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Archaeology over the past fifty years has shown that in the early 9th century Western Europe experimented with a coalescing of states affirmed by a common reform ideology and with it increased communication to regions beyond. At different speeds, regions of Western Europe adopted this new strategy known as the correctio. Within a generation, the correctio gave rise to a new ‘feudal’ economy and significantly a new regionalism. The archaeology of Europe shows that there were winners and losers in these fast-changing regions. The losers, in many cases, controlled the written narratives and ascribed their altered socio-economic condition to the Others of the time, not least because the Others were leading exponents of the post-correctio economic agenda. This paper revisits Klavs Randsborg's groundbreaking book, The Viking Age of Denmark, in the context of post-war approaches to Europe's post-classical narrative.
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ABSTRACT
Archaeology over the past fty years has shown that in
the early 9th century Western Europe experimented with
a coalescing of states affi rmed by a common reform ide-
ology and with it increased communication to regions
beyond. At diff erent speeds, regions of Western Europe
adopted this new strategy known as the correctio. Within
a generation, the correctio gave rise to a new ‘feudal’
economy and signifi cantly a new regionalism. The ar-
chaeology of Europe shows that there were winners and
losers in these fast-changing regions. The losers, in many
cases, controlled the written narratives and ascribed their
altered socio-economic condition to the Others of the
time, not least because the Others were leading exponents
of the post-correctio economic agenda. This paper revis-
its Klavs Randsborg’s groundbreaking book, The Viking
Age of Denmark, in the context of post-war approaches to
Europe’s post-classical narrative.
“THE VIKING AGE IN DENMARK”
“It is most certainly evident and thus free
from doubt that all things which are seen, are
temporal and the things which are not seen,
are eternal.”
With this quotation from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in
AD 770) Klavs Randsborg opened his book on “The Vi-
king Age in Denmark” (1980, viii). Of his many books,
few caused more controversy. It instigated a paradigm
shift in understanding southern Scandinavian society in
the 9th and 10th centuries. Most of all it directed scholars
– archaeologists and historians – to the ‘eternal’ remains
and the binary opposite of the ‘seen’ texts. Never before
had the Viking Age been viewed as late prehistory and
explicitly in terms of its materialism. It was a radical
break from a European cultural history of this age ren-
dered by the Latin Christian authors of the time as the
pagan Other.
Klavs was perhaps unprepared for the criticism that
his book garnered, much of it because he broke the un-
spoken rules of post-1968 scholarship by reaching out-
side the bounds of his discipline (cf. Burke 2000; Mo-
reland 2010, 276-77). He also inherently challenged
Denmark’s Jante’s law. Klavs introduced me to Jante’s
law, the ten rules of which can essentially be reduced to
‘you are not to think you are anything special’ (MacLella
2016). Klavs was special because he had the discipline
of a major student of prehistory and archaeology, and a
cultural experience mixed with an intellectual curiosity
that through travel gave him cause to constantly, restless-
ly re-evaluate canonical European thinking. From deep
prehistory until the modern day, he was fi rst and foremost
a critical thinker and a problem solver. As the ‘barmy’
Viking, as I like to remember him aff ectionately – a riff on
the tendentious reviews of “The Viking Age in Denmark”
he provided an ineluctable logic for reappraising the
post-classical reintegration of Europe and its unfolding
union culminating in the EU. In this short essay, I wish to
pay tribute to his profound infl uence on my interpretation
of the 9th century (Fig. 1).
THE PRESENT IN THE PAST
Klavs Randsborg always had an eye on the present as he
surveyed the past. Being a European who understood Af-
rica and Asia, he was fascinated by connections, and by
moments when those connections ourished or ceased for
cultural reasons. He was, then, a sentient voice in criti-
cally thinking about the 9th century AD when Christian
Europe sought its own explanations for the rise of the
Vikings and the concurrent rise of Islam as pagan aggres-
sors. He was also a sentient voice in grasping that modern
Europe needed to explain how its 9th-century precursor
found its roots in the crucible of alliances and coalitions
with these pagan extra-community societies. Most of all,
KLAVS RANDSBORG AND THE NINTH
CENTURY AD
Richard Hodges
156 Acta Archaeologica
he was critical of archaeologists who interpreted their
data as ventriloquists, Marxist, Structuralist, Weberian
and other, of the ethnohistories that served 9th-century
Christian political forces. The archaeology of Charle-
magne’s age, which has lost its innocence in the period
since 1980, has nevertheless still to combat an inherent
nationalism based upon the ethnohistory. My aim in this
paper is to review this archaeology illustrating how, in
fact, it challenges this tendency towards academic as well
as popular nationalism.
The beating heart of 9th-century Europe was the Caro-
lingian Empire and its post-Carolingian legacy. Around
it, for the most part, most of Europe was taking shape.
However, it is now evident that, notwithstanding Char-
lemagne’s imperious attitude to Abbasid ambassadors
(cf. Nelson 2010), Europe in the 9th-century was a world
of primitive and miniscule economies in comparison to
the metropolitan societies of Tang China and the Abbasid
caliphate (cf. Goldstone 1987; 2000; Hodges 2012, 118-
19). A cursory look at the Belitung wreck from Indone-
sian waters dating to c. AD 836 – an Abbasid boat with
a Chinese and Thai cargo and its royal Viking contem-
porary, the Oseberg ship of AD 834 and there can be
little doubt about the marginal economic tribes of Europe
at this time (Krahl et al. 2011). Belitung represents bulk
trade whereas Oseberg belongs to a tribal society invested
in prestige goods exchange. As archaeologists and histo-
rians, facing these diff erences in scale, it is the evolving
regional character and rhythm of these primitive and min-
iscule European economies that must interest us.
Fig. 1. Archaeologists Richard Hodges (left), Klavs Randsborg (centre) and John Moreland (right) in Stourhead, UK, 2008.
157
Klavs Randsborg and the Ninth Century AD
CHARLEMAGNE’S REFORMS AND
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE
VIKING WORLD
It is not the royal palaces or monasteries or their outputs
that presently illustrate quantitatively the rise and fall of
the Carolingian Empire, it is the emporium at Dorestad.
Dorestad covered more than a hundred hectares at the
point where the rivers Lek and Rhine met, close to the
North Sea, and thanks to huge excavations, we know it
was an administered dendritic central-place. On the pres-
ent archaeological evidence, no other town west of the
Abbasid world was as large or as materially rich or indeed
furnished with civic components such as streets and prop-
erty boundaries and wells (see van Es 1990; Willemsen &
Kik 2010; Dijkstra & Williams 2010). Its archaeology is
also the weathervane of the rapid evolution of North Sea
trade in the later 8th century, and emphatically, by com-
parison, shows how under-developed primitive is the
word I have used (ignoring the anachronistic modernist-
primitivist controversy (cf. Goody 2006, 45)) – 9th-centu-
ry long-distance trade was in the Central Mediterranean
(Hodges 2012; 2018a; 2018b). Dorestad’s chronology
based upon dendrochronology bears witness to the cen-
tralized command economy of the Carolingian empire in
the 790s (cf. Davis 2015). Similarly, its mercantile reach
within the Low Countries and as far north as southern
Scandinavia must in some way be an indicator of Caro-
lingian demand (by renaissance palace, aristocratic and
monastic consumers) as well as a burgeoning early Vi-
king Age emerging market. More of southern Scandina-
via below.
The granular detail of Dorestad permits us to track the
immense ow of Rhenish goods northwards alongside
the extraordinary use of the new Frankish reform deniers
(of AD 793/4) as well as re-purposed middle Rhenish
wine barrels in this port. The Carolingians were seeking
something through the agency of this place that they did
not seek elsewhere. Was it slaves, or arctic prestige goods
or silver or a mixture of small amounts of these prestige
goods (ivories, honestones and hack-silver) (cf. McCor-
mick 2001; 2002; 2007; Hodges 2012, 133)? Whatever it
was, the Dorestad boom from c. 790-820, must be aligned
to Charlemagne’s correctio. These wide-ranging admin-
istrative reforms issued as royal capitularies already had
a basis in evolving custom in the Frankish reform monas-
teries and palaces constructed in the decades immediately
after AD 770. In short, the emporium served the adminis-
trative transformation of the Carolingian economy with
its increasing emphasis upon managed estates and con-
trolled, taxed agrarian production. Put another way, the
Carolingian renaissance was established by the time of
the Dorestad boom and, while it continued and evolved,
its exponents were eyeing investment in what J.-P. Dev-
roey has called cerealization (2003, 300-9) and a dif-
ferent kind of agrarian economy (Hodges 2012, 57-60).
Dorestad’s commercial boom had passed by the 820s,
long before the Vikings were active raiders. Consumer
demand, as Frans Theuws has shown (2004), was now
mediated through successor urban settlements that placed
emphasis upon being embedded in the culture and econ-
omy of the region, as opposed to being a liminal, extra-
territorial activity. This tight chronology – not of collapse
but of economic evolution implies that Carolingian con-
sumer demand was substantively evolving. The model
ts with monastic investment now increasingly focussed
on agricultural and artisanal production for counter-gifts
as opposed to new buildings (cf. Hodges 2012, 132-36;
Grainge 2006). Concurrently there was a signifi cant evo-
lution of the local Frankish aristocracy who within dec-
ades were to be constructing the fi rst personalized castles.
This transformation was the step towards what is traditio-
nally described as feudalism and the devolved consolida-
tion of Charlemagne’s governmental ideas.
Now, chronology is signifi cant here. The dating of
Dorestad as a weathervane is an essential component in
re-calibrating the narrative of the re-birth of Europe be-
cause it is also tied to comparable dendritic central-places
– emporia – in Anglo-Saxon England and southern Scan-
dinavia.
Southern Anglo-Saxon England – as much as the Brit-
ish nd it hard to accept was economically and mon-
etarily tied to the Carolingian rhythm. Northern England
was more marginal, except for its Northumbrian cultural
connections with the Carolingian court. Put simply, the
chronology of the large Mercian emporium at London
echoes closely the Dorestad boom. Whether this was the
case of the Anglian emporium at Ipswich has yet to be
seen. In the highly developed countryside (Oosthuizen
2007; 2013; Rippon et al. 2006; Rippon et al. 2015) a
secondary products revolution accompanied and outlived
this Anglo-Saxon boom, as Pam Crabtree has shown
(2010). Mirroring Carolingian agrarian reforms, produc-
tion in England clearly sustained southern England irre-
spective of the fact that the region experienced political
158 Acta Archaeologica
unrest throughout the 9th century. Turning to western and
southern Scandinavia, the Viking era, central-places like
Tissø (Jørgensen 2003) loosely emulated Carolingian
architectural form, while the emporia of rst, Ribe (Fe-
veile & Jensen 2000), then Kaupang (Skre 2007; 2008),
engaged with Dorestad’s traders and provided prestige
goods and consumer products that drove the Carolingian
demand and, concurrently, created similar demand in
Rhenish wine and costume details in the Baltic region.
The near-contemporary creation of Hedeby at the base
of Jutland in the early 9th century simply illustrates the
accelerating consumer demand in the early 9th-century in
the southern Baltic Sea region (von Carnap-Bornheim &
Hilberg 2007).
The point to emphasise here is not the unexpected
expansion of North Sea and Baltic Sea trading activity,
but its continuity at Hedeby and Kaupang throughout the
9th century, unlike Dorestad and Ribe (which went into
recession after c. 820), and the far-reaching connections
across the breadth of the Baltic Sea. The heart of the Vi-
king revolution was not raiding but trading based upon
measured silver, as Randsborg pointed out (1981). Byz-
antine seals from excavations at Hedeby, Ribe and Tissø
suggest that from c. AD 840 Byzantine ambassadors were
aware of this emerging market (cf. Shepherd 1995). Like-
wise, to see the Danish army in mid to later 9th-century
England as pagan raiders rather than conquerors is a mis-
take. Their purpose is undoubtedly best viewed through
the prodigious archaeological evidence of the eventual
outcome of the Danish intervention. The archaeology
of Northumbria and parts of Mercia show that once a
peace treaty was made with the West Saxons the instan-
taneous result was start-up civic investment followed by
Carolingian-styled commodity production mediated with
Frankish-styled silver coinage. Lincoln and York, to take
two examples, had belonged to an underdeveloped Eng-
land that was transformed by the Danish conquerors. In
la longue durée these were spectacular illustrations of
Charlemagne’s correctio in action a century after his leg-
islation had been conceived with the help, ironically, of a
Northumbrian prelate, Alcuin.
This discomforting archaeological narrative is hardly
consistent with the West Saxon historical narrative, which
champions the Christian agency of King Alfred. Howev-
er, it is not diffi cult to grasp the West Saxon dilemma.
After a long period of underdevelopment in north-east
England, foreign powers swiftly accelerated economic
advancement, creating not competition so much as a po-
litical threat to West Saxon hegemony. In the aftermath
of meeting this threat during the 10th century by the mili-
tary unifi cation of England and the creation of the Anglo-
Saxon state, the rural and urban economies evolved at an
even greater pace.
Søren Sindbæk’s studies using network analysis based
upon the archaeology of the North Sea region and its con-
nectivity to the Rhineland affi rms the rapid evolution of
north-west Europe in the decades after Charlemagne’s
correctio (2006; 2012). It is therefore a surprise to see
the southern half of this world, beyond the Alps, in parts
bordering the Abbasid metropolitan machine, and what in
contemporary terminology might be described as auster-
ity.
Austerity comes in diff erent forms and is all the more
perplexing in the shadow of classical civilisation. As
archaeologists and historians, however challenging, we
must take a wide-angled view of antiquity and trust the
material evidence rather than the ethnohistoric narratives.
Then we must refl exively critique these largely elitist nar-
ratives.
The scale of collapse after the early to mid-7th cen-
tury in the central Mediterranean is indisputable. Even
Rome by AD 750 was a largely abandoned, ruinous me-
tropolis reduced to a polyfocal group of sanctuaries and
aristocratic nuclei nurtured by small-scale pilgrimage (cf.
Hodges 2015). Elsewhere, Ravenna and Naples were lit-
tle more than landing places, consistent with a coin-less
rural economy that was reduced to a primitive subsistence
form (cf. Hodges 2018a). No matter how it is described,
there is no evading the fact that it appears as if ‘an ice age
settled upon the Roman Empire’ (Durrell 1945, 75). Now
let us review its transformation in the 9th century.
The transformation is surely connected to Charle-
magne’s search for ideological legitimacy for his Frank-
ish correctio (cf. Wickham 2005, 821-22). Investment
in monastic central-places in Italy accompanied support
for Rome’s papacy as the Frankish king sought imperial
status and geopolitical authority as opposed to Mediter-
ranean imports (contra McCormick 2007). There were
imports from Italy into the Carolingian realm, essentially
consistent with Charlemagne’s political intentions. The
celebrated Abbasid gift of an elephant to Charlemagne
was delivered via an Italian port. Cartloads of palatial
spolia (columns, marbles and glass waste) were also
transported northwards. The Frankish strategy in Italy
159
Klavs Randsborg and the Ninth Century AD
and the northern Adriatic Sea region was pursued by
small-scale incisions in support of its political strategy.
The Benedictine monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno,
for example, was transformed in c. AD 800 into a propri-
etary monastery as an ideological bulwark against Byz-
antine incursions into south-central Italy (Hodges et al.
2011a, 433-39). Once the Byzantine threat passed in the
820s, the monastery was reconfi gured around the twin
goals of obtaining regional aristocratic support (through
gifts and reciprocal prestigious counter-gifts) based upon
pilgrimage and investing in agrarian reform. San Vincen-
zo’s liminal initiatives may have started later than those
enacted by comparable monastic central-places within
the central Carolingian realms (a good comparison would
be the abbey of Zalavár in western Hungary (Szőke et al.
2004)), but within the central decades of the 9th century
the agrarian innovations of north-west Europe were being
widely adopted throughout Italy judging from the ubiqui-
tous insertion into villages of small manor-houses as well
storage facilities based upon crop rotation (cf. Bianchi
2015). Commerce as it grew, however, eschewed coinage
and probably used silver ingots as in the Baltic Sea.
It is in this evolving context that the rst Arab con-
nections to Italy occur culminating in the later 9th-cen-
tury conquest of Byzantine Sicily. As in Italy, Byzantine
commercial activity in the central Mediterranean before
AD 840 was on a miniscule scale of probable partner-
ships (cf. Hodges 2017). Trade appears to have incremen-
tally increased after the mid-9th century attracting western
Arab pre-eminently Aghlabid - attention and interest.
As yet the archaeological picture of western Byzantium
in some respects is not unlike Northumbria in terms of
under-development. A rich cultural legacy was nurtured
on the back of small-scale agrarian and largely non-exist-
ent urban provincial societies. As a result, we must treat
the narratives with caution not least because the Arabs
became an explanation for raids and sacks that were in
fact the consequence of the end of tribal politics and the
beginnings of a feudal economy. The monastery at San
Vincenzo was destroyed in just such a cataclysm (Hodges
et al. 2011b). The architect of this sack of the monastery
was Bishop Athanasius of Naples while his ‘Arab’ mer-
cenaries targeted the monastic palace of Abbot Maio, as
the archaeology illustrates (Hodges et al. 2011b; Hodges
2016). However, as in the case of the Danish territories
in later 9th-century England, the Arab conquerors of Sic-
ily were responsible for a paradigmatic transformation,
based upon a known model. By AD 900 they had made a
metropolis at Palermo and with it instituted a process of
industrialisation emulating east Mediterranean concep-
tual planning (cf. Molinari 2015).
THE FINAL NOTE
The Treaty of Rome in 1957 based upon the earlier steel
pact between France and Germany has led to a European
Union that consciously or unconsciously taken pride in
Charlemagne’s mythic status as an agent of change and
as the father of Europe. It is to the 9th-century renais-
sance and its fostering of feudalism that the EU traces
its imagined community (cf. Balibar 2004, 23). It is no
coincidence that its most prestigious prize is named after
Charlemagne. Now, following all that has happened to
the EU in its sixtieth decade, there should be pause for
refl ection. This imagined community may have existed
historically, but it is not accepted by the Union’s diff erent
nation states. National histories have stubbornly retained
their own symbols, ctions and myths paradoxically as
scientifi c archaeology (often funded by the EU) has re-
vealed that the 9th-century re-birth of Europe was gen-
erated by both a combination of strategic post-classical
agency and regional diversity. Christian and elitist narra-
tive tropes are anachronisms to a Europe confronting glo-
balisation through union. For example, the signifi cance
of the Viking age to the Frankish realms should not be
underestimated as North Sea connections gave purpose
to Charlemagne’s court-driven correctio. Likewise, we
now must not overestimate the role of Byzantium and
Lombard Italy in this European revival. Indeed, it is the
reduction of these latter, Mediterranean regions that cre-
ated the vacuum in which diverse Carolingian and Arabic
concepts were adapted and developed.
The 9th-century feudal revolution contingent on a ru-
ral aristocracy, a prelude in many minds to a European
modernity (Goody 2006, 83), owed much to the twin
forces of European-wide integration and regional cultural
diversity shaped during and after the 7th century. Such
forces were seldom popular at the time. Consequently,
ethnohistories written by court authors and monks must
be treated with critical caution and mediated by the ma-
terial evidence. Historians, to be fair, are well aware of
this, but archaeologists and museum curators are often
less so. As the EU grapples with resurgent nationalism,
mostly ignited by austerity measures and immigration,
160 Acta Archaeologica
it is time for archaeologists to renounce narratives based
solely upon origin myths and expound the importance of
commerce and planning in the Viking world, that ask why
the classical world collapsed so spectacularly and, em-
phatically, ask why modern archaeologists have resisted
these conclusions. We need to reconsider the very roots
of our histories. For example, Moses Finley was patently
wrong in his depiction of a European miracle borne from
a shared antiquity (Finley 1973, 147; cf. Goody 2006,
82). His ‘mentor Weber advocated that ‘the process of
sanctifying life could thus almost take on the character of
a business enterprise’ (1958, 124-5; see also Weber 1978,
212-16 and Costambeys 2007, 48-49). He would have
found the monastic evolution of San Vincenzo al Vol-
turno a satisfying illustration in the long march towards
the protestant ethic, but what would he have made of the
rationalised civic and productive facilities of Dorestad or
Ribe (cf. Wickham 2005, 688) and their absence at this
time in Rome? It is time, therefore, to build intellectual
capacity recognising what we say and write may be dif-
ferent from whom we are in material terms. Two sides
of history, not a solitary dimension need to shape future
narratives of this formative epoch.
Klavs Randsborg would have found Brexit puzzling,
but he could see in reviews of his perspicuous work on
the Vikings those late 20th-century inheritors of the West
Saxon court speaking through the prism of Victorian im-
perialism (and austerity) that stubbornly sought to deny
England’s essential relationship with Europe. As Klavs
profoundly believed, we have a debt not only to our com-
munities but also to our histories to use archaeology to
understand diversity and adaption, as well as the forma-
tion of complex strategies and cultural evolution.
161
Klavs Randsborg and the Ninth Century AD
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Author’s address:
Richard Hodges
The American University of Rome
Via Pietro Roselli 4
Rome, 00153 Italy
e-mail: R.hodges@aur.edu
Acta Archaeologica
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It has long been recognized that the landscape of Britain is one of the 'richest historical records we possess', but just how old is it? The Fields of Britannia is the first book to explore how far the countryside of Roman Britain has survived in use through to the present day, shaping the character of our modern countryside. Commencing with a discussion of the differing views of what happened to the landscape at the end of Roman Britain, the volume then brings together the results from hundreds of archaeological excavations and palaeoenvironmental investigations in order to map patterns of land-use across Roman and early medieval Britain. In compiling such extensive data, the volume is able to reconstruct regional variations in Romano-British and early medieval land-use using pollen, animal bones, and charred cereal grains to demonstrate that agricultural regimes varied considerably and were heavily influenced by underlying geology. We are shown that, in the fifth and sixth centuries, there was a shift away from intensive farming but very few areas of the landscape were abandoned completely. What is revealed is a surprising degree of continuity: the Roman Empire may have collapsed, but British farmers carried on regardless, and the result is that now, across large parts of Britain, many of these Roman field systems are still in use.
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This section presents the third volume of Max Weber's fundamental work Economy and Society which has been translated into Russian for the first time. The third volume includes two works devoted to the sociology of law. The first, 'The Economy and Laws', discusses differences between sociological and juridical approaches to studies of social processes. It describes peculiarities of normative power arenas (orders) at different levels and demonstrates how they influence the economy. The second, 'Economy and Law' ('Sociology of Law'), reviews the evolution of law orders (primarily, the three "greatest systems of law" including Roman Law, Anglo-American Law, and European Continental Law) in the context of changes in the organization of economy and structures of dominancy. Law is considered an influential factor of the rationalization of social life which in turn is affected by a rationalized economy and social management. The Journal of Economic Sociology here publishes an excerpt from the chapter 'Law, Convention and Custom' in this third volume, which shows the role of the habitual in the formation of law; explains the importance of intuition and empathy for the emergence of new orders; and discusses the changeable borders between law, convention and custom. The translation is edited by Leonid Ionin and the chapter is published with the permission of HSE Publishing House. © 2018 National Research University Higher School of Economics. All rights reserved.