The Conversion of Europe

Only fragments of information survive about the activities of the Franks in the desperately confused politics of fifth-century Gaul. Heroic attempts have been made to construct a plausible narrative. All founder on the rock of the simple but compelling rule that bricks cannot be made without straw. But in the last quarter of the century straws begin to accumulate. The first ruler of the Salian Franks of whom we can form any impression is Childeric, who seems to have died in 481 or 482. A contemporary who must have know what he was talking about, Bishop Remigius, lets us know in a surviving letter that Childeric administered the province of Belgica Secunda. The capital city of the province was Rheims, which was also the seat of Remigius’ bishopric. Belgica Secunda embraced a vast area of northern Gaul bounded by the Channel, the Seine, the Vosges and the Ardennes. It is plain that by Childeric’s time – and possibly owing to his agency – Salian dominion had expanded well beyond its early bounds in Toxandria. Childeric was buried at Tournai, another of the towns of Belgica Secunda. We know this because his grave was discovered there in 1653. It could be identified as his because it contained his signet-ring, which portrayed the full-face bust of a long-haired warrior in late Roman military uniform bearing a lance and surmounted by the legend CHILDERICI REGIS, ‘[by order] of King Childeric’. The signet-ring with its Latin inscription hints at acquaintance with Roman governmental routine. It was not the only object among the gravegoods which could be interpreted in a quasi-official light. There was a shoulder-brooch of the sort worn as a badge of rank by late Roman officials of high status and there was an enormous amount of gold in both coin – minted in the eastern half of the empire – and ornaments.* Some scholars have suggested that Childeric and his Franks might have been settled under treaty in northern Gaul, like the Visigoths in the south or the Burgundians in the east. Conceivably they had; in any case we should not rule out communications between them and the imperial government in Constantinople. These ‘Roman’ objects in Childeric’s funerary deposit must be balanced by others of different suggestiveness. There was jewellery of barbarian type, a throwing-axe, the severed head of his presumed favourite charger. Recent excavations at Tournai have revealed three pits close to the site of Childeric’s grave, each containing skeletons of about ten horses. Carbon-14 testing of these pits yielded a late-fifth-century date; and they were cut into by sixth-century burials. It cannot be demonstrated that these pits were connected with Childeric’s funeral rites but it looks extremely likely. Ritual slaughter of horses and the eating of their flesh were identified by early medieval missionaries as heathen customs. Childeric therefore (or those who buried him) looked both ways. Inside the Christian empire on its northern fringes, the Salian Franks yet maintained their ancestral observances. After all, Childeric’s gods had done very well by him. Who were his gods? It is a question to which no confident answer may be offered. Our ignorance of the Germanic paganisms of the early Middle Ages has already been lamented in Chapter 1. We must draw attention to it again here, with renewed lamentation. We can be reasonably sure, however, that for Childeric (as for Edwin of Northumbria) the cult of a god or gods of war, with the appropriate rituals, would have loomed large. There are hints too, in our early sources, that the veneration of ancestors was a part of the religious observance of the Frankish kings. The dynasty claimed a supernatural origin: Childeric’s father Merovech – whence the name Merovingian for the family – was held to have been the son of a sea-monster.

Childeric’s son Clovis succeeded his father as king of the Salian Franks in 481–2.* Clovis was a great warlord who expanded Salian dominion in every direction and he was the first Christian king of the Franks. Not only was he a convert to Christianity, he was a convert to Catholic Christianity. These features made Clovis significant for the writer who is our principal source of information about him, Gregory, bishop of Tours from 573 to 594. We have already encountered Gregory. He it was who listed the foundation of churches in Touraine, who was the friend of Aredius, who told moral tales warning against the perils of rusticity. Gregory’s most famous work was his Ten Books of Histories (often inaccurately called the History of the Franks).3 Justly renowned as the most readable of all early medieval narratives, the Histories are vivid, chatty, unbuttoned. With what art the bishop coaxes his readers into accepting his stories in the same relaxed fashion as he tells them! But the Histories had a serious purpose too; or rather, several serious purposes. If we confine ourselves to what Gregory had to say about Clovis, we need to take account of three things. First, Gregory felt concern about the squabbling kings of his own day and their endless internecine wars: he wished to hold up their ancestor before them as an example of strenuous valour. Second, Gregory wanted to show how God had helped the Catholic Clovis in all his wars, not just in some of them: this affected his chronology of the king’s reign and conversion. Third, we must make a large allowance for ignorance: like every historian Gregory was at the mercy of his sources, which were meagre. Writing as he was a century later, Gregory of Tours did not know much about Clovis. Because he didn’t, we can’t either.

Gregory has, however, left us a great literary set piece on the conversion of Clovis. We must attend to it not because of its claims to tell us what really happened – they can be shown to be ill-founded – but because it shows us how Gregory thought it appropriate to present a king’s conversion, and because of its literary influence upon other descriptions of royal conversions. As Gregory tells it the story of the conversion of Clovis goes like this. Clovis’s queen, Clotilde, was a Burgundian princess and a Catholic Christian. She wished to have their first-born son baptized and nagged her husband to permit it. She chided him for his attachment to the pagan gods but he was firmly loyal to them. The queen had the infant baptized. He promptly died, whereupon the king rounded on her, seeing in his son’s death a demonstration of the impotence of her Christian God. Clotilde had another son, whom also she caused to be baptized. The baby began to ail and Clovis predicted a second death. But the queen prayed and the infant survived. She continued her pressure upon the king to bring about his conversion. Eventually there came a time when Clovis took the field against the Alamans. Finding himself hard-pressed in battle, Clovis called upon ‘Jesus Christ … Thou that art said to grant victory to those that hope in Thee’, promising to believe and to undergo baptism in return for victory. The Alamans were defeated. At the queen’s prompting Bishop Remigius of Rheims began to instruct Clovis; but secretly, because Clovis feared that his subjects would not permit their king to forsake the ancestral gods. But his apprehensions proved baseless, for his people spontaneously decided ‘to follow that immortal God whom Remigius preaches’. All was made ready, and Clovis ‘like a new Constantine’ was cleansed in the waters of baptism. Three thousand of his armed followers were also baptized; so too his sister Albofleda; and another sister Lantechildis, who had previously been an Arian.

There are four essentials in this account: the role of a Christian queen in converting her pagan husband; the power of the Christian God to give victory in battle; the king’s reluctance, springing from anxiety as to whether he could carry his people with him; and the happy conclusion in the baptism of the king, some members of his family and large numbers of his following. We shall encounter these themes again. If they seem, with repetition, to betray something of the character of a topos or conventional literary formula, we need not doubt their fundamental plausibility.

Gregory’s account was intended to be straightforward but it hints at complexities. It is of great interest to discover that one of Clovis’s sisters was already a Christian at the time of his baptism, albeit an Arian one. This snippet of information acquires more significance when considered alongside a strictly contemporary source. There survives a letter to Clovis from Bishop Avitus of Vienne in which the writer congratulated the king upon his conversion. Avitus wrote in a convoluted and rhetorical Latin, but what he seems plainly to say at one point is that the conversion of Clovis which he celebrates was not a conversion from paganism to Christianity but one from heresy to orthodox Catholicism. In the context, the heresy can only have been Arianism.

This complicates the picture considerably. It raises the near-certainty that Arian proselytizers were at work among the Frankish elite. Had they taken initiatives which their Catholic rivals had been sluggish to grasp? Another surviving letter, already referred to, is from no less a man than Bishop Remigius of Rheims.4 It seems to date from 4812, and it was written to welcome Clovis’s succession to the administration of Belgica Secunda in the wake of his father Childeric’s death. In it the bishop proffered advice as to how the young man should conduct himself as king. He should, among other things, endeavour to keep on good terms with the bishops of the province: sound advice, in view of the enhanced status of the episcopate in late-antique society at which we glanced in Chapter 2. What is conspicuously lacking from the letter is any suggestion that Clovis might care to become a Christian. Some find this surprising; but it neatly exemplifies one of the attitudes we investigated in Chapter 1. The letter of Remigius to Clovis is a late example of the traditional Roman view that Christianity was not for barbarians.

One letter is not much – indeed it’s precious little – to go on. But the historian of a dark age must be thankful for the smallest mercies. The letter of Remigius permits us to envisage a Catholic episcopate initially aloof from evangelizing their new Salian masters. Arian clergy took advantage of this. The king himself was in no hurry and was prepared at the very least to dally with heresy before entering the Catholic fold. This we may be sure he finally did; no one doubts that in the end it was Remigius who baptized Clovis. ‘Finally … in the end’: the implication that the king’s approach to the baptismal font was a slow and cautious one is there in Gregory’s narrative and finds confirmation in yet another episcopal letter. Bishop Nicetius of Trier composed a letter of advice to Clovis’s granddaughter Chlodoswintha (Clotsinda, Lucinda) in about 565, when she was on the point of leaving Gaul to be married to the Lombard Prince Alboin. Let her remember how her grandmother Clotilde ‘led the lord Clovis to the Catholic faith’, even though ‘because he was a very shrewd man he was unwilling to accept it until he knew it was true’.5 Clovis had taken his time. The assigning of precise dates remains problematical. Victory over the Alamans, traditionally placed in the year 496, may indeed have been regarded by the king as God-given. Good reasons have been advanced for placing his baptism quite late in the reign; a strong case for 508 has been made.

Royal conversion was a complicated business. A first stage might have been marked, as suggested here, by the prospective acceptance of a Christian deity – possibly without any very clear awareness of His exclusive claims upon the believer’s allegiance. The final stage was baptism itself, full entry into the Christian community. The journey from first to last stage could have taken up to a dozen years, and there were plenty of intermediate stages. Clovis would have needed to be watchful, especially of his warrior following. He would have wanted to be quite sure that a new God could deliver the goods he had been led to expect. Bishop Nicetius was clear about these in his letter to Chlodoswintha. Look how your grandfather defeated the Burgundians and the Visigoths – and, he might have added, the Alamans, the Thuringians, the Ripuarian Franks and not a few of his own kinsmen. Look how rich their plunder made him. Look at the miracles which so impressed him, worked at the shrines of the saints of Gaul, of Martin at Tours, of Germanus at Auxerre, of Hilary at Poitiers, of Lupus at Troyes. For Clovis it must all have been reassuring and perhaps awe-inspiring. We must allow time, too, for Remigius’ instruction.

There may have been other forces at work as well. The long arm of east Roman diplomacy reached as far as northern Gaul. After his victory over the Visigoths at Vouillé in 507 Clovis received letters from the Emperor Anastasius conferring the office of honorary consul, with its insignia and uniform, upon him. During the last years of his reign the ‘new Constantine’ performed actions which recalled the first Constantine; and surely not coincidentally. Like Constantine he established a new capital for himself, at Paris. Like Constantine he built there a church dedicated to the Holy Apostles. Like Constantine at Nicaea he presided over a church council, at Orléans in the year 511. Like Constantine he was generous to the Catholic church, and there is just a little evidence that like Constantine he was masterful in his government of it. Like another emperor, Theodosius II, Clovis issued a code of law, written in Latin, the so-called Pactus Legis Salicae, the first surviving version of the famous Lex Salica or Salic Law, the law of the Salian Franks. A newly arrived barbarian warlord had been patiently shepherded into the Christian fold and a start had been made in schooling him in the ways of Christian kingship.

One of the chapters of Clovis’s law code deals with runaway or stolen slaves. It considers the contingency that slaves might be carried off trans mare, ‘across the sea’, and lays down the procedure to be followed in foreign courts of law to effect their recovery. For a king who ruled in northern Gaul the nearest sea is the English Channel and the most obvious way of understanding the phrase ‘across the sea’ is as a reference to south-eastern England. Like the Frankish king we too must turn our attention across the sea.

The fifth and sixth centuries are the most obscure in British history. In 410 the Emperor Honorius had instructed the civitates, as we might say the local authorities, to look after themselves when the imperial army and administration were withdrawn. For a generation or so they appear to have managed reasonably well: the British church, which was visited by Germanus, which could despatch Ninian to Galloway and to which Patrick was answerable, was not the church of a society in collapse. But this fragile stability did not last. Britain had long been the target of predators, like any vulnerable part of the Roman world. Her attackers came from the west, the Scotti or Irish; from the north, the Picts from what is now Scotland; and from the east, the peoples of the north German coastlands from the mouth of the Rhine to Jutland. Since the days of Bede these latter have been pigeon-holed as Angles, Saxons and Jutes, but it can be shown that several other tribal groups were involved, such as Frisians or Danes. Here I follow time-honoured convention in referring to them generally as the AngloSaxons. These were barbarian peoples whose homelands were well beyond the frontiers of the Roman empire. They had been less exposed to Roman ways than their neighbours the Franks, let alone the Goths. This is not to say that they had had no contact with the empire at all: archaeology has shown that trading relations were widespread; the settlement excavated at Wijster, in Drenthe in the northern Netherlands, a substantial village of at least fifty dwellings by the fourth century, seems to have subsisted by production for the market provided by the garrison towns of the lower Rhine about sixty miles distant. Recent excavations on the Danish island of Fyn have yielded abundant artefacts indicative of trade with the empire. Roman coin circulated as freely in northern Germania as it did further south in Gothia. Nevertheless, due allowance being made for commerce, it remains true that of the barbarians who took over the western imperial provinces those from the North Sea littoral were the least touched by Roman influence, the most uncouth.

Their taking over of much of eastern Britain occurred in the period of deepest obscurity between about 450 and 550. Valiant attempts to pierce this darkness have been and are being made by historians, archaeologists and place-name scholars. We do not need to consider these very difficult and intricate matters here. It is enough to reckon with the emergence in eastern Britain by the latter part of the sixth century of a number of small kingdoms under Germanic royal dynasties and warrior aristocracies, a ruling class whose members were, of course, like the Franks, pagan in their religious observances. Our immediate concern will be with the most south-easterly of these, the kingdom of Kent.

The degree to which Christianity was obliterated in those parts of eastern Britain occupied by the Anglo-Saxons is a matter of debate. It is not impossible, indeed it is quite likely, that there was some considerable survival of the Romano-British population under English rule, a state of affairs which would have been congruent with the circumstances elsewhere in the western provinces of the former empire. What we do not know is how thoroughly Christianity had permeated British society before the Germanic takeover occurred. If the area of Kent – restricting ourselves at present to the south-east – was anything like the Touraine of St Martin we might expect to find, around the year 400, some urban Christianity, some rural Christianity at gentry level, and a lot of rustic paganism. The early Christian archaeology of Kent does indeed present this impression. There is evidence of Christianity in late Roman Canterbury and at a few rural sites, of which the best known is the villa at Lullingstone with its private chapel. It is difficult to gauge to what degree this Kentish Christianity survived the disruptions of the fifth and sixth centuries. The Roman town of Canterbury seems to have experienced severe if never complete depopulation. Urban life in any generally accepted sense of the phrase seems to have died. This need not mean that Christianity disappeared from Canterbury altogether but it could mean that its presence there was insubstantial. The Roman villa at Lullingstone was destroyed by fire early in the fifth century: accident? arson? barbarian raiders? We have no means of telling: but we do know that it was not rebuilt. It has long been a plausible hypothesis that the landowning classes of eastern Britain made themselves scarce as their province drifted into insecurity and disorder as the fifth century advanced. They withdrew westwards into Wales, Cumbria or the south-western peninsula, where Christian principalities would survive independently of the Anglo-Saxons, in some cases for centuries; or they emigrated to safer parts of what was left of the empire. However, this should not exclude the possibility that some of them stayed. Near Aylesford, and suggestively close to another Roman villa, there is a settlement named Eccles. This placename has been borrowed, via British, from the Latin ecclesia, ‘church’ or ‘Christian community’. A pocket of Christians must have survived there long enough for the name by which they were known to their (non-Christian?) neighbours to have been adopted into the Germanic speech of the new overlords.

All of which gives food for thought but does not greatly advance our understanding. We can at least say that we must not rule out the possibility that there were Christians among the subjects of the pagan Kentish kings of the sixth century. These kings also had Christian neighbours. It is well known that the Anglo-Saxon peoples were great seafarers; it is sometimes forgotten that the Franks were too. For seafaring folk the Channel unites rather than divides. It was the highway from the north German coastal homelands to the rich pickings of Gaul for the raiders of the third and fourth centuries and for the settlers of the fifth and sixth (as for the Vikings later on). Saxons settled on both sides of it. They settled the southern parts of Britain to which they gave their name – the East Saxons of Essex, the South Saxons of Sussex and the West Saxons of Wessex. On the opposite side of the Channel Saxons were settled in three known areas (and possibly in others as well) – round Boulogne, round Bayeux and near the mouth of the Loire. The Saxons of the Loire were converted to Christianity by Bishop Félix of Nantes, who died in 582, a change in their culture which their insular kinsfolk in Britain would surely have got wind of. Did Franks also settle on both sides of the Channel? It is practically certain that Frankish settlement did occur in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, though in the last resort the evidence, mainly archaeological, is inconclusive. This evidence undoubtedly does show that there was a lively exchange of goods to and fro across the Channel at this period. Whether these things travelled as commodities of trade, as plunder, tribute, dowries, gifts, we do not know. All we know is that they travelled in abundance and that many of them were objects of high intrinsic value or status such as jewellery or glassware. We should take care to remember too the perishable commodities which leave no archaeological trace. What are we to suppose that the Anglo-Saxon nobility of Kent drank out of their handsome glass goblets imported from the Rhineland?

It would also appear that at least from time to time Frankish royal power was claimed – which is not to say that it was exercised – over parts of south-eastern England. The contemporary Greek historian Procopius tells of a Frankish embassy to Constantinople in about 553 which included Angles in it in order to demonstrate the Frankish king’s power over the island of Britain. A generation later Pope Gregory I could imply in correspondence with two Frankish kings that the kingdom of Kent was somehow within their range of influence. The one report may be explained away as misunderstanding, the other as diplomatic flattery – perhaps. What we cannot dismiss is sound evidence of dynastic contact, the marriage of a member of the heathen royal family of Kent to a Christian Frankish princess.

Ethelbert of Kent married Bertha, a bride ‘of the royal stock of the Franks’, in the words of Bede.6 His information can be supplemented from the Histories of Gregory of Tours, a strictly contemporary witness, and one who had probably met Bertha herself. He certainly knew her mother Ingoberga, whose piety, and generosity to the church of Tours, he warmly commended. Her father Charibert (d. 567) had been king of Neustria, that is the western portion of the Frankish realms with its capital in Paris (and including the Saxon settlements near Bayeux and Nantes). Unfortunately for us, Gregory has practically nothing to tell us about Bertha’s marriage. She was joined, he says, ‘to the son of a certain king in Kent’ – and that is all. Gregory stands at the beginning of a long and still-flourishing tradition of French historical scholarship which is wont to pay as little attention as possible to the history of the neighbouring island. He could have told us so much more. Was this the first such cross-Channel dynastic marriage, or had it been preceded by others? We do not know. When did it take place? We do not know, though it is possible to work out that it is unlikely to have been before the late 570s. What did the marriage mean for the relations between the two royal families? We do not know, though because Bertha as an orphan could not have ranked highly as a matrimonial catch and because Gregory seems to allude dismissively to the bridegroom we may suspect that Frankish royal circles would have looked down on Kentish ones.

We do know that Bertha’s kinsfolk had been able to insist that Ethelbert permit his wife to practise her religion. She came to Kent accompanied by a bishop named Liudhard (and presumably some subordinate clergy) whose role was to act, in Bede’s words, as her adiutor fidei, her ‘faith helper’ or private chaplain, not to attempt any wider evangelizing ministry. Her husband put at her disposal ‘a church built in ancient times while the Romans were still in Britain, next to the city of Canterbury on its eastern side’. There are two candidates for the identification, St Martin’s and St Pancras’, both extramural churches to the east of Roman Canterbury, beneath both of which excavation has revealed Roman brickwork and mortar. Near St Martin’s there was excavated in the nineteenth century a medallion attached to a late-sixth-century necklace: it was die-stamped with the name LEUDARDUS, presumably Bertha’s Bishop Liudhard. What is interesting, if Bede’s informants at Canterbury were correct, is that there were persons in Kent at the time of Bertha’s arrival who could identify a certain building as a Christian church. It suggests the presence of a Christian community at Canterbury.