MEJORAS IMPLANTADAS EN CURSOS ANTERIORES

For centuries, Latin had been the language in which the citizens of Rome made love, scribbled graffiti, commemorated their conquest of an empire in monumental inscriptions, wrote laws, issued tax lists, formulated and preserved rich literary traditions. And, as Christianity spread westwards in the second and third centuries, among communities incapable of understanding the Greek in which the Christian holy texts were written, religious leaders naturally chose to debate, preach, worship, and write in the local language. In preparing Latin translations of the Judaeo- Christian scriptures—the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament that comprised the Bible—and in using the same language for worship, fourth- and fifth-century churchmen in the western provinces of the Roman Empire were making their religion as widely accessible as pos- sible. In c.500 Latin implied a whole system of learning, a social code, and a technology of power as well as a religion.

As imperial rule crumbled and political systems changed from ancient to early medieval ones, how was the privileged status of Latin as a medium of culture, control, and communication affected? In what language did new converts to Christianity, far beyond the former imperial frontiers, worship? In what ways did the social significance of Latin change, and what political or religious importance did other languages acquire? These are important issues in their own right; together, they help us understand why the surviving written sources for early medieval history take the form they do. This section begins by evaluating the fate of the late Roman bureaucratic apparatus in post-imperial times. It then explores the cultural prestige attached to different systems of writing, and concludes with an extended discussion of the relationship between language and authority. This pays particular attention to the choice of language for written use in contexts where ideology and identity were as important as communica- tion of verbal meaning. By tracking regional variations in the use of Latin vis-à-vis the local languages of Europe, it emphasizes that sacred and secular authority both took many different written forms. The argument turns on the paradox that the use of Latin spread in geographical terms as the number of people able to understand it, let alone read and write it, diminished. By the end of the first millennium, Latin had become the mark of an elite, inseparably associated with the authority of kings and clergy alike throughout much—but not all—of the early medieval West. At the outset, it is helpful to distinguish between the western Roman Empire as a political and territorial entity; its administrative and legal apparatus; and Latin as the language in which communication was maintained and authority imposed. Each had a differing fate in the

post-imperial centuries: this uncoupling of polity, documentary procedure, and language helps explain some of the characteristic features of early me- dieval culture. The fate of the polity need not detain us here, for that will be the focus of Chapter 8. For the moment, it is enough to note that the deposition in 476 of the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was of little political significance, and that the disintegration of the western empire into a cluster of kingdoms ruled by local warlords had already begun much earlier in the fifth century.

Understanding the shifting relationship between language and the exercise of power during the early Middle Ages requires attention to the fate of the highly complex Roman bureaucracy of the fourth and early fifth centuries, for this did not cease to function with the termination of imperial rule in the West. Its salient characteristics in western and east- ern provinces alike included the linkage of governmental administration to an elite literary culture underpinned by a system of elementary and advanced Latin schooling. Scribal, stenographic, and notarial skills made the humble careers that sustained everything from military provisioning and the law courts to the book trade and estate management. Equally sig- nificantly, hard-won mastery of the canon of Latin classics was the access route to high office and the prestige it conferred. The conventional con- tent of this education thus provided a homogeneous cultural code that obliterated heterogeneous geographical and social origins. Simultaneously, its high cost did much to reinforce the social exclusiveness of the ruling elite by making it beyond the reach of the less well-off.

While governing always relied upon direct personal contact and patron- age, late Roman emperors also made extensive use of written administ- rative, fiscal, and legal procedures. Overall, inefficiency and internal contradiction vied with favouritism and corruption as the chief character- istics of the bureaucratic machinery that mediated between the emperors (one since 324 in Constantinople, the other, western, one since 408 in either Ravenna or Rome) and their subjects in the localities. In outlying western provinces, notably Britain and northern Gaul, much of this had probably collapsed rather earlier in the fifth century; further south, in Spain, central and southern Gaul, and Italy, Romulus Augustulus’ removal did nothing to interrupt bureaucratic habits. All the kingdoms that emerged on the Con- tinent during the fifth century relied directly on these inherited techniques of ruling. By appropriating traditional mechanisms of government for their own use, fifth- and sixth-century warrior kings asserted legitimacy, col- lected revenue, made law, and proclaimed their power.

If we take a long-term perspective, however, it is clear that inherited Roman bureaucracy did not endure. To assert that it decayed would be to adopt an inappropriate narrative of ‘decline and fall’. Rather, its con-

stituent elements—documentary forms, legal norms, tax accounting, judicial and archival procedures, and so on—disaggregated and thinned out. In places—but only in some places—fragments of the once-coherent bureaucratic regime then perished. Other fragments took on a new life. Men of property freed slaves, negotiated marriage contracts, endowed churches, and arranged their testamentary bequests in formal documents whose wording and appearance owed much to Roman precedent, but they did so in political circumstances that no Roman official would have recognized.

Establishing any precise chronology for these changes is extremely difficult, however, because of the patchy survival of evidence and the problems of dating what we do have. A few broad generalizations are nevertheless possible, if at the risk of oversimplification. Regarding the period between c.500 and c.750, the disaggregation tended to be slower in more southern areas than elsewhere, and was slowest of all in the papal bureaucracy in the city of Rome. Simultaneously, however, the nature of political elites was changing. Martial prowess gradually replaced a lengthy literary education as the quality that kings sought in their secular advisers—and that they rewarded with land and office. The bureaucratic expertise and the literary culture that had characterized the late Roman political elite became increasingly the preserve of Christian clergy, for the mastery of the written word remained as crucial for Christian worship as hitherto. Churchmen were thus becoming the new literate elite, experts in using the written word as a medium for negotiating power.

If we now extend our summary overview to the second half of our period, from c.750 to c.1000, then additional generalizations are possible. After the mid-eighth century, we encounter legal and administrative pro- cedures of Roman origin being adopted, adapted, and transplanted across a wide area, parts of which had never formed part of the Roman Empire. Eighth-century Bavarian dukes promulgated law in self-consciously Roman style; tenth-century German kings made formal grants of land and legal privilege to churches founded amongst the Slavs by means of docu- ments that stand in a recognizable relationship to late Roman exemplars, as do the coins minted by the early eleventh-century P emyslid rulers of Bohemia. An idiom of power, clearly indebted to Roman precedent, helped bring new kingdoms into being, and clergy played the role of mid- wife, as Chapter 7 will make clear. In brief, Roman bureaucracy and legal procedure were gradually disarticulated from the fifth century onwards, but, instead of disappearing, they persisted in piecemeal fashion as a reper- toire of ways of exercising authority from which Europe’s early medieval power brokers could pick and choose.

Against this background, we may turn to the cultural significance of language, and, in particular, to written language. Throughout the ancient world, Latin implied cultural superiority. Like Greek, the lingua romana was regarded as the language of learning, law, and rationality—those hall- marks that, Romans opined, raised their own world to a higher level than those around them. To a Roman, the peoples who lived beyond the im- perial frontiers were unkempt and ferocious, ‘barbarians’ whose way of life contrasted unfavourably with that of the inhabitants of the empire. The term ‘barbarian’ was laden with heavy cultural and linguistic prejudice: ‘as much distinguishes a barbarian from a Roman as a four-legged creature from a two-legged one, or a dumb girl from a man with the power of

speech’, wrote the late-fourth-century poet Prudentius.17 _{Above all, the}

gulf was educational, as we learn from Salvian. A Christian priest from the frontier city of Trier, he was among those displaced in the aftermath of the breach of the Rhine frontier in 406 by Germanic speakers and others, who then made their homes within Roman territory (see Figure 0.2). Writing in the middle years of the fifth century, he characterized the immigrants as ‘lacking in Roman learning, indeed in any civilized human

education’ and ‘ignorant of all literature and knowledge’.18_{Education—in}

the West the mastery of the Latin language in written and spoken form, and in the East, of Greek—entailed the whole cultural formation that underpinned Roman political hegemony. From an imperial perspective, Greek and Latin marked out a superior society that had no respect for the ignorant and uneducated.

Based on education, the distinction between Roman and ‘barbarian’ was cultural not racial, and thus never formed an impermeable barrier. Except as part of the mental furniture of the Roman elite, we should not take the prejudice too seriously. It is more fruitful to be alert to the ways in which political frontiers functioned as zones of intensive interaction and cultural osmosis, enabling those who originated beyond them to encounter Greek and Latin and either assimilate themselves into the late Roman world or, alternatively, appropriate techniques and uses of writing for their own purposes. Leaders of particular peoples might enter into diplomatic ties and treaties with the emperor that bound their subjects as a group. Assisted by secretaries and interpreters, some warlords, including the

Hunnic leader Attila (d.454), entered into written correspondence with

imperial authorities, utilizing Roman norms of written, diplomatic com- munication to negotiate the standing of their entire following. Individ- uals often also found personal advancement through trading with the empire or through undertaking military service on its behalf. Priscus, a Greek envoy to Attila, noted that, in addition to the ‘barbarous tongues’

spoken by the various peoples under Attila’s rule, ‘those that have com-

mercial dealings with the western Romans [speak] Latin’.19 _{Certainly, a}

fair number of military men and merchants would also have acquired at least rudimentary practical writing skills in the course of their careers. Although it is impossible to evaluate how this might have contributed to individuals’ professional success, the adoption of Latin words to do with warfare, writing, and trading into Celtic and Germanic languages is a clear sign of this acculturation.

In other contexts, those living outside the imperial borders appropri- ated aspects of the culture of writing to their own use rather differently— most notably the notion of symbolic representation of the sounds of which speech is constituted. Runes and ogam are both relevant here. The runic alphabet was a series of letter forms adapted during the first or second century ad from the Greek and Latin scripts to represent the sounds of Germanic speech. It was designed to be cut into wood, metal, or stone. The earliest surviving runes, on objects scattered sporadically throughout the Germanic-language zone, were employed for a range of practical and invocatory purposes, whether inscribing a woman’s name on a precious brooch, announcing the name of a treasured sword blade or spearhead, invoking good luck, or even naming the gods. Although often hard to decipher, early runic inscriptions are an example of an important theme, writing as a form of cultural osmosis around the periphery of the Roman world.

Later runic inscriptions epitomize new forms of that interaction. Anglo-Saxon monks standardized the runic alphabet and utilized it for Christian memorial inscriptions in the monasteries and churches of late-seventh- and eighth-century Northumbria as a complement to Latin inscriptions in the Roman alphabet. In tenth- and eleventh-century Scandinavia, on the other hand, a new and vigorous tradition of com- memorative inscribed rune stones seems to have been a local reaction to the pressures of foreign missionaries. In Norway runes coexisted with Christian, Latin literacy into the late Middle Ages, being turned to new administrative purposes, although always remaining primarily a script for carving not penning. Although they gradually lost out to the more pres- tigious Latin alphabet and authoritative texts introduced by Christian priests, runes were never condemned for their pre-Christian origins. Quite the opposite: the ways in which runes were co-opted to Christian uses, especially in Northumbria, reveal a spectrum of literate practices and a readiness to adapt to which we shall return shortly.

The history of ogam is not dissimilar, but takes us instead beyond the far western frontier of the Roman Empire. Around the Irish Sea, fourth- century speakers of Gaelic were in close contact with the Latin culture of

late Roman Britain; probably on its eastern, British, shore individuals with a precise knowledge of the sound systems and spelling conventions of the Latin language developed an entirely new sequence of marks to represent the Gaelic language. Specifically designed for stone monuments to com- memorate deceased persons of elite status in direct imitation of Roman epitaphs, ogam is testimony to the impulse to appropriate—on local terms—the evident association between writing and power. In the king- dom of Dyfed in south-west Wales, as elsewhere in western Britain, it was used until the seventh century for the Irish part of bilingual Old Irish–Latin epitaphs, in public assertions of the direct equivalence and high status of these two minority languages, and in Scotland, both Gaelic and Pictish ogam inscriptions occur. Across the Irish Sea, the many fifth- and sixth-century ogam stones of south-western Ireland are an idiom for emulating Roman memorial practices while shunning its language and script. They demonstrate the resonances of Roman hegemony beyond the empire long after its western half had ceased to exist as a political entity. Like runes, ogam was adapted to Christian contexts, lingering longest in Scotland, into the tenth century. Its abandonment in eighth-century Ireland and replacement by Latin as the language for the display of secular status became possible only once Latin itself was no longer asso- ciated with powerful neighbours just across the Irish Sea. By then, Latin had acquired a completely different significance as a mark of Christian- ity. On any evaluation, the diffusion of this Roman religion beyond the boundaries of empire had a defining cultural significance in European his- tory; crucial here is the stimulus to reading and writing presented by this book-based creed, for Christianity prompted the development of ways of writing local languages that had hitherto remained wholly or largely pre- literate. It also introduced more ways of exploiting writing to enhance power and authority than either runes or ogam had ever expressed.

Over the course of the early medieval centuries, there emerged a richly textured and widely varying repertoire of languages of authority, of which Latin was only one. We can best survey this region by region, paying par- ticular attention to the languages of Christian worship, of law, and of the expression of claims to landed property. To commence, we should remain in Ireland, where the impact of Christian book learning was startling, for two reasons. First, although the details of the conversion of the Irish dur- ing the fifth century in large part elude us, it is clear that the Irish had mastered ‘Latin as a foreign language’ by c.600. During the following century, they not only began composing their own texts in Latin but also adapted the Latin alphabet to writing in their own language. With the ability not merely to carve short inscriptions on stone but now to write lengthy Old Irish texts in fluent documentary hands, Irish filid—scholars,

poets, and legal experts—appropriated the Roman alphabet to their own uses, creating a large corpus of Old Irish texts side by side with Christian Latin ones. This took many forms, including Old Irish poems, geneal- ogies, mythical tales, but also a very large number of legal treatises, set- ting out the complexities of Irish social organization and detailing the norms that regulated everything from bee-keeping to the treatment of hostages or the qualifications for poets of different ranks. These law books were the work not of legislators making new law, but rather of judges and scholars systematizing past procedures and existing social practices into generalized normative statements whose impact on everyday living is unknown. How far the Irish ever supplemented these law tracts with practical administrative forms of writing cannot be said. It is impossible to determine whether the almost total absence of tribute lists, land docu- mentation, and the like is the result of massive documentary losses or of a persistent preference for oral modes of remembering and regulating community affairs. We are left with only the vivid insights into how the elite of highly trained scholar-poets and jurists thought their com- munities ought to operate, but very little evidence about how they actu- ally did. We shall encounter some of these ideal societies later.20

Secondly, the Irish preferred to keep their Bible and their worship in a foreign language. Hitherto, the seepage of Christianity beyond the fron- tiers of the Roman Empire had been accompanied by translation of the Bible into the local language, often also accompanied by development of a new script so as to keep each language in its own script. In the mid- fourth century, the priest Ulfilas (b. c.311, d. 383) had done exactly this for