The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages

389 Pages·2013·2.396 MB·English

by  Ian N. Wood

THE MODERN ORIGINS OF THE
EARLY MIDDLE AGES
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Th e Modern Origins of
the Early Middle Ages
IAN WOOD
1
3

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© Ian Wood 2013
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First Edition published in 2013
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For Ann, Jinty, Pauline, and Wendy
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Preface
All books have specifi c contexts, and this one is no exception. Its subject matter is
the changing interpretation within Europe of the end of the Roman Empire and
the early Middle Ages from the eighteenth century to the present and how indi-
vidual interpretations infl uenced and were infl uenced by the circumstances in
which they were written. Th e underlying question of the book, however, is a related
but slightly diff erent one: why is early medieval history, or indeed any pre-modern
history, important? Th is question was raised in a very sharp way by the then educa-
tion secretary, Charles Clarke, in May 2003 when he allegedly stated ‘I don’t mind
there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes but there is no
reason for the state to pay for them.’1 A similar vision seems to underlie the Coali-
tion Government’s views of the place of the Humanities in Higher Education since
2010.
Modern historians can claim that they have a function in policing the use and
abuse of the immediate past, some of which impinges unquestionably on the
present.2 Certainly history can and sometimes has to be a fact-checking exercise:
but facts, particularly those relating to the distant past are often not amenable to
strict verifi cation. Moreover, interpretation is frequently an issue that is not black
and white, and uncertainty is even more likely to aff ect our reading of the Middle
Ages than of the modern period. Nevertheless, the issue of use and abuse is as rel-
evant to interpreting the sixth as the twentieth century.3 Th e Middle Ages are used
and abused all the time. 4 Part of a response to Charles Clarke must therefore be
that Medieval History is often exploited improperly, and this should not be allowed
to pass without comment. At fi rst sight, however, the misuse of Medieval History
is insignifi cant: it is most obvious in the tendency of journalists and politicians to
describe as ‘medieval’ or ‘dark age’ an atrocity that could only have happened in the
nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-fi rst century: that is, when the word ‘modern’
would be more accurate.5 It is easy to dismiss political rhetoric as nothing other
than words. Yet rhetoric does matter, and the use of words like ‘medieval’ in mod-
ern discourse involves the exploitation of the past.
Th e use of the distant past, however, even of the early Middle Ages, is more than
a matter of rhetorical colouring. Th e period from 300 to 700 has often been at the
1 For what Charles Clarke may or may not have said, see Nelson, Leadership in Society and the
Academy , pp. 4–5.
2 Macmillan, Th e uses and abuses of history . For a medievalist such a response seems over-simple.
3 Wood, ‘Th e use and abuse of the Early Middle Ages, 1750–2000’.
4 A particularly startling abuse of the supposed barbarian involvement in the Fall of the Roman
Empire dominates a speech ‘On the failure of multiculturalism and how to turn the tide’ delivered in
Rome by the right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders on 25th March 2011.
5 Simon Jenkins of the G uardian is a regular off ender, even though, as a lover of medieval parish
churches he should know better.
viii Preface
heart of arguments about the modern world. It was central to debates about aris-
tocratic privilege and about despotism in the eighteenth century; about class con-
fl ict, exploitation by foreign powers, and nationalism in the nineteenth; about the
limits of Germany and the nature of Europe in the twentieth. Naturally, the cir-
cumstances in which they were discussed led the Fall of Rome and the early Middle
Ages to be interpreted in particular ways. Historical argument is not just about
the past: it is about the present. While the present determines how we see the past,
the past is often used to validate or attack current circumstances—and that use
may be accurate, mistaken, or fraudulent. In short, to use a concept developed by
Michel Foucault, the interpretation of the early Middle Ages belongs to a modern
historico-political discourse.6
We tend to use the past without thinking, above all about where our under-
standing of it has come from and why that might matter. Yet if we address the
question of why certain historical events are and have been interpreted in particu-
lar ways, we start to understand why they have signifi cance for the present, and we
begin to have a more sophisticated response to Charles Clarke than a simple call
for getting facts right. Th is book is thus a response to the notion that medieval
history is purely ornamental.
Th at such a book needs to be written is a refl ection of the tendency of historians,
perhaps particularly historians trained in Britain, to have little interest in histori-
ography—and those historians who do think a great deal about historiography,
even those who are aware of the intellectual origins of the interpretations that con-
cern them, rarely think hard about the political, social, economic, and cultural
contexts in which those ideas were formulated. Th e Oxford History School, where
I was trained in the early 1970s, was little interested in historiographical questions.
Certainly there were historians who knew and appreciated their Gibbon, Kemble,
Stubbs, Maitland, Brunner, and Pirenne. Yet the intellectual and social histories to
which these authors themselves belonged were not made integral to our under-
standing of the past. In part this was because of a very Whiggish sense that histori-
cal interpretation was steadily improving. Indeed, I can remember being told,
when embarking on research on fi fth- and sixth-century Gaul that there was no
point in reading anything on the Franks earlier than Wallace-Hadrill’s Th e Long-
haired Kings . 7 I hasten to add that it was not Wallace-Hadrill himself, who was my
supervisor, nor indeed any of my tutors, who said this.8 Among early medievalists,
it would be Walter Goff art in the 1980s and 90s who fi rst made me, and no
doubt many of my generation, realize the quality of work written in the nineteenth
century. 9
6 Foucault, S ociety Must be Defended (originally published as I l faut défendre la société: cours au Collège
de France 1975–6 ) .
7 Wallace-Hadrill, Th e Long-haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History .
8 Nor was it said by any of my undergraduate tutors, the early medievalists among them being
Th omas Charles-Edwards, Henry Mayr-Harting, Peter Brown, Sabine McCormack, James Howard-
Johnston, and John Matthews.
9 Goff art, B arbarians and Romans A.D. 418–584: Th e Techniques of Accommodation .
Preface ix
I was, however, made aware of the relationship between the past and the context
in which it has been interpreted on moving to London in 1974 and working in the
Institute of Historical Research under the watchful eye of the librarian, Bill Kella-
way. Th ere was a certain frisson in opening volumes of the M onumenta Germaniae
Historica , perhaps the greatest collection of early medieval sources, and seeing the
bookplate ‘Geschenk des Deutschen Reiches’ (‘Gift of the German Reich’), in see-
ing, just along the shelf, with the same bookplate, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf , and
knowing that the students of the University of London had prevented von Rib-
bentrop from presenting them in person in 1937.1 0 Th is was clearly medieval his-
tory that mattered.
Th at frisson certainly sensitized me to look for a relationship between past and
present, but it scarcely brought home quite how important interpretations of the
Early Middle Ages might be for an understanding of the present. No medievalist
living at the time of the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, however, could have
failed to realize quite how dangerous a reading of the past might be, especially after
reading a work like Branimir Anzulovic’s H eavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide .1 1
It was as a result of this growing sensitivity to the relation between past and
present that I fi rst attempted to write about the development of historiography,
in response to a request from Henk Wesseling at the Netherlands Institute for
Advanced Study.
Th e signifi cance of individual historians in interpreting the past was also borne
in upon me as I came to appreciate the recollections of individuals I knew. Peter
Sawyer’s fund of anecdotes brought to life the intellectual milieux in which the
Viking Age and Late Anglo-Saxon England had been debated in the 1950s and
60s—in Manchester, Birmingham, and in Scandinavia. Most students who stud-
ied the Early Middle Ages in Oxford in the late 1960s and early 1970s were equally
aware of belonging to a period of intellectual ferment surrounding the lectures of
Peter Brown and exemplifi ed in the publication of Th e World of Late Antiquity in
1971. 12 Twenty-fi ve years later I was fortunate enough to be invited to contribute
to a volume refl ecting on the signifi cance of the book. Th e introductory article was
Brown’s own reconsideration of the work’s genesis.1 3 Here was a level of self-refl ec-
tion that was then uncommon among historians, at least in print.
I had already started to consider historiography of a more distant period, as a
result of a conference held in Oxford to mark the bicentenary of Gibbon’s death1 4 —
centenaries of Gibbon have been among the rare moments over the last decades
when specialists in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages have thought hard about
the development of their subject.1 5 For me, the discovery in preparing a paper
was not the value of Gibbon, which was less than I had expected, but rather the
10 I should add that they are no longer on the open shelves.
1 1 Anzulovic, H eavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide .
12 Brown, Th e World of Late Antiquity .
13 ‘SO Debate: Peter Brown, Th e World of Late Antiquity ’.
14 McKitterick and Quinault (eds), E dward Gibbon and Empire .
15 See Bowersock, Clive, and Graubard, E dward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire .