Download PDF | Guy Halsall - Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul_ Selected Studies in History and Archaeology, 1992-2009 (Brill's Series on the Early Middle Ages), 2010.
439 Pages
INTRODUCTION
This book concerns two problems, one general and one specifi c. Th e general question is that of how one might use written and excavated material together. Th e more specific issue is how one makes the evidence extracted from the cemeteries of Merovingian northern Gaul talk about world views and the social structures they produced. Seven of these eleven chapters are papers originally published elsewhere between 1992 and 2003, which—gratifyingly—it was felt could usefully be brought together in one place; some have not been particularly accessible.
These were written to be read individually in other contexts and this book is possibly still best approached as a series of stand-alone essays. Inevitably, therefore, if reading this volume, or a part of it, ‘from cover to cover’, areas of overlap and repetition remain, which I hope the reader will tolerate. As with many another ‘Greatest Hits’ collection, as well as the ‘rarities’ this one comes with remixes and previously unreleased material.
The ‘remixes’ are Chapters 7 and 9, which are (especially in the case of chapter 9) versions of previously published works, substantially rewritten for this volume and, in the case of Chapter 7, translated back into English. Th e previously unreleased material is represented by Chapters 10 and 11, which originated as seminar or conference papers and were never written up for publication. Th e original draft of chapter 11 has circulated in ‘samizdat’ format and even been cited in footnotes.1 As well as those papers, this volume contains fi ve ‘commentaries’ (sometimes longer than the chapters), in which I discuss the background to the papers and meditate further on the issues raised, consider published responses to my work and other more recent literature on the same topic and take my argument further. Much of what might otherwise have been contained in a general introduction is thus presented closer to the relevant chapters where, it is hoped, it might be more valuable.
This introduction serves to present more general background and a brief introduction to the historiographical significance of the papers collected here—in other words ajustifi cation for the presentation of this collection. It may thus be useful, or even interesting, to set out some autobiographical context.2 Since my undergraduate degree (taken in history and archaeology as an equal combination at the University of York) I have retained an equal interest in both disciplines and the profound conviction that a rounded appreciation of the early medieval period can only come through knowing about history and archaeology.
Indeed one benefit of studying the two subjects together has been the ability to bring the insights from one into the study of the other. Th roughout my career, an advantage of this multi-disciplinary formation has been the ability to critique historical approaches from the perspective of an archaeologist and archaeological work from the viewpoint of an historian; the corresponding disadvantage is, of course, that of being treated as an archaeologist by historians and as an historian by archaeologists! Th ere is also the danger of being accused, oft en with reason, of being a jack of all trades and master of none. Th e use of these disciplines to elucidate the social history of Merovingian Gaul came from taking Edward James’ suggestion that working on Gaul might be a good career move; there were (and still are) far fewer people in the UK studying that area than there were researching Anglo-Saxon England, and almost none from the joint perspectives of history and archaeology.
After some consultation the topic of my thesis was fixed as a regional study of the civitas of Metz, mostly lying in the north-east of what is now France and partly in modern Saarland (Germany). Neither of us had a very clear idea of where this would lead but the evidence for the region is fairly plentiful in comparison with most other Merovingian civitates and the potential seemed to be there to combine written and excavated data and to bring together several areas of archaeology in which I had become interested as an undergraduate, principally the study of cemeteries and of urban settlement. Being an Englishman studying Merovingian France was not always easy. Much Merovingian cemetery archaeology was, and remains, in the hands of local amateur enthusiasts who, when they replied my enquiries, were sometimes not backward in expressing the view that I really ought not to be studying their region at all. The hostility and obstruction that I experienced as a young doctoral research student goes some way to explaining, albeit without excusing, my reluctance to pull punches in critiquing traditional French approaches to Merovingian cemetery archaeology. More generally, I suspect that bringing approaches from one national historiographical tradition to bear on the data from another is always going to present problems of dialogue.
These probably explain the fact that, in spite of a discernible reduction in the insularity of French Merovingian studies, although the work of British scholars on general historical issues is oft en referred to, their detailed attempts to discuss specifi c areas of l’Hexagone tend not to be.3 Fortunately, this was far from the only response, and it is a pleasure to record again my indebtedness to Professors Nancy Gauthier and Michel Parisse for their encouragement and, above all, to the conservateurs of the various museums of Lorraine and their staff , who were extremely welcoming. Some junior employees of the Direction des Antiquités de Lorraine signifi cantly counteracted the lack of assistance off ered by their superiors. It must also be emphasised that not all non-professional local chargés de fouilles were hostile or obstructive. Claude Lefebvre, for example, was extremely friendly and helpful and I off er him, again, my gratitude. Finally, the Godfather of French Merovingian Studies, Patrick Périn, has always been very encouraging and supportive, even though our approaches remain poles apart.
Th ough other areas of my doctoral research produced conclusions,4 I was able to make the most detailed contributions in the fi eld of burial archaeology. When I came to rewrite my thesis for publication, the discussion of cemeteries was more or less the only section that remained largely unaltered from the original. In fact the monograph was a much more documentary historical aff air than had been the thesis, which (in spite of having been written in a history department)5 was very largely archaeological. Th e book only restored the balance between the two disciplines, and the documentary sections are those that I would change most, given the opportunity; as the present volume will make clear, there is much that I would add to the archaeological analyses but little that I would fundamentally change. In scholarly terms, the best part of my thesis was, ironically, the component that has never been published: the critical catalogue of cemetery sites in the diocese of Metz.
That empirical research furnishes the basis for the fi nal seven chapters in this volume. Most of the previously published papers that reappear in this volume were concerned with developing and refi ning the line of argument initially presented in Settlement and Social Organisation: Th e Merovingian Region of Metz. I have subsequently pursued the lines of enquiry I took in that book with regard to urbanism and the rural settlement pattern,7 but the essays collected here are solely those which explore the use of funerary data. My approach to the archaeological cemetery evidence was largely moulded by my education in a British archaeology department in the middle decades of the 1980s. Th e studies presented here were inspired by the teaching I received on a course on the archaeology of cemeteries,8 and above all by my reading of the work of Ellen-Jane Pader.9 My thesis aimed to apply then recent Anglophone theoretical and analytical approaches to mortuary evidence to the study of Merovingian data.
In some ways, therefore, my career has led me full circle as in this volume I have taken the opportunity to explore some areas in which the more plentiful (if not always high-quality) evidence from Gaul, and the ways in which it can be combined with written data such as are more or less absent from early Anglo-Saxon England, can refi ne ways of seeing the post-imperial10 centuries on the British side of the Channel.11 Historiographically, therefore, the original research from which stem the ideas contained in the present work was located in a phase of British archaeology, during the later 1970s and 1980s, when researchers were exploring the use of cemetery data to elucidate the study of social organisation, oft en using structuralist analyses and nascent statistical programmes for the analysis of the patterns of association between grave-goods and other variables within the burial ritual.
During the later 1980s, I became aware of archaeological theory of the post-processualist camp12 and especially its core tenets: seeing material culture as deliberately and actively constructed, rather than being a passive refl ection of society, as had been the case with earlier views.13 My reading of post-processualist archaeology affected my interpretation of the cemetery evidence in particular in my concern with the need to provide an explanation for the custom of furnished burial, such as was common in northern Gaul in the sixth and seventh centuries. Funerary customs did not seem to provide any support for their usual interpretation as pagan or as a ‘Germanic’ introduction.
The religious dimension of this critique of traditional cemetery studies featured little in my analyses. As far as I was concerned, Bailey K. Young had made most of the important critical points in dismantling the connections between paganism and burial with grave-goods, or unfurnished inhumation and Christianity.14 My concern was rather with arguing that these furnished graves could not be seen as passive markers of non-Roman ethnic identity, although such identities being themselves active and contingent creations made it unlikely that the archaeological record would simply refl ect them in this way in any case. This thinking is pursued in chapters 2, 3 and 4 below and in the accompanying commentaries 2 and 3, the former being my fullest discussion of the problem to date.
As further made clear in commentary 2, this line of thinking owed (like most of my work) an enormous amount to my doctoral supervisor, Edward James, author of the first and still influential sustained critique of the notion that cemeteries could be used to plot the distribution of Gallo-Romans and Frankish settlers.15 In supervisory meetings, Edward pushed me very rigorously to defend my emerging view that furnished inhumation had nothing to do with trans-Rhenan ethnicity; only rather later did I discover some thoughts he had had a decade or more previously along much the same lines.16 Th e historiographical reception of this part of my work receives fuller attention below.17
This, as discussed there, is an area where the essays published here have made a signifi cant impact, provoking debate about one of the archaeological cornerstones of Germanist ormigrationist views of the post-imperial archaeological record. It is satisfying to note that, even where my interpretation is not accepted and where the ‘Germanic’ interpretation is preferred, the days seem to be numbered when these burials can be cited unhesitatingly as evidence of ‘Germanic’ settlement, without at least reference to the existence of doubts. As discussed in commentary 2, the ‘antiGermanist’ view that I revived and developed has long been taken on board by historians and there are indeed signs that it may be gaining more general acceptance among students of post-imperial mainland European archaeology.
It is, however, fair to say that it has had limited (if any) impact upon the study of early Anglo-Saxon burial, where, in one form or another, the ‘Germanic’ import of furnished inhumation remains generally accepted.18 If these burials were produced neither by religion nor by the existence of long-standing ethnic custom, then there seemed little reason why it should be the simple reflection of the wealth, rank or social class of the deceased. Here I contributed to a trend of criticism of the use of Merovingian cemetery data to explore issues of class and wealth in which, again, Edward James had played a signifi cant part.19 Indeed, my analysis of the patterns of association between grave-goods and the age and sex of the deceased (discussed below in chapters 8 and 9) showed that there could be no straightforward relationship between grave furnishing and wealth or rank.
Age and gender seemed to be far more important in determining the extent of a grave’s furnishing. Th is was perhaps the area of my research that grew most directly out of the works on Anglo-Saxon cemeteries that I had studied as an undergraduate.20 As is discussed further in commentary 5, the initial phase of my research into the cemetery data, the attempt to isolate gender-specifi c artefacts and artefact-kits was directly inspired by then relatively recent work on English evidence.21 Th e availability of directly contemporary written sources enabled a more rounded and contextual discussion of gender than was available for the Anglo-Saxon material. It has therefore had some role in furthering the study of this area in archaeological analyses in Britain and mainland Europe.22 Th e emergence, from my quest for gender-based artefact assemblages, of the importance of age as a determinant of grave-goods burial, was, for all that it was unexpected and indeed accidental,23 more ground-breaking. In 1988 the idea that there might be a link between the nature of a grave’s furnishing and the age of the deceased was, if not unheard of, still a new concept.24
That the study of social age might even help to explain the grave-goods custom was (and remains) even more radical. When it was presented at the conference of the Association Française d’Archéologie Mérovingienne in Metz in 1988, Patrick Périn’s ‘prudence’ (scepticism) was the most polite response expressed in open discussion.25 A more generous comment (reported to me by its recipient) was made in private conversation by Helmut Roth: ‘they criticise him today but in twenty years’ time they’ll all think he was right.’ Th is was one of the remarks that most encouraged me in persisting with my research and I am duly grateful. Roth’s remark was in some ways quite prescient, although it has taken a little less than twenty years for other work to come to similar conclusions, much of it has been carried out entirely separately from my own and far from everyone thinks I was right! Nevertheless, whatever the problems with the data from which I drew my conclusions (the principal basis for Périn’s ‘prudence’), subsequent studies of better-quality evidence (mostly, I reiterate, conducted entirely independently of my work) have confi rmed the general outlines of my model.26 All these conclusions about furnished inhumation left unanswered one crucial (but all-too-oft en ignored) question: if not demanded by ethnic custom or religious belief, or a manifestation of rank or wealth, then why did people dispose of their dead in this way? I began to answer this question in the course of my thesis by linking this ritual display with the instability of local social hierarchies and competition for authority.
This, it should be made clear, was not to deny that certain families might have maintained local pre-eminence from the Roman period right through to the Carolingian; it was to suggest that in eras where burial with grave-goods was employed, that pre-eminence was open to competition, expensively maintained and transferred with some difficulty from one generation to the next. This point is further emphasised in the analyses presented in chapters 2 to 11. Whereas chapters 8–11 refi ne the arguments set out in my thesis and the subsequent monograph, about the ways in which Merovingian cemetery evidence permits an investigation into gender, age, sexuality and other dimensions of social organisation, chapters 5–6 more clearly develop my original interpretation of the burial rite in terms of ritual. All of the ideas just discussed—the poverty of ethnic/religious explanations, the importance of age and gender in determining the distribution of grave-goods, the linkage of furnished burial with social competition and the explanation of the custom through its analysis as public ritual—are closely inter-related.
Another important area connected with all of those just enumerated, and which arose from the analysis of the cemeteries of the region of Metz—initially arising from noting the diff erences between the sites at Ennery and Audun-le-Tiche—was the study and explanation of change within the Merovingian period. One of the most important possible areas in which archaeology can contribute to the study of the post-imperial centuries is in revealing its dynamism. Th e written record has a tendency to homogeneity, resting largely on the desire of authors to make their works conform to those of the model writers within particular genres. Historians have also had a tendency to aggregate evidence from divergent chronological contexts. All this has made the detection of change more difficult and the significance of variations between sources written at different times hard to evaluate.
Much historical writing therefore has a tendency to assume continuity and debates about change can all too oft en take the form of contests between those who believe in stasis or gradual, barely perceptible evolution and those who wish to locate a single period of revolutionary change.27 In my doctoral thesis I was still imprisoned within the dominant ‘from Roman to medieval’ frame of mind.28 By the time I began to rewrite the thesis in 1992 I had realised that the evidence and analysis presented in the thesis was in fact pointing in a quite diff
erent direction. I had stressed the signifi cance of the changes that took place around 600 in my thesis.29 Th e essays collected here repeatedly stress the importance of those changes. It is to be hoped that they acquire some readership among Anglo-Saxon archaeologists, for the descriptive similarity of the changes in the nature of the data between the sixth and seventh centuries in England and in Gaul are quite extensive. Th is ought to call into question many currently accepted explanations for the English changes, especially conversion to Christianity or the creation of kingdoms. Nevertheless, as well as dynamic change through time, another aspect of my work has been geographical diversity. Th ere has been a fi ne tradition of regional studies of early medieval mainland Europe, albeit largely of the Carolingian era and later.
These studies have, furthermore, tended to deal with geographically peripheral regions of kingdoms. Regional surveys of the Merovingian period have not always had that sort of geographical focus, but in terms of coverage have usually been primarily artefactual overviews and have studied traditional issues such as Frankish settlement. My study of the region of Metz was in some ways more ‘Carolingian’ in its focus on aspects of social history and in moving away from the topic of Frankish settlement (largely because of my belief in the incapability of the evidence to answer such questions, as noted above), but diff erent from many regional studies in focussing on an area at the heart of a polity, in this case Austrasia. Nevertheless, I made it clear from the outset that it ought not to be considered typical, and that I made no claims that any of my conclusions could be applicable to other areas.30 I should reiterate that point; though these essays repeatedly (probably wearisomely to anyone reading this book cover-to-cover) use the Metz data as a spring-board case study they by no means imply that there is anything necessarily typical about the area and certainly do not propose that one can unproblematically generalise from the region’s cemeteries. Th ere are indeed good reasons why things might be different around the chief royal urban residence of the kingdom.
In some ways royal presence did make the area around Metz rather diff erent from other regions. For instance, the lack of aristocratic monastic foundations in the area, which I linked to the presence of the court, meant fi rst a lack of the sorts of rich charter evidence as are available for other regions and second, perhaps, a difference in the development of particular types of estate. Within the region of Metz, variations can be traced in the details of the funerary custom over quite short distances. Comparison of the cemeteries of Lavoye and Dieue-sur-Meuse made this clearest. On a wider scale, even if the general outlines of my social analyses have been confi rmed by studies of better data elsewhere, there are interesting regional differences in detail. In this sense I believe that, as I had hoped it would when it was published,31 my study of the region of Metz has made a valid contribution to unravelling the Merovingian world’s diversity and dynamism. It will quickly become apparent from the commentaries in this volume that this is a somewhat grumpy, or at least exasperated, volume.
I should make clear at the very outset that my sometimes rather despairing attitude towards early medieval archaeology is one that I maintain can only be held by someone who is (to some extent at least) an ‘insider’, an archaeologist. It is one held by someone with a deep and passionately held belief in the importance of archaeology in driving forward the study of this period (and others), and in the ability of archaeology (defi ned as the study of the unwritten, material cultural traces of the past)32 to speak with an independent voice. Archaeology, as I wrote in 1995,33 is in an unequalled position to help to shape revised views of the written data and thus to write new histories of this period. My exasperation stems from archaeology’s failure, as I perceive it, to make that voice speak adequately rigorously about the postimperial era in areas of interpretation and understanding, rather than in those of data recovery and description, where it occupies, of course, an unchallengeable position as the only discipline which is likely to produce more evidence for this period.
This failure to make archaeology (in my view) speak with suffi cient authority stems from diametrically opposite causes on diff erent sides of the English Channel. On its northern shores, it originates, in no small part, in British archaeology’s continued suspicion of and hostility towards the discipline of documentary history; an embittered estrangement might not be putting it too harshly. Th is is discussed at length in chapter 1 and Commentary 1. As I argue in commentary 1, British archaeology has invested far too much of its own sense of identity in an opposition to documentary history, rather than in self-confi dently shaping its own distinctive methods of contributing to the broader study of the past, which can be placed alongside documentary studies, appreciating the diff erent contributions made by the latter. As I, again, claim in commentary 1, that sort of self-confi dence would involve the recognition of the limits as well as developing the possibilities of archaeological analysis and an acceptance of the independent study of the written record as a complementary rather than antagonistic approach to past society, from which archaeological study can benefi t, as well as one which can benefi t from discussion with archaeologists.
I should make clear at the very outset that my sometimes rather despairing attitude towards early medieval archaeology is one that I maintain can only be held by someone who is (to some extent at least) an ‘insider’, an archaeologist. It is one held by someone with a deep and passionately held belief in the importance of archaeology in driving forward the study of this period (and others), and in the ability of archaeology (defi ned as the study of the unwritten, material cultural traces of the past)32 to speak with an independent voice. Archaeology, as I wrote in 1995,33 is in an unequalled position to help to shape revised views of the written data and thus to write new histories of this period. My exasperation stems from archaeology’s failure, as I perceive it, to make that voice speak adequately rigorously about the postimperial era in areas of interpretation and understanding, rather than in those of data recovery and description, where it occupies, of course, an unchallengeable position as the only discipline which is likely to produce more evidence for this period.
This failure to make archaeology (in my view) speak with suffi cient authority stems from diametrically opposite causes on diff erent sides of the English Channel. On its northern shores, it originates, in no small part, in British archaeology’s continued suspicion of and hostility towards the discipline of documentary history; an embittered estrangement might not be putting it too harshly. Th is is discussed at length in chapter 1 and Commentary 1. As I argue in commentary 1, British archaeology has invested far too much of its own sense of identity in an opposition to documentary history, rather than in self-confi dently shaping its own distinctive methods of contributing to the broader study of the past, which can be placed alongside documentary studies, appreciating the diff erent contributions made by the latter. As I, again, claim in commentary 1, that sort of self-confi dence would involve the recognition of the limits as well as developing the possibilities of archaeological analysis and an acceptance of the independent study of the written record as a complementary rather than antagonistic approach to past society, from which archaeological study can benefi t, as well as one which can benefi t from discussion with archaeologists.
I have learnt enormously from conversations with, and reading the works of, the researchers leading this movement, who have refi ned my own ways of seeing. It is diffi cult not to be exasperated by French Merovingian archaeology’s treatment of the northern Gallic, ‘Frankish’ cemetery evidence. Although very good work has been done on settlement archaeology and on other areas of Gaul, the discussion of that cemetery data remains sadly outmoded. An obsession with crude ethnic ascription remains, alongside the desire to force the archaeology into frameworks drawn from old readings of the written data. Furthermore, some of the work on ethnicity continues to employ very old-fashioned approaches such as the measurement of skulls. Social analysis remains, to all intents and purposes, non-existent.38 Some of these points, notably the attitude towards historical grandnarratives and general theoretical diff erences of approach, have led to a certain insularity of British early medieval archaeology.39 Th is is unfortunate for a number of reasons.
Partly this seems to stem from an unspoken assumption that British archaeology is ipso facto theoretically and methodologically in advance of that on mainland Europe (south of Scandinavia especially). Th is is an attitude based upon the fact that for a long time British archaeology was indeed far in advance of that in other areas in terms of fi eld techniques and oft en developed self-consciously theoretical approaches earlier than in other countries. While British archaeology’s excellence in the field remains, the differences between British and other European archaeologies may no longer be suffi cient to justify this insularity. Field techniques in other European countries are now oft en as advanced (sometimes from the adoption of British methods), and European analytical and theoretical approaches might be considered with profi t. As is discussed further in chapter 1 and commentary 1, the theoretical developments in British archaeology have not always represented unalloyed blessings. Th e failure to consider mainland Europe might also stem from a lack of ability in other languages that seems even further advanced among British archaeologists than among British historians. For some reason it appears to be acceptable among archaeologists to shelter behind a simple lack of linguistic competence in excusing such historiographical isolationism. As time goes on the assumptions of disciplinary superiority alluded to in the previous paragraph will become ever more detached from reality.
Meanwhile, European archaeologists continue to read and communicate in English as well as their native tongues. Given the lack of impact upon British archaeology even of communication in English about mainland European early medieval archaeology,40 we might seek a further historical explanation for this insularity. I suggest that this in part stems from changes in attitudes towards migration as an explanatory hypothesis. Older generations of Anglo-Saxon archaeologists sought explanation simply in terms of the migration to England of Anglo-Saxons from northern Germany and southern Scandinavia.
This was an attitude oft en framed by a particular reading of Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and frequently led to hypotheses that were unsatisfying from either an archaeological or an historical point of view (see above). Furthermore, archaeology carried out from this point of view rarely considered any parts of Europe other than those from which the migrants were assumed to have come. Th is in turn led to hypotheses that suff ered from a lack of awareness of similar processes in other former provinces of the Roman Empire. Many of the drawbacks of these approaches have long been pointed out and there is no need to repeat them here. However, the abandonment of the invasion (or migration) hypothesis by younger generations of British archaeologists appears to have led to a complete lack of interest in any of mainland Europe.41
This is compounded by the attitudes discussed above. Th is is unfortunate. Many of the explanations off ered in AngloSaxon archaeology for the custom of furnished inhumation, and thus the social and political analyses based thereon, suff er from insularity. Familiarity with the evidence from the southern shores of the Channel would cast enormous doubt upon the ‘Germanic’ and pagan assumptions still common and upon conversion to Christianity as a catch-all explanation for the cultural transformations of the late sixth and early seventh century. Th e essays in this collection attempt to restore some of the freedom to act to the members of Merovingian local communities. For too long, occupants of the past have been studied as members of particular static collectivities, whether based upon sex, religion, kindred, ethnicity or social class. Th ese are oft en expressed as simple binary oppositions: men or women, of this or that family, Franks or Romans, Christian or pagan, rich or poor, noble or commoner, free or slave. The argument has been presented that this was essentially how early medieval folk saw themselves: not as individuals but as members of groups. In a sense this is doubtless right. Perhaps people of all ages see themselves to some extent primarily as members of groups.
But each person stands at any one time at the intersection of a number of such groups. Th e traditional views make the people of the past twodimensional. More to the point it is clear that, in opposition to many traditional analyses, the simple fact of group-membership did not compel any particular course of action. Studies of families and kin-groups have shown how their membership, rather than being determined by ageold ‘Germanic’ kin structures, was determined by the political confi gurations at any particular time.42 In other words, people chose when and with whom to make their kindred or affi liation the basis of action according to the demands of the moment.
Traditional views of the so-called blood-feud have seen early medieval people driven to violent action by traditional ‘demands’ of codes of familial honour. Yet the existence of such codes, and even the historical reality of the ‘bloodfeud’ itself can be seriously doubted.43 Furthermore, the nature of these social groupings was never static. Th e study of early medieval ethnicity over the past two decades has illuminated very clearly how fl uid this was. As I discuss below, the gendered aspect of ethnic identity was also redefi ned during the earlier Merovingian period.44 Th e essays collected here aim to demonstrate how the experience of membership of these groups changed, and how those experiences themselves helped to transform the nature of social identities. As is discussed below, especially in chapters 8–11, what it meant to be a man or a woman, young or old, Frankish or Roman, what choices of sexual practice might have implied, were all perpetually under renegotiation in the Merovingian era.
The way into that negotiation comes largely through the analysis of the burial ritual that created our evidence, how it served as a sort of punctuation mark within constant social discourse, and of how it was itself constantly altered in the course of repeated re-enactment. Th is is enriched by the insights that the written record gives us into what people thought was the ‘correct’ structure of society and into their other beliefs and actions. Th is sheds light upon how ‘codes’ and institutions are perpetually redefi ned. Th ese do not stand outside social behaviour, governing the latter. Rather they are constituted by people’s knowledge or awareness of the ‘right way’ to behave, formed by the accumulation of interactions considered correct or acceptable and those that were not. In other words, what constrains action is not the existence of a structure extrinsic to people’s world-views, one that exerts some independent force upon them, but individuals’ knowledge or ideas about how to behave.
These ideas might periodically be written down and even given legal status but they are incapable of being frozen. As theorists have commented, we can think of these norms as a sort of behavioural grammar. Just as a language’s grammar to some extent constrains what can be made intelligible to a reader or listener, it permits the generation and transmission of new ideas. As is well known, languages are not frozen by grammatical rules; constant practice through speech and writing means that technically incorrect usages which nevertheless manage eff ectively to convey an intended meaning are eventually accepted. Similarly, every minuscule behavioural infraction of social norms that is not penalised in some way adds to the ‘memory bank’ of acceptable behaviour until over time, the correct way to behave would be quite shocking to someone from a previous period.
We are thus quite wrong to view the inhabitants of the Merovingian (or any other) past as members of static groups, whose actions will somehow be predictably in accordance with what we perceive to be the demands of such collectives (ethnic, gendered, familial, religious, wealth-based or whatever). My aim in these chapters is to bring the occupants of some Merovingian communities back from their graves and, by attempting to write social history (from documentary and archaeological sources) in accordance with the principles set out in this introduction, present them not as the predictable cardboard cutouts of previous histories but as active, thinking three-dimensional individuals with an ability to choose and, in so doing, to participate in the making of their history.
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