Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
For those historians with the interest and the patience to closely explore the factors leading to the Medieval world, consider Oxford historian Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages. A massive book (at a whopping 831 pages of proper text – to say nothing of the 110 page bibliography – it is 138 pages longer than Dante’s Divine Comedy, 101 pages longer than Grimm’s complete fairy tales, 64 pages longer than the complete Chronicles of Narnia, and if compared to my copy of The Lord of the Rings, a comparative page count would land the reader somewhere around the Battle of the Pelennor Fields), it is as detailed as its breadth will allow, spanning four hundred years of Europe after Rome and looking at nearly every region from the Pillars of Hercules to the Nile Delta. Wickham’s take on the world is one of economics and social constructs, forsaking church councils and political history for the gritty world of peasants and aristocrats, markets and towns, charting the progression from Rome’s fall in the fifth century to the formulation of the early European kingdoms in the ninth.
By taking a broad look at the post-Roman world, Wickham seeks to avoid unsightly teleologies (arguments that history has an ultimate end, such as capitalism, the Reformation, or the European Union) that must – in his view – come about through too narrow an examination. Wickham divides the post-Roman world into three parts: the eastern and western halves of the Mediterranean, and the “North,” which includes the British Isles and Denmark, but occasionally Francia. Despite such divisions, the whole work is a look at the Big Picture. Wickham is very good at what he does, viewing such broad subjects as church growth, Viking raids, and the roller coaster ride of the aristocracy as large movements that shape his world, preferring these over individuals and events; written records, lives of prominent men, and archeological finds are all stitched into the survey canvas, never a one taken as the marker of world change. Yet while Wickham wishes to avoid teleologies, he ascribes to a sort of reverse-teleology: it all began with the decline of Rome.
Although nationalistic politics are not the focus of his work, Wickham takes his fellow historians to task whenever the opportunity arises. On the hotly debated topic of Decline and Fall, Wickham adheres most strongly to the continuity argument, encouraging historians to look beyond their teleologies and accept that Roman military defeat and loss of lands did not necessarily translate into political death. Wickham sees a great deal of continuity in the post-Roman world – while acknowledging its confusion – such as the “strikingly ordinary” will of an aristocrat in the 530s, whose holdings, though of no great size, nonetheless resembled that of earlier estates. As for when estates and villas did vanish, Wickham cites C.R. Whittaker as he argues for the “destruction” of the traditional villa only in the sense that it came to reflect local peasant values rather than those of the leisure senatorial class. Even population decline, to which Wickham admits, is turned around to bolster his continuity argument, pointing out that the areas in the West that lost population were largely peripheral and thinly peopled to begin with, and in cases of total transformation he argues for consistent habitation under merely new forms of material culture and language.
Wickham might be said to adhere to a “soft decline” model, observing the continuity of cities where the curial class simply abandoned its tax-raising role and town authority devolved into a hierarchy of “leading men” as imperial authority waned. In a similar vein, in his book Barbarians to Angels, Peter S. Wells criticized the notion that demonumentalization of cities bespeaks of European decline, arguing instead that the locals simply had other needs once monument-loving Rome receded from the West. Wickham agrees with this conclusion in his look at the Syrian town Scythopolis and later points out the ongoing presence of regional urban elites – to say nothing of Italian towns that have hosted populations up to the present day. Where Wickham does see substantial and total collapse of the Roman heritage is in England, a view that lines up nicely with that held by Bryan Ward-Perkins. However, despite the severe decline in Roman standards, Wickham notes that British “field systems have often been shown to pre-date even the Romans.” Indeed, the peasants seem to have experienced the smoothest ride of all Rome’s abandoned subjects.
Wickham defines peasants as settled cultivators and pastoralists who control a measure of their own resources and labor, as compared to slaves, who utterly lack any claim to land and liberty. Much of Wickham’s book might be considered an apology for peasants, who were not always the servile rustics one pictures from novels or Hollywood movies, but could be wealthy, contributing members of society, many donating land to the Church. They were also rather free in the period from AD 400 to 800: political fragmentation throughout the post-Roman world was a boon to peasants as the level of autonomy enjoyed at the local level was proportionate to fragmentation of the state. Such freedom came in varying degrees. In northern Italy, though dominated by the aristocracy, peasants still apparently had the ability to choose whom to approach for patronage, and Wickham cites a number of them exercising the right to testify in a court case involving their patron. Conversely, in the Ile de France peasants were almost completely under the domination of their landlords, working estates owned by the aristocracy. On the far opposite end of the spectrum are the towns of the Eastern Mediterranean, such as Aphrodito, which was completely in the hands of medium to rich land-owning peasants, and Jeme with its nearly omnipotent headman.
Control of labor is a prominent theme throughout Framing the Early Middle Ages and there were extremes of labor control: on the micromanaging end Wickham finds late-Roman Senator Palladius’ Opus agriculturae, a manual on the surveillance of one’s tenants for the purposes of improvement; on the opposite end of the spectrum rests a Bavarian law code that left tenants to their own devices, the lord simply providing the seeds for planting and reaping the rewards come harvest time. Wickham’s inner Socialist comes out in his glowing yet pragmatic description of (mostly) egalitarian villages where surplus wealth was shared out amongst the less fortunate so as to maintain social appreciation and cohesion. Such households often had un-free laborers attached to them, especially in England, Ireland, and Scandinavia, but unfortunately for his Marxist model, Wickham reports that the evidence supposes that class exploitation did not occur – at least not on a large-enough scale to matter. But despite this supposed lack of exploitation, the stress of free versus un-free makes frequent appearances throughout Wickham’s work, and though most of the un-free help – an amount left undefined – were merely tenants and arguably had the liberty to own possessions, they nonetheless had no public rights – indeed, mutilation by masters was a debatable topic amongst the seventh century Visigoths. Moreover, it would seem that the West was a less-free place than the rather autonomous East. But what autonomy existed in the whole of the formerly Roman world was eventually eclipsed by aristocratic rule as the aristocracy consolidated their hold, translated the peasant mode of production to that of a feudal society, and reduced the remaining holdouts of peasant freedom.
Crucial to Wickham’s reverse-teleology is the Roman aristocracy, having established itself in the empire as the rightful rulers and leisure class. A part of the Roman aristocratic pedigree was their advanced education, an anomaly, in Wickham’s eyes, in the history of the world’s otherwise violent rulers. However, the elites owed their power to the Empire. In the West, the fall of Rome precipitated a dramatic social alteration in the upper classes. Dislocated from their old power and abandoned by a receding empire, these worthies were forced to adopt increasingly militant lifestyles and identities, or else join the Church – though Wickham is careful to point out that militarization did not necessarily mean “Germanization,” as many Gallic aristocrats retained their Roman culture. More important for the European aristocracy was the ownership of land, which went towards furthering their militant, political, and ecclesiastical goals. Where the Roman senatorial class had held stupendous amounts of private land, in the post Roman world the aristocracy was largely divided between those who managed to continue the Roman model of land owning, and those whose land-ownership vanished, if ever it existed at all. In Gaul/Francia, there was general continuity, with some aristocrats lording over properties held across the realm and others restricted to within a district. This latter state was mirrored in Lombard Italy, a fractious region, where holding territories outside of a small area was almost non-existent. In the East, the picture was somewhat different. For a start, the political systems were consistently stable and as such allowed more options for the aristocracy, largely broken down into the categories of town and military, the latter becoming increasingly important, just as in the West.
Throughout his book, Wickham demonstrates a wise – if sometimes obsessive – drive to cover his tracks, examining every argument and heading off counterarguments so as to bolster his position. This has its pros and cons. On the one hand, it certainly serves to cement Wickham’s credibility. He admits to choosing to focus on subjects of personal interest and knowledge and professes respect and appreciation for other forms of research into the social sciences. Wickham seems to know his own limitations and is upfront when appropriate, admitting when he has no understanding of languages and pointing out his own hypotheses. He also takes his time to justify his opinions in light of rival research or insufficient evidence, and routinely directs the reader to other chapters that will further understanding of a subject. But however helpful Wickham may think it to work his way out of any corners in which his colleagues might wish to trap him, the sheer amount of ink wasted on such asides – many of them quite lengthy and pointless – derails the flow of the chapter, distracting the reader from the content.
But the most negative aspect of Framing the Early Middle Ages is its readability. Wickham is an outstanding historian and a fine author, yet his book reads with terrible monotony, the history devolving into sterile, fleshless survey. Of particular note amongst the few exceptions is an anecdotal portrayal of an admittedly fictional northern European town called Malling. Here Wickham tweaks his style by launching into a detailed examination of the evolving social patterns within the imaginary village, of headmen and patronage, and what the villagers hear of changes in other towns. Stuffed unceremoniously in between his more conventional – and factual – discussions of peasant social norms, the Malling episode is jarring, yet more enlightening and entertaining than the rest of the chapter and reveals to the reader the greatest weakness of the book.
For such a work, narrative may be considered an extraneous superficiality, yet Framing the Early Middle Ages badly needs one. Peter Heather, writing along similar lines in his Empires and Barbarians, somehow pulled it off. But more than narrative, what is especially left wanting in Wickham’s book is a more lively delivery – again, achieved stunningly in Heather. Though Framing the Early Middle Ages’s usefulness as an outstanding resource should not be ignored, the lack of vitality on the page runs the risk of numbing turning away readers less committed to battling their way through unforgivingly dull and often repetitive prose. To be more than a good book, a survey must be lively. In this, Wickham disappoints.
For better or for worse, Rome fell, yet from its collapse sprang the kingdoms of Christendom and the societies that shaped the world of today. Though hardly exhaustive insofar as each subdivision of early European history is concerned, there are likely few other works that can boast such expansive and well-organized synthesis than Framing the Early Middle Ages. Though dry, this book in invaluable for anyone who wants a clearer understanding of the building blocks of the Middle Ages.
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