing only as

copies is a matter of some concern to historians. Because of the legal value

of such documents to the ecclesiastical establishments that usually preserved

them – they proved their title to lands, revenues and legal privileges – charters

could be and frequently were forged. The problems of establishing the authen-

ticity of a document are sometimes easily resolved. In some areas, such as Gaul,

charters appear to have been written to fairly standard formulas – indeed we

have some formularies (collections of model documents for scribes to copy)

from the period. In such areas forgeries tend to stand out quite clearly. In oth-

ers, however, such as Anglo-Saxon England, where charters took no standard

form at all, the authenticity of documents can pose much greater problems.

Whether a charter is a faithful copy of a genuine grant, a later fabrication

which nevertheless used a genuine document or documents as a core, or an

outright fabrication, can therefore be a matter of debate. An extra dimension

of the problem arises in cases where a document might clearly in itself be a

forgery but where we might suspect that the ecclesiastical institution to which

it referred did indeed possess the speciﬁed lands and privileges, and might

even have been given them in circumstances much as described. ‘Forgeries’

can furthermore be of considerable interest in showing the historical ideas and

interests of the time at which they were composed.

In spite of the many variations in detail, charters tend to share a number of

basic features. They begin by specifying the donor, listing his or (occasionally)

her titles and honours and the recipient of the gift, following this up with a

statement of the motivation behind the donation. Since the gifts were usually

made to churches and monasteries, the motivation tended to be religious and

ader, Papyri.

Tablettes Albertini, ed. Courtois, Leschi and Saumagne.

Vel

azquez (ed.), Las pizarras Visigodas.