Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

the community of the realm 453
These moments were supplemented by a number of other mechanisms,
not least the tendency for successor-state kings to itinerate. Whatever their
other functions, such cycles of movement allowed kings to make contact
with considerable numbers of the landowners within the kingdom. This
imposed royal government in areas which might be beyond its normal
reach. Fredegar’s description of the crowds in Burgundy, flocking to win
legal redress from Dagobert when he arrived in the region, is a classic illustration.
Itineration also generated a series of social occasions which reinforced
senses of community among the élite: everything from formal
displays of royal sovereignty to feasts, to hunting. 53
In the later Roman empire, landowners came to court (physically or
metaphorically) to maintain their élite status. In the post-Roman west,
monarchs visited the landowners to assert their royalty; and, as we have
seen, there were other ways in which central power was structurally weakened
in the transformations associated with the end of the Roman empire.
Nevertheless, the mechanisms available to successor-state kings were powerful
enough to work one major transformation of their own: the dissolution
of any ethnic divide between the Roman and non-Roman elements out
of which most of the kingdoms had originally been constructed.
By c. a.d. 650, perhaps earlier in some kingdoms, a fundamental transformation
in perceptions of identity had worked itself out. Ethnic terms were
still used: ‘Burgundian’, ‘Goth’, ‘Frank’, etc., on the one hand, ‘Roman’ on
the other. The words had lost, however, their old significance. In the
Hispanic kingdom, ‘Goths’ were the élite landowners of the realm, whatever
their biological origins. The politically enfranchised class of freemen,
the definers and bearers of ‘Gothicness’ in the migration period, had been
broken up, as immigrant Gothic and indigenous Roman landowners made
common cause to create a new élite. Visigothic legislation mirrors the
process: picking out ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ freemen, who eventually came to
be ascribed different wergilds. 54 Elsewhere, the evidence for the process is
less good, but it does appear to have happened wherever Roman landowners
survived the initial chaos of invasion. Thus the seventh-century ‘Franci’
of Neustria were a nexus of some half-dozen or so leading landowning
families of the region who engaged in political competition with one
another at the highest level. And already in the early-sixth-century
Burgundian kingdom, legislative provisions reflect both the dominance of
a relatively small Burgundian élite – rather than an extensive freemen caste
– and its intermixing with surviving Roman landowners. 55
53 Some different aspects of itineration: Ewig (1963); Leyser (1979); Charles-Edwards (1988).
54 Heather (1996) 283ff., commenting on the original and revised versions of the Visigothic Code at
8.4.16.
55 Franci: Gerberding (1987) 167–8. Burgundians: Amory (1993) (who to my mind overstates the
speed of intermingling and the amount of confusion it generated).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008