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The leading international forum for literary culture
Ian Wood
THE MODERN ORIGINS OF THE
EARLY MIDDLE AGES
374pp. Oxford University Press. 65.
978 0 19 965048 4
Published: 2 July 2014
Huns besieging Aquileia, from The Chronicon Pictum,
also referred to as the Chronica Hungarorum (14th
century)
Why the Middle Ages are still with us
NICHOLAS VINCENT
T he starting point for this survey of modern approaches to the
early Middle Ages is a statement attributed in 2003 to the then
education secretary, Charles Clarke: I dont mind there being
some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is
no reason for the state to pay for them. Rarely can a modern
politician have stepped into so stinking a medieval dunghill. As
Ian Wood reveals in this trenchant and wide-ranging survey,
controversy over the early Middle Ages is no mere ornament. On
the contrary, in all sorts of ways nationalistic, social, political,
religious and (most alarmingly) racial the period from AD 400
to 700 remains central to the modern European sense of identity.
In the nineteenth century, Piedmont, Naples and France all
appointed early medievalists as prime ministers. Since then, early
medieval problems Schleswig-Holstein, AlsaceLorraine,
Belgium, more recently Yugoslavia have resisted even the
sleekest of modern political solutions.
From the eighteenth century onwards, long before Edward Gibbon
came trawling in their wake, French historians had made an
intellectual cock-fight of the fifth and sixth centuries. Both the
causes and the consequences of Romes fall became fiercely
controversial. Were kingship and the French state inherent in the
barbarian conquests, or merely copied by barbarians from the
Roman past? Were the Germanic invaders the ancestors of the
modern third estate, or an aristocratic elite, harbingers of noble
privilege and the Fronde? Were they free men (Franks/franci), as Tacitus had supposed them to be, or locust-like
enslavers of the previously free citizens of Rome? And what role did religion play in all this? Was the adoption of
Christianity, as Gibbon suggested in one of his few entirely original contributions, the cause of the fall of Rome? Or was
it a means by which classical civilization was rescued from extinction? By the 1770s, when Gibbon came to spread his
magniloquent and synthesizing net, the germ of these ideas and many more had already escaped the intellectual bell
jar. They were inhaled even by Louis XVI. Posing as his secretary Leclerc de Septchnes, it was perhaps Louis who
made the first French translation of the opening chapters of Gibbons Decline and Fall.
Revolution and Napoleon posed new problems. Thomas Jefferson suggested that Hengest and Horsa be portrayed on
the seal of the newly independent United States, as symbols of Saxon victory over imperial tyranny. Faced with such
presumption, how were modern empires, not least the British colonies, to be preserved against the fate of Rome? Just
as Napoleon clothed himself as a medieval king, crowned with the iron crown of Lombardy, in robes strewn with
Merovingian bees, so his opponents, not least Madame de Stal, sought to vilify him as Attila, barbarian scourge of the
West. In Italy, Manzonis Adelchi of 1822, following in the wake of Walter Scotts Ivanhoe, encouraged a view of
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conquerors as outsiders to peoples or proto-nations ever afterwards subject to foreign or aristocratic domination. East
of the Rhine, resistance to Napoleon inspired a generation of scholars determined to prove Germanic continuity,
asserting German custom as an alternative to French manners or the Napoleonic Code. This resulted, as early as 1819,
in the foundation of the body responsible for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, with its motto Sanctus amor
patriae dat animum (Holy love of the Fatherland supplies soul). Yet in its early years this was based in Hanover,
whose English King, George IV, together with the Russian Tsar, proved a more generous patron than either the King of
Prussia or the Austrian Emperor.
With this new nationalist agenda came a search not only for political but for racial origins. Ethnogenesis, the study of
the emergence of peoples and their languages and laws, went hand in hand with a willingness to identify racial
characteristics. The rot started here as early as the 1780s in the work of the Englishman, Thomas Pinkerton,
determined to distinguish noble Teuton from degenerate Celt. Such thinking informed not only the intellectually
respectable Edward Augustus Freeman, but crackpots and fanatics. It meant that, after the German defeat in 1918,
early medieval history played an ever more sinister role in race theory, claims to ancestral living space and the work
of those such as Karl August Eckhardt, scholarly editor of Lex Sallica for the Monumenta, yet also an SS
Sturmbannfhrer, contributor to a Festschrift of 1941 for Heinrich Himmler.
Even before this, as early as the 1870s, the experience of defeat in the Franco-Prussian war led Fustel de Coulanges,
first professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne, to question whether the Germans had ever truly conquered France.
The barbarian conquests, he argued, were ultimately an irrelevance, masking a far more gradual process of Teutonic
assimilation to Gallo-Roman ways. Alsace was crucial to the formation of many French medievalists, not least Marc
Bloch, himself of Alsatian- Jewish descent, after 1918 appointed lecturer at the newly de-Germanized University of
Strasbourg. It was these same Franco-German tensions that led Henri Pirenne to posit his own famous thesis on the
fall of Rome. Roman civilization, Pirenne argued, did not end abruptly in the fifth century, but survived until at least
the seventh. It was brought to an end not by German conquest but by the rise of Islam, closing off the Mediterranean to
northern trade.
Woods exposition of these theories is penetrating and full of insight. He dispels any idea that medieval history is
irrelevant or merely ornamental. At the same time, his treatment is highly, sometimes unnecessarily selective. Wood
himself proclaims his desire to follow Michel Foucault in the exploration of dominant discourses. But how is
dominance to be distinguished from dull tradition or the merely picturesque?
To begin with the example of the Church. Wood traces the role that Christian apologetics have played in the debate
over the fall of Rome, but he does so without sufficient attention to inter-denominational rivalry. As a result, he misses
the fact that both in France (where such issues were crucial to the defence of the Gallican establishment) and in the
Protestant north (where there was a desire to prove descent from pure, Teutonic proto-Lutherans) this was far more
than a question of belief versus scepticism. Bede, for example, was crucial to the Gallican cause, not least because he
preserved letters of Pope Gregory instructing the new English mission to follow the liturgy of either the Roman church
or the Church of Gaul. Gallicanism also contributed, after 1815, to the explosion of enthusiasm in France for local or
regional histories, often focused on a single saint or diocese. Here, by confining himself to the discourse on
nationhood, Wood misses another significant theme. The history of the early Middle Ages was taught, beyond Paris
and Berlin, in intensely local ways, as the history of Armorica or Normandy, Burgundy or Pomerania. Many of these
histories disputed what was viewed, as early as the nineteenth-century, as the false modern perspective of statist
metropolitanism.
Various discourses are silenced altogether. Thus there is nothing here on Friedrich Klopstock and the veneration of
Hermann and the Teutoburg forest (site of a famous Germanic victory over Rome), nor on Sabine Baring-Gould and
the Glastonbury legends, nor indeed on King Arthur as model of all things from Tennysonian chivalry, via Wagnerian
angst, to doomed Celtic heroism. Intellectual historians might expect the study of Boethius, or Gildas, or Isidore to
loom rather larger. There are other remarkable omissions, none more so than the sociological historicism of Engels.
There is no Oswald Spengler, and no Arnold Toynbee. Sir Henry Maine played a crucial role not only in revolutionizing
legal anthropology, but in introducing his English readers to ideas of communal property ownership
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(Markgenossenschaft), influenced not only by German jurists such as Georg Von Maurer but by Maines personal
experience of legal administration in India. Wood refers to him to only once, and misleadingly, as Sumner Maine.
Among those here termed Catholic revivalists, Christopher Dawson is considered in detail, but largely, one suspects,
because of his significance to the thinking of Peter Brown. By contrast, there is nothing on Cuthbert Butler, nothing on
Charles Plummer and the Irish saints, nothing on Hippolyte Delehaye, the Bollandists, or the opening up of
hagiography as a source of social and political insight. Wood contributes a fascinating account of Pirennes anti-
Germanism, but without mentioning the death of Pirennes son, killed fighting the Germans on the Yser in October
1914. He notes the significance of Geoffrey de Ste Croix to the discourse of class struggle, but without acknowledging
that slavery and its consequences were crucial to Frank Walbanks account of the fall of Rome, published as early as
1946, in a book influenced not just by Marxism but by Liverpool, a city that had grown rich from the slave trade.
But let us not make the definitive the enemy of the good. The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages is a splendid
survey, full of new and interesting things. It will enlighten the young and infuriate their elders, not least those of
Marxist persuasion. It is a pleasure to read.
Nicholas Vincent is Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia and the author of A Brief History
of Britain 10661485, which was published in 2011.