OFF: settlement of England (was: Re: Mountain Grill (!))

[Jon Jarrett]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, Jill Strobridge wrote:

> And when the supply of
> coinage dried up then land became wealth and the best place a
> landowner could be was in his house on his country estate with a
> private army to guard it.

        Since most of the coinage that was coming in was paying the army,
private soldiery would have been easy to obtain at that point. In fact
defensive troops (as distinct from the field army) may have been billeted
on major estates for a long time by then, so drawing a line between a
`public' army paid for by an aristocrat on behalf of the area in which was
he was pre-eminent and a private army of his is really quite hard to
draw. I think the only difference was whether they jumped to orders from
Rome. Since the orders stopped coming in 410...

> So auxiliaries and estate owners that didn't get drawn into the
> Imperial civil wars (and many of them would have been) and didn't
> flee to France would have gone back to being local leaders in a
> countryside of slowly decaying villa estates.    The Visigoths (I
> think I'm correct in this?) attempted to emulate Roman authority
> and adopted the trappings of Roman power but the Huns weren't even
> remotely interested in these aspects of Roman civilisation.     The
> steady influx of Anglo-Saxon settlers were also far more interested
> in land acquisition and generally it seems ignored stone buidings -
> which by that stage were probably more trouble than they were worth
> to reconstruct by a culture that did not have any great stone
> building traditions.

        The Visigoths moved into areas which had a running Roman
administration and, seeing how it could help guarantee their status,
preserved it as far as they could. Their kings were in particular very
keen on maintaining the Roman law in a useful fashion; most early medieval
texts of Roman law (which was kind of rediscovered in its full bulk in the
twelfth century as society began to need that kind of fine argument
again) are based on the summary compilations, or `breviaries', of the
Visigothic kings.

        In Britain it seems unlikely that any such authority survived and
so preserving the `state' was a pointless endeavour. The Anglo-Saxon kings
ruled over areas small enough that they could enforce obedience
personally; the Visigoths were finding themselves able to take over the
whole of the South of France, or indeed all of Spain, units which needed
delegation if they were to be kept as units.

> In the end it was church leaders and bishops who became guardians
> of the urban centres and churches that formed the focus of urban
> survival where it did occur (but not in Britain).
>
> Well - at least that's as I understand it from my recent studies!

        Quite true. In France and what parts of Germany, Austria, Alpine
Italy and so on were Roman, the bishop became the obvious figurehead of
his community in the absence of any other whose interests were trusted by
the people. The presence of the bishop and his administration, limited
though it was, more or less guaranteed that towns remained some kind of
settlement and economic focus. It's a bit harder to say what was going on
in Spain, secular elites may have survived better there. What is
noticeable is that in Spain, unlike Gaul, the Church very rapidly saw
`barbarian' bishops, or at least, the people who were rising in the Church
had Visigothic names as often as not, whether or not that means they were
`etnnically' (whatever that mean) Gothic. In Gaul it remained fashionable
to act Roman. Interesting to wonder why given that authority structures
seem to have survived better in Spain.

        Um, well, interesting for some anyway. Perhaps I should stop this
now :-) Yours,
                Jon

ObCD: The Bevis Frond - _Hit Squad_
--
                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)