BACKGROUND

WESTERN EUROPE in the two centuries after 476 had entered what used to be called the Dark Ages. The darkness of the time was as much to do with the shortage of surviving information as to the reality of the time itself, and certainly archaeology has cast more light than before on the sixth and seventh centuries. For all the revisions, though, the kingdoms of the Franks and Visigoths, the Anglo-Saxons and Lombards, still appear as poor, backward and little developed. Whereas the view that siege warfare had little place in any of these new realms has been challenged, it remains to study developments in this area as the empire of the Franks achieved its apogee at the turn of the ninth century, with economic development and greater political stability creating the conditions for a revival of culture, art and architecture.

The continued use of walled Roman cities as vital centres of power, particularly in the heavily romanised south of Gaul and northern and central Italy, made it inevitable that in the numerous wars following the collapse of imperial rule methods of defending and attacking these cities must have developed. The use by Germanic warlords of the surviving and inherited skills of masons and artisans was to be expected. At the same time, it has been shown that the Goths in Italy and Spain and the Franks in Gaul, although much of their warfare did revolve around the cities, were able to deploy only crude and limited versions of the weaponry and techniques of the Roman empire, while in Britain the Anglo-Saxons, having originated from areas less touched by Rome, leave no evidence even of these vulgarised skills.

If the Merovingian dynasties managed to maintain a relatively peaceful existence (except for wars between wings of the ruling family) in the seventh century, and if the Anglo-Saxons conducted their conflicts largely outside the remains of the Romano-British cities, a decline in the call for skills of building defences, and of defending and attacking them, might be expected. There is no reason, however, to argue for their complete disappearance, and evidence for the continued existence of some of these skills is to be found from the late seventh century onwards. What we do not know is whether skilled craftsmen had to be imported or whether there were native artisans who could be mobilised.