OUR KNOWLEDGE of relations between the Franks and Frisians in the Merovingian Period largely concerns the region that Bede calls Frisia Citerior (Historia Ecclesiastica, V, 10). Unfortunately the Anglo-Saxon monk nowhere offers a definition of the region, but Alcuin, in his Vita Willibrordi, states that when Willibrord first visited Radbod, which is normally thought to have been in 690, he went to the king's castrum at Utrecht (Vita Willibrordi 5). This and the revelatory excavations of Wim van Es at the site of Wijk bij Duurstede have not surprisingly led historians to concentrate their attention on the region of Utrecht and Dorestad. The very word citerior itself implies that it is more central than the other part of Frisia defined as ulterior. This, however, is only Bede's nomenclature (Bazelmans 2009, 331). We do not know where it came from, or whether it reflected an established view. It has arguably led to a rather blinkered understanding of Frankish-Frisian relations. For a start, it is worth noting that Utrecht and Dorestad do not appear to have been the home territory of those Frisian kings about whom we know anything. Stephen of Ripon (Vita Willibrordi 27) tells us nothing about the whereabouts of Aldgisl's centre of power – but he implies that it was close to fishing grounds. As we have seen, Radbod had a fortress at Utrecht, but this is unlikely to have been ancestral land, since the castellum had been in Frankish hands earlier in the seventh century (Boniface, ep. 109). Current views have placed the centre of his power in West Frisia, perhaps in Texel or Kennemerland (van Egmond 2005; Nijdam and Knottnerus 2019). Alcuin seems to imply that his authority stretched as far as Helgoland – but unfortunately the chapters of the Life of Willibrord describing the island shrine of Fosite (Vita Willibrordi, 10–11) do not make it entirely clear whether Helgoland was part of Radbod's kingdom, or whether his reaction to the saint's sacrilege was merely a response to demands made on him by the inhabitants of the island. The only other named leader, Bubo, was killed at the Battle at the Boorne (Fredegar, Cont. 17), and appears to have had his powerbase in Westergo or Oostergo. Oostergo was, of course, the focus of Boniface's mission at the time of his martyrdom at Dokkum (see Fig. 7.1 for the principal sites referred to in this chapter).

IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE to be able to add a volume dedicated to Frisians of the Early Middle Ages to the Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology series. All of the previous titles in this series derived from symposia organized by and presided over by the late Professor Giorgio Ausenda. From the early 1990s, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress (CIROSS) affiliated to the Universita di San Marino ran a series of symposia examining, individually, major ethno-cultural groups which both formed in and were responsible for the re-shaping of Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire. This is the tenth volume in that series, and the first representing a revival of the format and objectives defined by Giorgio Ausenda following the founder’s death in 2007. Hosted by the Fries Museum, a symposium on ‘The Frisians’ was organized and held in Leeuwarden in the province of Fryslân/Friesland, the Netherlands, from 11 to 14 September 2018, designed to coincide with the status of Leeuwarden as European City of Culture in that year.

The concept of historical archaeoethnology is, as described by Ausenda, to ‘recover knowledge of several aspects of the life style and sociocultural conditions of past populations’ (Ausenda ed. 1995, 3, 295–304). With its focus on the major ethno-cultural groups whose rise defines the emergence of an Early Middle Ages/Medieval Period after the end of the Roman Period, it may surprise us that Frisians have not been the subject of this series up to now. Their Continental and North Sea neighbours have been addressed: the Continental Saxons, the Franks and Alemanni, the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians. But perhaps where those Early-medieval groups have been or can be more clearly defined and therefore demarcated, the Frisian group, although well known, has been rather elusive and more challenging to capture.

This is not least the case because historically ‘Frisian’ has been an identity that has stretched through the territory of various modern states, notably Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, all of which have different research traditions, with the outputs of research published in different languages – including Frisian. Recent years have seen an increase in research on various aspects of the Early-medieval Frisian identity and culture in an international and interdisciplinary perspective, based primarily in historical, archaeological and linguistic sources.

Introduction

This project explores the use of a practice-led research methodology in the design of generative data visualisations that can be used to record and reveal the details of an empiric museum visit. The object of capturing this visitor information is to assist in the future design and development of tools for the creation of interactive museum experiences that can be improved by connecting the physical dimension of museums and exhibitions with digital information in new and novel ways. In this research we were specifically concerned with how user engagement in the museum can be captured, visualised and represented back to a visitor, museum curator or the broader community in a way that might bring added value or insight. Moreover, the capturing of the visitor experience becomes an archival process and practice that can be used in the design of future exhibitions, and more fundamentally to inform thinking around the ongoing ontological and epistemological position of the museum.

This research was initiated through a European Union-funded project entitled Material Encounters with Digital Cultural Heritage (meSch), which had the goal of exploring possibilities for the creation of tangible interactive experiences that connect the physical dimension of museum exhibitions with relevant digital cross-media information. The meSch consortium consists of 12 partners from six European countries and was coordinated by Sheffield Hallam University. The project started in February 2013 and lasted for four years. It was funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme ICT for access to cultural resources (meSch, 2017).

The design research outlined in this chapter is based on exploring the premise that data collected from a museum visit detailing personal profiles; time spent at exhibits, choice and sequence of viewing and so on can be used to explore how data can be generatively visualised to allow visitors to make informed decisions about what they have seen, to help plan return visits, or acquire additional knowledge, and to help curators to organise future displays based on an improved understanding of visitor interests.

In this chapter we introduce a range of novel concepts and ideas developed by Visual Communication academics and students at Sheffield Hallam University to expand and enhance visitor experience in museums and other sociocultural settings.

The history of British saints on the Continent is notoriously difficult to research – and I deliberately use the word ‘British’ and ‘Briton’ even where others might prefer ‘Breton’, because for the sixth century it is usually impossible to make a definite distinction between those who originated in Great Britain and those who came from Brittany. The majority of our sources are late: the most substantial body of material is hagiographic, but the Vita Winwaloei was written by Wrdestin and Clement in the first years of the ninth century, that of Machutus (Malo) by Bili around 860, and that of Paul Aurelian by Wrmonoc in 884. Of the two Lives of Gildas, the earliest appears to belong to the eleventh century, and the second, by Caradoc of Llancarfan, to the twelfth. The first Life of Samson (VIS) would seem to have been composed initially during the seventh century, which is when the author himself claims to have been active, and there are certain linguistic and terminological features in the Life that support such a date. There may, of course, have been a subsequent moment of what French scholars are now describing as réécriture, but even so the fact that the text makes no mention of a diocese of Dol surely indicates that the work as we have it antedates the foundation of the see, whose existence is not clearly attested before the mid-ninth century.

For Samson, unlike Gildas, Paul Aurelian, Winwaloe (Gwennolé), and Malo, we at least have the evidence of the subscription list of the Council of Paris, which can be dated by means of the other signatories to the period 556 to 573. The Council provides us with a useful point of departure for considering the activities of British ascetics in the Merovingian world. Having considered the early evidence for Samson, I will turn to that relating to the Irish saint Columbanus, which arguably gives us our most extensive block of dateable evidence for the influence of Britons on the Continent, before returning to what the Vita Samsonis has to say about the saint's Continental career, and the ways in which it complements and differs from the Columbanian material.

In the final paragraph of the last volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon sketched the issues that had most concerned him. In the section of the list which covers the causes of the end of the Roman West one finds “the disorders of military despotism; the rise, establishment, and sects of Christianity; the foundation of Constantinople; the division of the monarchy; the invasion and settlements of the barbarians of Germany and Scythia.” All these issues had certainly attracted Gibbon's attention in previous volumes, although in an even more succinct précis he had placed particular emphasis on two factors: “I have described the triumph of Barbarism and Religion.”

In what follows I wish to examine the relationship between the “triumph of Religion” and the “Decline and Fall” of the west Roman Empire—taking “Decline and Fall” as the period from the fourth to the seventh centuries, and not in a strictly Gibbonian sense. Although one can certainly say that the Empire came to an end in the West at some point in the fifth or sixth century, my prime concern is not with the significance of the deposition of the last western emperor (nor even with the fall of the Empire), but rather with the difference between western Europe, and the western Mediterranean more broadly, in 300 and in 600. While this is not intended as a critique of Gibbon, his interpretation provides a useful scaffolding for examining the changes that took place between those two dates. The distinction between the late- and post-Roman western Mediterranean can be seen as illustrating a “Decline,” but, as will become clear, I doubt whether the qualitative judgement that the word implies is helpful when one considers the major changes that took place.

Even though Gibbon's concerns, most especially that of religion, will provide the main focus for the line of argument that I will put forward, it should be stated immediately that his summary can no longer be regarded as providing an adequate list of the causes of the fall of the west Roman Empire.

The reactions to the devastation of parts of Gaul and Spain, and to the activities of the Visigoths within Italy did, however, have their religious side. Some pagans attributed the taking of Rome by the barbarians in 410 to the aban-donment of the old gods, while some Christians saw the disaster as a just retribution on a sinful world. One need only recall the letters of Jerome and Pelagius, and the sermons of Augustine, written in the immediate aftermath of the Sack of Rome; or the subsequent, and very much more considered, response of the bishop of Hippo in the City of God. Orosius reversed the pagan argument: the destruction had been unleashed by God on the ungrateful city, and indeed the major damage to the forum had been caused by a divine thunderbolt, which destroyed all the idols. Even so, in his view, the three-day sack in 410 was as nothing compared with a fire that had devastated the city 700 years after its foundation (i.e. in 54/53 bc), not to mention the one that lasted six days during the reign of Nero or the total sack of Rome by Brennus following a six-month siege in ca. 399 bc. In any case, the Gothic sack famously morphed into a religious procession after Alaric ordered the restitution of “the sacred vessels” to the Church of St Peter.

It is worth pausing here for a moment on some of the ideas relating to the Empire and its demise that were current in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Eusebius, of course, had set out a very positive view of the Empire as the fulfilment of Christian history. In one way or another his view was adapted in the East to fit the developments of the fifth century—the reigns of Theodosius II (401–50) and of Marcian could still be seen as belonging to the triumph of the Christian Empire. In the West, despite the fact that Eusebius's Chronicle, in Jerome's translation, seems to have been better known than it was in the East, it was harder to follow a pure Eusebian line. Not surprisingly there is an apocalyptic strain to be found in a number of chronicles of the period, notably that of Bishop Hydatius writing in north-west Spain in the middle of the fifth century.

We may disagree with Gibbon in seeing religion as a cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire but never-theless agree with him that the late Roman period saw “the rise, establishment, and sects of Christianity,” that “the Church, and even the State, were distracted by religious factions,” and that “the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods.” We may deny that “the sacred indolence of the monks was undoubtedly embraced by a servile and effeminate age,” but it is clear that monasticism was a major issue from the fifth century onwards. We can also go further than Gibbon in emphasizing the economic impact of the rise of the Church. This would not be reversed until the Reformation and the subsequent secularization of ecclesiastical property. In a sense the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries mark the economic formation of western Christendom, and the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth its de-formation (and not just its Reformation). Whether the endowment of the Church in the sixth and seventh centuries meant any more than the transfer of property from secular to ecclesiastical hands is surely a question that needs to be asked. Did the exploitation of land change in the immediate post-Roman period because of the new clerical landlords? Or did Church property simply replicate the landholding of the secular aristocracy of the Later Empire, some of whose lands were scattered across vast areas, just as the holdings of the great monasteries and bishoprics came to be? Peter Brown has pointed to the rise of the managerial bishop, interested in model farming. Did such men change the economy? In the West, at least, we know a good deal more about ecclesiastical property in the seventh century than we know about secular estates three centuries earlier. From Merovingian St. Martin's at Tours we have an extraordinary accounting document that provides a glimpse of payments required from the peasantry. Can we just read back from the known to the less known? Or should we hypothesize some significant change? A priori, the need to feed large monastic communities and to provide them with light changed distribution and demand, if not production. A community of monks did not move, whereas a Roman aristocrat with a comparable spread of estates could have progressed, and no doubt often did, between the major centres of his or her property, as we know did medieval kings.

This short book is a greatly expanded version of the plenary lecture entitled “Religion and the End of the Roman West,” which was delivered at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies on May 14, 2016. I am very grateful to the organizers for the invitation to deliver a plenary, and in particular to Simon Forde, who asked me to turn the lecture into the present publication. I am also very grateful to an old friend, Professor Thomas F. X. Noble, who acted as chair at the lecture.

The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan provided me with the opportunity to examine a subject that has long troubled me: how is one to keep in balance at least a sample of the numerous rewarding approaches to the period from the fourth to the seventh centuries, when many of them, it seems to me, have followed differing, sometimes seemingly mutually exclusive, trajectories? The most obvious rift is between socio-religious history on the one hand and socio-economic history on the other. The solution that I offer here is to present the Church, which is usually treated from a religious or social viewpoint, in terms of numbers, following a largely empirical line of argument: for me the idea probably derives from a sadly unpublished paper by Anthony Bryer, in which he provided a spell-binding analysis of the Byzantine Church as an economic institution.

I am indebted to numerous friends, and an even larger number of students, who have discussed aspects of the topic with me over the years: I think in particular of friends in the “Bucknell/Woolstone” group, of peers involved in the “Transformation of the Roman World” project, colleagues and students associated with “Texts and Identities” and “Networks and Neighbours,” as well as Robert Wiśniewski's team working on “Presbyters in the Late Antique West,” with whom I debated often during a fellowship at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies. Many of them appear in the footnotes, and to name them all would take up a very considerable number of lines. who have commented on the book in one of its drafts: Stanisław Adamiak, Ann Christys, John Haldon, Pawel Nowakowski, Helmut Reimitz, Mark Stansbury, Jerzy Szafranowski, Chris Wickham, and Robert Wiśniewski; as well as Adrien Bayard, who very kindly tracked down a citation that had eluded me.

Turning from the disagreements between pagans and Christians over the causes of the sack of Rome to disagreements between the Christians themselves—Gibbon's “sects of Christianity”—no one could deny the fact that the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries were riven by doctrinal conflict. This was a key period in the definition of orthodoxy and, as a corollary, the designation of doctrinal opponents as heretics. Without considering any of the minor heresies one can list Arianism, Donatism, Priscillianism, Pelagianism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism as doctrinal positions that caused major conflict in the course of the three centuries following the conversion of Constantine. Some, though not all, modern histories of the fall of Rome have integrated these doctrinal disputes into their narratives.

Ecclesiastical historians, of course, have most certainly not lost sight of the importance of doctrine, or of the sig-nificance of the ecumenical councils, which have attracted notable attention in recent years. The wider social and political implications of doctrinal debate, however, were rather more central to scholarship in the 1970s than is now the case. In 1972 Bill Frend published his account of The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, in which he placed the religious debates over the nature of Christ in the fifth and sixth centuries firmly at the centre of his reading of the history of the early Byzantine World. But he had already looked at the history of the African Donatist Church in a similar vein in 1952. Frend's arguments led to heated discussion as to whether ancient heresies were national or social movements in disguise. Most scholars would see the debate as long concluded, and as it was formulated by Frend this is surely the case. Yet equally there is no doubt that the debates over Monophysitism in the fifth and sixth centuries caused lasting divisions in the eastern Empire—divisions which Justinian's attempts to solve did nothing but exacerbate. Indeed, in condemning the writings of Sozomen, Socrates, and Ibas in an attempt to win over some of the critics of the settlement at Chalcedon, the emperor caused the controversy of the Three Chapters, which for a while split East and West, and continued to trouble the West into the seventh century.

The economy is not a dominant element in Decline and Fall, and indeed the relevant evidence was almost entirely unavailable in the eighteenth century. What Gibbon chose to emphasize was “Religion and Barbarism,” but he also pointed to “the disorders of military despotism,” “the foundation of Constantinople,” and “the division of the monarchy.” These last three issues can usefully be taken first, before we turn to the two factors on which Gibbon came to place most emphasis.

Gibbon did not share Montesquieu's view that the Roman Empire had been despotic for much of its exis-tence. For him the Roman Empire did indeed become despotic, but not until after the Age of the Antonines, and, as his summary suggested, with regard to the internal problems of the Empire his emphasis was very largely on what he called “the disorders of military despotism.”

There is a great deal to be said for the argument that military matters were central to Rome's problems. The maintenance of the army was at the heart of much imperial policy. It underpinned the tax regime, which was extremely burdensome for most sections of the population. Not so for the aristocracy, which was expected to con-tribute rather more to the Empire through acts of munificence than through the payment of taxes (though they were not exempt from State exactions). To describe such acts the French have long spoken of Roman évergétisme (“evergetism”), borrowing a word from the Greek. Imperial income was in large measure dedicated to paying the army, which employed a huge number of men: by combining the evidence of John Lydus, who talks of an army of 389,704 soldiers and a fleet of 45,562 sailors in the days of Diocletian, with the narrative of the sixth-century Byzantine historian Zosimus, who refers to some 581,000 soldiers in the civil wars of 312, with the late fourth-/early fifth-century evidence for the distribution of officials and their legions to be found in the Notitia Dignitatum, its size has been estimated at between 400,000 and 600,000 men, out of an overall population of perhaps 55 million. None of these figures, however, is any more than a guess, and even if those given by John Lydus and Zosimus are accurate, they refer to a very specific period of time, while any estimate made from the Notitia depends on assumptions about the extent to which legions were kept up to strength.

Ordinations from Silvester to Gregory I in the Liber Pontificalis

(Page references are to The Book of Pontiffs, ed. and trans. Davis.)

Silvester (314–35) (Davis, p. 27)

Ceremonies: 6 in December

Bishops: 65

Priests: 42

Deacons: 26

Mark (336) (Davis, p. 28)

Ceremonies: 2 in December

Bishops: 27

Priests: 25

Deacons: 6

Julius I (337–52) (Davis, p. 28)

Ceremonies: 3 in December

Bishops: 9

Priests: 18

Deacons: 4

Liberius (352–66) (Davis, p. 30)

Ceremonies: 2 in December

Bishops: 19

Priests: 18

Deacons: 5

Felix II (355–65) (Davis, p. 30)

Ceremonies: 1 in December

Bishops: 19

Priests: 21

Deacons: 5

Damasus (366–84) (Davis, p. 31)

Ceremonies: 5 in December

Bishops: 62

Priests: 31

Deacons: 11

Siricius (384–99) (Davis, p. 32)

Ceremonies: 5 in December

Bishops: 32

Priests: 31

Deacons: 16

Anastasius I (399–402) (Davis, p. 32)

Ceremonies: 2 in December

Bishops: 11

Priests: 9

Deacons: 5

Innocent I (402–17) (Davis, p. 34)

Ceremonies: 4 in December

Bishops: 54

Priests: 30

Deacons: 12

Zosimus (417–18) (Davis, p. 34)

Ceremonies: 1 in December

Bishops: 8

Priests: 10

Deacons: 3

Boniface I (418–22) (Davis, p. 34)

Ceremonies: 1 in December

Bishops: 36

Priests: 13

Deacons: 3

Celestine (422–32) (Davis, p. 36)

Ceremonies: 3 in December

Bishops: 46

Priests: 32

Deacons: 12

Sixtus III (432–40) (Davis, p. 38)

Ceremonies: 3 in December

Bishops: 52

Priests: 28

Deacons: 12

Leo I (440–61) (Davis, p. 40)

Ceremonies: 4 in December

Bishops: 185

Priests: 81

Deacons: 31

Hilary (461–68) (Davis, p. 42)

Ceremonies: 1 in December

Bishops: 22

Priests: 25

Deacons: 6

Simplicius (468–83) (Davis, p. 43)

Ceremonies: 3 in December and February

Bishops: 88

Priests: 58

Deacons: 11

Felix III (483–92) (Davis, p. 44)

Ceremonies: 2 in December

Bishops: 31

Priests: 28

Deacons: 5

Gelasius I (492–96) (Davis, p. 45)

Ceremonies: 2 in December and February

Bishops: 67

Priests: 32

Deacons: 2

Anastasius II (496–98) (Davis, p. 45)

Ceremonies: 1 in December

Bishops: 16

Priests: 12

Deacons: 0

Symmachus (498–514) (Davis, p. 48)

Ceremonies: 4 in December and February

Bishops: 117

Priests: 92

Deacons: 16

Hormisdas (514–23) (Davis, p. 50)

Ceremonies: December

Bishops: 55

Priests: 21

Deacons: 0

John I (523–26) (Davis, p. 52)

Ceremonies: ?