Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West 450-900

Guy Halsall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415239400
• eBook ISBN: 9781134553877
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Guy Halsall relates warfare to many aspects of medieval life, economy, society and politics.This book recovers its distinctiveness, looking at warfare in a rounded context in the British Isles and Western Europe between the end of the Roman Empire and the break-up of the Carolingian Empire.

Examining the raising and organization of early medieval armies and looks at the conduct of campaigns, the survey also includes a study of the equipment of warriors and the horrific experience of battle as well as an analysis of medieval fortifications and siege warfare.

Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West uses historical and archaeological evidence in a rigorous and sophisticated fashion. It stresses regional variations but also places Anglo-Saxon England in the mainstream of the military developments in this era, and in the process, provides an outstanding resource for students of all levels.

1
WARFARE AND VIOLENCE IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

Introduction

Early on the morning of Tuesday 18 October 841, Nithard, a Frankish aristocrat, indeed a grandson of the Emperor Charlemagne, sat down to write his account of the events of that year up to the great battle of Fontenoy, which had taken place on 25 June. He tells us the day he wrote because ‘while [he] was writing’ there was an eclipse of the Sun ‘in the first hour’ (between about 6.00 and 7.00 a.m.). Nithard had fought at Fontenoy. Presumably he had killed men there; he was engaged in what was apparently the hardest-fought sector of the battle. Battle like this was a bloody, face-to-face affair carried out with what later generations would call ‘cold steel’, and a nobleman of Nithard’s standing would have been stationed in or very close to the front rank. It seems reasonable to suppose that Nithard was by turns frightened and furious, experiencing all the immense and extreme adrenaline-driven emotions which hand-to-hand fighting produces. He had to try his best to kill, and he would have known it: if he did not he would be killed. Almost exactly three years after Fontenoy, on 14 June 844, Nithard was indeed killed in battle in the Angoumois, possibly by some of the same men he had faced at Fontenoy.¹

Nithard and his account of Fontenoy make a valuable case study of the problems involved in the study of early medieval warfare. Though Nithard is unusual in writing an eyewitness report of an early medieval battle, perhaps even more unusual in that he wrote within four months of its occurrence, and although he tells us much about the negotiations before the battle, his account of the fighting takes barely a paragraph.² Even this is more detailed than most early medieval descriptions of battle, but it is nevertheless terse, formulaic and in fact contains less incidental detail than some later ninth- and early tenth-century accounts written by clerics and monks who had not experienced warfare first hand. Nithard wrote stylish, classically influenced Latin and it was by this that he expected to be judged by his audience. To Nithard and his contemporaries, a writer’s ‘authority’ was based upon these things, not on detailed ‘factual’ knowledge. Autopsy – to be able to say ‘I know because I was there’ – was rhetorically impressive but, unlike modern historians, neither writer nor reader expected the minutiae of what actually happened to bog down a written account or to take precedence over the display of knowledge of classics, scripture or the writings of the church fathers (patristics). The ‘True Law of History’ (lex vera historiae)³ was moral, not empirical. Intellectual weight derived not from factual report but from exegetical understanding and explanation, and thus historical authority rested upon scholarly learning, not the meticulous compilation of accurate records of the lived world. We should not, however, be led into thinking that Nithard’s writing, and that of other early medieval authors, was somehow divorced from ‘reality’. Theirs was, simply, a different reality from that of post-Enlightenment modern Europe. There was a genuine and pressing need to find meaning and lessons in everyday events in order to understand the workings of God in the world. Thus Nithard saw real relevance in the eclipse which took place as he wrote. The battle of Fontenoy had been a deeply traumatic event, the bloody rupture of a Frankish polity which had (just about) endured for well over a century.⁴ How apt, then, that the Lord would mark this dreadful year with an eclipse, the more so that He did so just as Nithard, a participant in the battle, was writing his report for one of the kings who had led the armies there. When Nithard pauses to tell us of the eclipse he illustrates graphically the mental gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

This is underlined by the very brevity of Nithard’s account of Fontenoy. As will become apparent throughout this book, during the early Middle Ages people did not write in detail about warfare.⁵ This is one of the most intriguing aspects of the study of war in this period. Eric John wrote that Anglo-Saxon society was so violent that fighting and making war were central to its way of life.⁶ Kingship was inextricably bound up with warfare. Warfare is best documented in Francia, where rulers like Charles Martel (Frankish mayor of the palace, 717–41) or his grandson Charlemagne went on campaign most years of their lives. The Royal Frankish Annals record that in 792 ‘no military campaign was carried out this year’, as though this were in itself newsworthy.⁷ Indeed it was, and when the same report was made in 790, a later annalist felt obliged to explain Charlemagne’s lack of military activity.⁸ However, in 792 the annalists were wrong; an expedition was sent against Benevento in the winter. One of the rank and file, Ripwin, made arrangements in case he did not come back.⁹ The Appendix lists all the occasions during one well-documented period of ten years (581–90) when an army was called out or when larger-scale violence broke out in the Merovingian realms.¹⁰ They total thirty-seven incidents. Elsewhere, the records are not as complete, but the picture is still of endemic warfare. Between 600 and 850 fourteen wars are recorded between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex; in the same period, Mercia waged eleven wars against the Welsh and fought other opponents on eighteen recorded occasions. This list of forty-two wars almost certainly does not represent a full list of incidents of warfare during this period and possibly consists mostly of the more serious and noteworthy outbreaks of fighting.¹¹ Yet even on this conservative estimate Mercia found itself at war with one or other of its neighbours every five or six years. In seventh-century England twelve battles were recorded involving the death of at least one king or major royal figure, besides ten other battles and eleven other instances of warfare. That not all warfare was so ‘newsworthy’, let alone unusual that it would naturally be recorded, is also made clear by a Spanish inscription recording the death of an aristocrat called Oppila on campaign against the Basques – a campaign otherwise completely unknown.¹² Between 791 and 883, the Spanish kingdom of the Asturias was attacked thirty-three times by the Emirs of Cordoba; on at least seven occasions, when not under assault, the Christians took advantage of the respite to attack the Moslems.¹³ Warfare was a common and very real feature of early medieval life. The period has, moreover, been described as an ‘heroic age’.¹⁴ Why, then, was there so little written in any detail about warfare? Classical Greek writers told all about battle in various genres, taking us from the high-level political and strategic background, through discussion of the tactical course of a battle, to the moral effects of combat and the values of particular formations and weapons and down to the most earthy and human features of battlefield experience: the inexperienced warrior soiling himself with fear as the enemy approached.¹⁵ Roman writers discussed similar things. There is thus a huge difference between the classical Greek and Roman worlds, where we can study strategy, routes and orders of march, orders of battle, battlefield tactics and psychology in detail and try to recover the experience of warfare in all its horror,¹⁶ and the early medieval west, where such things lie largely beyond our purview.

Was warfare too grim to write about or discuss? This is possible but unlikely to be the whole explanation. Early medieval warfare is unlikely to have been more horrific than classical Greek warfare, yet people wrote often and graphically about their experience of the latter. Occasionally we hear of warriors glorying in their exploits. Notker the Stammerer tells us of Eishere, a warrior from his childhood, thus an elder contemporary of Nithard, who would tell of how he fought the Slavs, spitting them on his spear like little birds ‘squealing their incomprehensible lingo’.¹⁷ Some epic heroic poetry such as the Frankish epic Waltharius may, given that it survives in manuscripts from monastic contexts, represent monkish satire upon secular aristocrats and their silly boasting about fighting.¹⁸

The explanation for the absence of writing about warfare is, again, to be sought at least partly in contemporary expectations of written sources. The Latin tradition of secular narrative history that emphasised wars and battles, such as epitomised by Sallust, Tacitus and later Ammianus Marcellinus, had largely died out in the Latin west by this period, though the Greek tradition was continued in the east. Thereafter the detailed discussion of matters military ceased to be an accepted part of the narrative historical genres. Nevertheless, early medieval writers were well acquainted with the classics; Nithard used Sallust, for example. Yet only at the very end of our period, from about Nithard’s day onwards, do accounts of battles and other military encounters begin to be a little more detailed. What we can learn about past society often depends upon the rules of the genres within which contemporaries wrote, and the genres of historical writing which existed in the early medieval west did not expect the author to discuss warfare in depth. Its existence, the routes of armies, where battles were fought and who won remained an accepted and major part of the subject matter but further detail appears not to have been regarded as appropriate.

Why this should have been the case is unclear. We might wonder if Christianity played a part. Classical historiographical traditions were intricately related to Graeco-Roman religious beliefs and a set of relationships with the divine, which in turn gave rise to particular attitudes towards battlefield prowess and heroism, probably going back to Homer and other early epic poets. Christian attitudes towards killing could be quite different. The western Church had never been particularly easy about the Christian’s role in a secular state which might require one to kill.¹⁹ In theory, penance could be required from those who killed in war. Religion might explain a certain reluctance on the part of those who had experienced it to discuss warfare.

This explanation does not seem entirely satisfactory. The Church has usually found sufficient theological elasticity to justify most aspects of human behaviour. In the zealously Christian Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, detailed writing about military affairs, both in histories and in military treatises, remained common. A millennium after Nithard, fighting in defence of a fairly inhuman cause, the Confederate commander ‘Stonewall’ Jackson referred to his troops as the ‘Army of the Living God’, whilst his colleague, General Leonidas Polk, was Episcopalian bishop of Louisiana. In the early Middle Ages the Church was wedded to militant, martial and often very violent imagery. The fifth-century poet Prudentius was popular in Nithard’s day. Prudentius wrote extremely gory accounts of martyrdoms on the one hand, and of the warfare to be waged between virtues and vices on the other.²⁰ Carolingian manuscript illustrations accompanying Prudentius’ work deck out the virtues and vices in contemporary war-gear. Illustrations to Bibles and Psalters are a major source for contemporary depictions of warriors and warfare. In art, the norms of written sources are reversed; although they borrowed models from classical art, early medieval illuminators were quite prepared to bring images from everyday reality into the midst of writing about the remote past. Similarly, Christian poetry in England and on the Continent imported ‘heroic’ warrior imagery and aspects of contemporary warfare into accounts of biblical or early Christian history.²¹ From the seventh century onwards, Old Testament ideas of kingship became increasingly popular; early medieval kings were expected to be warriors and the Book of Kings was an apt source of role models. The Bible, however, says little about how battles were won and lost and its explanation of why not surprisingly focuses upon the divine. This change in views of agency may bring us closer to explaining the difference between the classical period and the early medieval. Warfare remained part of the established material for historical writing and early medieval writers liked to model their style upon the great Roman practitioners of the genre, yet perhaps the details of human behaviour, weapons and armour on the battlefield remained unnecessary. After all, battles were supposed to be won by divine favour, not human agency.

The fact that most historical writing was carried out by churchmen cannot explain the absence of discussions of warfare. Some of the more detailed accounts of battles were written by clergy or monks. If we look at secular poetry a similarly intriguing picture presents itself; in many ways it is an opposing picture to that provided by prose sources but this serves only to heighten the problem. Much of the surviving poetry from the period concerns warriors, weapons and warfare. This style was projected into vernacular poetry dealing with Biblical or Christian topics. Here Christianity cannot play a decisive role. The same problems, by and large, apply to Scandinavian heroic poetry after the close of our period, poetry which presumably, though to a now unknowable extent, drew upon pre-Christian traditions. This sort of poetry was, we assume (leaving aside the possibility that it is monastic in origin), a staple at the great feasts of the era, and was delivered to audiences comprising people like Nithard, who had fought and knew the business of fighting. Indeed at the very time that Nithard lived, we can trace the earliest written versions of possibly older vernacular tales, especially poems, often concerned with epic battle, as in the Old High German Hildebrandslied.²² This poetry can be called ‘heroic’. However, it is standardised and formal, glorifying battle and the role of warriors within it, but saying very little about how it was actually carried out or what happened on the battlefield. It is blunt, triumphalist and in the final analysis, whilst more complex in terms of composition, language and poetic style, in content reasonably to be compared to the more unpleasant, aggressive songs chanted at the opposition every Saturday afternoon at British football grounds. The extent to which poetry like this has much at all to do with actual battlefield reality is debatable (though in chapter 9 an attempt will be made to relate it to action on the battlefield). On the opposite side from Nithard at the Battle of Fontenoy was another Frankish aristocrat, otherwise unknown, called Engilbert. He wrote a poem (in Latin) about the battle, which gives a few fleeting details of the fighting and is infused with a bitter sense of loss.²³ Yet this too eventually retreats into formal clichés about wolves and other carrion beasts feeding on the corpses of the slain. It is interesting to speculate upon how Nithard, Engilbert and others responded to poets. How much did they relish the standard, formulaic phrases telling simply how they or some other heroic army slaughtered their enemies? Did they view them with a certain distaste? Did the bravado serve to mask horrific memories, or provoke more sombre reflection on comrades lost? In the end we shall never know. What seems to confront us again, especially given the warrior Engilbert’s own participation in the production of this stylised poetry, is the fact that writers and audiences did not expect everyday ‘reality’ or lived experience to get in the way of the demands of genre. Again, authority depended upon satisfying those demands, and not upon ‘telling it like it was’. Ultimately, the question of why warfare was not written about in detai...

Table of contents

• WARFARE AND HISTORY
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 WARFARE AND VIOLENCE IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
• 2 WARFARE AND SOCIETY
• 3 RAISING AN ARMY (1): POST-ROMAN EUROPE
• 4 RAISING AN ARMY (2): THE CAROLINGIAN WORLD
• 5 RAISING AN ARMY (3): ALLIES, MERCENARIES AND TRAINING THE TROOPS
• 6 RAISING AN ARMY (4): THE SIZE OF ARMIES
• 7 CAMPAIGNING
• 8 WEAPONRY AND EQUIPMENT
• 9 BATTLE
• 10 FORTIFICATION AND SIEGE WARFARE
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX: MILITARY ACTIVITY IN THE FRANKISH REALMS, 581–90
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX