Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

peers and lords: local communities 463
As the public institutions of the successor states became less able to
shape local society, it seems likely that these inherent economic inequalities
(among both Romans and non-Romans) prevailed. As a result, lesser (i.e.
essentially poorer) freemen entered into tighter and more subservient relations
with their richer neighbours, prompting a diminution in their status
and the rise of entrenched local high-status groups. Once such groups had
established their superiority to such an extent that it was heritable, then we
can start usefully to consider them as ‘nobilities’.
In Frankish Gaul, the new lordships of the seventh century seem to have
been associated with precisely this kind of social redefinition. A range of
archaeological and literary evidence, for instance, suggests that the
Frankish heartland of Austrasia saw noble families entrench their hold on
local society to an unprecedented degree around the year 600. We have
already come across the franci of late-seventh-century Neustria, not as a
large group of freemen warriors, but as a small group of noble families. 82
Elsewhere, the pace of change varied. Visigothic laws of the sixth century
distinguish lesser and greater freemen, but, at that time, despite vertical ties
of patronage, all shared the same wergild. Only later in the seventh century
were they ascribed different wergilds – probably marking the moment at
which status became essentially an inherited attribute. 83 In Italy, we have
seventh-century references to a few great Lombard families, and the laws
clearly expect that lesser Lombard arimanni might be bound by grants of
land to greater freemen. Only in the eighth and ninth centuries, however,
do arimanni disappear. 84
These kinds of processes were not everywhere triumphant. Ninthcentury
east Breton society was composed of self-governing small-scale
communities – plebes – where all free landowners, no matter how small their
holdings, played a considerable part in the running of local affairs. Processes
of dispute settlement are best evidenced in the surviving material, and the
likelihood of an individual taking on particular roles (judge, assessor, expert
witness, surety, etc.) did vary with wealth, but only slightly. In this society,
the key right was to be recognized as a free local landowner, and greater
lordship played no dominant role. Even here, however, there is a caveat.
This society is made accessible by the survival of the charter collection of
the great Benedictine house of Redon, founded in the area in 832. The
monastery’s archive preserved material about the plebes only because they
later became part and parcel of its own title deeds. In the later ninth century,
Redon became the dominant landowner in the region, acquiring considerable
powers of lordship. This material thus illustrates both the long-term
82 Halsall (1995) ch. 9. 83 Heather (1996) 283ff.
84 Great families: Rothari’s Edict pref.; cf. Laws of Liutprand 62 on greater and lesser freemen. More
generally, Wickham (1981) 134ff. None the less, it is likely that substantial numbers of smaller free landowners
survived very generally in Carolingian Europe beneath a politicized aristocratic élite: Wickham
(1992) with refs.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008