âThe relationship between the living and dead members of their clan has long been seen as an essential one in early medieval society. The dead constituted an age class that continued to have a role and to exercise rights in society. Archaeologists have suggested that the rich grave goods in burials of the ate fifth and sixth centuries were evidence of this importance in Reihengräberzivilization, in which ancestors played the role of intermediaries between the clans and tribes (Stämme) and the gods. Kurt BĂśhner and others have thus suggested that Christianity, which greatly lessens the role of the dead, must have had a fundamental impact on the place of the dead in in Merovingian society: âThe profound change that Christianity brought with it is shown most clearly with relationships with the dead. Although these were once ancestors of many clans and tribes in which they lived on and enjoyed divine or quasi-divine veneration, they now entered the eternality of Christ.â As evidence of this essential transformation in relationship between the living and their ancestors, BĂśhner cites the famous passage from the Vita S. Vulframni in which the Frisian duke Radbod, about to be baptized, asked Wulfram, the bishop of Sens, whether there were many Frisian kings and princes in heaven or in hell. Wulfram answered that, since these praedecessores had not been baptized, they were surely in hell. Hearing this pronouncement, the duke determined not to be baptized, saying that he could not do without the company of his predecessors. This text, whose importance for historical ethnography Herwig Wolfram has emphasized, seems however to contradict other archaeological evidence which, as we shall see, places in doubt BĂśhnerâs interpretation both of the process of Christianization and of the account in the Vita Vulframni.
Radbod died in 719 and, it can be assumed, joined his damned ancestors. Around the same time or shortly before in the Rhineland near Alzey, Frankish nobles were founding a funerary chapel that served to preserve the memory of their pagan ancestors and, in a functional sense, to Christianize them retroactively. The church in question was Flonheim, and the careful archaeological study of the site by Hermann Ament suggests that the theological response to Radbodâs question presents only part of the eighth century reality.
On December 29, 1876, the parish of Flonheim was destroyed by fire. During reconstruction between 1883 and 1885 it was discovered that the church stood on the foundations of a much older building, within which were found ten Frankish burials. The oldest portion of the church was a tower, the upper part of which was Gothic; the lower, Romanesque of ca. 1100. The foundations of the Romanesque portions of the tower, a crypt, were older still; and directly under this oldest portion of the old church, was a particularly rich Frankish burial. Amentâs examination of grave goods and his reexamination of the nineteenth-century report of the excavations demonstrated that the graves were part of a larger row cemetery, traces of which had been found in the 1950s elsewhere in the village. Moreover, the ten graves appear to be those members of a wealthy clan. That in the Merovingian period a family would erect a mortuary chapel in which to bury its members would hardly be remarkable; examples are common, particularly even earlier ones in the more Romanized areas of Europe. What is remarkable, however, is that Amentâs dating of the burials, particularly of grave 5, the one directly under the tower, is so early that the burials must predate the erection of the church (first mentioned in 764/767) and, in the case of grave 5, the conversion of Clovis. Ament compares this grave -in its depth (greater than the others at Flonheim), in its furnishings, and in its relation to other graves- to grave 319 at Lavoye. The rich furnishings of grave 5 include a famous golden-handled sword and other weapons and ornaments which both in their forms and variety argue for a date conclusively for a date contemporary with the tomb of Childeric (481). Ament sees grave 5 as a founderâs burial, like that at Lavoye. Around it, in the sixth and early seventh centuries, other clan members were buried. When the chapel was built, the importance of this founderâs burial was still recalled, and its builders included the other clan graves within the confines of its walls. The erection of a chapel over the graves of a clan and the particular position given to the clearly pre-Christian burial both strongly suggest that the continuity between pre-Christian and Christian members was not broken by baptism. In fact, on a physical, structural level, the founder was given a burial infra ecclesia after the fact, thus including him in the new Christianized clan tradition. Ament has compared the situation at Flonheim to those at Arlon, Speiz-Eingien, Morken, and Beckum and suggests that these other Merovingian churches containing Frankish burials may well be similar to Flonheim; for the chapels also appear to postdate the earliest burials.
The American archaeologist Bailey Young has compared these apparently ex post facto Christianizations to observations of Detler Ellmers on Swedish cemeteries and suggests that the practice of assimilating pre-Christian ancestors into the Christian cult of the dead may be detected there as well. In Sweden, with the coming of Christianity, churches were generally built near the preexisting sepulchers of prominent families, and the last furnished burials are therefore older than the actual cemeteries. Elsewhere, pagan remains were moved into Christian burial places. The most famous Christian reburial in the North is that of the Dane Harold Bluetoothâs pagan parents Gorm and Thyre at Jelling. Harold first buried his parents in a wooden chamber covered by a large mound surrounded by standing stones in an outline of a ship, giving them a traditional pagan burial. After his conversion around 960, he had his parentsâ remains removed to a church. Excavations of the present stone church (ca. 1100) indicate three previous wooden churches and a large, centrally placed grave containing the disjointed remains of a man and a woman obviously reburied there after the disarticulation of the skeletons. Haroldâs runestone explicitly announces that the monuments he created were dedicated âto his father Gorm and his mother Thyre,â although it goes on to say that Harold âmade the Danes Christian.â
In both Frankish and Scandinavian situations, the archaeological evidence seems to contradict the explicit statement of Wulfram. How is the historian to resolve this contradiction? I would suggest that it arises from two sources. The first is the difference noted above between the intellectualized articulation of belief by clerical elite and the actual societal practice, lay and clerical. The second is the way the specific circumstances of Radbodâs aborted conversion color both the question and the response, making them part of a discussion of salvation in modern Christian terms, when the real issue is ethnicity and hegemony in eighth century Frankish terms.
In the case of Flonheim and similar burials, the meaning of the construction of a Christian church over a pagan tomb is implicit: the ancestors have been conjoined in the new cult as they were in the old. Conversion is not an individual, but a collective, act that involves the entire clan and people, a fact long recognized about two groups of Franks - those of Clovisâs generation and their descendants. The collective nature of conversion implicitly applies to a third group of Franks as well, their ancestors. Although Gallo-Roman authors like Gregory of Tours have emphasized Clovisâs conversion, that does not mean the Franks had lost respect for or interest in their pre-Christian ancestry. Witness the literature of Merovingian Frankish genealogy, the Liber historiae Francorum, among others. Retroactive conversion is not articulated; indeed, it would be difficult to reconcile that orthodox Christianity. But in the symbolic and ritual structure that solidified and expressed the values of Frankish-Christian civilization, a place was found for their ancestors. Here, as in the example of the ritual humiliation of the saints I mentioned earlier, the physical juxtaposition presents a meaning in a Wittgensteinian sense which was apparently accepted by the lay founders of the church at Flonheim as well as by its clerics. Perhaps, although we cannot be sure of how much they knew of its origins, even the monks at Lorsch, to whom the church was given in the 760s, perceived this meaning.
Thus the Franks of Flonheim, pagan and Christian, could keep each other company in the next life but not, apparently, Radbod and his pagan ancestors. It is tempting to cast this distinction in terms of the supposed two stages of conversion, the first represented by a maximum accommodation to pagan tradition; the second (and this being the case with Radbod), an insistence on an inner meaning of Christianity. In fact, this approach will hardly suffice. Frisia was, in the early eighth century, hardly into a second phase of conversion; it was at the first stage of a process that would take generations. Rather, we should consider the specific context of the efforts to convert Radbod and his Frisians. Wulframâs contact with the duke was part of the Frankish effort to subjugate the Frisians, an effort in which conversion was specifically conversion to Frankish Christianity. After Pepin II defeated Radbod in 694, he sent Wilibrord to convert Radbod and his people. Wulframâs efforts were part of this mission. Pepinâs intention was specifically to establish a Frankish political and cultural basis in order to pacify the region. Conversion and baptism at the hand of a Frankish bishop would have meant, then, the acceptance of a specifically Frankish ethnic identity and the rejection of Frisian autonomous traditions, political and cultural. Radbod would really have cut himself off from his ancestors, but not merely by being assured of heaven while they languished in hell; for he would have become, in a real sense, a Frank. A similar break with their ancestors was demanded of the Saxons during the eighth century. It is hardly happenstance that the earliest condemnations of traditional Germanic burial sites in favor of church cemeteries was specifically directed at Saxon Christians: âWe order that the bodies of Christian Saxons be taken to the church cemeteries and not to the burial mounds of the pagans.â Likewise, the famous Indiculus superstitionum was directed specifically at those âsacrileges at the tombs of the deadâ performed by the Saxons. In the case of both the Frisians and of the Saxons, the bonds uniting the conquered people to their independent ancestry had to be broken because they were a source of anti-Frankish ethnic and political identity, not simply because they were pagan in a narrow religious sense. In the entirely Frankish contexts of Flonheim, Arlon, Spiez-Einigen, and Morken, though, conversion did not mean the rejection of a cultural and political tradition. It meant instead the confirmation of tradition through the acceptance of a new and more powerful victory-giver, Christ. The benefits of such a conversion could be shared with the past as well as with the future.
- Patrick J. Geary (Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, pages 35-41)
