The Future of American Medieval Studies - Part 2

 As I discussed in my previous post, there are disadvantages to being an American when studying the Middle Ages, but also advantages, in that one is not trapped in a national history, taught since first grade, designed to instill patriotism.  Today I want to continue the discussion of where medieval studies might go next, because every academic field is influenced by the wider world.

Right now a lot of people are noticing that white men of European ancestry and (probable) Christian heritage are not automatically superior beings, before whom all others must give way.  Sure, some are great, but so are a lot of people who don't fall under this heading.  Because such men were (for the most part) the rulers who created the Glorious Fatherland (or Motherland) during the Middle Ages, it is harder for European scholars to break away from their dominance than it has been for Americans.

Women's studies was the first to point a new direction.  It's not new any more, it's been fifty years, but as young women started studying the Middle Ages they started asking where all the women were and were not ready to hear that medieval women were passive and silent and so rarely mentioned that it wasn't even worth thinking about them.  As in fact the women (and men) discovered when they started looking for women in medieval records, they were all over the place, active and with a lot to say.

The initial wave of women's studies was full of what I call the Fabulous Females trope, books and articles which basically said, Look!  Girls could do things too!  Who knew?  Here are a few wildly unusual women to prove something or other (cue Joan of Arc).

More recently studies of women in the Middle Ages have primarily focused on gender, that is what was considered proper masculine or feminine behavior, and on the ways that women were able to resist and negotiate their way through a system in which they had far fewer what we would call rights than men did--remembering that most lower status males didn't have such rights either.

Interestingly, scholars have now come to appreciate the high position women held in theological thought, even though they couldn't become bishops (or popes) or university professors (or even university students).  Because they were weaker than men physically, at least on average, many theologians said that their suffering and penance and fasting was more meritorious than that of men, because they weren't as well equipped to endure it.  Many noted that the opening of the Bible (Genesis) has God create both men and women in His own image.  God's creation of Eve from Adam's rib in the next chapter was seen as indicating that men and women were meant to stand side by side, rather than having one dominate the other, as Eve being made either from a piece of skull or a foot bone might have suggested.

Just as those studying medieval women found much to look at when earlier scholars had assumed there was nothing there, so other medievalists were able to study other groups that had been overlooked as less interesting or less worthy of analysis.  Peasants, the urban poor, minority groups (like Jews and Muslims), and queer people have begun to receive proper scholarly attention.  Saints, once dismissed as superstitious nonsense, began attracting scholars interested in the varieties of religious experience.

Medieval history has also expanded geographically.  In the US medieval studies initially focused on England, which after all is the source of our principal language and the inspiration for many of our laws.  But Americans soon crossed the Channel to study medieval France and Flanders.  Art historians plunged into the Italian Renaissance and (mostly) recognized that their period was part of the Middle Ages.  Germany was a little slower to find a place in American medieval studies, in part because Americans were less likely to know German than French, and Spain was slower still, both because knowing Arabic would really help and because of Spain's reputation as a land of superstition and inquisition, the so-called Black Legend.

But more recently medievalists have really branched out, taking in eastern Europe and the Middle East, included North Africa in studies of Europe's Mediterranean coastlands, and also ventured to other parts of the globe.  Here, rather than doing some simplistic compare-and-contrast of Charlemagne's empire and Great Zimbabwe, scholars have tended to concentrate on trade routes (like the Silk Road) and cultural influences, such as how a bronze Chinese lion ended up next to the church of San Marco in Venice.

Meanwhile medieval studies has become increasingly multi-disciplinary.  It has been for a century, in that medievalists have recognized that we really cannot study the political or legal history of the Middle Ages without also knowing something about its church history, its art history, or its literature.

So just as women, minorities, global society, and people with different orientations and belief systems have become important in contemporary thought, so too these issues have influenced medieval studies.  But wait!  The Middle Ages was patriarchal, aggressively Christian, racist, oligarchic, and colonial (as in trying to settle western communities in the Middle East), and society encouraged elite young men to learn violence.  How can we love the Middle Ages when they were like that?

Well, maybe there is value in studying people who are not like us, or at least not like what we would like to be.  I've studied knights and saints, and I would never have been a knight and don't believe in the saints.  But I do believe in people, and it's always worth asking what people took seriously, even if it doesn't match one's own preferences.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on approaches to the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

The Future of American Medieval Studies - Part 1

 The Medieval Academy of America (of which I am a Fellow) is coming up on its 100th anniversary, so it seems appropriate to think about the past and future of medieval studies, particularly in the US.  The topic is considered in a number of pieces in the January 2025 issue of Speculum, the Academy's journal.

Americans have both an advantage and a disadvantage compared to Europeans in studying the Middle Ages.  On the one hand, we have to travel thousands of miles to get to most medieval evidence.  Some medieval art, a few bits of architecture (like the Cloisters in Manhattan), and the occasional document are found in the US, but the castles, the churches, the medieval street layouts, and almost all the archives require extensive travel to access.  The saying, "The past is a foreign country" certainly applies.

On the other hand, it is much easier for Americans to try to look at medieval evidence as itself, without having to consciously avoid back-extrapolating from the present to medieval times.  For example, we can study the rule of Henry II of England without having to think about how English property titles were until recently traced back to Henry's time.  We can look across international borders far more easily than, say, the French, who know that the English and the Germans are The Other Guys, national enemies for centuries.

This does not of course mean that American medievalists, like other historians, do not always have presentist issues lurking when they study the past.  Industrialization in the nineteenth century created a backlash where people wanted to pursue and celebrate hand crafts, and such crafts were labeled medieval.  There was also a sense that society had become too coarse, and many dreamed of a bygone age of courtesy and chivalry, identified as medieval.  (I here stifle a snort.)

In the early twentieth century, in the aftermath of World War I, Americans wanted to justify becoming involved in a war fought thousands of miles away.  The justification was western civilization, now identified with Europe, considered to have begun with Greece and Rome, with ideals and institutions that developed during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, culminating of course with American democracy.  The eighteenth-century founders of the United States had all had a classical education and used Athenian democracy, Plato's Republic, and the Roman Senate as models, but now the gaps between the year 1 or so and the present were to be filled in with medieval culture and Christianity.

Western Civ is still with us, though it's less and less likely to be a foundational course for all college students.  In the 1960s everything was supposed to be modern and relevant.  We're going to the moon!  Who wants to worry about "dark times beyond the sea"?  Medieval studies however staged a resurgence in the following decades, due to a combination of Tolkien and a desire for an imagined past full of traditional values, rather than all this disturbing new stuff.

(I realized the 60s were officially over during the Ford administration, when I saw a toothpaste ad, done in sepia tones, of a white haired grandma giving a child in a white nightie baking soda to brush her teeth with.  And at a basin, not a sink.  The advertised toothpaste was said to contain baking soda, just like Grandma used to use.  You would never have seen that half a dozen years earlier.  Mini skirts went out at exactly the same time.)

Most students still get their primary exposure to medieval studies via a Western Civ course, though such courses are more and more being replaced by Global Studies.  Global Studies has its own challenges, like how are we going to cover 10,000 years of the history of an entire planet in 30 weeks?  Initial efforts were awkward, like Western Civ textbooks where all the ancient and medieval history chapters were still there, just shorter, and interleaved with other chapters.  So a chapter on Charlemagne was followed by a chapter on Great Zimbabwe in Africa, and one on the Italian Renaissance by one on the Inca of South America.  Efforts were made to "compare European and Japanese feudalism," feudalism being roughly defined as fortified dwellings and guys with swords, and resulting in unsatisfactory results. The Global Studies folks are still trying to figure out how to do this better.

In spite of minimal academic exposure to the Middle Ages, a lot of young people try to learn about it on their own.  Tolkien, including the "Lord of the Rings" movies, have been a major influence, joined more recently by the "Game of Thrones" shows and George Martin's books.  With or without the admixture of magic,  medieval society looks like one in which the individual can make a difference, and where big issues, beyond paying the electric bill or doing the laundry, can dominate.  In spite of its name, members of the Society for Creative Anachronism try to learn (and cosplay) something fairly close to real medieval culture.

Meanwhile academic medieval studies have pulled away from Western Civ to follow its own direction.  When "dark times across the sea" had been declared irrelevant, medievalists initially responded by emphasizing Rise of the Nation State.  After all, neither ancient Greece's little city-states nor Rome's Empire were a good model for modern nationalism, but Europe's countries of today have clear medieval antecedents.

More recently, medievalists have decided we've said all that's needed to be said about the nation state.  Medieval studies have gone off in all sorts of interesting new directions, like gender, or memory studies, or the history of agriculture, or the relationship of the church and secular society.  Stay tuned as I address this in my next post.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on approaches to the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Early Medieval Magic

 A lot of modern fantasy literature is set in a vaguely medieval world, but one equipped with working magic.  There are castles, kings, peasants, riders on horseback, and wizards.  (This characterizes my own fiction as well as that of many others.)  But how did the real Middle Ages view magic?

Well, it was different.  For starters, no wizards, no wizards' schools, no magical talents developing within the young person who (maybe) is prophesied to save her people.  Although there might be some practitioners who were more versed in magical knowledge than others, magic was primarily worked by people themselves.  For example, a woman might glue caraway seeds to the insides of her legs in the hope of conceiving a child.

Many churchmen worried about the rituals and incantations that could accompany the caraway seeds (or whatever).  Anything they found worrisome could be promptly labeled paganism, saying it compared to whatever the Romans had been up to before they converted to Christianity.  For example, exchanging gifts on January 1 was declared a pagan practice.

Modern scholars have tended to believe the early medieval priests, saying that the "simple folk" continued to follow pagan practices long after they theoretically became Christian, and that anything called Christian at the time was doubtless just superstition.

But this is an attempt to impose modern ideas of correct religion on people 1500 years in the past.  The magical practices that early medieval lay people attempted to carry out were, to them, part of Christianity, a way to get the attention of God and the saints.  The priests might think they were going about it the wrong way, but they agreed with the underlying premise, that the divine was accessible in times of danger.

For early medieval magic was not something opposed to the church and its teachings (as it is in most modern fantasy stories) but rather something parallel to it.  Its incantations, spells, amulets, potions, and herbal remedies were all intended to access the supernatural.  Wise practitioners might be holy hermits (I'm not talking here about the witch scares of the end of the Middle Ages).  The real fear for priests was that incautious lay people might summon a demon when they thought they were invoking a saint, with predictable consequences.

Indeed, priests were often the source of amulets, that were used to protect against fire, or against violent weather, or against various diseases.  The amulets might be made from plants, or from bones, or have touched a saint's relic, or incorporate a few words from the Bible on a scrap of parchment.  Church councils routinely told priests to stop providing such amulets, an indication that the practice was very common.  After all, who better to help access the supernatural than a priest?

An important part of magic was divination, determining what would be a good direction to follow, or for that matter what was the cause of illness, or if someone was trying to poison you.  If someone was, you really were not supposed to poison them right back, unless of course they deserved it.

Divination could be done at home by interpreting dreams or the roll of the dice or strange signs, or by consulting practitioners with their collections of mouse bones or understanding of what a lightning strike meant.  Early medieval people did not follow the early Roman practice of divination through examining chicken entrails, as they all agreed that was pagan. 

William Klingschirn discusses Merovingian-era magical practices in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on tmedieval religion and society, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

 

The Restoration of Notre Dame

 In April of 2019, the roof beams of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire.  The flame roared through the 900 year old oak beams that supported the lead roof, sending particles of lead throughout the neighborhood and threatening to collapse the whole structure.  As Parisians watched in horror, the nineteenth-century spire that had risen above the crossing crashed down through the church's stone vaulting.

 

At the time there was fear that it might never be restored or might, like Reims cathedral (bombed in World War I) take decades to repair.  President Macron promised it would be rebuilt in time for the 2024 Olympic Games, to be held in Paris.  The restoration efforts didn't quite make the Games, but the cathedral has now reopened, just in time for Christmas 2024.

It helped that the church was not nearly as badly damaged as Reims had been.  Other than at the crossing, where the spire had come down, the stone vaulting (the ceiling you might call it, with all the oak beams and the roof above it) had mostly survived.  The church's interior was damaged by smoke and water but was mostly still there, unlike at Reims, which had been left as a shell after the bombing.

It also helped that a concerted search through Europe's forests (including eastern Europe) was able to find and obtain enough tall oaks to replace the twelfth-century beams.  (Many had been planted two centuries ago with the thought that they would become ships' masts, but steam replaced sail before they were used.)  In spite of some talk in 2019 of redoing the cathedral with an exciting new 21st-century "look," the decision was made to restore the church more or less to how it had been before the fire.  That meant not only using oak beams rather than steel but repairing the stonework (including the vaulting) using medieval techniques.

A major role here was played by craftsmen who had been working on Guédelon Castle.  As I've noted before, this is a project where modern people are attempting to build a medieval castle using medieval techniques and finding it more of a challenge than they anticipated.   But some medieval techniques they've worked out via trial and error, looking at how real medieval castles are put together, others they've found in late medieval handbooks.  At any rate, craftsmen who've developed a good feel for wood and stone played a major role in Notre Dame's reconstruction.

 

Notre Dame reopened in a grand ceremony attended by international dignitaries.  The interior especially looks strikingly different than it did six years ago, being limestone white rather than smoke-stained gray (from centuries both of candle smoke and more recently coal residue from the heating system).  One can see why thirteenth-century visitors to Paris were stunned by the cathedral.

But other aspects have been restored to the nineteenth-century standard,  including a new spire to replace the one erected by Viollet-le-Duc that crashed through the vaulting, and also including the gargoyles and the rather insipid heads of the queens and kings of the Old Testament, depicted on the front.  Some new things have been added, like the sprinkler system (good idea!).  But overall one can now enter the church and imagine oneself back in the thirteenth century.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on churches and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Available both as an ebook and in paperback.

Barbarians and Romans

 As I discussed back when I started this blog, the idea of Rome falling to hordes of barbarians, like a tsunami sweeping up the beach and inland, used to be a standard part of history.  In recent decades it has been rejected, because it is unsupported by the evidence.  Yes, there were major changes between the fourth and seventh centuries, but a process that takes three centuries is hard to characterize as a "fall."

The only place where Germanic peoples and their culture essentially overran the Romanized Celtic peoples of the Roman Empire was England, where Roman cities disappeared and Christianity moved to the margins.  But even there a great deal of melding between Roman and Anglo-Saxon culture occurred, and British scholars named the following centuries the Dark Ages not because they were evil but because we know so little about them.

And England of course is not the model for all of Europe and the Mediterranean basin, as much as the English would like you to believe it.  In fact on the European Continent in the fourth and fifth centuries a lot of Germanic people were welcomed into the Empire, serving in the Roman armies, settling in various territories.  There was friction of course and the occasional sacking of a city, like Rome itself in 410, but the Empire continued on.

The biggest changes to the Empire were the disasters of the sixth century, several "years without a summer" which broke down trade routes and nearly emptied the cities, as lack of harvests meant no food for the cities to buy, coupled with the first outbreak of the Black Death.  Then in the seventh century the rise of Islam meant that Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and North Africa became Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, rather than Greek and Latin speaking and predominantly Christian, and no longer answered to the Emperor.

But how did Romanized populations react to the Germanic people settling among them in western Europe?  The Romans were not impressed with those they called barbarians, a term they coined because they said those who didn't speak Latin just said "Ba bar ba barg" or the equivalent.  But the Germanic peoples were impressed by Roman culture and, on the Continent, jettisoned their religion and language like a hot potato.  That's why Spanish, Italian, and French are all descended from Latin, in spite of the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Franks.  Even Romanian is a Latin-derived language.  East of the Rhine and in Scandinavia, however, where the Empire had never extended, and in Anglo-Saxon England, Germanic languages persisted (as they still do).

In practice, Romans and Germanic peoples quickly started to intermarry, meaning their descendants had a shared ethnic identity.  Archaeologists who have tried to determine whether a burial represents a Gallo-Roman or a Frank, for example, have been confused by both Roman and Germanic artifacts in the same grave.  Names still had cultural overtones, but parents might name a son Siegfried who they hoped would rise to power as a warleader, while naming a different son Peter who they hoped would end up as a bishop.

The so-called barbarian kings, who established kingdoms within the old Empire with the favor of the Emperor (now in Constantinople), kept much of the old imperial governance structure.  The Empire had been divided into administrative units, each called a pagus, centered on a city.  The pagi became first Christian dioceses (by the fourth or fifth century) and then (by the sixth or seventh century) the counties into which the kingdoms were divided.  Even some of the old Roman taxation system remained, although the collected money went not to Rome or Constantinople but rather to the king.

Interestingly, the Germanic people settled in the old Empire all wanted to assert their own thnic identity.  The Franks were the first to start writing down their old, traditional laws, writing them in Latin, in imitation of Roman law.  These so-called Salic Laws inspired similar written lawcodes from other Germanic peoples, including laws written for the Goths, the Bavarians, the Burgundians, and so on.  This is an indication that even as "German" and "Roman" were in the process of being fused into what would become a (sort of) general medieval culture, the "barbarians" were proud of their heritage and didn't want to forget it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval social and political history, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other e-tailers, either as an ebook or in print.

Horses

 These days most people do not see a horse on most days.  Riding lessons are for the well-to-do (or for actors appearing costume dramas).  But in the Middle Ages horses were everywhere.

Domestic horses, scientists have now determined, were first found sometime around 2000 BC, in the Steppes east of the Black Sea.  Such domestic animals as sheep, goats, and cattle had been around a lot longer, but until then horses were primarily a food item, hunted by being speared or run off a cliff.  The rock of Solutré in southern Burgundy, seen below, is believed to be one where horses were hunted in this way, as a lot of horse skeletons have been found there.  (Native Americans ran buffalo off cliffs in the same way.)

Domestic horses really change everything.  It is far easier to travel long distances on horseback than on foot.  The nomads of the steppes of Central Asia, who used domestic horses first, found them both a good way to travel and an important aid in herding their other domestic animals.  Cowboys in both North and South America followed in this tradition.

From Central Asia domestic horses spread east to China and west to Europe and the Mediterranean basin and Arabian peninsula.  Around the Mediterranean, horse transport primarily used chariots in antiquity.  Roman roads provided a fairly smooth surface along which horses could trot, pulling a lightweight chariot.  Armies however were primarily made up of foot soldiers, though their leaders rode on horseback.  (I have to wonder if the fact that Romans wore nothing under their togas reduced their enthusiasm for horseback riding.)

One challenge facing horseback riding is the danger of sliding off, if the horse goes too fast or suddenly plunges or rears.  Today that challenge is at least partially resolved by the use of stirrups, that stabilize the rider's perch.  Riders on the steppes seem to have developed the stirrup around the fifth century AD, although it took several hundred more years to reach western Europe.

The stirrup revolutionized warfare and made possible the appearance of knights, medieval fighters on horseback.  Although the majority of fighters in every war were still foot soldiers, one now had cavalry as well, fighters who could wield spear or sword from horseback, thanks to the stirrup.  Knights were primarily aristocratic or, at least in the eleventh century, employed by aristocrats, because horses were expensive.  Not only did they need rich food like oats, but iron horseshoes and iron stirrups were not cheap.

By the thirteenth century, horses were sometimes used in agriculture, although oxen remained the principal draft animal.  Because horses move faster than oxen, one could plow more acreage in the same amount of time, yielding more crops.  Of course this advantage was lessened by the fact that some of those more abundant crops had to be oats to feed the horses, and horses are inherently more skittish than oxen.

The use of horses in agriculture required the development of better horse collars that put the pressure on the chest, not the neck of the horse.  Chariots had harnessed horses in a way that could choke them if anything too heavy was pulled.  Better horse collars, like saddles and stirrups, came out of Central Asia.

Horses reached the Americas with the Spaniards.  Native Americans had either carried their possessions themselves or had had dogs pull sledges (no wheels in the Americas before Columbus).  But the Indians of the plains recognized the value of horses by the seventeenth century and established their own herds, either of horses that had escaped the Spaniards or ones stolen from them.  In South America, horses provided a new form of transportation, as the native llamas and alpacas cannot be ridden except perhaps by a very small child.

(Ironically, horses' ancestors had originally developed in the Americas and crossed the Bering landbridge into Asia, many tens of thousands of years before they were domesticated. But there were no horses around when white men reached the Americas.  The ancestral horses left behind in the Americas had either died out by themselves or were killed off (and doubtless eaten) by indigenous people.)

Horses continued to provide the major form of transportation through the nineteenth century.  New York City had serious problems with heaps of horse manure and the bodies of dead horses, who expired after long and arduous lives of pulling buggies and carts.  Armies as late as World War I employed horses.  Only with the invention and spread of internal combustion vehicles did horses cease to be the major way to travel.  The Amish still use buggies drawn by horses, and horses are still used for herding in parts of the American west, but horses are now primarily used for racing or for leisure activities.  But they still have their uses.  If someone breaks a leg hiking in the backwoods stretches of the Appalachian Trail, horses have to go in and pack the wounded hiker out.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval knights, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Roman Villas

 Roman civilization was city-based.  Outside of Rome itself the cities were small, at most ten thousand people and maybe only a few thousand, but they were still the centers for religion, government, communication, and economic exchange, and these cities persisted into the Middle Ages.  The big Roman provinces were divided into smaller units, called pagi, and each was comprised of a central city and its surrounding countryside.

But how about the countryside beyond the city, the pagus that the city governed?  There were small groupings of people in what we might consider a village, a vicus as it was called, an administrative sub-unit.  But the rural population was scattered thinly, most involved in agriculture.  The countryside was dotted with villas, homes of wealthy Romans who oversaw the big plantation-style agriculture of the time.

 

The term villa could mean either an elegant home or the property attached to it, usually both.  Villas were the country estates of wealthy aristocrats, places they went when they wanted to relax, though they also maintained city dwellings, where the excitement and action took place.  Villas were high-status homes, large, full of atriums, flowering shrubs, mosaics, and bath houses.  They were not a single structure but a collection of structures.  A great many people lived there, under the kindly or not so kindly direction of the head of the household.  Villas also functioned as the centers of the plantation agriculture that marked the Roman Empire.  The slow disappearance of these villas between the third and sixth centuries (it happened at different times in different places) was an indication that the civilization was changing.

A big part of it was the end of plantation-based agriculture.  The Romans had used slaves, not worrying if they were worked to death because new ones were always being captured as the Empire expanded.  But once the Empire stopped conquering new territories and bringing home new slaves, this became a much less viable way to raise crops.  The new Germanic peoples setting in the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries (Goths around the Mediterranean, Angles and Saxons in Britain, Franks in Gaul) had never used plantation agriculture.  The climate disasters and Black Death of the sixth century, leading to rapid population loss and shrinking of cities (where the produce of the plantations had been bought and sold), meant that people turned to small-scale agriculture.

But what about the villas?  With their economic purpose gone, they became much less viable.  Some of the wealthy Romans instead moved to much smaller, semi-fortified structures on hilltops, feeling the times were much too dangerous for the open villa layout.  But most of the aristocrats who survived moved to the cities with their walls, which were rebuilt around a much smaller population center.

The elegant villa structures themselves fell into disuse.  Because they had been founded in places that were chosen because they were quiet, bucolic, and good for large scale agriculture, rather than at strategically important spots as the cities had been, there was no incentive to maintain them.  Fields once worked by slaves became overgrown with first shrubs, then trees.  

The land attached to villas increasingly became the property of the bishops.  Early medieval bishops in Gaul were mostly from the old aristocracy (and centered in cities), and if they inherited or acquired villas, that land now belonged to the church.  Wealthy families who had moved permanently to the cities considered it an act of piety to give bishops land they no longer wanted, and for which there was no buyer.

In some cases rural monasteries, which really first appeared in Gaul in the seventh century (earlier monasteries had been primarily built in or near the cities), took up the lands and sometimes even the remains of the buildings of the old villas.

 

From the sixth-century population collapse to the first signs of population growth in the late eighth century stretches a little-documented period in which the pattern of rural settlement thoroughly changed.  The cities were still there, but the little rural hamlets of the Empire, the vici, disappeared.  Archaeology suggests that much of the reduced rural population lived in isolated farms.

New villages began appearing in the late eighth century, but they were usually not in the same locations as the old villas, even though the villages (farming communities) were called by the same name in Latin (villa).  The old Gallo-Roman aristocracy had mostly died out, and the new aristocrats established new manor houses for a new form of agricultural organization.  A few old villa structures became repurposed as palaces for the wealthy, but for the most part their mosaics (as seen above) and their pillars were something discovered by accident.

Alexandra Chavarría Arnau discusses the evidence for the decline of late Roman villas in in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the Roman-medieval transition, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.