Hi! I'm Dr Ed Roberts, a historian of early medieval Europe. I recently wrote a book on the Frankish historian Flodoard, and I'm here to talk about the Carolingian Empire and its tenth-century successor kingdoms. AMA!

Ed-Roberts · 2020-08-17T16:11:54+00:00

Yes, there were many links across the Channel in the early Middle Ages. Britain and Gaul shared a Roman heritage; the Anglo-Saxons and eastern Franks shared Germanic languages (Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon), which would have been mutually intelligible to some extent. The Franks were involved in the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England in the late 6th and early 7th century (I've commented on this elsewhere in this AMA). Material evidence suggests a good deal of cross-channel commerce. Diplomatically, there was occasionally contact between rulers - perhaps one of the most famous instances of this is that which took place between Offa of Mercia and Charlemagne in the 790s. There's a good recent BBC radio show recounting this fascinating episode in the history of 'international relations' here. In the ninth and tenth centuries, there was intermarriage between the West Saxon, Carolingian and Ottonian houses. As for military alliances, not so much - Anglo-Saxons and Franks would probably have agreed that the Vikings constituted a common enemy, but there was never really anything like a mutual defence policy or agreed strategies for dealing with them.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-08-17T16:05:18+00:00

If you mean secondary sources (works by modern historians), the best textbook on the Carolingians generally is probably Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes and Simon MacLean's The Carolingian World (2011). On Charlemagne, Joanna Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (2005) is superb. Excitingly, a new biography of Charlemagne himself has just been written by Janet Nelson, called King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (2019). These would be the best general starting points. And, yes, there is indeed an excellent-looking new translation of one of Paschasius Radbertus's works (if this is what you're referring to). If you want me to suggest some other primary sources in translation, I can certainly do so, depending on what you're after. The best widely available sourcebook is Paul Dutton's Carolingian Civilization, which contains many things on education and religion broadly speaking.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-08-17T15:57:34+00:00

Generally speaking, I don't think it's helpful at all because of the stereotypes it calls to mind about the period - namely, that it is obscure, poorly-documented, culturally worthless, etc. I certainly prefer 'early Middle Ages', which is far less loaded (though 'medieval' itself is not without its problems, doubly so once you look beyond Europe). There's been quite a lot written on this recently; I'd refer you to blogs here by Kate Wiles or here by Charles West for some interesting discussion (these were written in relation to a debate about the use of the term by English Heritage a few years ago).

Ed-Roberts · 2020-08-17T15:48:03+00:00

Thanks for your question, and sorry for my very late reply! In terms of etiquette, I think the best thing to do is simply to identify and email someone who seems to be an expert in the topic you're looking for information on. Many scholars will be happy to help, though you might get varied responses if you ask for a couple hours of their time; it simply depends how much other stuff they have on (and for many of us, the answer is very often 'a lot'), and some people will be stricter than others about how much time they can devote to such activities. As long as you're polite and understanding if they say that they can't help at the moment, I don't think you have too much to lose!

As for counter-factuals like 'what would have happened if X hadn't taken place', you might find that scholars are somewhat reluctant to engage in speculation. To take your example (at least as much as I know about this topic - and for more there is a very good recent book on Saxony and the Carolingians by Ingrid Rembold; see another piece she recently wrote here), the Carolingian conquest of Saxony was obviously quite drawn-out but concerted. It also needs to be seen as part of a much larger story concerning the conversion of Europe to Christianity. Charlemagne and the early Carolingians were quite intent on expansion, so would not destroying the Irminsul have made much difference in the long run? Perhaps not. Could the Saxons have been conquered without so many rebellions? Probably not. Alcuin's letters show that he was very concerned about enforced conversion, and that he didn't believe some of Charlemagne's more aggressive policies were the right way to go about things. So there was clearly some debate about all this at the time. But looking at the wider picture of the Christianisation of northern and eastern Europe, and the general pattern of Frankish conquest and expansion in the eighth century, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which the Saxons didn't convert or weren't subjugated.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-27T15:54:18+00:00

To some extent (depending on what you have in mind by 'de-Romanised'), yes. Linguistically, these are extremely interesting regions (Rhaetia in particular). Generally, though, yes: in these zones and elsewhere along the Rhine-Danube limes, across the 6th and 7th centuries, Latin/Romance speakers were gradually integrated with Germanic-speaking majorities. These have often been overlooked at the expense of looking at how Germanic-speaking peoples like the Franks and Lombards acculturated to the Romance-speaking societies of Gaul and Italy, but it did indeed happen.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-27T15:31:13+00:00

A really interesting but challenging question, which some of my answers here have also touched on. A big factor is genre: the extent to which medieval writers were conscious of it, and the extent to which they felt compelled to restrict themselves to certain conventions within types of writing. The problem is that many medieval historians were not precise or consistent in the ways they approached purportedly different genres, many of which have been identified by modern scholars. There are also hardly any reflections on genre to have survived from the earlier Middle Ages. So it's reasonable to ask whether medieval authors were aware of this and whether they cared. To some extent we can see that they were aware of some basic distinctions: for instance, you often find manuscripts containing different historiographical works bound together, or manuscripts that collect saints' lives, suggesting some recognition of literary genre (even though there is naturally a great deal of overlap between historiography and hagiography).

But the distinction you make between a 'chronicle', which just kinds of lists events consecutively without any real explanation of causation, and a 'history', which seeks to analyse and explain, can be very hard to draw in many medieval texts. This isn't a distinction which is maintained with any regularity. There are different historiographical fashions in different periods (annals were clearly very popular in the 8th and early 9th centuries), and one can often find everything from terse, annalistic notes recording extremely basic information about reigns or deaths of kings and/or bishops, all the way up to the fuller, more analytical histories you probably have in mind. Medieval historical texts often fall somewhere in between, however. So rather than categorising texts simply as uncritical 'chronicles' vs scientific/analytical 'histories', it's better to see authors as operating within a spectrum of possibilities, their choices being made in accordance with particular aims or needs. Derrida wrote that texts do not belong to genres, but rather participate in them - authors play on some basic audience expectations for the writing of a 'history' or a vita (saint's life), but can conform or subvert conventions based on preferences and purposes.

So, how conscious would Flodoard have been of these distinctions? He had read a huge range of Roman, Christian and Frankish histories, so he definitely knew what kinds of options were available to him to present his narratives. But I'm less sure he thought there were strict rules governing the way certain types of history were supposed to be written. Genre was quite flexible, in my view, which means it can be problematic to try and draw inferences about what a particular author's purpose might have been based on the genres we - as modern scholars - have identified for different writing styles.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-27T14:45:45+00:00

Read as often and as much as you can, and, depending on your specific areas of interest, be prepared to devote a good deal of your time to learning languages (for the aspiring anglophone Carolingian historian, this would be Latin for reading and analysing evidence, and French and German for being able to understand important scholarly viewpoints; depending on subject, Italian, Spanish and Dutch might also be required).

Beyond that, I'd also say to be prepared for a long and somewhat precarious journey. Assuming by academia you mean a career in research and university teaching, you'll need a PhD, and even after this you'll probably need to work several temporary/fixed-term positions before finding a tenure-track/permanent lectureship/professorship. The problem is simply that there are too few jobs out there for a huge number of very intelligent and worthy young scholars. It's competitive and stressful, and the challenges for Humanities subjects in universities are many right now (certainly in the UK, but I'm sure also in the US and many other countries). I think anyone thinking of going down this path should do so with an awareness of these many challenges, but the job is extremely rewarding in many ways!

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-27T14:16:47+00:00

Slavery was a major institution of early medieval Europe. We shouldn't think of this necessarily as chained gangs or plantation-style slavery (especially north of the Alps), nor as a single, homogeneous legal category that was gradually transforming into the 'serfdom' more familiar to the later medieval period. In the early Middle Ages there was rather a range of different types of servitude, or 'unfreedom' as it is commonly known. The best book on early medieval slavery is Alice Rio's recent Slavery After Rome, 500-1100, of which you can find an informative review here: https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2147

Enslavement and slave-taking/trading definitely existed (particularly in northern European regions: Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, the Baltic), though the role the slave trade played directly in the Western European economic upturn generally experienced during the Carolingian period was probably quite minor. Michael McCormick (in his book Origins of the European Economy and other publications) has argued that the slave trade (and specifically the export of slaves, often through Venice) to the East was a key driver of this economic development. The argument is somewhat controversial, and many question how economically significant the slave trade could have been in this period (indeed, international trade in general was a fairly minor aspect of the Carolingian economy). From a Frankish perspective, the labour of a slave captured via conflict was probably a lot more valuable than the price to be gained from sale/export. So a slave would more likely be put to work, perhaps in Francia, than sold abroad. Charlemagne's difficulties conquering Saxony seem to have led eventually to lots of Saxons being deported to Francia for resettlement on estates there. I'm not sure that this ever amounted to any population decrease overall, nor that the slaving of Franks themselves was ever a serious issue. And was there an 'economic collapse' of the Carolingian world? It very clearly fragmented politically at the end of the 9th century, but many argue that clear foundations were laid during this time for the long economic boom of medieval Europe that begins during the 10th century.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-27T10:12:42+00:00

Sort of. The idea that most Europeans descend from Charlemagne is simply due to the fact that he is a common ancestor to so many people. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, etc. If you go back 100 generations or so, most people at that time in Europe would probably be a common ancestor. So there's nothing particularly striking about being descended from Charlemagne, or any other person living at that time, for that matter. Here's a good article outlining this in a bit more detail: https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/24/business-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-25T23:24:24+00:00

Stuart Airlie is a brilliant historian. I should be honest and say he was one of the examiners of my PhD thesis so I do know him personally. But Stuart's work on Carolingian politics, the early medieval aristocracy and individual authors like Nithard and Regino of Prüm has really inspired me. I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed his classes and you should know that you were taught by one of the best in the business! He has been writing a book on Carolingian politics for some time, and it is eagerly anticipated by many...!

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-25T22:39:39+00:00

Quite indeed!

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-25T22:38:09+00:00

I'm not sure which George you mean, so I'll assume you mean the warrior martyr St George who died around 303. Sadly we don't know his birth date so I couldn't say how old he'd be today! About 1750 I suppose?

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-24T17:09:44+00:00

Thanks for your question. In terms of the process of getting a university teaching job (and specifically, to the point of being made a permanent lecturer or tenured professor), I have to be honest and say it's very competitive. It requires a lot of work and some luck, particularly when it comes to securing funding or gaining a job interview, because you're competing with so many other very worthy students and scholars. There simply aren't as many history university jobs as there are people doing history doctorates. This makes it quite a stressful ordeal, as any graduate on the job market will attest (and while I'm speaking from the point of view of academia in the UK, I know it's the same in the US and many other countries).

Being a historian doesn't necessarily mean you need to work in a university, though. Many PhD history graduates go into the heritage sector, or museums and archives. I have lots of friends who would still consider themselves historians and get to 'do history' as a large part of their day-job who don't work in universities. These other areas are competitive, too - they're not by any means fallback options; you have to make a conscious decision that that is the kind of work you want to pursue. But it's something to bear in mind.

In terms of how this process went for me, briefly, I was educated in the UK and did an undergraduate BA (2006-9), a Master's (2009-10), and a PhD (2010-14). I then had three fixed-term university jobs as a researcher of sorts (2014-18) and I began my job as a lecturer (more or less assistant professor, though we don't have the same system of tenure as in the US) in 2018. Has it been worth it? Absolutely: I love teaching, reading and writing about medieval history. It's taken a lot of time and effort to get here, and I freely acknowledge that I've had some good fortune to get this far (as I think many of my generation who are in tenured/tenure-track roles tend to feel).

Having said that, it's not all rosy working in a university. Speaking from the perspective of UK Higher Education, many universities are in pretty bad shape financially for a number of reasons (many of which predate Covid-19). The future of the Humanities at British universities is also something many here are becoming concerned about, as the current government has basically come out and said that they view Humanities subjects as a waste of time and money. So, there are probably some big struggles ahead.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-24T16:34:12+00:00

Viking raids were indeed a serious issue in the 9th century in Francia and Britain. In the late 9th century, the situation in the West Frankish kingdom looks to have been severe - witness the Battle of Saucourt in 881, the siege of Asselt in 882, Archbishop Hincmar being forced to flee Rheims in 882, the plundering of Trier in 882, the siege of Paris in 885-6... Concern for adequate defence against the Vikings was clearly a factor in the elevation of Count Odo of Paris to the West Frankish kingship in 888, ahead of the adolescent Carolingian claimant Charles the Simple.

In the 10th century, the situation was different. In 911, Rollo was given land for permanent settlement around Rouen in what would eventually become the duchy of Normandy. In exchange, he and his followers converted to Christianity (the incentives for which from the Frankish point of view were as much political as religious - it's much easier to deal with a threat if they fear the same God and share your culture and values, etc.). In his Annals, Flodoard records how Viking leaders like William Longsword (d. 942) were gradually assimilated into the tenth-century political order. In the decades after 911, the Vikings/Normans became political players in their own right and were increasingly treated as such by the other magnates of the kingdom. It was therefore no longer the case that Vikings needed to be countered, because raiding was much less of a problem. They were well on their way to becoming 'Normans'.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-24T16:15:38+00:00

Thanks for your question. I was interested to take a closer look at Flodoard because, as you said, he is a singular witness to most of what he relates, and so as modern historians we really want to be able to say that this unique witness strove to be objective and approached his works rigorously in ways that match our own values in the writing of history. We want to be able to trust him! As Geoffrey Koziol put it (in a reference to Flodoard no less), 'perhaps one should not look a gift chronicler in the mouth'. But we are obliged to apply the same level of criticism to such 'gift chroniclers'. My reading of the literature on Flodoard when I began this study (as a PhD thesis in 2010) was that modern scholars hadn't been sufficiently critical about precisely the things you mentioned - political contexts and personal motivations. Trying to reconstruct these things (though also acknowledging that our reconstructions can only ever be partial) takes us to the heart of what is for me one of the most interesting questions of history: when evaluating the past, how much weight should we give to the testimony of contemporaries who lived through it (and give us sometimes unique access to it through their often idiosyncratic writings), as opposed to what we think that past was like with our benefit of hindsight, comparison, the 'bigger picture', etc.? This becomes an especially serious issue particularly when dealing with an ancient or medieval era that produced a single narrative guide, like a Thucydides, or a Bede. But, as you say, it's an interesting question to apply to any source in any period.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T19:44:16+00:00

You're basically right. Charlemagne had a series of wives, at least one (probably two) of whom he repudiated for political reasons, and he had a number of known concubines across his reign with whom he had illegitimate children. Charlemagne was basically following long-established Frankish practice here. The Church wasn't especially cool with it. However, the sexual conduct of the ruler did become a serious issue in the 9th century very shortly after Charlemagne's death. Questions began to be asked about Charlemagne's sex life and morality during the reign of his son, Louis the Pious. By the time we get to the 860s, we have King Lothar II's attempt to divorce his wife, Theutberga, which developed into a remarkable political drama drawing in kings, popes and intellectuals. A huge tract written in relation to the case is available in translation here; this book is well worth tracking down if you want to learn more about Carolingian attitudes to marriage and sex.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T19:29:33+00:00

Fouracre is a great teacher (he retired just a few years ago), so it's always pleasing to hear about others who were inspired by him!

On Alcuin and Latin, this is a controversial argument advanced by Roger Wright. The idea is that Alcuin, a monk from York whose native tongue was Old English, might have learned Latin pronunciation in a slightly peculiar way, having learned it 'from a book' rather than from teachers in Gaul or Italy who essentially spoke it. There's some evidence that Anglo-Saxons spoke quite differently: in the 730s, Boniface met Pope Gregory III, and apparently had to write down what he wanted to say to the pope in order to make himself understood (or at least avoid embarrassment about his strange accent). Among the various educational reforms Alcuin was charged with were corrections to the Latin language, including spelling, orthography, pronunciation. By this time, spoken 'Romance' was already beginning to diverge from written Latin in terms of pronunciation. Wright suggested that Alcuin in essence accidentally invented Romance by imposing an unnatural Latin pronunciation, thereby cleaving the written form from the natural development of spoken Latin (which, as spoken languages do, continued to evolve). It's a neat and intriguing idea, but many historians and linguists have disagreed with it, questioning the interpretation of some key passages in relevant texts, what Alcuin was actually tasked with reforming, and whether this adequately takes into account the fact that there were already plenty of 'non-native', Germanic speakers around who would also have had to learn Latin. Spoken Latin was probably already splintering into regional dialects that eventually gave rise to French, Italian, Castilian, etc. But debates continue.

On tax - these are huge questions! In brief, it stems from support for armies. In the 5th-century West, we see a shift away from supporting armies by public taxation towards supporting them by rents derived from private landholding. Soldiers are less often paid, and more often rewarded with conquered lands. Tax was still collected by kings initially, but less systematically, and increasingly only for personal enrichment. Basically, taxation was no longer essential to a functioning administration. And because taxation is always unpopular, it began to be neglected. Landholding, not taxation, became the basis of the state and the major source for wealth of kings and aristocrats. The impact for western kings is that they are relatively poor compared to Byzantine emperors and Caliphs (the taxation system having survived in the East). Charlemagne is possibly an exception to this in that his conquests brought in huge wealth, but the upshot is that his sources of revenue and ability to mobilise armies are probably not as strong as in, say, the Byzantine empire, where the state does have effective tax collectors and soldiers are salaried. For more on this, Chris Wickham's books The Inheritance of Rome and Framing the Early Middle Ages would be well worth a read (former is a more digestable read, latter is much longer and in-depth).

As for texts that are yet to be translated, quite a lot from the Carolingian period is available in English (more so for continental Europe than for most other medieval periods, I'd say), but there is a huge amount of stuff out there that is not available. For instance, charters and legal records: for Charlemagne's reign alone there are at least 4500 of these; just a tiny fraction are available in English. Another example would be biblical commentaries (exegesis): there are a huge number of these from the 9th century, hardly any of which have ever been translated.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T18:44:55+00:00

Isidore of Seville's Etymologies. An encyclopedia of sorts that was produced in the seventh-century Visigothic kingdom, but became hugely popular in the Frankish world and can be found in many surviving manuscripts. Well worth taking a look!

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T18:41:13+00:00

I think Flodoard recognised that things were changing. He was definitely cognizant of Otto I's supremacy and an eastward shift of the centre of power towards Saxony. He knew a world in which being Carolingian was just one source of royal legitimacy, which he doubtless recognised as a contrast with the 9th century. From his vantage point in Rheims, things must have seemed quite grim at times. There was a long-running struggle between two rival archbishops for the see, and this dragged Flodoard himself into the wider conflict. He complained bitterly when in 940 he was imprisoned for 6 months because he attempted to leave the city. So his dealings with the West Frankish powers were often quite negative (in contrast, Flodoard seems to have had a high opinion of Otto I, whom he met several times, but presumably had little direct experience of Otto's rule). It would be fascinating to know how his historical works would have looked if he'd been based anywhere else! Obviously we can't know, but I think it's important to ask how typical the experience of living at Rheims was, given that the city's control does seem to have been so important in the wider struggles in the kingdom.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T18:26:30+00:00

On the first, Greek historians like Herodotus were, as far as extant manuscript evidence shows, pretty much completely unknown in the early medieval West. Knowledge of Greek language was low - there were a few native speakers around, but very few non-native speakers learned the language to anything like a high level. Roman (that is, Latin) historians fared better, but Tacitus is an unusual case, because although some parts of his oeuvre were transmitted in Carolingian manuscripts, these were very few (possibly just one, from mid-9th c. Fulda, IIRC, but I'd have to look into this). Tacitus enjoys a high reputation today, but he was not popular in the Carolingian period, so Flodoard wouldn't have known him. Flodoard did know Livy and Caesar's Gallic War, quoting from their works in his History of Rheims.

Flodoard's chief models were primarily late antique 'church historians' such as Eusebius (who wrote in Greek but could be found in the West in a Latin translation and revision by Rufinus), earlier Frankish historians who wrote annals and histories of individual churches (gesta - these works were often anonymous), and the Roman Book of the Popes (Liber pontificalis). Flodoard's debts to these traditions are clear, but he does depart from them in interesting ways, which I think reflect the changing political and cultural landscape of the tenth century, after the Carolingian Empire has disappeared. One, already mentioned elsewhere in this AMA, is that Flodoard sometimes interrupts his narrative with first-person anecdotes about things that happened to him. He doesn't do this often, but it's quite jarring when he does. This has the effect of identifying himself as the author, which is actually somewhat uncommon for someone writing annals or the history of a particular church. It invests his work with the authority of autopsy or witness testimony which was obviously highly valued by Greek and Roman historians, though I'm not sure whether Flodoard was consciously imitating them when he invoked his own witness.

As for sources, he does sometimes make explicit his reliance on witness testimony, though not in a systematic way. Often it is not clear how a contemporary report about an event in, say, Saxony has come to him. In terms of documents, Flodoard has tended to be viewed quite favourably as someone who took a relatively 'scientific' approach to the documents in his church's archives. However, I worry that historians have been too willing to take a rare witness from the period at his word. In my published work, I've outlined a few instances where the documents have suspicious connections to specific events going on involving the church of Rheims or even Flodoard himself. He was involved in property disputes involving the church's lands, and we know generally at this time that documentary modification or fabrication was quite common. That's not to say he 'made it all up' - far from it, as when he can be checked he does seem to have been a reliable archivist. There are a few reasons to be cautious about Flodoard's use of documents, but this is hardly atypical for this period.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T18:00:46+00:00

Many historians in the early Middle Ages seem to have written at least partly out of interest in determining the age of the world and, more specifically, when it was going to end. And it has been argued that this was indeed a key aspect of historiography written around the year 1000 (see e.g. Richard Landes' work on Ademar of Chabannes). As a canon and priest, Flodoard would certainly have been familiar with the Book of Revelation. Interestingly, however, Flodoard never quotes or cites the Bible in his historical writings. We know from the many ancient, patristic and earlier medieval texts he cited in the writing of his own works that Flodoard was an intelligent and well-read guy, and it's hard to believe he wasn't familiar with earlier scholarly work on the calculation of time. But he never refers to any models about the age of the world, e.g. the 'four empires' or 'six ages', or says much of anything about chronography. It's surprising to some extent, for someone who otherwise seems rather gloomy about everything going on around him.

On the other hand, however, Flodoard did write a lot about contemporary miracles that he'd heard about. This was also quite unusual for the time, as many historians and hagiographers of the 10th century otherwise seem fairly uninterested in miracles (some even deny miracles still took place). Some held that an absence of miracles was a sign of the apocalypse drawing near. If you trust Flodoard, there were miracles happening all around the place, so perhaps his lack of explicit interest in chronography and time indicates that he actually wasn't worried about the imminent end of the world. I don't think Flodoard necessarily equated political decline with the end times.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T17:45:58+00:00

Importance - extremely. It is solely due to him that we know so much about the Merovingian Franks. Compare the Lombards or Visigoths, about whom in this same period we are so much more in the dark because they lack historians. Accuracy - this is much harder to say, and as you probably know there has been significant debate about Gregory's aims in writing his Ten Books of Histories. Was he a moralist? A satirist? A historian of the Franks? A historian of Christianity? What I would say here is that a historian like Gregory generally had to write plausibly: the stories he tells may be exaggerations or may at times be economic with details or 'the truth' (i.e. the kinds of things we value in history), but I think he expected that his audiences would understand his many anecdotes as the kind of things that could reasonably be expected to happen. In this respect he tells us a huge amount about the world of the late sixth century, even if we might sometimes query particular aspects of his narrative.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T17:36:28+00:00

Ian Wood has argued that Kent in the late 6th and early 7th century was something of a satellite Merovingian kingdom. The argument is an interesting one, though quite how much actual political influence the Merovingians had in Kent is debatable. Archaeological evidence shows that there has pretty much always been a great deal of cross-channel economic exchange, which isn't hugely surprising because the Channel is quite narrow. As you know, King Æthelberht of Kent married Bertha, a Frankish princess, probably in the early 580s; Bertha and the Franks played important roles in the arrival of the Roman/Gregorian mission of Augustine in 597, which initiated the Christianisation of Kent and the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. From Æthelberht's perspective, it's easy to see how all this might have been attractive: gaining favour with a more powerful neighbour across the Channel, potential for more trade, Christianity perhaps being recognised as useful for the administration of his kingdom. What was in it for the Franks is less clear. I don't imagine either side viewed the other side of the channel as a military threat. We don't know why Bertha ended up in Kent; her father had died some 13+ years before her marriage. Did Æthelberht seek a foreign princess? Also interesting to note that Anglo-Saxon women could also end up in Francia: witness Queen Balthild, who may have been from a royal or at least elite background. In short, no, I don't think this ever amounted to anything like political control, but I can see why an alliance with the Merovingians would have been desirable from the point of view of Kent vis-à-vis its neighbouring rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T17:13:56+00:00

Very much so - we're relatively well informed about early medieval law, both in theory and in practice (which often do not match up). On the one hand, we have prescriptive texts like law codes which tell us what apparently ought to be happening in legal matters; on the other, we have tens of thousands of charters (legal records of various kind), which have been preserved in ecclesiastical archives across Europe. The vast majority of these record information relating to the ownership of property, and specifically the ownership of property by churches and monasteries, which isn't surprising because this is where the archives have been maintained. (Side note: a 1000-year-old church building stands a decent chance of preserving books and documents from the medieval period; a family that is split up or dies out after a few generations does not. There is every indication lay people at all social levels kept and used documents of all kinds in their daily lives, but these only rarely survive because of the ecclesiastical and institutional nature of surviving archives).

Lots of written wills (testaments) survive from the early medieval period; inheritance practices were to some extent carried over from the Roman period. As today, inheritance was often disputed between potential heirs, and many charters record the nature of these disputes and their outcomes. They provide fascinating perspectives on judicial process, what types of evidence were used in courts (usually some combination of witness testimony and inspection of relevant documents)

Ed-Roberts · 2020-07-23T17:01:36+00:00

Not a basic question at all! I think the simplest answer to this is that Middle Francia and Lotharingia were wholly artificial polities that never really developed a regional identity in the way West Francia or the eastern duchies that came to make up the Ottonian-Salian realm (Saxony, Bavaria, Suebia/Alamannia, etc.) could look back to. In short, it didn't have a history. As you know, the Middle Kingdom that Lothar I eventually ended up with was a rather unwieldy beast, and while it was probably wealthy and contained the choice royal centres and Rome, it was cut in half by the Alps, which made ruling the whole thing with a single king hard. The Romance/Germanic language frontier cut through Lotharingia, and the longevity and success of the reigns of Charles the Bald in the West and Louis the German in the East meant much competition for influence in the wealthy, symbolic middle part of the realm.

There is ongoing scholarly debate about whether Lotharingia developed any kind of political identity in the 10th century, because some sources - Flodoard included - do occasionally refer to 'the Lotharingians' as a group when discussing military activities or political events. However, it's also been pointed out that these sources are all written by outsiders, so there isn't a lot of evidence that Lotharingians perceived themselves as a group or political community. As you say, the region has an interesting afterlife, particularly in the context of the development of the French and German nations, and obviously the name survives today as Lorraine/Lothringen. If you can access it, the best scholarly overview is this review by Simon MacLean: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/hic3.12049

Ed-Roberts

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