The Long Morning of Medieval Europe

New Directions in Early Medieval Studies

Jennifer R. Davis, Michael McCormick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351886369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Recent advances in research show that the distinctive features of high medieval civilization began developing centuries earlier than previously thought. The era once dismissed as a "Dark Age" now turns out to have been the long morning of the medieval millennium: the centuries from AD 500 to 1000 witnessed the dawn of developments that were to shape Europe for centuries to come. In 2004, historians, art historians, archaeologists, and literary specialists from Europe and North America convened at Harvard University for an interdisciplinary conference exploring new directions in the study of that long morning of medieval Europe, the early Middle Ages. Invited to think about what seemed to each the most exciting new ways of investigating the early development of western European civilization, this impressive group of international scholars produced a wide-ranging discussion of innovative types of research that define tomorrow's field today. The contributors, many of whom rarely publish in English, test approaches extending from using ancient DNA to deducing cultural patterns signified by thousands of medieval manuscripts of saints' lives. They examine the archaeology of slave labor, economic systems, disease history, transformations of piety, the experience of power and property, exquisite literary sophistication, and the construction of the meaning of palace spaces or images of the divinity. The book illustrates in an approachable style the vitality of research into the early Middle Ages, and the signal contributions of that era to the future development of western civilization. The chapters cluster around new approaches to five key themes: the early medieval economy; early medieval holiness; representation and reality in early medieval literary art; practices of power in an early medieval empire; and the intellectuality of early medieval art and architecture. Michael McCormick's brief introductions open each part of the volume; synthetic essays by accomplished specialists conclude them. The editors summarize the whole in a synoptic introduction. All Latin terms and citations and other foreign-language quotations are translated, making this work accessible even to undergraduates. The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies presents innovative research across the wide spectrum of study of the early Middle Ages. It exemplifies the promising questions and methodologies at play in the field today, and the directions that beckon tomorrow.

PART ONE
Discovering the Early Medieval Economy

Part One
Discovering the Early Medieval Economy

Michael McCormick

For the end of the ancient world and the character of medieval civilization, the economic history of the early Middle Ages has long loomed large. In Part One, the reader meets the latest new directions in our understanding of the early medieval economy, whose development now appears both much longer, and deeper, than even just a few years ago. This in turn implies that the extraordinary wealth that culminated in the civilization of high medieval Europe took centuries longer to build than previously recognized: the long morning of Europe’s economy was long indeed.

Alfons Dopsch’s (1868–1953) powerful and optimistic argument contended that the early Middle Ages essentially continued the ancient economy without rupture, and his work has exercised deep influence, especially in the Germanspeaking lands.¹ The basic continuity in agrarian organization, craft production, and trade that he advocated was accepted by Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) – with a critical modification. The great Belgian historian believed that economic organization remained essentially the same until the rise of Islam shattered Mediterranean unity around the time of Charlemagne, and destroyed what Pirenne took to be the main motor that powered economic development: longdistance trade.² Around this debate, more recent contributions have challenged and often clarified the role of technological development in the countryside, the history and character of the great estate, demographic trends and settlement patterns, and the collapse and rebirth of trade.³

For all the brilliance of its leading exponents, the resolution of the great debate seemed, in this one case, hampered by the relative scarcity of evidence, and by the contradictory conclusions deduced from what shafts of light radiated from the explicit records of the economy, which remained sporadic. Nevertheless, more rigorous scrutiny of the written sources began to change our understanding of the agrarian basis of the early medieval economy. From them Adriaan Verhulst rewrote the history of the great estate, arguing that far from dysfunctional dinosaur villas inherited from late Rome, the bipartite manors of the early Middle Ages were a dynamic new invention that spread out from the Frankish heartland between the Rhine and the Loire rivers. The next step was the observation that the intensified production of the new estate organization was at least in part geared to markets, rather than self-sufficiency.⁴

Georges Duby’s view of the early medieval countryside’s economic futility famously pinpointed the failure to invest the capital required to build numerous water mills and so boost the productivity of rural labor, otherwise wasted by the need to hand-grind cereals for the daily bread.⁵ But Dietrich Lohrmann’s meticulous re-examination of Duby’s written evidence, in the light, notably, of water tables and subsequent mill development in the Paris region, proved just the contrary: already by the 820s, mills had been built practically everywhere they were feasible.⁶ Archaeology is now discovering the mills themselves, and so deepening across Europe our knowledge of capital investment in the early medieval countryside.⁷ Another changing technology with profound implications for agrarian productivity, that of the plow, was made famous by Lynn White and others. It now looks very different as well. Joachim Henning’s archaeological investigations have shown that the original shift was actually to a more technologically advanced type of tool for working the soil and boosting food production. The spread of this swivel plow fused Roman technology and barbarian household organization into a new agrarian system, a new “logic of production”. It too began in the early Middle Ages, centuries earlier than the move away from the light Mediterranean scratch plow or ard had previously been dated.⁸

As these advances suggest, a whole new chapter has begun with the rise of medieval archaeology. The new field is delivering massive new data, especially from natural scientific approaches such as palaeobotany, archaeozoology, and various soil investigations. They cast intense light on the organization of food and craft production, even as settlement patterns ally with cemetery population studies to clarify demographic patterns in the countryside. The archaeology of interregional trade has made tremendous headway in the Mediterranean, at least down to c. 700, and as ceramic studies for the subsequent period advance and provide reliable chronological and geographical proxy indicators for the movement of other kinds of goods, we may expect further progress there too, as Angeliki Laiou shows. Around the North Sea, our knowledge has advanced further and faster, as the exchange systems and wares are emerging from the earth in often startling detail. The excavation of the nascent trading towns there and in the Baltic has revealed the circulation of goods symbolized by English, French and German export ceramics, Rhenish wine barrels, and woolen textiles of still uncertain archaeological provenance.⁹ And, as Joachim Henning reminds us in Chapter 2, those early towns made some of their money on the bodies of Europeans, from slave sales. The first rays of light have even begun to fall on the penetration of early medieval longer-distance trading circuits into the countryside.¹⁰ Finally, the last few years have spawned at least three big books which integrate new data and the new understandings of old data into broader views of the early medieval economy.¹¹ Such syntheses are indispensable. All the data in the world will not take us toward what really happened if we fail to organize the new data into plausible economic systems. Even when such syntheses (including, of course, my own) will be shown to come up short against new and better evidence and understandings, they will have served us well if their formulations and analyses are clear and cogent enough to spark better investigations and explanations.

Part One starts with just such a synthesis: Chris Wickham’s bold analysis of the regional and inter-regional forces of supply and demand. Building on the new data from archaeology, he locates the driving force for growing economic complexity in elite demand, itself the reflection of increasing wealth extracted from the countryside, which, he argues, must be addressed on the level of internal regional development. His is a stimulating model for integrating old and new data into broader conceptual patterns, and is sure to spark rich discussion.

We move then to the village level to analyze broad patterns of changing rural economic organization as they appear, notably, from the archaeology of slave shackles and rural implements in Gaul, and from house and settlement types in Tuscany. Joachim Henning’s ambitious archaeological and historical synthesis addresses directly Wickham’s crucial question of labor, productivity and wealth in the countryside, but from a different angle, as it investigates rural slave or servile labor and its productivity in a comparative light. Henning asks how slaves or servile peasants may have affected the economic performance of the western provinces of the late Roman Empire in competition with the barbarian newcomers, on one hand. On the other, he challenges the new understanding of the Carolingian bipartite estate by underscoring the ambiguous archaeological evidence on the economic performance of the Carolingian countryside under the impact of the Frankish aristocracy’s new manorial system.

In Chapter 3, Riccardo Francovich examines aristocratic impact on the countryside from another angle. In Tuscany, the archaeological and historical evidence illuminates the passage from the late Roman pattern of dispersed settlement dominated by villas and isolated farms to the medieval (and modern) one of nucleated villages. Pierre Toubert’s brilliant historical research into the Italian archives of the ninth and tenth centuries had uncovered the crucial process of incastellamento, the building of castelli (castles, usually small).¹² Since the castles sit amidst villages, the ruling elites and their castelli were until now thought to have played the crucial role in reorganizing the Italian countryside into its productive medieval and later pattern of nucleated villages, and launching the rise of the agrarian economy. Francovich’s survey, mapping and test excavations of central Italy reveal that most villages had come into being long before the archives begin to document them and the building of castles. If we put ourselves in the place of the peasants whose villages were already centuries old when the great men arrived to build castles in their midst, and to use those forts to dominate, to extract revenues from those same peasants, the whole process appears in a new light, and with it, again, the stages of the growth of the medieval economy across that very long morning of early medieval Europe.

These new interpretations of the early medieval economy were made possible by the emergence of large amounts of new evidence from archaeology. The next chapter introduces the reader to a major source of radically new data that is just beginning to become available from the new field of biomolecular archaeology. Immense untapped testimony on the early medieval economy lies buried in the bones of the people who created it. What did the peasants eat on those early medieval manors, and how much? Where did they come from, where did they move to? How did they hold their tools? How did the changing early medieval economy shape their life experience? Whom did the Anglo-Saxon conquerors choose as their mates? My own essay introduces the reader to the molecular revolution’s first results in investigating such questions. Finally, Angeliki Laiou’s concluding reflections in Chapter 5 offer insight into the whole set of questions opened by Part One, inspired by the salutary parallel of Byzantine developments. The depth of perception that comes with a comparative view emphasizes the importance of discovering the still largely missing links between the crucial developments in the countryside and the market circuits of trade that have only begun to emerge from the soil and the neglected written sources.

Where do we go from here? Archaeological investigation must continue to devise carefully considered survey, sampling and excavation strategies to develop more new data for these questions, particularly from biomolecular evidence. The exploration of specific manors on the ground must be a high priority. Historians, natural scientists and archaeologists must work together to expand exploitation and reflection on the archaeological materials, along the lines of what we already attempt in Part One. Historians and philologists will have to collaborate to locate hitherto unidentified economic data in the written sources, thanks notably to the growing ranks of online databanks of medieval texts. And we must all deepen our understanding of modern economic and anthropological thinking about the economics and cultural patterns of development, agrarian management and change, demography, craft production, markets and trade. This expansion “outward” of our sources of information should not come at the expense of new empirical evidence from “within”, that is, from better-documented late medieval and early modern Europe, for instance, about the crucial process of rational managerial decision-making in the countryside.¹³ That, for the first time, we are glimpsing the complexity of developments in the early medieval countryside incites us to allow for the possibility of differing developments in different areas and, especially, of much greater dynamism over time, of sharp and repeated upturns and downturns in different aspects of Europe’s economic life across that long morning of half the medieval millennium.¹⁴ The new data and insights oblige us to be ready and willing to return to texts that historians have reckoned to have said (or refused to yield) their last word, and to challenge the interpretations of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• List of Abbreviations
• The Early Middle Ages: Europe’s Long Morning
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Index