Rural Centres, Trade, and Non-Agrarian Production

In contrast to the relative scarcity of publications dealing with the buildings and layouts of rural settlements, many volumes have been devoted to the development of early medieval trade and craft production (e.g. Jankuhn et al. 1981; 1983; K. Düwel et al. 1987, vols. 1–4; Hodges and Whitehouse 1983). Archaeological research into these topics has been made more fruitful—as well as more complex—by the contributions of neighbouring disciplines such as history, geography, and numismatics. It has, however, tended to focus almost exclusively on towns, monasteries, and royal centres, yet craft production, trade, and exchange also played a significant role in farming communities before and after the emergence of such specialized centres. Indeed, the rural settlements of northwest Europe were already significantly differentiated in their economies in the Migration period, suggesting a high level of socio-economic complexity several centuries earlier than has generally been supposed. The evidence now available for trade and non-agrarian production, which derives almost wholly from archaeology, calls for a thoroughgoing reassessment of when and how centralized authorities emerged in northern Europe after the collapse of the western Empire. This is particularly true for northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, where early state formation has conventionally been dated to the late Viking period. Research into state formation has in the past focused on the origins of towns and market centres, the latter usually seen as arising from participation in long-distance trade which was controlled by kings or magnates. Yet, several centuries before there were kings or towns in northern Europe, rural settlements emerged which point to a degree of political centralization. This chapter considers the evidence for these rural centres and the role of non-agrarian production and exchange in rural settlements generally: what was the scale and context of the production, distribution, and consumption of non-agrarian goods? Who controlled these activities, and how, if at all, did the long-distance trade networks which fuelled the nascent towns of Merovingian and Viking Age Europe affect the economies of the communities which lay in their hinterlands?

Land and Power: Settlements in the Territorial Context

As settlements became more clearly bounded and fixed in the landscape, so too did territories based on landed production, which became increasingly intensive and politically controlled (as we shall see in Chapter 5). These territories became formalized when leaders were able to exercise authority within them by protecting clients through juridical and/or military means, and by extracting surplus from, and controlling access to, landed resources. The identification of communities and individuals with a particular territory or region, whether this was defined by shared markets, dialect, military allegiances, or other commonalities, must also have grown in importance in this period, as ties of ethnicity and kinship began to give ground to bonds of clientship and rank. The formalization of territories was of course key to the formation of early kingdoms. What can archaeology tell us about the effects of territorialization and estate formation on rural communities? Certain regular features govern territorial formation in pre-industrial societies. In particular, universal ‘push–pull’ factors underlie the territorial structure and settlement pattern of agrarian communities. Briefly stated, every community needs to establish a territory in order to keep neighbouring communities at a distance and preserve its resources (‘push’ factors), but the necessity of maintaining certain social ties between communities, such as marriage, trade, and shared defence (‘pull’ factors), will act to minimize the distance between them (Heidinga 1987, 157). For example, the distribution of settlement in the Veluwe district of the central Netherlands shows that the northeast and the southwest regions were largely empty in the seventh century, even though their soils were suitable for farming and they were occupied both before and after this period. They lay outside the core area of the seventh-century resettlement of the Veluwe, however, and it appears that communities chose not to spread out thinly across the entire territory, but rather to remain relatively close to one another (Heidinga 1987, 162). In the Netherlands, Germany, and England, early territories could, under certain circumstances, be remarkably stable and survive to be detected in much later boundaries (e.g. Waterbolk 1982 and 1991a; Cunliffe 1973; Janssen 1976). In view of this stability and the behavioural ‘rules’ which appear to govern territorial formation, some archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct proto-historic territories. Several presuppositions underlie such reconstruction. The first is that the ‘push–pull’ factors already mentioned invariably operate between neighbouring communities.

Rural Communities in Early Medieval Europe: Archaeological Approaches and Frameworks

The primary aim of this book is to provide an overview of the evidence for the settlements and everyday life of rural communities in northwest Europe from c. ad 400 to 900, broadly the period from the collapse of the western Roman Empire to the rise of early states in its former provinces and Scandinavia. Its secondary purpose is to relate this evidence, which comes mainly from archaeological excavations, to Anglo-Saxon England and to consider its implications for our understanding of settlements here. Each chapter concludes, therefore, with a brief discussion of the comparable evidence from England, even though detailed comparisons cannot always be drawn due to differences in the quantity and nature of the data available. The evidence is examined under five broad topics: buildings and what the ‘built environment’ tells us about the household and its activities; the layout of farmsteads and settlements and how these may reflect the social structure of communities; the formation of territories and demographic developments; farming strategies; and, finally, the role of non-agrarian production and exchange in the economies of rural settlements. Working with evidence spanning such a broad chronological and geographical range is naturally beset with methodological difficulties. One obvious complication is introduced by the different traditions of periodization and terminology used by scholars working in different countries. Thus, a settlement dating to the sixth century might be described as ‘Germanic Iron Age’, ‘Migration period’, ‘early Anglo-Saxon’, or ‘Merovingian’, depending on its location. The chapters which follow draw primarily on evidence from a large region, stretching from southern Scandinavia, through northwest Germany to the Netherlands. This brings with it the danger of adopting a ‘melting pot’ approach, however unintentionally (Halsall 1995a, 1–3). Yet, an appreciation of regional, indeed local, diversity and of the potential for rapid social change in this period is essential. This North Sea zone has been chosen, furthermore, not out of a misguided belief in a ‘homogeneous Germanic culture’ (ibid.), but because it was in close cultural and economic contact with England and includes the regions from which the Anglo-Saxons believed their forebears to have originated.

The Forces of Production: Crop and Animal Husbandry

In a world in which virtually everyone was a farmer, farming was not an ‘occupation’: the early medieval leod who, on the one hand, was in military service to the king, could also have fields to till. It is perhaps for this reason that, although the Lex Salica deals extensively with farming matters, it contains no term for ‘farmer’. The daily life and world view of early medieval communities were undoubtedly shaped in fundamental ways by the agricultural cycle, yet it is difficult to treat farming activities per se, precisely because there is so little description of everyday activities. Further complicating matters, ancient field systems are notoriously difficult to identify and date, and although animal bones and plant remains survive in relative abundance from this period, agricultural tools are very rarely preserved. Even excavating settlements is unlikely to tell us much about systems of farming. A web of economic and environmental factors underlies the developments in farming practices apparent during the second half of the first millennium ad, and agrarian production remains among the most intractable, yet crucially important, subjects in early medieval studies. This chapter begins with a broad overview of what is known about the agrarian practices of individual communities from archaeological and written sources, and concludes with a consideration of the implications of this evidence for wider social and economic issues. For example, in those regions lying within the former western Empire, how much continuity was there with the late Roman rural economy? When did at least some farms begin regularly to produce a substantial, tradeable, surplus? Finally, how did the intensification of cereal production apparent throughout the North Sea zone relate to changes in the nature of lordship and land tenure? Early medieval law-codes and charters generally have more to say about animal rearing than about crop husbandry and some of this information is remarkably detailed; the Lex Salica, for example, refers to some ten different categories of pig! (Wickham 1985). Some Carolingian charters, furthermore, refer to the relative values of different animals; those for the estates of Werden, for example, state that a cow was worth 8 denarii, as much as a ewe with a lamb, and so on (Wulf 1991).

Epilogue: Trajectories and Turning-Points

A survey such as this one can only present a fraction of the archaeological evidence available for early medieval settlements, yet even a relatively brief review of this evidence makes plain the remarkable diversity of these settlements in terms of form and economy; the communities they represent were far from being simple, isolated, and economically primitive as so often portrayed in traditional historical scholarship. In particular, the recognition on the one hand of highstatus complexes dating to the Migration period and, on the other, farming communities of ‘ordinary’ status which were extensively engaged in trade and non-agrarian production, points to a higher degree of economic complexity, integration, and resilience than was previously imagined. Furthermore, the archaeology, when viewed in toto, points to what has aptly been dubbed ‘the long eighth century’, namely the period from c.680 to 830,1 as a turning-point, not only in terms of settlement structure and architecture, but also in the organization of landed production and regional exchange. By 800, as we have seen, rural settlements in the North Sea zone were configured in ways that were markedly different from their Migration period predecessors. The longhouse had, in most regions, undergone a radical transformation or been given up altogether; settlements were increasingly planned and bounded; farming and craft activities, as well as the circulation of goods, showed signs of a wide-ranging reorganization; and elite families had stamped an increasingly separate group identity onto the landscape as they established distinctive settlements and buried their dead in new burial grounds away from the communal cemeteries of their ancestors. While the very nature of archaeological evidence does not permit us to point with certainty to the specific causes which lay behind these changes, the emergence of kingdoms in northwest Europe provides the backdrop against which they can best be understood. The development of early states—specifically in Denmark and England—and the northward expansion of Frankish colonial activities required both increased production and the mobilization of agrarian resources into an increasingly centralized political system. Indeed, an increased emphasis on surplus extraction must lie behind many of the changes observable in the plant and animal remains of this period and in the remnants of craft production, as well as in the greater size and storage capacities of at least some farmsteads in central Jutland, Lower Saxony, Westphalia, and Drenthe.

Houses and Households: The Archaeology of Buildings

As Rapoport suggests, a house is more than merely a shelter against the elements. The built environment and the way space is organized within the house reflect and reinforce social organization. While this is obviously true of the great hall in Beowulf, it is equally, if less obviously, true of ordinary houses. If, furthermore, we are to assess the economic conditions and daily life of the early Middle Ages, we need to understand the nature of the buildings in which people lived and worked. Indeed, the study of early medieval settlements in northwest Europe has traditionally been dominated by the study of buildings, chiefly for two reasons: first, on a small number of waterlogged sites, buildings (which were, with few exceptions, constructed entirely of timber) are extraordinarily well preserved, with walls standing in some cases up to a metre or more in height (Fig. 2.1); and second, other categories of artefacts, with the exception of pottery, are usually scarce. In the great majority of settlements, floor layers contemporary with the use of the buildings have been destroyed by later erosion or ploughing, and only the debris which collected or was discarded in pits and ditches survives. Even where none of the timber superstructure survives, the ground-plans of these buildings, etched into the subsoil as patterns of postholes, reveal that they could be imposing structures. A fifth-century longhouse at Flögeln-Eekhöltjen (Lower Saxony) measured an extraordinary 63.5 m in length (Zimmermann 1992a, 139). A seventh- to tenth-century hall at Lejre (on the island of Zealand) was comparable in floor area (over 550m²) to the halls of the Carolingian palaces at Paderborn and Frankfurt, and is estimated to have stood up to 4 metres in height (Fig. 2.2; Christensen 1991; Winkelmann 1971; Stamm 1955). Of similarly lofty dimensions was a Migration period hall recently excavated at Gudme, on Funen, whose main roof-supporting posts were set into massive pits (Figs. 2.3 and 2.4). The fact that these timber buildings have naturally fared less well in the archaeological record than their more durable stone counterparts in former imperial territories has often led to gross underestimates of their size, complexity, and quality.

Settlement Structure and Social Space

The way in which a community arranges its living space is only partly due to technical considerations: social relations also play a major role in determining the layout of settlements, as we can see from cross-cultural studies (Rapoport 1980, 9). A correlation exists, for example, between increased economic complexity and complexity and regularity in settlement structure. Thus, while hunter-gatherer settlements tend to have a fairly flexible structure, societies which emphasize concepts of property and territory are more likely to develop fixed ‘rules’ regarding settlement layout (Fraser 1968). The early Middle Ages saw profound changes in socio-political structures as early states were formed, as well as major developments in food-production strategies and technology. We should, therefore, expect to see these changes reflected, at least indirectly, in the layouts of settlements. Spatial order in a settlement both reflects and helps to regulate social order and social relations; it provides, quite literally, ‘a framework for living’ (Chapman 1989; Giddens 1979, 207; Leach 1976, 10). This presents the archaeologist with a daunting prospect, for it is far easier to explain the arrangement of early medieval settlements in terms of function or geometry than in terms of kinship structure, household composition, marriage patterns, and so on, factors which we can at best only glimpse through documentary sources. If, for example, we are to interpret the significance of an exceptionally large house or farmstead accurately, we first need to know whether power was vested in the heads of households or lineages, a council of elders, or in some form of paramount chiefdom. Despite these limitations, settlement layout is an important source of evidence for the social and economic structures of early medieval communities. The individual household appears to have been the basic unit of agricultural production in northwest Europe from the Roman Iron Age to the Carolingian/Viking periods. The economic importance and, to some degree, independence of the household is underscored by the fact that in most cases each lay within its own enclosure and had its own storage facilities (in contrast, for example, to the shared compounds of the earlier Iron Age, as seen, for example, at Hodde in Denmark: Hvass 1985).