The Early Middle Ages (c. 500-900): Feuding and Peacemaking
In most early medieval societies, the political elite incorporated both the old Roman aristocracy and the elites of the new ‘barbarian’ peoples. Families continued to be a central aspect of elite status, but their prominence rested on a combination of their wealth, especially in land, and their personal relationship with the leader of one of the new kingdoms that were being established throughout Western and Central Europe.
These elites were not lords, in the sense that they did not usually exercise judicial or fiscal power in their own right, though they might exercise it on their own behalf or by delegation from the ruler. The most important social distinction in the early medieval world was not between the nobles and the commoners, but between the free and the unfree. Military violence was not the exclusive preserve of aristocrats from the fifth to the seventh centuries, but elite status does seem to have affected how and why violence was used for political and social ends.Elites were habitually violent towards one another for their own purposes. Often considered emblematic of early medieval aristocratic violence is the so- called feud between Sichar and Austregesil in sixth-century Merovingian France. Actually termed bella civilia (civil or civic wars) in the source that relates the story, the conflict began at a Christmas party, involved multiple murders, and was reignited after lying dormant for several years when Sichar insulted another man named Chramnesind at dinner.[462] [463] Conflicts like this were primarily a masculine enterprise - Chramnesind reportedly thought to himself that if he did not violently respond to Sichar’s insult then he ‘ought not be called a man, but rather a weak woman’ - but there are cases in which elite women too had recourse to killing. At least this was true of some of the women who shared the king’s bed, as the sanguinary enmity between Queen Brunhild and Queen Fredegund and other examples show.[464] (A slave who raised his hand to Sichar, on the other hand, was flogged and had his extremities amputated before being hanged.) Personal and emotional - or at least presented that way in the sources - such conflicts have been seen as part of an aristocratic culture of feud in which kin-groups collectively addressed injuries to their members outside of the restraints of law or government.
While not chaotic because there were incentives to settle disputes and rules for pursuing enmity, the collective responsibility of kinship and the tit-for-tat rhythms of vengeance and counter-vengeance created a potentially limitless cycle of violence.The characterization of early medieval elite violence as ‘feud' has, however, been increasingly called into question. We actually have little evidence for this sort of ‘classical' feuding: the incidents that have been grouped under the rubric are heterogeneous, and closer inspection shows that the extended kin-group so essential to anthropological models of feud seems to play little role in violent early medieval conflicts.[465] Even in the classic, almost universally cited example of Sichar's feud(s) with Austregesil/Chramnesind, his two opponents do not seem to have been related. Rather than ‘feud' in the anthropological sense, elite violence was generally in the service of wars over ‘higher-order' political objectives like territorial expansion or it was an act of specific vengeance for a particular injury. (It is true that those distinctions could be blurred, the ‘feud' between Brunhild and Fredegund being an iconic - if atypical - example.) The law codes promulgated by early medieval kings usually gave some scope for such ‘private vengeance' as long as it was publicly advertised, though whether such laws could be enforced - or were ever even intended for such a purpose - is an open question. Perhaps more importantly, such violence was fully congruent with social norms common to others at the top of the social hierarchy.
Legal and governmental questions regarding aristocratic violence come into sharper focus in the eighth and ninth centuries. Aristocrats were central to the successes of the Carolingian kings and emperors. Their massive campaigns against their neighbours mobilised substantial armies, constituted primarily of magnates and their followers whose specialised horses and equipment were paid for by taxing peasants.
Aristocratic prominence also grew through Carolingian practices of administration. Provincial governors (called counts) were chosen from the men of the highest elite families. Not free to act at will, their power - locally rooted, often effectively hereditary - was nonetheless difficult to curb.[466] When civil war divided the Carolingian empire after 840, it appears that these elites became increasingly given to local wars among themselves, which were now called werrae (the root of the modern romance guerra, guerre, etc.) as distinct from the public wars of the state, labelled with the classical word bellum.[467] In the Carolingian heyday in the early ninth century, proclamations against vindicatory violence had been made, with threats of dispossession or amputation for offenders who refused settlement.[468] Anglo-Saxon England saw similar developments about a century later, where kings sometimes issued legislation that strictly limited the legality of bloodfeud, discouraged the involvement of kin, and increased royal interest in dispute-resolution.Again, in both the Carolingian and the Anglo-Saxon historiography, there is much controversy about the meaning and effect of this legislation, particularly given the state of the sources. Frankish and Anglo-Saxon laws admit the existence of feud, despite limitations, and while tenth-century administrative innovations may have given rulers greater abilities to shape their subjects' behaviour, the sources give us almost no indication as to how much they exercised these abilities or how far up the social ladder that might have extended. What we can observe of Anglo-Saxon elites' behaviour suggests that for the powerful, for whom politics and personal grievance cannot be neatly distinguished, violence was always an option. On the continent, we again primarily have prescriptive sources for the period before 840, but some scraps of descriptive evidence suggest that Frankish magnates may well have been engaging in werrae even under Charlemagne.[469] What does seem clear is that elite violence in the early Middle Ages partook of a wider culture in which victims and their supporters were at least partially responsible for redressing wrongs at the perpetrator's expense (and that of his or her supporters). These wrongs ranged from the theft of cattle to the murder of kin to the usurpation of a kingdom. Legally constituted authority, in so much as a king or great prince might be said to be such, often had a role to play in settling or limiting these conflicts, and their claims to fines payable to themselves on top of retributive damages to the victim are suggestive of royal interest and injury in these purportedly ‘private' affairs.