[Draft plan]

1. Caesar and Tacitus.

2. The district and army structure.

3. The first battles against Rome.

4. Progress until the migration period.

Notes

1. in the text

2. the German peoples

3. the Franconian dialect

[ON THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE GERMANS]

CAESAR AND TACITUS

The Germans are by no means the first inhabitants of the country they now occupy.* At least three races preceded them.

The oldest traces of man in Europe are found in certain strata of southern England, which it has not yet been possible to date with accuracy, but which probably fall between the two glacial periods of the so-called Ice Age.

After the second glacial period, as the climate gradually grew warmer, man appears all over Europe, North Africa and Anterior Asia up to India, together with the extinct great pachyderms (mammoth, straight-tusked elephant, woolly rhinoceros) and carnivores (cave lion, cave bear), and with still surviving animals (reindeer, horse, hyena, lion, bison, aurochs). The tools belonging to this period indicate a very primitive level of culture—crude stone knives, lozenge-shaped stone hatchets or axes, used without handles, scrapers for the preparation of animal skins, and borers, all made of flint—approximately corresponding to the stage of development of the present aborigines of Australia. The skeletal remains found so far do not enable us to form an idea of the physique of these men, from whose wide distribution and overall uniform culture it may be inferred that this period was of very long duration.

We do not know what became of these early palaeolithic people. In none of the countries where they appeared, including India, have races survived that could be considered their representatives in present-day mankind.

* | here follow in the main Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, London, 1880.

In the caves of England, France, Switzerland, Belgium and Southern Germany the tools of these extinct people are found for the most part in the lowest layers of stratified deposits. Above this lowest cultural stratum, and frequently separated from it by a more or less substantial layer of stalagmite, a second tool-bearing layer is found. These tools belong to a later period and are already much more skilfully made, and also of more varied material. Although the stone implements are not yet polished, they are designed and fashioned in a manner more suited to their purpose; with them are found arrow- and spear-points of stone, reindeer antler and bone; daggers and sewing needles of bone or antler, necklaces of pierced animal teeth, etc. Individual pieces are in part ornamented with very vivid drawings of animals, reindeer, mammoth, aurochs, seal, whale, and also hunting scenes with naked people; we find even beginnings of sculpture in horn.

If early palaeolithic people appeared in the company of animals of predominantly southern origin, animals of northern origin appear with the later palaeolithic people: two still surviving kinds of northern bear, the polar fox, the wolverine, the snowy owl. These people probably came in with these animals from the north-east, and the Eskimos would appear to be their last remaining descendants in the modern world. The tools of both correspond completely, not only in detail but in the ensemble. So do the drawings; the food of both is supplied by almost exactly the same animals. Their way of life, as far as we can reconstruct it for the extinct race, corresponds exactly.

These Eskimos, who so far have only been traced north of the Pyrenees and the Alps, have also disappeared from European soil. As the American Redskins even in the last century, by an inexorable war of extermination, pressed the Eskimos back to the extreme north, so in Europe the now appearing new race seems gradually to have driven them back and eventually exterminated them without mixing with them.

This new race came from the south, at least in Western Europe; it probably penetrated from Africa into Europe at a time when the two continents were still linked by land, both at Gibraltar and at Sicily. It stood on a considerably higher stage of culture than its predecessors. It knew agriculture; it had domestic animals (dogs, horses, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle). It knew hand pottery, spinning and weaving. Although its tools were still made of stone, they were already worked with great care and for the most part polished smooth (they are distinguished as neolithic from those of the earlier periods). The axes have handles and are thus for the

first time usable for felling trees; it thus became possible to hollow out tree trunks for boats in which one could cross over to the British Isles, now separated from the continent by the gradual sinking of the ground.

In contrast to their predecessors they buried their dead with care; we therefore have sufficient skeletons and skulls to judge of their physique. The long skulls, small stature (average for women 1.46 metres, for men 1.65 metres), the low forehead, the aquiline nose, strong brows and weak cheekbones and moderately developed jaw bones indicate a race whose last modern representatives would seem to be the Basques. The neolithic inhabitants not only of Spain but of France, Britain and the whole region at least as far as the Rhine were in all probability of Iberian race. Before the arrival of the Aryans Italy also was inhabited by a similar small, dark-haired race, the closeness of whose relationship to the Basques is today difficult to judge.

Virchow traces these long Basque skulls deep into northern Germany and Denmark,’ and the oldest neolithic pile dwellings of the northern slopes of the Alps also belong to them. Schaaffhausen, on the other hand, declares a series of skulls found near the Rhine to be decidedly Finnish, in particular Lappish,° and the oldest history knows only Finns as the northern neighbours of the Germans in Scandinavia, of the Lithuanians and Slavs in Russia. These two small, dark-haired races, one from beyond the Mediterranean, the other directly from Asia north of the Caspian Sea, appear to have run into one another in Germany. It remains totally obscure in what circumstances this took place.

These various immigrations were eventually followed, also still in prehistoric times, by that of the last great stock, the Aryans, the peoples whose languages are grouped around the most ancient of them, Sanscrit. The earliest immigrants were the Greeks and Latins, who took possession of the two south-eastern peninsulas of Europe; in addition probably also the now lost Scythians, inhabitants of the steppes north of the Black Sea, very likely most closely related to the tribes of the Medes and Persians. Then the Celts followed. We know of their migrations only that they took

place north of the Black Sea and by way of Germany. Their vanguard pressed through to France, conquered the country to the Garonne and subjugated even a part of western and central Spain. They were brought to a halt, here by the sea, there by the resistance of the Iberians, while behind them other Celtic tribes from both sides of the Danube pressed after them. They are known to Herodotus here at the ocean coast and at the sources of the Danube.* But they must have arrived much earlier. The graves and other finds from France and Belgium prove that the Celts did not know any metal tools when they took possession of the country; in Britain, however, they appear from the beginning with bronze tools. Between the conquest of Gaul and the move to Britain a certain time must have gone by, during which the Celts acquired the knowledge of bronze, through their trading connections with Italy and Marseilles, and introduced it at home.

In the meantime the Celtic peoples behind them, themselves pressed by the Germans, were pressing more and more strongly; before them the ways were barred, and thus a move in a south-easterly direction took place, as we find later also with the Germanic and Slav migrations. Celtic tribes crossed the Alps, moved through Italy, the Thracian Peninsula and Greece, and either met with destruction or found permanent settlement in the Po plain and in Asia Minor. The mass of the tribe is found about that time (—400 to —300*) in Gaul, as far as the Garonne, in Britain and Ireland, and north of the Alps on both sides of the Danube, as far as the Main and the Riesengebirge, if not beyond. For, even if Celtic mountain and river names are less frequent and more disputed in North Germany than in the south, it is not to be assumed that the Celts only chose the more difficult way through . mountainous South Germany without at the same time using the more convenient way through the open North German plain.

The Celtic immigration only partially displaced the existing inhabitants; especially in the south and west of Gaul these still formed the majority of the population, even if as an oppressed race, and the present population has inherited their physique. It is clear from the custom of bleaching the hair with soap existing among both Celts and Germans in their new places of settlement -that both dominated over a pre-existing dark-haired population. Fair hair was a feature of the ruling race, and where this was lost through mixing of the races, soap had to’ come to the aid.

* I distinguish the years before our era mathematically, by a minus sign (—), for

brevity’s sake.

The Celts were followed by the Germans, and here we can determine the time of their immigration with some probability, at least approximately. It will hardly have begun long before —400 and was not yet quite completed in Caesar’s time.

About the year —325 Pytheas’ account of his voyage gives us the first authentic information on the Germans.* He went from Marseilles to the Amber coast and there mentions Guttons and Teutons, without doubt German peoples. But where was the Amber coast? It is true that we usually think only of the East Prussian one, and when Guttons are named as neighbours of that coast that certainly fits. However, the distances given by Pytheas do not fit this region but fit rather well the great bay of the North Sea between the North German coast and the Cimbric Peninsula.’ The Teutons, also named as neighbours, fit in there, too. There—on the western side of Schleswig and Jutland—is another Amber coast; Ringkjobing to this day has a considerable trade in the amber found there. It also seems most improbable that Pytheas should so early have already penetrated so far into quite unknown waters, and still more so that the complicated voyage from the Kattegat to East Prussia should not only remain entirely without mention in his very careful statements, but not fit into them at all. One should therefore decidedly declare for the view, first pronounced by Lelewel, that Pytheas’ Amber coast must be sought on the North Sea,° were it not for the name of Guttons, who can only belong to the Baltic. A step towards removing this last obstacle has been taken by Miillenhoff, who reads Guttons as a distortion of Teutons.‘

About 180 before our era the Bastarnae, undoubtedly Germans, appear on the lower Danube and a few years later are noted as soldiers in the army of the Macedonian King Perseus against the Romans—the first mercenaries. They are savage warriors:

“Men who do not know how to plough or sail the seas, who did not follow the life of herdsmen, but who were ever practising one business and one art, that of fighting and conquering their antagonists.”

It is Plutarch who gives us this first information of the way of life of a German people.‘ Centuries later we find these same Bastarnae north of the Danube, although in a more westerly

On the Early History of the Germans 1]

region. Fifty years later Cimbri and Teutons broke into the Celtic ~ Danube region, were repelled by the Celtic Boii, living in Bohemia, moved in several bands to Gaul and into Spain, and defeated one Roman army after another until at last Marius put an end to their almost twenty years of migration by destroying their no doubt already greatly weakened troops, the Teutons at Aix-en-Provence (—102) and the Cimbri at Vercelli in Northern Italy (—101).

Half a century later Caesar met two new German armies in Gaul: first, on the Upper Rhine, that of Ariovistus in which seven different peoples were represented, including the Marcomanni and Suebi; soon afterwards, on the lower Rhine, that of the Usipetes and Tencteri, who, pressed by the Suebi, had left their former seats and reached the Rhine after wandering for three years. Both armies succumbed to orderly Roman warfare, the Usipetes and the Tencteri also to Roman breach of treaty. In the first years of Augustus, Dio Cassius reports an invasion of Thrace by the Bastarnae; Marcus Crassus defeated them on the Hebrus (the present-day Maritza). The same historian also mentions a move of the Hermunduri, who at the beginning of our era left their homeland for unknown reasons and were settled by the Roman general Domitius Ahenobarbus “in a part of the country of the Marcomanni’.* These are the last migrations of that epoch. The consolidation of Roman rule on the Rhine and the Danube put a stop to them for quite a long time; but there are many signs which indicate that the peoples of the north-east, beyond the Elbe and the Riesengebirge, did not achieve permanent settlement for a long time.

These expeditions of Germans formed the first act of that migration of peoples which, halted for three centuries by Roman resistance, towards the end of the third century swept irresistibly across the two border rivers, flooded Southern Europe and Northern Africa and only came to an end with the conquest of Italy by the Langobardi in 568—an end in so far as the Germans took part in them, but not for the Slavs, who long remained in movement in their rear. These were literally migrations of peoples. Entire peoples, or at least large parts of them, went on the move with wife and child, with goods and chattels. Wagons covered in skins served as dwellings and for the transport of women and children as well as of the paltry household effects; the

cattle were driven along with them. The men were armed and ready to overcome any resistance, to repel any attack; a military host by day, a military camp fortified by the wagons at night. The human losses during these moves, through constant fighting, through misery, hunger and sickness, must have been colossal. It was a life-and-death adventure. If the move succeeded, the survivors settled on foreign soil; if it failed, the migrating tribe disappeared from the earth. Those who were not killed in the slaughter of battle perished in slavery. The Helvetii and their allies, whose migration was halted by Caesar, started out with 368,000 head, including 92,000 fit to bear arms. After their defeat by the Romans only 110,000 were left, whom Caesar, exceptionally, sent back home, for political reasons. The Usipetes and Tencteri crossed the Rhine with 180,000 head; almost all of them perished in battle or fleeing rom pursuit. No wonder that during this long period of migration entire tribes often meappcared without trace.

This migratory way of life of the Germans is fully matched by the conditions Caesar found on the Rhine. The Rhine was by no means a sharply defined border between Gauls and Germans. Belgic-Gallic- Menapii had villages and fields on the right bank of the Rhine in the area of Wesel; on the other hand, the part of the Maas delta, on the left bank of the Rhine, was occupied by the German Batavi, and round Worms as far as Strassburg there lived German Vangiones, Tribocci and Nemetes, whether since Ariovistus or even earlier is uncertain. The Belgae made constant wars upon the Germans, everywhere territory was still disputed. As yet no Germans were living south of the Main and the Erzgebirge; only shortly before, the Helvetii had been driven by the Suebi from the region between Main, Rhine, Danube and the Bohemian Forest, as had the Boii from Bohemia (Boihemum), which bears their name to this day. The Suebi did not occupy the land, however; they transformed it into that wooded wilderness, 600 Roman * (150 German) miles long, which was to protect them from the south. Further east Caesar indicated more Celts (Volcae Tectosages) north of the Danube, where Tacitus later places the German Quadi.” Not until Augustus’ time did Maroboduus lead his Suebian Marcomanni to Bohemia, while the Romans cut off the angle between Rhine and Danube with entrenchments and

peopled it with Gauls. The area beyond this fortified frontier seems to have been settled by Hermunduri. This shows conclusively that the Germans moved to Germany via the plains north of the Carpathians and the Bohemian border mountains; only after they had occupied the northern plains did they drive the Celts, who lived in the mountains more to the south, across the Danube. The way of life of the Germans as described by Caesar also proves that they were by no means yet settled in their country. They lived in the main by raising cattle, on cheese, milk and meat, less on corn; the chief occupation of the men was hunting and - military training. They tilled the soil a little, but only as a sideline and in the most primitive forest fashion. Caesar reports that they worked the fields for just one year, the next year always taking new land under the plough.’* It seems to have been slash-and-burn cultivation, as is still practised today in northern Scandinavia and Finland; the forest—and outside the forest there were only swamps and peet-bogs, in those days useless for agriculture— was burnt down, the roots superficially removed and also burnt, together with the turf; the corn was sown into the soil fertilised by the ash. But even in that case Caesar’s statement on the annual renewal of arable land is not to be taken literally and as a rule is to be understood as applying to a habitual passing on to new land after at least two or three harvests. The entire passage, the un-German distribution of land by princes and officials, and particularly the motivation attributed to the Germans for this rapid change, smacks of Roman concepts. This change of land was inexplicable to the Romans. To the Rhenish Germans, already in the process of transition to permanent settlement, it may already have appeared as an inherited custom, more and more losing purpose and meaning. To the Germans of the interior, the Suebi who were just arriving on the Rhine, and for whom it was mainly valid, it was still, however, an essential condition of a way of life by which the whole people moved slowly forward in whatever direction and at whatever pace the resistance they met permitted. Their constitution, too, was tailored to this way of life: the Suebi were divided into a hundred districts, every one of which supplied a thousand men annually to the army, while the rest of the men stayed at home, looking after cattle and fields and taking their turn in the army the second year. The mass of the people, with the women and children, only followed the army when it had

conquered new territory. This is already an advance towards settlement compared with the migrating hosts of the time of the Cimbri.

Caesar speaks repeatedly of the custom of the Germans to make themselves secure on the side facing an enemy, that is any alien people, by deep forest wildernesses.* This is the same custom which lasted into the late Middle Ages. The Saxons north of the Elbe were protected by the border forest between Eider and Schlei (Old Danish Jarnwidhr) against the Danes, by the Saxon forest between the Bay of Kiel and the Elbe against the Slavs, and the Slav name of Brandenburg, Branibor, is again only a designation of such a protective forest (Czech braniti—to defend, bor—pine and pinewood).

After all that there can be no doubt about the stage of civilisation of the Germans encountered by Caesar. They were far from being nomads in the sense of the contemporary Asiatic horse-riding peoples. Nomads need the steppe, and the Germans were living in the virgin forest. But they were equally far removed from the stage of settled peasant peoples. Strabo, sixty years later, still says of them:

“It is a common characteristic of all these” (Germanic) “peoples that they migrate with ease, because of their simple way of life, for they do not till the soil or accumulate wealth; they live in huts which they can build in one day; and they live for the most part off their livestock, as the nomads do, and like the nomads they load their belongings on their wagons and with their herds move whithersoever they think best.” >

Comparative language studies prove that they had already brought with them from Asia a knowledge of agriculture; Caesar shows that they had not forgotten it. But it was the kind of agriculture that serves semi-nomadic warrior tribes, slowly proceeding through the wooded plains of central Europe, as a makeshift and subordinate source of livelihood.

It follows from the above that in Caesar’s time the immigration of the Germans into their new homeland between Danube, Rhine and North Sea was not yet completed or was at most in process of completion. That is by no means to say that at the time of Pytheas, Teutons, and perhaps also Cimbri, could not have reached the Jutland Peninsula, or the furthest advanced Germans the Rhine, as may be concluded from the absence of any signs of their arrival. A way of life compatible only with constant movement,

repeated moves to the west and south and lastly the fact that Caesar encountered the largest mass known to him, the Suebi, still in full movement, admit only one conclusion: obviously, we have here glimpses of the last moments of the great Germanic immigration into their main European settlement area. It was the Roman resistance on the Rhine and later on the Danube which put an end to this movement, confined the Germans to the region they were then occupying, and thus forced them to adopt permanent habitation.

For the rest, our ancestors, as Caesar saw them, were proper barbarians. They only allowed merchants into the country to secure purchasers for their booty rather than to buy anything from them; for what need had they for foreign things, anyway? They even preferred their ill-favoured ponies to the fine, strong horses of the Gauls. The Suebi suffered no importation of wine whatever, believing the men were thereby rendered effeminate.* In this respect their Bastarnae cousins were more civilised; on the occasion of their invasion of Thrace” they sent envoys to Crassus, who made them drunk and elicited from them all he needed to know concerning the positions and intentions of the Bastarnae, whom he then lured into an ambush and destroyed. Even before the battle on the Idistavisus (16 of our era) Germanicus described the Germans to his soldiers as without armour or helmets, protected only by shields made of wicker or light boards, only the first rank having real lances, posterior ranks nothing but sharpened poles hardened by fire.“ Metal working was then therefore still scarcely known to the inhabitants of the Weser region, and the Romans will have taken good care not to let merchants carry arms into Germany.

Fully a century and a half after Caesar, Tacitus gives us his famous description of the Germans. Here much already looks quite different. As far as the Elbe and beyond, the migrating tribes had come to a halt and settled down permanently. To be sure, for a long time there was still no question of towns; settlement was made in villages consisting of individual farmsteads, either widely spaced or close together, but even in the latter case every house was free standing in its own space. Houses were built without quarry-stones or roof-tiles, roughly put together of

untrimmed timber (materia informi must here mean this in contrast to caementa and tegulae); blockhouses, as still in northern Scandinavia, but no longer huts which can be built in one day, as with Strabo.* We shall deal later with the agrarian constitution. The Germans also already had subterranean storage chambers, a kind of cellar where they dwelt in the winter for warmth and where the women practised weaving, according to Pliny.” Agriculture is therefore already more important, but cattle is still the chief wealth; it is numerous, but of poor breed, the horses ugly and no runners, sheep and cattle small, the latter without horns. Under “nourishment” meat, milk and crab apples are listed, but no bread. Hunting was no longer much practised, hence the stock of game was already much reduced since Caesar. Clothing was also still very primitive, a rough blanket for the mass, otherwise naked (almost as among the Zulu Kaffirs), but the wealthiest already had closely fitting clothes; animal skins were also used; the women dressed much like the men, but already more often wore linen garments without sleeves. The children all ran about naked. Reading and writing were unknown, but one passage indicates that priests were already using runes, characters derived from the Latin, which they cut into wooden staves. Gold and silver were not treasured by the Germans of the interior, silver vessels presented by Romans to princes and envoys served the same common uses as earthenware. The insignificant trade was by simple barter.

The men still had the custom common to all primitive peoples of leaving the work in the home and field to the women, old people and children, as something unmanly. They had, however, adopted two civilised customs: drinking and gambling, and they practised both with all the abandon of untouched barbarians, gambling to the extreme of throwing dice for their own persons. In the interior their drink was barley or wheat beer; if schnapps had already been invented, world history might well have taken a different course.

At the borders of Roman territory further progress had been made: imported wine was drunk; to some extent people had become used to money, preference naturally being given to silver, as more handy for limited exchange, and, according to barbarian

custom, to coin with a stamp well-known of old. We shall see that they had good cause for such precaution. Trade with the Germans was only conducted on the banks of the Rhine itself; only the Hermunduri, straddling the Limes Germanicus, went at this time in and out of Gaul and Rhaetia for trading purposes.

Hence the first great phase of German history, the final transition from a migratory life to permanent habitations, occurred in the period between Caesar and Tacitus, at least for the greater part of the people, from the Rhine to far beyond the Elbe. The names of the individual tribes begin more or less to coalesce with certain tracts of land. Information from ancient writers being contradictory, and names fluctuating and changing, it is, however, often impossible to assign a definite settlement area to every tribe. It would also lead us too far from our subject. A general statement found in Pliny must suffice here:

“There are five principal Germanic stocks: the Vindili, who include the Burgundiones, Varini, Carini and Guttons; the second stock consists of the Ingaevones, including the Cimbri, Teutons and the tribes of the Chauci. The Iscaevones, including the Sugambri, live close to the Rhine. The Hermiones, comprising the Suebi, Hermunduri, Chatti and, Cherusci, occupy the middle of the country. The fifth stock comprises the Peucini, and the Bastarnae, whose neighbours are the Dacians.” 4

A sixth branch may be added to these: the Hilleviones, living in Scandinavia.”

Of all the information we gather from the ancient writers this fits best with the later facts and with the preserved linguistic remains.

The Vindili comprise peoples of the Gothic tongue who occupied the Baltic coast between Elbe and Vistula and deep inland; the Guttons (Goths) were settled beyond the Vistula around the Frische Haff. The scarce linguistic remains which have been preserved leave not the slightest doubt that the Vandals (who must have formed part of Pliny’s Vindili, since he transfers their name to the whole main stock) and the Burgundians spoke Gothic dialects. Only the Warni (or Varini), who are usually, on the basis of information from the 5 and 6 centuries, reckoned among the Thuringians, can cause doubts; we know nothing of their language.

”

to “Scandinavia” with a vertical

The second stock, the Ingaevones, first of all includes peoples speaking the Frisian tongues, inhabitants of the North Sea coast and the Cimbric Peninsula, and most probably also speakers of the Saxon tongue between Elbe and Weser, in which case the Cherusci must also be reckoned among them.

The Iscaevones are at once singled out by the Sugambri, who joined them, as the later Franks, the inhabitants of the right bank of the Rhine from the Taunus down to the sources of the Lahn, Sieg, Ruhr, Lippe and Ems, bordered on the north by Frisians and Chauci.

The Hermiones, or Herminones, as Tacitus calls them more correctly,’ are the later High Germans: the Hermunduri (Thuringians), Suebi (Swabians and Marcomanni-Bavarians), Chatti (Hessians), etc. The Cherusci are without doubt placed here in error. It is the only indubitable error in the whole of Pliny’s list.

The fifth stock, Peucini and Bastarnae, is lost. No doubt Jacob Grimm is right in reckoning it to the Gothic.?

Finally, the sixth stock, the Hilleviones, comprises the inhabitants of the Danish islands and the great Scandinavian peninsula.

Hence the division of Pliny corresponds with surprising accuracy to the grouping of the German dialects which later actually appear. We know no dialects which do not belong to either Gothic, Frisian-Low Saxon, Franconian, High German or Scandinavian, and even today we can still acknowledge Pliny’s division as exemplary. I shall examine anything that might possibly be said against it in my note on the German peoples.‘

We must therefore conceive of the original immigration of the Germans into their new homeland approximately as follows: In the first instance the Iscaevones advanced into the middle of the North German plain, between the southern mountains and the Baltic and North seas; close after them, but nearer to the coast, the Ingaevones. These appear to have been followed by the Hilleviones, who turned off to the islands, however. They are followed by the Goths (Pliny’s Vindili), who left the Peucini and Bastarnae behind in the south-east; the Gothic name in Sweden testifies that individual sections joined the migrating Hilleviones. Finally, south of the Goths, the Herminones, who, at least for the greater part, moved only in Caesar’s and even Augustus’ time

into their settlements, which they retained until the migration of peoples.*

THE FIRST BATTLES AGAINST ROME

Since Caesar, Romans and Germans faced each other across the Rhine, and since the subjection of Rhaetia, Noricum and Pannonia by Augustus across the Danube. In the meantime Roman rule had been consolidated in Gaul; Agrippa had covered the whole country with a network of military roads, fortresses had been built, a new generation, born under the Roman yoke, had grown up. Brought into the most direct communication with Italy by the Alpine roads over the Little and Great St. Bernard, built by Augustus, Gaul could serve as the base for the conquest of Germania from the Rhine. Augustus entrusted his stepson (or real son?) Drusus with the accomplishment of this conquest with the eight legions stationed on the Rhine.

Pretexts were provided by constant friction among the borderdwellers, by German intrusions into Gaul and by an alleged or actual conspiracy of the disaffected Belgae with the Sugambri, according to which the latter were to cross the Rhine and effect a general rising. Drusus made sure of the Belgic leaders (— 12), crossed the river close by the island of Batavia above the Rhine delta, devastated the country of the Usipetes and partly that of the Sugambri, sailed down the Rhine, forced the Frisians to supply him with auxiliary foot soldiers and sailed with the fleet along the coast and into the mouth of the Ems to make war on the Chauci. But here his Roman seamen, unaccustomed to the tides, grounded the fleet during the ebb; he got it free only with the help of the allied Frisian troops, who were better acquainted with the matter, and returned home.

This first campaign was only an extensive reconnaissance. In the following year (—11) he began the actual conquest. He crossed the Rhine again below the mouth of the Lippe, subjugated the Usipetes living there, threw a bridge across the Lippe and invaded the country of the Sugambri, who had just taken the field against the Chatti because these did not want to join the alliance against the Romans under the leadership of the Sugambri. On the confluence of the Lippe and the Eliso he then made a fortified camp (Aliso) and retreated again across the Rhine when winter

4 -1243

approached. During this retreat he was ambushed in a narrow defile by the Germans, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that his army escaped annihilation. This year he also made another fortified camp “in the land of the Chatti, close to the Rhine”’.”

- This second campaign of Drusus already contains the complete plan of conquest as it was afterwards consistently followed. The region immediately to be conquered was fairly sharply delimited: the Iscaevonian interior to the border with the Cherusci and Chatti and the coastal strip belonging to it as far as the Ems, if possible to the Weser. The main job of subjecting the coastlands was allotted to the fleet. In the south, the base of operations was Mainz, founded by Agrippa and extended by Drusus, in the neighbourhood of which we must look for the fort built “in the land of the Chatti” (nowadays it is being sought in the Saalburg at Homburg). From here the course of the lower Main leads into the open country of the Wetterau and the upper Lahn, the occupation of which would separate Iscaevones and Chatti. In the centre of the front of attack the flat country through which the Lippe flows and particularly the broad ridge of hills between the Lippe and the Ruhr offered the most convenient line of operations to the main Roman force; by its occupation it could divide the region to be conquered into two approximately equal areas and at the same time separate the Bructeri from the Sugambri. From this position it could coordinate its action with the fleet, on the left; together with the column debouching from the Wetterau isolate the Iscaevonian slate mountains on the right, and in front keep the Cherusci in check. The fort of Aliso formed the most advanced stronghold of this line of operations; it was situated near the sources of the Lippe, either at Elsen near Paderborn at the confluence of the Alme and the Lippe, or at Lippstadt, where a big Roman fort has recently been discovered.”

In the following year (—10) the Chatti, realising the common danger, at last allied themselves to the Sugambri. But Drusus attacked and forced them into subjection, at least in part. This cannot have outlasted the winter, however, for in the next spring (-—9) he attacked once more, advanced as far as the Suebi (i.e., probably Thuringians, according to Florus and Orosius also

Marcomanni,’ who at that time still lived north of the Erzgebirge), then attacked the Cherusci, crossed the Weser and only turned back at the Elbe. He devastated the whole land he moved through, but met everywhere with heavy resistance. On the way back he died, thirty years old, even before he reached the Rhine.

To the above account, taken from Dio Cassius, we add from Suetonius that Drusus had the canal dug from the Rhine to the Ijssel by which he led his fleet to the North Sea through Frisia and the Flevo (Vliestrom—the present fairway between Vlieland and Terschelling, out of the Zuider Zee)”; from Florus, that he erected over 50 forts along the Rhine and a bridge at Bonn and also fortified the line of the Maas, thus securing the position of the Rhenish legions both against risings of the Gauls and against incursions of the Germans. Florus’ fables of forts and earthworks on the Weser and Elbe are empty boasting‘; he [Drusus] may have thrown up entrenchments there during his marches, but he was too good a general to leave even a single man as garrison there. But there is surely no doubt that he had the line of operations along the Lippe provided with fortified bases. He also fortified the passes over the Taunus.

Tiberius, Drusus’ successor on the Rhine, crossed the river in the following year (—8); the Germans, except the Sugambri, sent peace negotiators; Augustus, who was in Gaul, refused all negotiations as long as the Sugambri were not represented. When at last they also sent envoys, “numerous and respected men”, says Dio, Augustus had them taken prisoner and interned them in various towns in the interior of the empire; “distressed at this, they took their own lives”.‘ In the following year (—7), Tiberius went again with an army to Germania, where already nothing had any longer to be combated, except a few insignificant instances of unrest. Velleius says of this time:

“Tiberius so subdued the country (Germania) that it differed but little from a tributary province.”

This success will probably have to be attributed not only to Roman arms and to the much vaunted diplomatic “wisdom” of

4*

Tiberius, but in particular to the transplanting of Germans to the Roman bank of the Rhine. Already Agrippa had shifted the Ubii, who were always much attached to the Romans, to the left bank of the Rhine at Cologne, with their consent. Tiberius forced 40,000 Sugambri to go over and settle, and with that he broke this powerful people’s strength to resist for a considerable time.

Tiberius now retired for some time from all affairs of state and we learn nothing of what went on in Germany during several years. A fragment from Dio tells of a move of Domitius Ahenobarbus from the Danube to beyond the Elbe.* Soon after that, however, about the first year of our era, the Germans rose. According to Velleius’ statements, Marcus Vinicius, the Roman supreme commander, fought on the whole with success and in recognition received rewards.” Nevertheless, in the year 4, soon after his adoption by Augustus, Tiberius had to cross the Rhine once more to restore the shaken Roman power. He subjected first the Canninefates and Chattuari, living next to the river, then the Bructeri, and “won over” the Cherusci. Further details are not given by Velleius, who participated in this and the following campaigns. The mild winter allowed the legions to remain in movement until December; then they went into winter quarters in Germany itself, probably at the sources of the Lippe.

The campaign of the following year (5) was to complete the subjugation of western Germany. While Tiberius advanced from Aliso and defeated the Langobardi on the lower Elbe, the fleet sailed along the coast and “won over” the Chauci. On the lower Elbe the army met the fleet sailing up the river. With the success of this campaign the work of the Romans in the north appeared to be done, according to Velleius‘; in the following year Tiberius turned to the Danube, where the Marcomanni, who had recently moved to Bohemia under Maroboduus, were threatening the frontier. Educated in Rome and familiar with Roman tactics, Maroboduus had an army of 70,000 foot and 4,000 cavalry, organised on the Roman pattern. Tiberius attacked this army on the Danube in the front, while Sentius Saturninus was to lead the legions from the Rhine through the country of the Chatti into the rear and the flank of the enemy. Then the Pannonians rose in Tiberius’ own rear, and the army had to turn and reconquer its

base of operations. The fighting lasted three years; but the Pannonians had only just been defeated when in northern Germany things also took such a turn that there could no longer be any question of conquests in the land of the Marcomanni. Drusus’ plan of conquest had been fully retained; but to carry it out in security, campaigns by land and by sea had become necessary as far as the Elbe. In the plan of campaign against Maroboduus the idea transpired of shifting the border to the Little Carpathians, the Riesengebirge and the Elbe as far as its mouth; but for the time being that was still in the remote future and soon became quite impracticable. We do not know how far up the Wetterau Roman forts may have reached; to all appearances this line of operations was at the time neglected in favour of the more important line along the Lippe. There, however, the Romans appeared to have made themselves fairly well at home. The Rhine plain on the right bank from Bonn downwards belonged to them; the Westphalian lowland from the Ruhr northwards to beyond the Ems, to the borders of the Frisians and the Chauci, remained in military occupation. In the rear, Batavi and Frisians were at that time still reliable friends; further west the Chauci, Cherusci and Chatti could be held to be mastered sufficiently, after their repeated defeats and after the blow which had also struck the Langobardi. And in any case, in those three peoples a fairly powerful party existed at the time which saw salvation only in joining Rome. In the south, the power of the Sugambri was broken for the time being; part of their territory, between Lippe and Ruhr, and also in the Rhine plain, was occupied, the rest was surrounded on three sides by the Roman positions on the Rhine, the Ruhr and in the Wetterau, and certainly often enough traversed by Roman columns. In the direction of the Lippe sources, from Neuwied to the Sieg, from Deutz and Neuss to the Wupper, Roman roads leading over dominating mountain ridges have recently been traced at least as far as the border of Berg and Mark.’ Still further off the Hermunduri, in agreement with Domitius Ahenobarbus, occupied part of the area abandoned by the Marcomanni and were in peaceful intercourse with the Romans. And, finally, the wellknown disunity of the German peoples justified the expectation that the Romans would only have to conduct such minor wars as

they themselves must have thought desirable for the purpose of gradually transforming their allies into subjects.

The core of the Roman position was the country on both sides of the Lippe as far as the Osning. Here Roman rule and Roman customs were made acceptable by the constant presence of the legions in fortified camps and “virtually transformed” the barbarians, according to Dio.* Here, near the permanent army quarters, there arose those towns and markets of which the same historian writes and whose peaceful intercourse contributed most to the consolidation of the alien rule. Everything seemed to go splendidly. But it was to be otherwise.

Quintilius Varus was appointed supreme commander of the troops in Germany. A Roman of the beginning decline, phlegmatic and indolent, inclined to rest on the laurels of his predecessors, and still more to take advantage of these laurels for himself.

“That he was no despiser of money is demonstrated by his governorship of Syria: he entered the rich province a poor man, but left it a rich man and the province poor” (Velleius).>

Otherwise he was “a man of mild character’; but this mild character must have been greatly upset by the transfer to a country where extortion was made so difficult for him because there was almost nothing to extort. Varus nevertheless tried, and that by the method which had long become customary with Roman proconsuls and propraetors.’ First of all it was necessary as quickly as possible to arrange the occupied part of Germany on the footing of a Roman province, to replace the indigenous public authority, which had hitherto continued to function under the military rule, by Roman authority and thus to turn the country into a source of revenue—both for the fisc and for the proconsul. Varus accordingly tried to “transform” the Germans “more rapidly and effectively”. He “issued orders to them as if they were slaves and exacted money as he would from subject nations” (Dio).“ And the main instrument of subjugation and extortion he used there was the well-tried one of the power of supreme judge exercised by Roman provincial governors, which he here arrogated to himself and on the strength of which he sought to force Roman law on the Germans.

Unfortunately Varus and his civilising mission were nearly one and a half thousand years in advance of history; for that was

roughly how long it was before Germany was ready to “‘receive Roman law”. In fact, Roman law with its classical dissection of private property relations must have appeared as pure nonsense to the Germans, whose title to the little private property that had developed amongst them derived solely from their common property in land. Similarly the solemn forms and _ procedural challenges, the constant adjournments that are a feature of Roman legal proceedings, must have seemed to them, who were used to finding judgment and sentence themselves in open public court within a few hours according to inherited custom, as just so much denial of justice; just as the swarm of officials and legal sharks surrounding the proconsul must have seemed to them what they in fact were—nothing but cut-throats. And now the Germans were supposed to surrender their free Thing, where fellow tribesmen judged fellow tribesman, and submit to the peremptory sentence of a single man who conducted the proceedings in a foreign language, and who at best based himself on a law unknown and quite inapplicable to them—and who himself was an interested party. The free German, whom according to Tacitus only a priest could physically chastise in seldom cases,* who could forfeit life and limb only through treason against his people, but could otherwise atone for every offence, even murder, by a fine (wergeld), and who was moreover used to exercising blood revenge for himself and his relations on his own—this free German was now supposed to submit to the scourge and the axe of the Roman lictor.? And all for no other reason than to throw the doors wide open to the exchequer bleeding the land white through taxation, and to the extortion and corruption of the proconsul and his accomplices.

But Varus had miscalculated. The Germans were no Syrians. He impressed them with his enforced Roman civilisation only in one respect. He merely showed the neighbouring peoples pressed into alliance what an intolerable yoke awaited them also, and thus forced on them a unity which they had never before been able to achieve.

Varus stood in Germany with three legions, Asprenas with another two on Lower Rhine, only five or six marches from Aliso, the centre of the position. In the face of such a force only a long and carefully prepared, but then suddenly struck, decisive blow offered a prospect of success. Conspiracy was therefore imperative. Arminius undertook to organise it.

Arminius, of the Cheruscan nobility, son of Segimerus, who seems to have been a military leader of his people, had spent his early youth in Roman military service, mastered the Roman language and custom, and was a frequent and well received guest at the Roman headquarters, whose loyalty seemed beyond all doubt. Even on the eve of the surprise attack Varus relied on him as a rock. Velleius called him

“a young man of noble birth, brave in action and alert in mind, more so than barbarians usually are; a young man whose countenance and eyes shone with the fire of the mind. He had been our constant companion on previous campaigns,” (that is, against Germans) “and in addition to Roman citizenship, enjoyed the Roman dignity of equestrian rank”.4

But Arminius was more than all that, he was a great statesman and a considerable general. Once resolved to put an end to Roman rule on the right bank of the Rhine, he took the necessary steps without hesitation. The Cheruscan military nobility, already much dominated by Roman influence, had to be won over at least in great part, and the Chatti and Chauci, and even more so the Bructeri and Sugambri, who were directly under Roman yoke, had to be drawn into the conspiracy. All that took time, even though Varus’ extortions had prepared the ground; and during this time it was necessary to lull Varus into security. This was done by taking him in with his hobby of dispensing justice and making a complete fool of him with it. Velleius tells us that the Germans,

“who with their extreme savagery combine great cunning, to an extent scarcely credible to one who has had no experience with them, and are a race of born liars, by trumping up a series of fictitious lawsuits, now suing one another without cause, and now thanking him for settling their disputes with Roman justice, so that their own barbarous nature was being softened down by this new and hitherto unknown discipline and order, and that quarrels which had usually been settled by arms were now being settled by law—the Germans brought him to such a complete degree of negligence, that he came to look upon himself as a city praetor, administering justice in the forum, and not a general in command of an army in the heart of Germany” >

So passed the summer of the year 9. To make still more certain of success, Varus was induced to split up his troops by detaching them in various ways, which cannot have been difficult given the character of the man and the circumstances.

“Varus,” Dio says, “did not keep his troops properly together, as was necessary in a hostile country, but lent teams of soldiers to people who needed help and

asked for it, either to guard a fortified place, to catch robbers, or to escort grain transports.” *

In the meantime the chief conspirators, in particular Arminius and Segimerus, were constantly round him and frequently at his table. According to Dio, Varus was now already warned, but his confidence knew no bounds. At length, in the autumn, when all was ready for striking the blow, and Varus with the bulk of his troops had been lured deep into the land of the Cherusci, as far as the Weser, a feigned rising at some distance gave the signal. Even as Varus received the news and gave orders for departure, he was warned by another leader of the Cherusci, Segestes, who seems to have maintained a sort of clan feud with the family of Arminius. Varus would not believe him. Segestes thereupon proposed that he himself, Arminius and the other leaders of the Cherusci should be put in chains before Varus marched off; success would show who was right. But Varus’ confidence was unshakeable, even when on his departure the conspirators stayed behind, under the pretext that they were gathering allies to join him with them.

This happened, indeed, though not as Varus expected. The troops of the Cherusci were already assembled. The first thing they did was to massacre the Roman detachments stationed with them at their own earlier request, and then to attack Varus on the flank while he was on the march. The latter was moving along bad forest paths, for here, in the land of the Cherusci, there were not yet any paved Roman military roads. Taken by surprise, he at last realised his situation, braced himself and from now on showed that he was a Roman general—but too late. He let his troops close up, had his large train of women, children, waggons, pack animals, etc., lined up in order and protected as well as was possible considering the narrow paths and dense woods, and turned towards his base of operations—which we must take to have been Aliso. Pouring rain softened the ground, hindered the march, constantly breaking up again the order of the ponderous train. With heavy losses Varus succeeded in reaching a densely wooded mountain, which, however, offered open space for a temporary camp. This was occupied and fortified still in fairly good order and according to regulations; the army of Germanicus, visiting the place six years later, still recognised there distinctly

“the work of three legions”.” With a resolve appropriate to the

situation Varus here had all the not absolutely necessary waggons and baggage burnt. The next day he moved through open country, but again suffered so heavily that the troops were separated still more widely, and in the evening the camp could no longer be fortified according to regulations; Germanicus found only one half-ruined mound and a shallow ditch. On the third day the march led again through wooded mountains, and here Varus and most of the leaders lost heart. Varus killed himself, the legions were destroyed almost to the last man. Only the cavalry escaped under Vala Numonius; individual refugees from the infantry also appear to have managed to get to Aliso. Aliso itself held out at least for some time, since the Germans did not know the regular siege attack; later the garrison somehow fought its way through, wholly or in part. Asprenas, intimidated, appears to have confined himself to a short advance to receive them. Bructeri, Sugambri and all the lesser peoples rose, and Roman power was again thrown back across the Rhine.

The localities of this expedition have been much disputed. Most likely, before the battle Varus was stationed in the hollow of the Rinteln valley, somewhere between Hausberge and Hameln; the retreat decided upon after the first attack was in the direction of the Doren gap near Detmold, which forms a plain and broad pass through the Osning. This is the general view which has become traditional and fits in with the sources as well as the military exigencies of the war situation. Whether Varus reached the Doren gap remains uncertain; the breakthrough of the cavalry and perhaps the first ranks of the infantry would appear to show that he did.*

The news of the annihilation of the three legions and the rising of the whole of western Germany struck Rome like a thunder clap. Some already saw Arminius marching across the Rhine and spreading insurrection in Gaul, Maroboduus on the other side crossing the Danube and carrying with him the barely subdued Pannonians on a march across the Alps. And Italy was already so exhausted that it could hardly supply men any longer. Dio reports that there were only few young men capable of bearing arms left among the citizenry, that the older men refused to join the army so that Augustus punished them with confiscation of their wealth, and some even with death; that the emperor eventually managed to raise a few troops for the protection of Rome from among

freedmen and veterans, disarmed his German bodyguard and banned all Germans from the city.*

Arminius did not cross the Rhine, however; Maroboduus was not thinking of any attack, and so Rome could indulge undisturbed in outbursts of fury at the “perfidious Germans”. We have already seen Velleius’ description of them as people who “with their extreme savagery combine great cunning ... and are a race of born liars”. Similarly Strabo. He knows nothing of “German loyalty” and “Celtic perfidy”; quite to the contrary. While he calls the Celts “simple and straightforward”, so simple-minded that they “gather for battle in full view of everybody and without any circumspection, thus making it easy for the enemy to carry the

day”,” he says of the Germans:

“In dealing with them it was always advisable not to trust them, those who have been trusted have done great harm as, for instance, the Cherusci, in whose country three legions, with their general Varus, were destroyed by an ambush in violation of the treaties.”

Not to speak of the indignant and vindictive verses of Ovid." One could imagine to be reading French authors of the most chauvinistic period, boiling with rage at Yorck’s breach of faith or the treachery of the Saxons at Leipzig.” The Germans had become well acquainted with Roman loyalty to agreements and probity when Caesar attacked the Usipetes and Tencteri during the negotiations and the truce; they had become acquainted with it when Augustus had the envoys of the Sugambri taken prisoner, while before their arrival he had rejected any negotiations with the German peoples. All conquering nations have this in common that they will try to outwit their opponents by any means; and they find this quite in order; no sooner do their adversaries do the same thing, however, than they call this breach of faith and treachery. But the instruments of subjection must also be allowed to serve to throw off the yoke. So long as there are exploiting and ruling nations and classes on the one hand, and exploited and ruled ones on the other, so long the use of cunning side by side with force will for both sides be a necessity against which all moral preaching will be powerless.

However childish the fantastic statue of Arminius erected at Detmold may be—it had only one good side, that it induced Louis

Napoleon to erect a similarly ridiculous, fantastic colossus of Vercingetorix on a mountain at Aliso [-Sainte-Reine]—it remains true that the Varus battle was one of the most decisive turning points in history. It decided Germany’s independence of Rome once and for all. One can argue at length to no purpose about whether or not this independence was such a great gain for the Germans themselves; it is certain that without it the whole of history would have taken a different course. And even if in fact all the subsequent history of the Germans has been almost nothing but a long series of national disasters, mostly through their own fault, so much so that even the most brilliant successes almost always turned out to the detriment of the people, one must nevertheless say that here, at the beginning of their history, the Germans were decidedly fortunate.

Caesar used the last vital forces of the dying Republic to subjugate Gaul. The legions, since Marius consisting of recruited mercenaries but still exclusively Italic men, since Caesar literally died out in the measure in which the Italic people themselves died out under the rapidly spreading latifundia and their slave economy. The 150,000 men who made up the compact infantry of the 25 legions could only be kept together by extreme measures. The 20-year service was not observed; veterans who had completed their service were forced to remain with the colours for an indefinite period. That was the chief reason for the mutiny of the Rhenish legions on the death of Augustus which Tacitus describes so imaginatively,” and which with its extraordinary mixture of refractoriness and discipline recalls so vividly the mutinies of the Spanish soldiers of Philip II in the Netherlands,”' in both cases testifying to the solidity of the army at a time when the Prince had broken the word he had given it. We saw how vain Augustus’ attempt remained after the Varus battle to reinstate the old levy laws which had long gone out of use; how he had to fall back on veterans and even freedmen—he had used these once before, during the Pannonian insurrection.’? The reserve of free Italic peasants’ sons had disappeared with the free Italic peasants themselves. Every new reserve contingent introduced into the legions worsened the army’s quality. And since these legions, this core of the entire might of the army, which was difficult to maintain, had nevertheless to be spared as much as possible, the auxiliary troops came more and more to the fore and fought battles in which the legions only formed the reserve, so that

already in Claudius’ time the Batavi could say: the provinces were being conquered with the blood of the provinces.

With such an army, more and more alienating itself from the ancient Roman discipline and solidity and therewith from the ancient Roman manner of fighting, increasingly composed of provincials and eventually of barbarians alien to the empire, almost no great aggressive wars could any longer be conducted — soon no great offensive battles could be fought. The deterioration of the army placed the state on the defensive, which was first fought aggressively, then more and more passively, until at length the weight of the attack, now shifted completely to the side of the Germans, broke through irresistibly across the Rhine and Danube along the whole line from the North Sea to the Black Sea.

In the meantime it was necessary, even to safeguard the line of the Rhine, to let the Germans feel once more, on their own territory, the superior strength of Roman arms. For this purpose Tiberius hastened to the Rhine, restored weakened discipline by his own example and strict punishment, limited the train of the mobile army to the absolutely necessary and marched through western Germany in two expeditions (years 10 and 11). The Germans did not present themselves for decisive battles, the Romans did not dare to occupy their winter camps on the right bank of the Rhine. There is no evidence that Aliso and the fort set up at the mouth of the Ems in the country of the Chauci retained their permanent garrison also in the winter, but it is probable.

In the year 14, in August, Augustus died. The Rhenish legions, who after completing their service were neither dismissed nor given their pay, refused to recognise Tiberius and proclaimed Germanicus, son of Drusus, emperor. He calmed the rising himself, returned the troops to obedience, and led them into Germany in three expeditions which have been described by Tacitus.*, Here Arminius confronted him and proved a general fully worthy of his opponent. He sought to avoid any decisive battles in open country, to hinder the Romans’ march as much as possible, and to attack them only in swamps and defiles where they could not deploy their forces. But the Germans did not always follow him. Pugnacity often carried them away into fighting in unfavourable circumstances; greed for booty more than once saved Romans who were already sitting firmly in a trap. So Germanicus gained the two fruitless victories on the Idistavisus and on the Angrivarian limes,’ barely escaped on the retreats

through narrow swamp passes, lost ships and crews through storms and floods on the Frisian coast, and was eventually recalled by Tiberius after the expedition of the year 16. With that the Roman expeditions into the interior of Germany came to an end.

But the Romans knew only too well that a river line is only held if one also holds the crossings to the other bank. Far from retreating passively beyond the Rhine, the Romans transferred their defence to the right bank. The Roman fortifications which cover the regions of the lower Lippe, Ruhr and Wupper in big groups, at least in some cases corresponding to later districts, [and] the military roads built from the Rhine to the border of the Duchy of Mark, lead us to surmise here a system of defence works along a line from the Ijssel to the Sieg, corresponding to the present frontier line between Franks and Saxons, with occasional deviations of the border of the Rhine province in the direction of Westphalia. This system, which was probably still to some extent defensible in the 7th century, must then also have kept the Saxons, who were advancing at that time, from reaching the Rhine, and thereby fixed their present ethnic border against the Franks. The most interesting discoveries have been made here in recent years (by J. Schneider)*; we may well expect further discoveries.

Farther up the Rhine the great Roman Limes was gradually built up, especially under Domitian and Hadrian; it runs from below Neuwied over the heights of Montabaur to Ems, there crosses the Lahn, turns west at Adolfseck, following the northern slopes of the Taunus, envelopes Griiningen in the Wetterau as its northernmost point, and thence, running in a south-south-easterly direction, reaches the Main south of Hanau. From here the Limes runs on the left bank of the Main to Miltenberg; thence in an only once broken straight line to the Wurttemberg Rems, near the castle of Hohenstaufen. Here the line, built further at a later time, probably under Hadrian, turns eastward via Dinkelsbihl, Gunzenhausen, Ellingen and Kipfenberg, and reaches the Danube at Irnsing above Kehlheim. Smaller entrenchments lay behind the Limes, and larger forts as support points at a greater distance. Thus enclosed, the country to the right of the Rhine, which at least south of the Main had lain deserted since the Helvetii were driven out by the Suebi, was peopled by Gallic vagrants, stragglers of the troops, according to Tacitus.°

Thus conditions gradually became calmer and safer on the Rhine, the Limes and the Danube. Fighting and expeditions continued, but the mutual borders remained unchanged for some centuries.

PROGRESS UNTIL THE MIGRATION PERIOD

Written sources on the situation and the events in the interior of Germany fail after Tacitus and Ptolemy. Instead a series of other, much more vivid sources is opening up for us: finds of antiquities in so far as they can be attributed to the period under discussion.

We have seen that at the time of Pliny and Tacitus Roman trade with the interior of Germany was virtually non-existent. But we find in Pliny an indication of an old trade route, which in his time was still used occasionally, from Carnuntum (opposite the confluence of the March with the Danube), along the March and the Oder to the Amber coast.* This route, and also another, through Bohemia along the Elbe, was probably used at a very early period by the Etruscans, whose presence in the northern valleys of the Alps is documented by numerous finds, particularly the Hallstatt find.'* The invasion of the Gauls into northern Italy will have put an end to this trade (ca—400) (Boyd Dawkins).” If this view is confirmed, this Etruscan trade, especially the importation of bronze goods, must have been conducted with the peoples who occupied the land on the Vistula and the Elbe before the Germans, probably with Celts, and the immigration of the Germans would have had as much to do with its interruption as the backflow of the Celts into Italy. The more easterly trade route, from the Greek cities on the Black Sea along Dniester and Dnieper to the area of the Vistula mouth, would then appear to have come into use only after this interruption. The ancient Greek coins found near Bromberg, in the island of Oesel and elsewhere suggest this interpretation; among them are pieces of the fourth, possibly the fifth century before our era, coined in Greece, Italy, Sicily, Cyrene, etc.

The interrupted trade routes along the Oder and Elbe were bound to be restored again as soon as the migrating people came to a halt. At the time of Ptolemy not only these, but other roads of

traffic through Germany seem to have come into use again, and where Ptolemy’s evidence fails, finds continue to bear witness.

C. F. Wiberg * has clarified much here by careful compilation of the finds, and has provided the evidence that in the second century of our era the trade routes both through Silesia down the Oder and through Bohemia down the Elbe were used again. In Bohemia Tacitus already mentions

“traders in booty and merchants” (lixae ac negotiatores) “out of our provinces

whom avarice and oblivion of their homes have led into enemy territory and to Maroboduus’ army camp”.4

So also the Hermunduri, who, long since friends of the Romans, had, according to Tacitus,° unhindered access to the Agri Decumates' and Rhaetia as far as Augsburg, will surely have traded Roman goods and coins from the upper Main further to the Saale and Werra. Traces of a trade route into the interior have also been revealed further down the Roman Limes, on the Lahn.

The route through Moravia and Silesia appears to have remained the most important one. The only watershed that has to be crossed, that between the March, or Becva, and Oder, passes through open hill country and lies less than 325 metres above sea level; even now the railway passes along here. Beginning with Lower Silesia the north German lowlands open up, so that roads can branch out in all directions to the Vistula and the Elbe. Roman merchants must have resided in Silesia and Brandenburg in the second and third centuries. There we find not only urns of glass, tear bottles and burial urns with Latin inscriptions (Massel near Trebnitz in Silesia and elsewhere), but even complete Roman sepulchral vaults with recesses for urns (columbaria), (Nacheln near Glogau). Undoubted Roman graves have also been found at Warin in Mecklenburg. Similarly, finds of coins, Roman metal ware, clay lamps, etc., are evidence of trade along this route. Generally speaking, the whole of eastern Germany, although never entered by Roman armies, is studded with Roman coins and manufactures, the latter frequently documented by the same trade marks as occur on finds in the provinces of the Roman Empire. Clay lamps found in Silesia bear the same trade mark as others found in Dalmatia, Vienna, etc. The mark: Ti. Robilius Sitalces, for instance,

* Bidrag till kinnedomen om Grekers och Romares forbindelse med Norden. German

by Mestorf: Der Einfluß der klassischen Völker etc., Hamburg, 1867.

is stamped on bronze vases of which one was found in Mecklenburg, another in Bohemia; this indicates a trade route along the Elbe.

Moreover, in the first centuries after Augustus Roman merchant vessels sailed on the North Sea. This is proved by the find in Neuhaus on the Oste (Elbe mouth) of 344 Roman silver coins from Nero to Marcus Aurelius with remains of a ship which probably foundered there. Shipping also went along the southern coast of the Baltic, reaching the Danish islands, Sweden and Gotland, and we shall have to study this more closely. The distances given by Ptolemy and Marcianus (about the year 400) between the various points on the coast can only have been derived from the reports of merchants who sailed along that coast. They are given from the coast of Mecklenburg to Danzig and thence to Scandia. Finally, this trade is proved by innumerable other finds of Roman origin in Holstein, Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania, the Danish islands and southern Sweden, on sites lying closest to each other near the coast.

How far this Roman traffic included the import of weapons into Germany is difficult to determine. The numerous Roman weapons found in Germany could equally well be booty, and the Roman border authorities naturally did everything to cut off supplies of arms to the Germans. Some could have come by sea, however, particularly to the more distant peoples such as those of the Cimbric peninsula.

The rest of the Roman products which came to Germany by these various routes consisted of household goods, jewellery, toilet articles, etc. Household goods include bowls, measures, tumblers, vessels, cooking pots, sieves, spoons, scissors, ladles, etc., of bronze; a few vessels of gold or silver; clay lamps, which are very widespread; jewellery made of bronze, silver or gold: necklaces, diadems, bracelets and rings, clips rather like our brooches; among the toilet articles we find combs, pincers, ear spoons, etc.—not to mention articles the use of which is disputable. Most of these manufactures, according to Worsaae, were made under the influence of the tastes dominant in Rome in the first century.’

The difference between the Germans of Caesar, and even of Tacitus, and the people who used these wares is great, even if we admit that they were used only by the nobler and wealthier families. The “simple dishes without much preparation” (sine

5~1243

apparatu) “or condiments” with which the Germans, according to Tacitus, “banished their hunger”* had given way to a cuisine which already used a fairly sophisticated apparatus and in addition probably also obtained the corresponding condiments from the Romans. Contempt for gold- and silver-ware had given way to the desire to adorn oneself with them; indifference to Roman money to its spread all over German territory. And especially the toilet articles—what a transformation of customs is revealed by their mere presence among a people which, as far as we know, invented soap, indeed, but used it only to bleach the hair!

Concerning the goods which the Germans provided to the Roman traders in exchange for all this cash and these wares we are in the first instance dependent on the information of the ancient writers, who, as we have said, leave us almost completely in the dark. Pliny mentions vegetables, goose quills, woollen stuffs and soap as articles which the empire imported from Germany.” But this insipient trade at the border cannot be a standard for the later period. The chief article of trade of which we know was amber; it does not suffice, however, to explain a traffic which was spreading all over the country. Cattle, the chief wealth of the Germans, will also have been the most important export; the legions stationed at the border alone guaranteed a big demand for meat. Hides and furs, which in the time of Jornandes were sent from Scandinavia to the Vistula mouth, and thence into Roman territory, no doubt found their way there from the East German forests even in earlier periods. Wild beasts for the circus were brought in from the north by Roman seafarers, Wiberg thinks. But nothing could be got there save bears, wolves and possibly aurochs, and lions, leopards and even bears were easier to procure nearer home in Africa and Asia.—Slaves? asks Wiberg eventually, alrhost bashfully, and there he has probably got the right idea.‘ Indeed, apart from cattle, slaves were the only article Germany could export in sufficient quantities to balance its trade with Rome. The cities and latifundia of Italy alone used up an enormous slave population, which propagated itself only to a very small extent. The entire Roman large landed property economy had as its precondition that colossal importation of traded prisoners of war which flooded into Italy in the ceaseless wars of conquest of the decaying Republic, and even of Augustus. That

had now come to an end. The empire was on the defensive within fixed borders. Defeated enemies, from whom the bulk of the slaves were recruited, were being supplied in decreasing numbers by the Roman army. One had to buy them from the barbarians. And should not the Germans also have appeared on the market as sellers? The Germans who were already selling slaves according to Tacitus (Germania, 24),* who were constantly at war with each _ other, who, like the Frisians, when money was scarce paid their tax to the Romans by giving their wives and children into slavery and who already in the third century, if not before, sailed on the Baltic Sea and whose maritime expeditions in the North Sea, from the Saxon voyages of the third century to the Norman voyages of the tenth, had as their main object, alongside other forms of piracy, the hunt for slaves—almost exclusively for the trade?—the same Germans who, a few centuries later, both during the migration of the peoples and in their wars against the Slavs acted as the prime slave hunters and slave traders of their time? Either we must assume that the Germans of the second and third centuries were quite different people from all the other neighbours of the Romans, and quite different from their own descendants of the third, fourth and fifth centuries and later, or we must admit that they also largely participated in the slave trade to Italy, which at the time was held to be quite decent and even honourable. And then the mysterious veil falls, which otherwise conceals the German export trade of that time.

Here we must return to the Baltic traffic of those times. While the coast of the Kattegat has almost no Roman finds to show, the southern coast of the Baltic as far as Livland, Schleswig-Holstein, the southern fringes and the interior of the Danish islands, the southern and south-eastern coasts of Sweden, Oeland and Gotland are very rich in them. By far the greater part of these finds belongs to the so-called denarius period, of which we shall have more to say later, and which lasted until the first years of the reign of Septimius Severus, i.e. to about 200. Tacitus already calls the Suiones strong by virtue of their rowing fleets and says that they honour wealth”; hence they surely already practised maritime trade. Shipping, which first developed in the Belts and in the Oeresund and Oelandsund and in coastal navigation, had to dare on to the high seas to draw Bornholm and Gotland into its circle; it had to have acquired considerable assurance in the handling of

5*

vessels to develop the lively traffic the centre of which was the island of Gotland, farthest away from the continent. Here, indeed, more than 3,200 Roman silver denarii have been found up to 1873,* against about 100 on Oeland, barely 50 on the Swedish mainland, 200 on Bornholm and 600 in Denmark and Schleswig (of these 428 in a single find, Slagelse on Zealand). An analysis of these finds shows that down to the year 161, when Marcus Aurelius became emperor, only a few, but from then on to the end of the century, masses of Roman denarii came to Gotland. In the last half of the second century shipping in the Baltic must already have achieved a considerable development; that it existed already earlier is shown by Ptolemy’s statement* that the distance from the Vistula mouth to Scandia was 1,200 to 1,600 stadia (30 to 40 geographical miles”). Both distances are about right for the eastern point of Blekinge as for the southern tip of Oeland or Gotland, depending on whether one measures from Rixhéft or Neufahrwasser and Pillau respectively. They can only rest on seamen’s reports, just like the other distance measurements along the German coast to the mouths of the Vistula.

That this sea traffic on the Baltic was not practised by the Romans is indicated, firstly, by their altogether nebulous concepts about Scandinavia and, secondly, by the absence of any finds of Roman coins on the Kattegat and in Norway. The Cimbric Cape (Skagen), which the Romans reached under Augustus, and from which they saw the endless. sea spreading out, seems to have remained the limit of their direct sea traffic. Hence the Germans themselves sailed on the Baltic and maintained the intercourse which brought Roman money and Roman manufactures to Scandinavia. Nor could it have been otherwise. Beginning with the second half of the third century the Saxon maritime expeditions appear quite suddenly on the coasts of Gaul and Britain, and that with a daring and assurance which they could not have acquired overnight, which rather presupposes long familiarity with navigation on the open sea. And the Saxons, by whom we must here also understand all the peoples of the Cimbric peninsula, hence also Frisians, Angles and Jutes, could only have acquired this familiarity on the Baltic. This big inland sea, without tides, where

* Hans Hildebrand, Das heidnische Zeitalter in Schweden. Translated into German

by J. Mestorf. Hamburg, 1873.

the Atlantic sou’westers only arrive having exhausted their fury in great part on the North Sea, this extensive, long basin with its many islands, its shallow, closed-in bays and straits, where on crossing from shore to shore one cannot see land only for short distances, was as if made to serve a newly developing navigation as training waters. Here the Swedish rock drawings, attributed to the bronze age, with their many representations of rowing boats, indicate a maritime traffic of great antiquity. Here the Nydam bog-find in Schleswig presents us with a boat made of oak timbers, 70 feet long and eight to nine feet wide, dated to the beginning of the third century, and quite suitable for voyaging on the high seas.* Here that boat-building technique and sea-faring experience quietly grew which made possible the later conquering expeditions of Saxons and Normans on the high seas and laid the foundations which enabled the Germanic people to stand at the head of all sea-faring peoples of the world to this day.

Roman coins which reached Germany before the end of the second century were predominantly silver denarii (1 denarius = 1.06 mark). And moreover, as Tacitus informs us, the Germans preferred the old, well-known coins with serrated rim, the design including a team of two horses.” Indeed, among the older coins many of these serrati bigatique have been found. These old coins only had some 5 to 10 per cent copper added to the silver; Trajan already ordered that 20 per cent copper be added to the silver and the Germans do not seem to have noticed this. But when Septimius Severus from 198 onwards raised the addition to 50-60 per cent, the Germans thought it too bad; these devalued later denarii occur in the finds only quite exceptionally, the importation of Roman money ceased. It only began again after Constantine, in the year 312, established the gold solidus as the monetary unit (72 solidi to the Roman pound of 327 g of fine gold, hence 1 solidus = 4.55 g fine = 12.70 marks) and then it was predominantly gold coins, solidi, which came to Germany, but even more so to Oeland and particularly Gotland. This second period of Roman money importation, the solidus period, lasted to the end of the Western Empire for West Roman coins, and for Byzantine coins up to Anastasius (died 518). Most of the finds have been made in Sweden, on the Danish islands, and a few on the German Baltic coast; in the German interior they are sporadic.

The counterfeiting of coins by Septimius Severus and his

successors does not, however, suffice to explain the sudden cessation of trade relations between Germans and Romans. Other causes must have come into play. One is evidently to be sought in the political situation. In the beginning of the third century the aggressive war of the Germans against Rome started, and by 250 it had flared up all along the line from the Danube mouths to the Rhine delta. Of course, no regular trade could be conducted by the warring parties in these circumstances. But these sudden, general, persistent aggressive wars themselves require an explanation. Internal Roman conditions do not explain them; on the contrary, as yet the empire resisted everywhere successfully and between individual periods of wild anarchy strong emperors were still produced, particularly around this time. The attacks must therefore have been conditioned by changes among the Germans themselves. And here again the finds provide the explanation.

At the beginning of the sixties of our century finds of outstanding importance were made in two Schleswig peatbogs, which, carefully studied by Engelhardt in Copenhagen, have now, after various wanderings, been deposited in the Museum in Kiel. They are distinguished from other, similar finds by the coins belonging to them, which establish their age with fair certainty. One of these finds, from the Taschberg (Danish Thorsbjerg) moor near Siiderbrarup, contains 37 coins from Nero to Septimius Severus; the other, from the Nydam moor, a peat-covered, silted-up sea bay, 34 coins from Tiberius to Macrinus (218).’ Hence the finds are without doubt from the period between 220 and 250. They contain not only objects of Roman origin but also numerous others, made in the country itself and which, being almost perfectly preserved thanks to the ferrous peat water, reveal with amazing clarity the state of the north German metal industry, weaving and shipbuilding, and through the runic letters even the writing in use in the first half of the third century.

Here we are even more struck by the level of the industry itself. The fine fabrics, the delicate sandals, and the neatly worked leather straps bear witness to a much higher stage of culture than that of the Germans of Tacitus; but what arouses particular amazement is the local metal work.

Linguistic comparisons show that the Germans brought the knowledge of metals and their uses with them from their Asiatic homeland. The art of smelting and working metal was perhaps

On the Early History of the Germans 4]

also known to them, but they had barely retained it at the time when they came into collision with the Romans. At least the writers of the first century give no indication that iron or bronze were produced and worked between Rhine and Elbe; they rather suggest the opposite. Tacitus, it is true, says of the Gothines (in Upper Silesia?) that they were digging for iron,* and Ptolemy attributes ironworks to the neighbouring Quadi”; both may again have acquired a knowledge of smelting from the Danube area. Nor do the finds of the first century documented by coins contain any local metal products anywhere, but only Roman ones; and how could the masses of Roman metal ware have got to Germany if a home metalworking industry had existed there? Ancient casting moulds, incomplete castings and waste of bronze are indeed found there, but never with coins to document their age; in all probability these are traces of pre-Germanic times, the residue of the work of itinerant Etruscan bronze casters. In any case, the question whether the German immigrants had lost the art of metalworking completely is pointless; all the evidence goes to show that no, or hardly any, metalworking was practised in the first century.

Here now the Taschberg moor finds suddenly turn up, and reveal to us an unexpectedly high level of the indigenous metal industry. Buckles, metal plates for mountings, decorated with animal and human heads; a silver helmet which completely frames the face, leaving only eyes, nose and mouth free; chain armour of wire netting, which presupposes very laborious operations, since the wire had first to be hammered (wire drawing was not invented until 1306), and a head ring of gold, not to mention other objects the indigenous origin of which might be disputed. These finds agree with others—those from the Nydam moor and bog finds from Fyn, and lastly a find from Bohemia (Hofovice), likewise discovered at the beginning of the sixties, which contains magnificent bronze disks with human heads, buckle clips, etc., quite in the manner of the Taschberg finds, hence probably also of the same period.

Beginning with the third century the metal industry will have spread over the whole German area, being increasingly perfected; by the time of the migration of the peoples, say by the end of the ‘fifth century, it reached a relatively very high level. Not only iron

and bronze, gold: and silver also were worked regularly, Roman coins imitated in gold bracteates,* the base metals gilded; inlaid work, enamel and filigree work occur; highly artistic ornaments in good taste, only in part imitating Roman work, are found on otherwise often crudely ‘made pieces, especially on clips and buckles or fibulae, which have certain characteristic forms in common. Buckles from Kerch on the Sea of Azov are lying in the British Museum next to quite similar ones found in England; they could be from the same manufactory. The style of these pieces is basically the same, from Sweden to the Lower Danube and from the Black Sea to France and England, though often with quite: clearly distinguishable local peculiarities. This first period of the German metal industry came to an end on the continent with the end of the migration of the peoples and the general acceptance of Christianity; in England and Scandinavia it lasted a little longer.

That this industry was widespread among the Germans in the 6th and 7th centuries and that it had already become a separate branch of industry is proved by local laws [Volksrechte].'’ Smiths, swordmakers, gold--and silversmiths are frequently mentioned, in the Alamannic law’ even smiths who have passed. a_ public examination (publice probati). Bavarian law punishes theft from a church, a ducal court, a smithy or a mill with harsher penalties “because these four are public buildings and are always open”.”° In Frisian law” the goldsmith has a higher wergeld by one fourth than other people of his estate; Salic law?! estimates the simple bondsman at 12 solidi, but one who is a smith (faber) at 35.

We have already mentioned shipbuilding. The Nydam boats are rowing boats, the bigger one, made of oak, for fourteen pairs of rowers; the smaller one is of pine. Oars, rudder and scoops were still lying inside. It was not until the Germans began to navigate the North Sea, too, that they seem to have adopted sails from the Romans and Celts.

They knew pottery already at the time of Tacitus, but probably only hand pottery. The Romans had large potteries on the borders, particularly inside the Limes in Swabia and Bavaria, which also employed Germans, as is proved by the workers’ names burnt into the pots. With these workers the knowledge of glazing

and the potter’s wheel and also higher technical skill will have come to Germany. Glassmaking, too, was known to the Germans who broke in across the Danube; glass vessels, coloured glass beads and glass insets in metal ware, all of German origin, have often been found in Bavaria and Swabia.

Finally, we now find runic writing widely spread and generally used. The Taschberg find has a sword sheath and a shieldboss which are ornamented with runes. The same runes are found on a gold ring found in Walachia, on buckles from Bavaria and Burgundy, and lastly, on the oldest runic stones in Scandinavia. It is the more complete runic alphabet, the one from which the Anglo-Saxon runes were later derived; it contains seven more characters than the Norse runic writing which predominated later in Scandinavia and indicates also an older linguistic form than the one in which the oldest Norse has been preserved. It was, incidentally, an extremely clumsy system of writing, consisting of Roman and Greek letters so changed that they were easily scratched [eingeritzt = writan] on stone, metal and especially on wooden staves. The rounded forms had to give way to angular shapes; only vertical or inclined strokes were possible, not horizontal ones on account of the wood grain; this way, however, it became a very clumsy writing for parchment or paper. And indeed, as far as we can see, it has only served for religious and magic purposes and for inscriptions, perhaps also for other brief communications; as soon as the need for real literary writing was felt, as among the Goths and later the Anglo-Saxons, it was discarded and a new adaptation of the Greek or Roman alphabet made which preserved only individual runic characters.

Finally, the Germans will also have made considerable progress in tillage and cattle raising in the period here discussed. The restriction to permanent settlement forced them to it; the enormous population growth, which overflowed in the migration of the peoples, would have been impossible without it. Many a stretch of virgin forest must have been cleared, and most of the “Hochacker”—stretches of wood which show traces of ancient cultivation—among them, in as far as they are situated on territory that was then German. Special proofs are here, of course, lacking. But if Probus already, towards the end of the third century, preferred German horses for his cavalry, and if the large white cattle, which replaced the small, black Celtic cattle in the Saxon areas of Britain, got here through the Anglo-Saxons, as is now assumed, this indicates a complete revolution also in the cattle raising, and consequently in the agriculture, of the Germans.

* * &

The result of our study is that the Germans made considerable progress in civilisation in the period from Caesar to Tacitus, but that they progressed even more rapidly from Tacitus to the migration of the peoples—about 400. Trade came to them, brought to them Roman industrial products and with these at least some Roman needs; it awakened an industry of their own, which leaned on Roman patterns, to be sure, but at the same time developed quite independently. The bog finds in Schleswig represent the first phase of this industry which can be dated; the finds of the time of the migration of the peoples represent the second phase, showing a higher development. Here it is remarkable that the more westerly peoples were decidedly more backward than those of the interior, and especially of the Baltic coasts. The Franks and Alamanni, and later still the Saxons, produced metal work of a quality inferior to that of the Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, and the peoples who had moved out from the interior—the Goths on the Black Sea and the Lower Danube, the Burgundians in France. The influence of the old trade routes from the Middle Danube along the Elbe and Oder is here not to be gainsaid. At the same time the inhabitants of the coast turned themselves into skilled shipbuilders and bold seafarers; everywhere population was rapidly growing; the territory restricted by the Romans no longer sufficed. New movements of landseeking peoples arose, at first far in the east, until finally the billowing masses irresistibly overflowed at every point, over land and sea, to new territories.

NOTE: THE GERMAN PEOPLES

Roman armies only reached the interior of Germany proper by a few routes of march and during a short period of time, and then only as far as the Elbe; nor did merchants and other travellers get there often, or far into it up to Tacitus’ time. Hence it is not surprising that intelligence on this country and its inhabitants is so meagre and contradictory; it is rather surprising that we learn as much for certain as we do.

Even the two Greek geographers among our sources can only be used without reservations where they find independent confirmation. Both had only book learning. They were collectors and in their own way and according to their resources also critical sifters of material now largely lost to us. They lacked personal knowledge

of the country. Strabo makes the Lippe, so well known to the Romans, flow into the North Sea parallel with the Ems and Weser, instead of into the Rhine, and is honest enough to admit that the country beyond the Elbe is completely unknown.* While he disposes of the contradictions in his sources and his own doubts by means of a naive rationalism which often recalls the beginning of our century, the scientific geographer Ptolemy attempts to allot to the individual German peoples mentioned in his sources mathematically determined locations in the inexorable grid of his map. Ptolemy’s geography of Germany is as misleading as his work as a whole is grandiose for his time.” In the first place the material available to him is for the greater part vague and contradictory, often directly wrong. Secondly, however, his map is wrongly drawn, many rivers and mountain ranges are quite wrongly entered. It is as if an untravelled Berlin geographer, say about 1820, felt obliged to fill the empty spaces on the map of Africa by bringing into harmony the information of all sources since Leo Africanus and allotting to every river and every mountain range a ‘definite location, to every people a precise seat. Such attempts to do the impossible can only worsen the errors of the sources used. Thus, Ptolemy entered many peoples twice, Laccobardi on the lower Elbe, Langobardi from the middle Rhine to the middle Elbe; he has two Bohemias, one inhabited by Marcomanni, the other by Bainochaimi, etc.“ While Tacitus says specifically that there are no cities in Germany,’ Ptolemy, barely 50 years later, already is able to name 96 places.“ Many of those names may well be true place names; Ptolemy seems to have gathered much intelligence from merchants, who at this time already visited the east of Germany in greater numbers and began to learn the names of the places they visited, which were gradually becoming fixed. The origin of certain others is shown by the example of the alleged town of Siatutanda, which our geographer thinks he reads in Tacitus, probably from a bad manuscript, who wrote: ad sua tutanda.’ Side by side we find information of surprising accuracy and of the greatest historical value. Thus Ptolemy is the only ancient writer who places the Langobardi, under the distorted name Laccobardi, it is true, exactly where to this day we find

Bardengau and Bardenwik bear witness to them; similarly, Ingrioni in Engersgau where today we still find Engers on the Rhine at Neuwied.* He, also alone, gives the names of the Lithuanian Galindi and Suditi which to this day continue in the East Prussian districts Galinden and Sudauen. But such cases only show his great scholarship, not the correctness of his other statements. Moreover, the text is terribly distorted, especially where the main thing, the names, are concerned.

The Romans remain the most direct sources, particularly those who visited the country themselves. Velleius was in Germany as a soldier and writes as a soldier, approximately in the manner of an officer of the grande armée” writing of the expeditions of 1812 and 1813. His account does not enable us to establish the localities even for military events; not surprising in a country without towns. Pliny also served in Germany as a cavalry officer and visited the Chaucian coast among other places. He described all the wars conducted against the Germans in twenty books*’; this was Tacitus’ source. Moreover Pliny was the first Roman to take a more than military and political interest in the affairs of the barbarian land; his interest was theoretical.” His information on the German peoples must therefore be of special importance as resting on the Roman scientific encyclopaedist’s own enquiries. It is traditionally maintained that Tacitus had been in Germany, but I cannot find the evidence. At all events, at that time he could have gathered direct information only from near the Rhine and Danube.

Two classical works have tried in vain to square the charts of peoples in the Germania [of Tacitus] and of Ptolemy with one another and with the chaos of other ancient information: Kaspar Zeuss’ Deutsche and Jacob Grimm’s Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Where these two brilliant scholars did not succeed, nor anybody since, we will have to regard the task as insoluble with our present resources. The inadequacy of the resources is clear from the fact alone that both had to resort to the construction of false auxiliary theories; Zeuss thought that Ptolemy should have the last word in all disputed questions, although nobody has criticised Ptolemy’s fundamental errors more sharply than he did; Grimm believed that the might which overthrew the Roman world empire must have grown on more extensive ground than the area between

Rhine, Danube and Vistula, and that therefore, with the Goths and Dacians, the greater part of the country in the north and north-east of the lower Danube should be taken as German, too. The assumptions of both Zeuss and Grimm are today obsolete.

Let us try to bring at least some clarity into the matter by limiting the subject. If we succeed in establishing a more general grouping of the peoples into a few principal branches, later investigations into detail will have gained firm ground. And here we are offered a point of departure by Pliny* in a passage which has proved more and more reliable in the course of the enquiry and certainly leads to fewer difficulties and involves us in fewer contradictions than any other.

When we begin with Pliny we must indeed drop the unconditional validity of Tacitus’ triad and the old legend of Mannus and his three sons Ing, Isk and Ermin.” But firstly, Tacitus himself is unable to do anything with his Ingaevones, Iscaevones, and Herminones. He makes not the least attempt to group the peoples he lists individually under these three principal branches, and secondly, no one else has succeeded in doing this. Zeuss makes a terrific effort to force the Gothic peoples, whom he conceives as “Istaevones”, into the triad, and thereby only aggravates the confusion. As for the Scandinavians, he does not even attempt to bring them into it and construes them as a fourth principal branch. But with that the triad is destroyed quite as much as with the five principal branches of Pliny.

Now let us look at these five branches individually.

I. Vindili, quorum pars Burgundiones, Varini, Carini, Guttones.

Here we have three peoples, the Vandals, Burgundians and the Goths themselves, of whom it is established, firstly, that they spoke Gothic dialects, and secondly that at that time they lived deep in the east of Germany: Goths at and beyond the Vistula mouth; Burgundians, placed by Ptolemy in the area of the Warta and as far as the Vistula,? and Vandals, placed in Silesia by Dio Cassius, who calls the Riesengebirge after them.© We should surely also reckon to this Gothic main branch, to name it by the language, all those peoples whose dialects Grimm derives from the Gothic, that is, in the first place the areas to which Procopius directly ascribes

the Gothic language, including the Vandals.* We know nothing of their earlier domicile, nor of that of the Heruli, whom Grimm places among the Goths, side by side with Skiri and Rugii.” Pliny names the Skiri on the Vistula,“ Tacitus the Rugii immediately next to the Goths on the coast.* Hence the Gothic dialect occupied a fairly compact region between the Vandal mountains (Riesengebirge), the Oder and the Baltic up to and beyond the Vistula.

We do not know who the Carini were. Some difficulty is caused by the Varini. Tacitus lists them next to the Angles among the seven peoples who sacrifice to Nerthus,° of whom Zeuss already remarked, rightly, that they look uncommonly like Ingaevones' But the Angles are counted by Ptolemy among the Suebi, which is obviously wrong. Zeuss sees in one or two names distorted by the same geographer the Varini and accordingly he places them in the Havelland and counts them as Suebi." The heading of the ancient common law identifies Varini and Thuringians’ without qualification; but the law itself is common to Varini and Angles. After all this we must leave it in doubt whether the Varini are to be reckoned to the Gothic or the Ingaevonian branch; since they have completely disappeared the question is not of great importance.

II. Altera pars Ingaevones, quorum pars Cimbri, Teutoni ac Chaucorum gentes:

Pliny here allocates the Cimbric Peninsula and the coastal districts between Elbe and Ems to the Ingaevones as their domicile. Of the three peoples here named, the Chauci were surely very close relatives of the Frisians. To this day the Frisian language predominates along the North Sea, in Dutch West Friesland, in Oldenburg Saterland and in Schleswig North Friesland. During the Carolingian period™ Frisian was spoken almost exclusively along the whole coast, from the Sinkfal (the bay which today still

On the Early History of the Germans at 49

forms the boundary between Belgian Flanders and Dutch Zeeland) to Sylt and Schleswig Widau, and probably still a good deal further north; the Saxon language only on both sides of the Elbe mouth, to the sea.

Pliny evidently understands by the Cimbri and Teutons the then inhabitants of the Cimbric Chersonesus,* who therefore belonged to the Chauci-Frisian language branch. With Zeuss and Grimm we must therefore see in the North Frisians direct descendants of these oldest peninsular Germans. '

It is true that Dahlmann (Geschichte von Danemark)” maintains that the north Frisians immigrated into the peninsula only. in the fifth century, from the south-west. But he does not cite the smallest evidence for this statement which has rightly been left quite out of consideration in all later studies.

Ingaevonian would accordingly here be in the first place synonymous with Frisian, in the sense that we name the entire linguistic branch after the dialect of which alone older memorials and surviving dialects remain. But is the extent of the Ingaevonian branch thereby exhausted? Or is Grimm right when he comprises in it the totality of what he, not quite accurately, terms Low German, that is alongside the Frisians also the Saxons?‘

To begin with, we may admit that Pliny allots to the Saxons quite the wrong place when he reckons the Cherusci among the Herminones. We shall find later that indeed no option is left but to reckon the Saxons also among the Ingaevones and thus to understand this main branch as the Frisian-Saxon one.

Here it is in place to mention the Angles, whom Tacitus possibly, Ptolemy definitely reckons among the Suebi. The latter places them on the right bank of the Elbe,* opposite the Langobardi, by whom he can only mean the true Langobardi on the lower Elbe if the statement is at all to be taken to imply anything reliable; hence the Angles must have come from Lauenburg approximately as far as the Prignitz. Later we find them in the peninsula itself, where their name has been preserved and whence they went to Britain together with the Saxons. Their language now appears as an element of Anglo-Saxon, in particular the decidedly Frisian element of this newly formed dialect.

Whatever may have become of those Angles who either remained behind in the interior of Germany or strayed there, this fact alone compels us to reckon the Angles among the Ingaevones, in particular to their Frisian branch. To them is due the far more Frisian than Saxon vocalisation of Anglo-Saxon and the fact that the further development of this language in many cases proceeds strikingly in parallel with that of the Frisian dialects. Of all the continental dialects the Frisian are today closest to the English. Similarly, the change of guttural sounds into sibilants in English is not of French but of Frisian origin. English ch = c instead of k, English dz for g before soft vowels could certainly originate from Frisian tz, tj for k, dz for g, but never from French ch and g.

With the Angles we must also count the Jutes to the Frisian-Ingaevonian branch, whether they were already occupying the peninsula in the time of Pliny or Tacitus or did not immigrate there until later. Grimm finds their name in that of the Eudoses, one of Tacitus’ peoples who worshipped Nerthus’*; if the Angles are Ingaevonian, it becomes difficult to allot the remaining peoples of this group to another branch. In that case the Ingaevones would extend to the area of the Oder mouth, and the gap between them and the Gothic peoples is filled.

III. Proximi autem Rheno Iscaevones (alias Istaevones), quorum pars Sicambri.”

Already Grimm, and others after him, Waitz for example,“ more or less identify the Iscaevones and Franks. But their language confuses Grimm. From the middle of the 9th century all German documents of the realm of the Franks were composed in a dialect which cannot be distinguished from Old High German; hence Grimm assumes that Old Franconian perished in the alien country and at home was replaced by High German, and so he eventually reckoned the Franks to the High Germans.

Grimm himself asserts as a result of his investigation of preserved linguistic remains that Old Franconian has the value of an independent dialect holding an intermediary position between Saxon and High German.* This suffices here for the time being; a closer investigation of the Frankish linguistic situation, where much is still unclear, must be reserved for a special note.°

MAP

OF GERMAN SETTLEMENT

ACCORDING TO ENGELS’

“ON THE EARLY HISTORY

OF THE GERMANS”

GERMAN PEOPLES

GOTHS (Gothic peoples) (Pliny’s “Vindili”):

Goths — Skiri Burgundians Rugii Vandals Bastarnae

INGAEVONES (Frisian-Saxon peoples): Frisians

Peninsular Frisians (Cimbri and Teutons) Chauci

Saxons

Angles

Jutes (Eudoses)

Cherusci

Varini (?)

ISCAEVONES (Frankish peoples):

Ubii Usipetes

Chamavi__ Tribocci Lesser Bructeri Vangiones} (Iscaevonian?) Sugambri Nemetes peoples Tencteri

HERMINONES:

Suebi (Langobardi, Swabians-Alamanni, Bavarians-Marcomanni), Hermunduri (Thuringians)

Chatti (Hessians)

Chatti peoples: Batavi and Chattuarj

SCANDINAVIANS (Hilleviones)

100 0] 100 200 km [= |

True enough, the area allotted to the Iscaevonian branch is comparatively small for an entire main German branch, and moreover one which has played such a mighty role in history. From the Rheingau onwards it accompanies the Rhine, extending inland to the sources of the Dill, Sieg, Ruhr, Lippe and Ems, northwards cut off from the sea by the Frisians and Chauci, and at the mouth of the Rhine penetrated by splinters of other peoples, mostly of Chattish origin: Batavi, Chattuari, etc. The Germans settled on the left bank of the lower Rhine will then also belong to the Franks; but also the Tribocci, Vangiones and Nemetes? The small extent of this area is explained, however, by the resistance offered to the expansion of the Iscaevones on the Rhine by the Celts and since Caesar the Romans; while in their rear the Cherusci had already settled, and on their flank Suebi, particularly the Chatti, hemmed them in more and more, as Caesar attests.* Here a dense population, for German conditions, was compressed into a small space, as is proved by the constant pressing across the Rhine: at first by conquering hordes, later by voluntary transfer to Roman territory, as with the Ubii. For the same reason the Romans easily succeeded here, and only here, in transferring considerable sections of Iscaevonian peoples to Roman territory already at an early period.

The investigation to be made in the note on the Franconian dialect will prove that the Franks form a separate group of Germans, composed of various branches, speaking a particular dialect divided into many subdialects, in short possessing all the marks of a main German branch, as is required if they are to be declared identical with the Iscaevones. On the individual peoples of this main branch J. Grimm has already said what is necessary.” In addition to the Sugambri he reckons among them Ubi, Chamavi, Bructeri, Tencteri and Usipetes, that is the peoples who inhabited the area on the right bank of the Rhine which we have earlier designated as Iscaevonic.

IV. Mediterranet Hermiones, quorum Suevi, Hermunduri, Chatti, Cherusci.“

J. Grimm already identified the Herminones, to use the more correct spelling of Tacitus, with the High Germans.* The name

6*

Suebi, which according to Caesar covered all High Germans as far as he knew them,’ is beginning to become differentiated. Thuringians (Hermunduri) and Hessians (Chatti) appear as separate peoples. The rest of the Suebi still remain undifferentiated. Leaving aside as inscrutable the many mysterious names which get lost already in the next centuries, we must, however, distinguish among these Suebi three great branches of High German tongue which later played their part in history: the Alamanni-Swabians, the Bavarians and the Langobardi. We know for certain that the Langobardi lived on the left bank of the lower Elbe, about the Bardengau, separated from their other branch comrades, advanced into the midst of Ingaevonian peoples. Tacitus describes this isolated position, which had to be maintained by prolonged fighting, excellently, without knowing its cause.” We also know since Zeuss and Grimm‘ that the Bavarians lived in Bohemia under the name of Marcomanni, the Hessians and Thuringians in their present abodes and in the neighbouring areas to the south. Since Roman territory began south of the Franks, Hessians and Thuringians, no other space remained for the Swabians-Alamanni than that between Elbe and Oder, in the modern Mark Brandenburg and the Kingdom of Saxony; and here we find a Suebian people, the Semnones. Thus they were probably identical with these, bordering on Ingaevones in the north-west and on Gothic branches in the north-east and east.

So far everything seems to go fairly smoothly. But now Pliny reckons also the Cherusci among the Herminones,* and here he decidedly makes a slip. Caesar already distinguishes them definitely from the Suebi, among whom he still reckons the Chatti.© Nor does Tacitus know anything of Cherusci belonging to any High German branch. Neither does Ptolemy, who extends the name Suebi to the Angles. The mere fact that the Cherusci filled the space between Chatti and Hermunduri in the south and Langobardi in the north-east is not enough by a long way to conclude from that on any close branch kinship; although it may have been precisely that which misled Pliny here.

As far as I know, no scholar whose opinion matters counts the Cherusci among the High Germans. This only leaves the question whether they are to be reckoned among the Ingaevones or the Iscaevones. The few names which have come down to us show a Frankish stamp; ch instead of the later h in Cherusci, Chariomerus; e instead of 7 in Segestes, Segimerus, Segimundus. But almost all German names which came to the Romans from the banks of the Rhine seem to have been handed down to them by Franks in Frankish form. Moreover, we do not know whether the guttural aspirate of the first shift of the consonants, in the seventh century still ch with the Franks, did not sound ch with all West Germans in the first century and was only later weakened to the h common to them all. Nor do we otherwise find any branch kinship of the Cherusci with the Iscaevones, such as showed itself when the Sugambri took in the remaining Usipetes and Tencteri after they had escaped from Caesar. Moreover, the country on the right bank of the Rhine occupied at the time of Varus by the Romans and treated by them as a province coincides with Iscaevonian- Frankish territory. Here Aliso and the other Roman forts were situated; of the Cheruscan country at most only the strip between the Osning and the Weser seems to have been actually occupied. Beyond it, the Chatti, Cherusci, Chauci and Frisians were more or less uncertain allies, held in check by fear, but autonomous in their internal affairs and free of permanent Roman garrisons. In this area the Romans, when met with resistance of any strength, always made the branch boundary the limit of conquest for the time being. Thus Caesar had done in Gaul; at the border of the Belgae he halted and only crossed it when he thought that he had made sure of Gaul proper, so-called Celtic Gaul.*

Nothing remains but to reckon the Cherusci and their nearest relatives among the smaller neighbouring peoples to the Saxon branch, and hence among the Ingaevones, after J. Grimm” and the usual view. The fact that the old Saxon a is purest preserved just in the old Cheruscan area, against the o in the genitive plural and weak masculine which predominates in Westphalia, suggests the same thing. In this way all the difficulties disappear; the Ingaevonian branch, like the others, is given a fairly rounded territory into which only the Herminonian Langobardi penetrate a little. Of the two great divisions of the branch, the Frisian-Anglian- Jutish occupies the coast and at least the northern and western

parts of the peninsula, the Saxon division the inner country and perhaps also now already a part of North Albingia, where soon afterwards Ptolemy first mentions the Saxones by name.*

V. Quinta pars Peucini, Basternae contermini Dacis.”

The little we know of these two peoples stamps them as branch relatives of the Goths, as does even the form of the name, Bastarnae. If Pliny lists them as a separate branch, this is probably due to the fact that he heard of them from the lower Danube, through Greek intermediaries,” while his knowledge of the Gothic peoples on the Oder and Vistula had been gained on the Rhine and the North Sea, so that the connection between Goths and Bastarnae escaped him. Both Bastarnae and Peucini are German peoples who stayed behind at the Carpathians and the Danube mouths and continued migrating for some time, preparing the later great realm of the Goths, in which they became immersed.

VI. I mention the Hilleviones, the collective name under which Pliny lists the German Scandinavians,° only for the sake of completeness and in order once more to establish that all the ancient authors allot to this main branch only the islands (which include Sweden and Norway), excluding them from the Cimbric peninsula.

Thus we have five main German branches with five principal dialects.

The Gothic, in the east and north-east, has -é in the genitive plural of the masculine and neuter, -6 and -é in the feminine; the weak masculine has -a. The inflected forms of the present tense (the indicative) are still close to those of the originally related languages, in particular Greek and Latin, if the shifting of the consonants is borne in mind.

The Ingaevonic, in the north-west, has -a in the genitive plural, and also for the weak masculine; in the present indicative all three persons in the plural end in -d or -dh, all nasal sounds being expunged. It is divided into the two main branches of the Saxon and Frisian, which merge again into one in the Anglo-Saxon. Close to the Frisian branch is

the Scandinavian; genitive plural ending in -a, weak masculine. in -2, weakened from -a, as shown by the whole declension. In the present indicative the original -s of the second person singular

passes into -r, the first person plural retains -m, the second -dh, the remaining persons are more or less mutilated.

These three face the two southern branches: the Iscaevonic and Herminonic, in the later mode of expression the Franconian and the High German. The two have in common the weak masculine ending -0; most probably also the genitive plural ending -6, although it is not substantiated in the Franconian, and in the oldest western (Salic) documents the accusative plural ends in -as. In the present tense the two dialects, as far as we can document this for the Franconian, are close and, in this respect like Gothic, closely correspond with the originally related languages. But the whole course of linguistic history, from the very significant, archaic peculiarities of the oldest Franconian to the great differences between the modern dialects of both, precludes us from throwing the two dialects together into one; just as the whole course of the history of the peoples themselves makes it impossible for us to put them both into one main branch.

If throughout this investigation I have considered only the forms of inflection and not the phonetic relations, this is to be explained from the considerable changes which have occurred in the latter—at least in many dialects—between the first century and the time when our oldest linguistic sources were drawn up. In Germany I need only recall the second shift of the consonants; in Scandinavia the alliterations of the oldest songs show how much the language altered between the time when they were composed and when they were written down. Whatever it may still be possible to do in this respect will most likely be done by competent German linguists; here it would only have made the investigation unnecessarily complicated.

: : : script

THE FRANKISH PERIOD”

THE RADICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE RELATIONS

OF LANDOWNERSHIP UNDER THE MEROVINGIANS?7

AND CAROLINGIANS

The mark system” remained the basis of almost the entire life of the German nation till the end of the Middle Ages. Eventually, after an existence of one and a half millennia, it gradually disintegrated for purely economic reasons. It succumbed to economic advances with which it was unable to keep pace. We shall later examine its decline and ultimate destruction and we shall see that remnants of the mark system continue to exist even today.

It was only at the expense of its political importance that it was able to survive for so long. For centuries it had been the form embodying the freedom of the Germanic tribes. Then it became the basis of the people’s bondage for a thousand years. How was this possible?

The earliest community, as we have seen, comprised the whole people. Originally the people owned all the appropriated land. Later the whole body of inhabitants of a district [Gau], who were closely interrelated, became the owners of the territory settled by them, and the people as such retained only the right to dispose of the tracts which had not yet been claimed. The populace of the district in their turn handed over their field and forest marks to individual village communities, which likewise consisted of closely kindred people, and in this case too the land that was left over was retained by the district. The same procedure was followed when the original villages set up new village colonies—they were provided with land from the old mark by the parent village.

With the growth of the population and the further development of the people the blood-ties, on which here as everywhere the entire national structure was based, increasingly fell into oblivion.

This was first the case with regard to the people as a whole. The common descent was less and less seen as real consanguinity, the memory of it became fainter and fainter and what remained was merely the common history and the dialect. On the other hand, the inhabitants of a district naturally retained an awareness of their consanguinity for a longer time. The people thus came to mean merely a more or less stable confederation of districts. This seems to have been the state of affairs among the Germans at the time of the great migrations. Ammianus Marcellinus reports this definitely about the Alamanni,’ and in the local law” it is still everywhere apparent. The Saxons were still at this stage of development during Charlemagne’s time and the Frisians until they lost their independence.

But the migration on to Roman soil broke the blood-ties, as it was bound to. Although the intention was to settle by tribes and kindreds, it was impossible to carry this through. The long marches had mixed together not only tribes and kindreds but also entire peoples. Only with difficulty could the blood-ties of the individual village communities still be held together, and these became thus the real political units of which the people consisted. The new districts on Roman territory were from the start, or soon became, judicial divisions set up more or less arbitrarily—or occasioned by conditions found already in existence.

The people thus disintegrated into an association of small village communities, between which there existed no or virtually no economic connection, for every mark was self-sufficient, producing enough to satisfy its own needs, and moreover the products of the various neighbouring marks being almost exactly the same. Hardly any exchange could therefore take place between them. And since the people consisted entirely of small communities, which had identical economic interests, but for that very reason no common ones, the continued existence of the nation depended on a state power which did not derive from these communities but confronted them as something alien and exploited them to an ever increasing extent.

The form of this state power depends in its turn on the form of the communities at the time in question. Where, as among the Aryan peoples of Asia and the Russians, it arises at a time when the fields are still cultivated by the community for the common account, or when at any rate the fields are only temporarily

allotted by it to individual families, i.e. when there is as yet no private property in land, the state power appears as despotism. On the other hand, in the Roman lands conquered by the Germans, the individual shares in arable land and meadows already take, as we have seen, the form of the allodium, the owners’ free property subject only to the ordinary mark obligations. We must now examine how on the basis of this allodium a social and political structure arose, which—with the usual irony of history—in the end dissolved the state and completely abolished the allodium in its classical form.

The allodium made the transformation of the original equality of landed property into its opposite not only possible but inevitable. From the moment it was established on formerly Roman soil, the German allodium became what the Roman landed property adjacent to it had long been—a commodity. It is an inexorable law of all societies based on commodity production and commodity exchange that the distribution of property within them becomes increasingly unequal, the opposition of wealth and poverty constantly grows and property is more and more concentrated in a few hands. It is true that this law reaches its full development in modern capitalist production, but it is by no means only in it that this law operates. From the moment therefore that allodium, freely disposable landed property, landed property as commodity, arose, from that moment the emergence of large-scale landed property was merely a matter of time. |

But in the period we are concerned with, farming and stock-breeding were the principal branches of production. Landed property and its products constituted the by far largest part of wealth at that time. Other types of movable wealth that existed then followed landed property as a matter of course, and gradually accumulated in the same hands as landed property. Industry and trade had already deteriorated during the decline of the Roman empire; the German invasion ruined them almost completely. The little that was left was for the most part carried on by unfree men and aliens and remained a despised occupation. The ruling class which, with the emerging inequality in property, gradually arose could only be a class of big landowners, its form of political rule that of an aristocracy. Though, as we shall see, political levers, violence and deceit contribute frequently, and as it seems even predominantly, to the formation and development of this class, we must not forget that these political levers only advance and accelerate an inevitable economic process. We shall indeed see just as often that these political levers impede economic

development; this happens quite frequently, and invariably when the different parties concerned apply them in opposite or intersecting directions.

How did this class of big landowners come into being?

First of all we know that even after the Frankish conquest a large number of big Roman landowners remained in Gaul, whose estates were for the most part cultivated by free or bound copyholders against payment of rent (canon).

Furthermore we have seen that as a result of the wars of conquest the monarchy had become a permanent institution and real power among all Germans who had moved out, and that it had turned the land which had formerly belonged to the people into royal domains and had likewise appropriated the Roman state | lands. These crown lands were constantly augmented by the wholesale seizure of the estates of so-called rebels during the many civil wars resulting from the partitions of the empire. But rapidly as these lands increased, they were just as rapidly squandered in donations to the Church and to private individuals, Franks and Romans, retainers (antrustions*°) and other favourites of the king. Once the rudiments of a ruling class comprising the big and the powerful, landlords, officials and generals had formed, during and because of the civil wars, local rulers tried to purchase their support by grants of land. Roth has conclusively proved that in most cases these were real grants, transfers of land which became free, inheritable and alienable property, until this was changed by Charles Martel.*

When Charles took over the helm of state, the power of the kings was completely broken but, as yet, by no means replaced by that of the major-domos.*' The class of grandees, created under the Merovingians at the expense of the Crown, furthered the ruin of royal power in every way, but certainly not in order to submit to the major-domos, their compeers. On the contrary, the whole of Gaul was, as Einhard says, in the hands of these

“tyrants, who were arrogating power to themselves everywhere” (tyrannos per totam Galliam dominatum sibi vindicantes).4

This was done not only by secular grandees but also by bishops, who appropriated adjacent counties and duchies in many areas,

* P. Roth, Geschichte des Beneficialwesens, Erlangen, 1850. One of the best books

of the pre-Maurer period. I have borrowed a good deal from it in this chapter.

and were protected by their immunity and the strong organisation of the Church. The internal disintegration of the empire was followed by incursions of external enemies. The Saxons invaded Rhenish Franconia, the Avars Bavaria, and the Arabs moved across the Pyrenees into Aquitania.” In such a situation, mere subjection of the internal enemies and expulsion of the external ones could provide no long-term solution. A method had to be found of binding the humbled grandees, or their successors appointed by Charles, more firmly to the Crown. And since their power was up to then based on large-scale landed property, the first prerequisite for this was a total transformation of the relations of landownership. This transformation was the principal achievement of the Carolingian dynasty.** The distinctive feature of this transformation is that the means chosen to unite the empire, to tie the grandees permanently to the Crown and thus to make the latter more powerful, in the end led to the complete impotence of the Crown, the independence of the grandees and the dissolution of the empire.

To understand how Charles came to choose this means, we must first examine the property relations of the Church at the time, which anyway cannot be passed over here, being an essential element of contemporary agrarian relations.

Even during the Roman era, the Church in Gaul owned considerable landed property, the revenue from which was further increased by its great privileges with regard to taxes and other obligations. But it was only after the conversion of the Franks to Christianity ** that the golden age began for the Gallic Church. The kings vied with one another in making donations of land, money, jewels, church utensils, etc., to the Church. Already Chilperic used to say (according to Gregory of Tours):

“See how poor our treasury has become, see, all our wealth has been ' transferred to the Church.” ?

Under Guntram, the darling and lackey of the priests, the donations exceeded all bounds. Thus the confiscated lands of free Franks accused of rebellion mostly became the property of the Church.

The people followed the lead of the kings. Small man and big could not give enough to the Church.

“A miraculous cure of a real or imagined ailment, the fulfilment of an ardent wish, e.g. the birth of a son or deliverance from danger, brought the Church whose

saint had proved helpful a gift. It was deemed the more necessary to be always open-handed as both among high and low the view was widespread that gifts to the Church led to the remission of sins” (Roth, p. 250).

Added to this was the immunity protecting the property of the Church from violation at a time of incessant civil wars, looting and confiscation. Many a small man thought it wise to cede his property to the Church provided he retained its usufruct at a moderate rent.

Yet all this was not sufficient for the pious priests. With threats of eternal punishment in hell they virtually extorted more and more donations, so that as late as 811 Charlemagne reproaches them with this in the Aachen Capitulary,”’ adding that they induce people

“to commit perjury and bear false witness, so as to increase your” (the bishops’ and abbots’) ‘“wealth”.4

Unlawful donations were obtained by hook or by crook in the hope that, apart from its privileged judicial status, the Church had sufficient means to cock a snook at the judiciary. There was hardly any Gallic Church Council in the sixth and seventh centuries that did not threaten to excommunicate anyone trying to contest donations to the Church. In this way even formally invalid donations were to be made valid, and the private debts of individual clerics protected against collection.

“We see that truly contemptible means were employed to arouse, again and again, the desire for making donations. When descriptions of heavenly bliss and infernal torment were no longer effective, relics were brought from distant parts, translations were arranged and new churches built; this was a veritable business in the ninth century” (Roth, p. 254). “When the emissaries of the St. Medard monastery in Soissons by much assiduous begging obtained the body of Saint Sebastian in Rome and in addition stole that of Gregory, and both bodies were deposited in the monastery, so many people flocked to see the new saints that the whole area seemed to be swarming with locusts, and those seeking relief were cured not individually but in whole herds. The result was that the monks measured the money by the bushel, counting as many as 85, and their stock of gold amounted to 900 pounds” (p. 255).

Deceit, legerdemain, the appearance of the dead, especially of saints, and finally also, and even predominantly, the forging of documents, were used to obtain riches for the Church. The forging of documents was—to let Roth speak again—

“practised by many clerics on a vast scale ... this business began very early....

The extent of this practice can be seen from the large number of forged documents contained in our collections. Of Bréquigny’s 360 Merovingian certifi-

cates? nearly 130 are definitely forgeries.... The forged testament of Remigius was used by Hincmar of Reims to procure his church a number of properties, which were not mentioned in the genuine testament, although the latter had never been lost and Hincmar knew very well that the former was spurious.”

Even Pope John VIII tried to obtain the possessions of the St. Denis monastery near Paris by means of a document which he knew to be a forgery. (Roth, pp. 256 ff.)

No wonder then that the landed property the Church amassed through donations, extortion, guile, fraud, forgery and other criminal activities assumed enormous proportions within a few centuries. The monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, now within the perimeter of Paris, at the beginning of the ninth century owned landed property of 8,000 mansi or hides,‘ an area which Guérard estimates at 429,987 hectares with an annual yield of one million francs=800,000 marks.** If we use the same average, i.e. an area of 54 hectares with a yield of 125 francs=100 marks per hide of land, then the monasteries St. Denis, Luxeuil, St. Martin de Tours, each owning 15,000 mansi at that time, held landed property of 810,000 hectares with an income of 1'/) million marks. And this was the position after the confiscation of Church property by Pepin the Short!* Roth estimates (p. 249) that the entire property of the Church in Gaul at the end of the seventh century was probably above, rather than below, one-third of the total area.

These enormous estates were cultivated partly by unfree and in part also by free copyholders of the Church. Of the unfree, the slaves (servi) were originally subject to unmeasured service to their lords, since they were not persons in law. But it seems that for the resident slaves too a customary amount of duties and services was soon established. On the other hand, the services of the other two unfree classes, the colons and lites >*” (we have no information about the difference in their legal position at that time) were fixed and consisted in certain personal services and corvée as well as a definite part of the produce of their plot. These were long established relations of dependence. But for the Germans it was something quite new that free men were cultivating not their own or common land. It is true that the

Germans met quite frequently free Roman tenants in Gaul and in general in territories where Roman law prevailed; however during the settlement of the country care was taken to ensure that they themselves did not have to become tenants but could settle on their own land. Hence before free Franks could become somebody’s copyholders they must have in some way or other lost the allodium they received when the country was being occupied, a distinct class of landless free Franks must have come into existence.

This class arose as a result of the beginning concentration of landed property, owing to the same causes as led to this concentration, i.e., on the one hand civil wars and confiscations and on the other the transfer of land to the Church mainly due to the pressure of circumstances and the desire for security. The Church soon discovered a specific means to encourage such transfers, it allowed the donor not only to enjoy the usufruct of his land for a rent, but also to rent a piece of Church land as well. For such donations were made in two forms. Either the donor retained the usufruct of his farm during his lifetime, so that it became the property of the Church only after his death (donatio post obitum). In this case it was usual, and was later expressly laid down in the kings’ Capitularies, that the donor should be able to rent twice as much land from the Church as he had donated. Or the donation took effect immediately (cessio a die praesente) and in this case the donor could rent three times as much Church land as well as his own farm, by means of a document known as precaria, issued by the Church—which transferred the land to him, usually for the duration of his life, but sometimes for a longer or shorter period. Once a class of landless free men had come into being, some of them likewise entered into such a relationship. The precaria they were granted seem at first to have been mostly issued for five years, but in their case too they were soon made out for life.

There is scarcely any doubt that even under the Merovingians relations very similar to those obtaining on Church estates developed also on the estates of the secular magnates, and that here too free and unfree rent-paying tenants were living side by side. They must have been very numerous as early as Charles Martel’s rule for otherwise at least one aspect of the transformation of landownership relations initiated by him and completed by his son and grandson* would be inexplicable.

This transformation depended basically on two new institutions. First, in order to keep the barons of the empire tied to the Crown, the Crown lands they received were now as a rule no longer a gift, but only a ‘“‘beneficium”’, granted for life, and moreover on certain conditions nonfulfilment of which entailed the forfeiture of the land. Thus they became themselves tenants of the Crown. And secondly, in order to ensure that the free tenants of the barons turned up for military service, the latter were granted some of the district count’s official powers over the free men living on their estates and appointed their “seniores’”. For the present we need only consider the first of these two changes.

When subduing the rebellious small “tyrants” Charles probably—we have no information regarding this—confiscated their landed property according to old custom, but in so far as he reinstated them in their offices and dignities he will have granted it to them entirely or in part as a benefice. He did not yet dare to treat the Church land of recalcitrant bishops in the same way. He deposed them and gave their positions to people devoted to him, ‘though the only clerical trait of many of them was their tonsure (sola tonsura clericus). These new bishops and abbots then began at his bidding to transfer large tracts of Church land to laymen as precaria. Such instances had occurred earlier too, but it was now done on a mass scale. His son Pepin went considerably further. The Church was in decay, the clergy despised, the Pope,* hard pressed by the Langobardi, depended exclusively on Pepin’s support. He helped the Pope, favoured the extension of his ecclesiastical rule and held the Pope’s stirrup. But as a remuneration he incorporated the by far largest part of the Church land into the Crown estates and left the bishops and monasteries an amount just sufficient for their maintenance. The Church acquiesced passively in this first large-scale secularisation, the synod of Lestines confirmed it, albeit with a restrictive clause, which was, however, never observed. This huge mass of land placed the exhausted Crown estate once more on a secure footing and was to a large extent used for further grants, which in fact soon assumed the form of ordinary benefices.

Let us add here that the Church was soon able to recover from this blow. Directly after the conflict with Pepin the worthy men of God resumed their old practices. Donations came once more thick and fast from all directions, the small free peasants were still in the same sorry plight between hammer and anvil as they had been

for the past 200 years. Under Charlemagne and his successors they fared far worse still and many entrusted themselves and all their possessions to the protection of the crosier. The kings returned some of their booty to favoured monasteries, and donated vast stretches of Crown land to others, especially in Germany. The blessed times of Guntram seemed to have returned for the Church during the reign of Louis the Pious. The monastery archives contain especially numerous records of donations made in the ninth century.

The benefice, this new institution, which we must now examine closer, was not yet the future fief, but certainly its embryo. It was from the outset granted for the common span of life of both the conferrer and the recipient. If one or the other died, it reverted to the owner or his heirs. To renew the former relationship, a new transfer of property to the recipient or his heirs had to be made. Hence the benefice was subject to both “throne-fall’? and “home-fall”, to use a later terminology. Throne-fall soon fell into desuetude; the great beneficiaries became more powerful than the king. Home-fall, even at an early stage, not infrequently entailed the re-transfer of the estate to the heir of the former beneficiary. Patriciacum (Percy), an estate near Autun, which Charles Martel granted as a benefice to Hildebrannus, remained in the family passing from father to son for four generations, until in 839 the king presented it to the brother of the fourth beneficiary as full property. Similar cases occur quite frequently since the mid-eighth century.

The benefice could be withdrawn by the conferrer in all cases in which confiscation of property was applicable. And there was no shortage of such cases under the Carolingians. The risings in Alamannia under Pepin the Short, the conspiracy of the Thurirgians and the repeated risings of the Saxons“*° invariably led to new confiscations, either of free peasant land or of magnates’ estates and benefices. This occurred also, despite all treaty stipulations to the contrary, during the internal wars under Louis the Pious and his sons.*' Certain non-political crimes were also punished by confiscation.

The Crown could moreover withdraw benefices if the beneficiary neglected his general obligations as a subject, e.g., did not hand over a robber who had sought asylum, did not turn up armed for a campaign, did not pay heed to royal letters, etc.

_ Furthermore benefices were conferred on special terms, the infringement of which entailed their withdrawal, which of course did not extend to the rest of the property of the beneficiary. This

was the case, for example, when former Church estates were granted and the beneficiary failed to pay the Church the dues that went with them (nonae et decimae*). Or if he let the estate deteriorate, in which case a year’s notice was usually first given as a warning so that the beneficiary could improve matters to avert confiscation which would otherwise follow, etc. The transfer of an estate could also be tied to definite services and this was indeed done more and more frequently as the benefice gradually developed into the fief proper. But initially this was by no means necessary, especially with regard to military service, for many benefices were conferred on lower clerics, monks, and women both spiritual and lay.

Finally it is by no means impossible that in the beginning the Crown also conferred land subject to recall or for a definite period, i.e. as precaria. Some of the information and _ the procedure of the Church make this probable. But at any rate this ceased soon for the granting of land as a benefice became prevalent in the ninth century.

For the Church—and we must assume that this applied to the big landowners and beneficiaries as well—the Church, which previously granted estates to its free tenants mostly only as precaria for a definite period of time, had to follow the stimulus given by the Crown. The Church not only began to grant benefices as well, but this kind of grant became so predominant that already existing precaria were turned into lifelong ones and imperceptibly became benefices, until the former merged almost completely into the latter in the ninth century. Beneficiaries of the Church and also of secular magnates must have played an important part in the state as early as the second half of the ninth century, some of them must have ‘been men of substantial property, the founders of the future lower nobility. Otherwise Charles the Bald would not have so vigorously helped those who had been without reason deprived of their benefices by Hincmar of Laon.

The benefice, as we see, has many aspects which recur in the developed fief. Throne-fall and home-fall are common to both. The benefice, like the fief, can only be revoked under certain conditions. The social hierarchy created by the benefices, which descends from the Crown through the big beneficiaries—the predecessors of the imperial princes—to the medium _be-

Page 17 of Engels’ manuscript The Frankish Period

neficiaries—the future nobility—and from them to the free and unfree peasants, the bulk of whom lived in mark communities, formed the foundation for the future compact feudal hierarchy. Whereas the subsequent fief is, in all circumstances, held in return for services and entails military service for the feudal lord, the benefice does not yet require military service and other services are by no means inevitable. But the tendency of the benefice to become an estate held in return for services is already obvious, and spreads steadily during the ninth century; and in the same measure as it unfolds, the benefice develops into the fief.

Another factor contributed to this development, i.e., the changes which took place in the district and army structure first under the influence of big landed property and later under that of the big benefices, into which big landed property was increasingly transformed as a result of the incessant internal wars and the confiscations and retransfers associated with them.

It is evident that only the pure, classical form of the benefice has been examined in this chapter, which was certainly only a transitory form and did not even appear everywhere simultaneously. But such historical manifestations of economic relations can only be understood if they are considered in their pure state, and it is one of the chief merits of Roth that he has laid bare this classical form of the benefice, stripping it of all its confusing appendages.

THE DISTRICT AND ARMY STRUCTURE

The transformation in the position of landed property just described was bound to influence the old structure. It caused just as significant changes in the latter, and these in their turn had repercussions on the relations of landed property. For the present we shall leave aside the remodelling of the political structure as a whole and confine ourselves to an examination of the influence the new economic position exerted on the still existing remnants of the old popular structure in the districts and the army.

As early as the Merovingian period we frequently encounter counts and dukes as administrators of Crown estates. But it was not until the ninth century that certain Crown estates were definitely linked to the countship in such a way that the count of the day received their revenue. The formerly honorary office had been transformed into a paid one. In addition to this we find the counts holding royal benefices granted to them personally, which

de Frederick Engels

is something self-evident under the conditions of that time. The count thus became a powerful landowner within his county.

First of all it is obvious that the authority of the count was bound to suffer when big landed proprietors arose under him and side by side with him. People who had often enough scorned the commands of the kings under the Merovingians and early Carolingians could be expected to show even less respect for the orders of the count. Their free tenants, confident ‘of the protection of powerful landlords, just as frequently disregarded the count’s summons to appear in court or turn up for his levy to the army. This was one of the reasons that led to grants being made in the form of benefices instead of allodial grants and later to the gradual transformation of most of the formerly free big estates into benefices.

This alone was not enough to ensure that the free men living on the estates of the magnates did in fact perform their services to the State. A further change had to be introduced. The king saw himself compelled to make the big landlords responsible for the appearance of their free tenants at court and for their performance of military and other traditional services to the State in the same way as hitherto the count was held accountable for all free inhabitants of his county. And this could only be accomplished if the king gave the magnates some of the count’s official powers over their tenants. It was the landlord or beneficiary who had to make sure that his people appeared before the court, they therefore had to be summoned through him. He had to bring them to the army, therefore the levy had to be effected by him, and so that he might always be held accountable for them he had to lead them and have the right to impose military discipline on them. But it was and continued to be the king’s service that the tenants performed, and the recalcitrant was punished not by the landlord but by the royal count, and the fine went to the royal fisc.

This innovation too goes back to Charles Martel. At any rate only since his time do we find the custom of high ecclesiastical dignitaries taking the field themselves, a custom which, according to Roth, was due to the fact that Charles made his bishops join the army at the head of their tenants in order to ensure that the latter turned up.* Undoubtedly this also applied to the secular magnates and their tenants. Under Charlemagne the new arrangement is already firmly established and universally enforced.

But this caused a substantial change also in the political position of the free tenants. They who had formerly been on an equal footing with their landlord before the law, however much they depended on him economically, now became his subordinates also in the legal sphere. Their economic subjection was_ politically sanctioned. The landlord becomes Senior, Seigneur, the tenants become his homines, the “lord” becomes the master of his “man”’. The legal equality of the free men has disappeared; the man on the lowest rung of the ladder, his full freedom already greatly impaired by the loss of his ancestral land, moves down another step nearer the unfree. The new “lord” rises that much higher above the level of the old communal freedom. The basis of the new aristocracy, already established economically, is recognised by the State and becomes one of the fully operative driving wheels of the State machinery.

But alongside these homines made up of free tenants there existed yet another kind. These were impoverished free men who had voluntarily entered into the service or become retainers of a magnate. The retinue of the Merovingians were the antrustions, the magnates of that time will likewise have had their retainers. The retainers of the king were, under the Carolingians, called vassi, vasalli or gasindi, terms which had been used for unfree men in the oldest codes of common law, but had now come to mean usually free retainers. The same expressions were applied to the grandee’s retainers, who now occur quite commonly and become an increasingly numerous and important element of society and State.

Old treaty formulas show how the grandees came to have such retainers. One of them (Formulae Sirmondicae 44) for instance says:

“Since it is known to one and all that I have not the wherewithal to feed and clothe myself, I ask of your” (the lord’s) “piety that I may betake and commend myself into your protection” (mundoburdum— guardianship, as it were) “‘so that ... you will be obliged to aid me with food and clothing, according as I shall serve you and merit the same; in return, may I be obliged to render you service and obedience in the manner of a freeman (ingenuilt ordine); nor shall it be in my

power to withdraw from your authority and patronage during my lifetime but I shall spend my days under your authority and protection.” 42

This formula provides full information about the origin and nature of the ordinary relations of allegiance stripped of all alien admixtures, and it is especially revealing because it presents the extreme case of a poor devil who has been reduced to absolute penury. The entry into the seignior’s retinue was effected by the

two parties reaching a free agreement—free in the sense of Roman and modern law—often rather similar to the entry of a present-day worker into the service of a manufacturer. The “man” commended himself to the lord, and the latter accepted his commendation. It was confirmed by a handshake and an oath of allegiance. The agreement was lifelong and was only dissolved by the death of one of the two contractors. The liege man was obliged to carry out all services consistent with the position of a free man which his lord might impose on him. In return the lord | provided for his keep and rewarded him as he thought fit. A grant of land was by no means necessarily involved and in fact it certainly did not take place in all cases.

Under the Carolingians, especially since Charlemagne, this relationship was not only tolerated but directly encouraged and_ eventually, it seems, made compulsory for all ordinary free” men—by a Capitulary of 847—-and regulated by the State. For example, the liege man could unilaterally annul the relationship with his lord only if the latter attempted to kill him, hit him witha . stick, dishonour his wife or daughter or deprive him of his hereditary property (Capitulary of 813). The liege man moreover was bound to his lord as soon as he had received a value equivalent to one solidus from him. This again clearly shows how little at that time the vassal relationship was linked with the granting of land. The same stipulations are repeated in a Capitulary of 816, with the addition that the liege man was released from his obligations if his lord wrongfully attempted to _ reduce him to the status of an unfree man or failed to afford him the promised protection although he was able to do so.*

With regard to his retainers the liege lord now had the same rights and duties towards the State as the landlord or beneficiary had with regard to his tenants. As before they were liable to serve the king, but here too the liege lord was interposed between the king and his counts. The liege lord brought the vassals to court, he called them up, led them in war and maintained discipline among them, he was responsible for them and their regulation equipment. This gave him a certain degree of penal authority over his subordinates, and was the starting point of the feudal lord’s jurisdiction over his vassals, which developed later.

In these two additional institutions, the formation of the retainer system and the transfer of the official powers of the counts, that is the State, to the landlord, the holder of a Crown benefice, and the liege lord over his subordinates—both tenants and landless retainers, who were soon all to be called vassi, vasalli

or homines—in this political confirmation and strengthening of the actual power of the lord over his vassals we see an important further development of the germ of the fief system contained in the benefices. The hierarchy of social estates, from the king downwards through the big beneficiaries to their free tenants and finally to the unfree men, has in its official capacity become a recognised element of the political organisation. The State recognises that it cannot exist without its help. We shall see later how in actual fact this help was given.

The differentiation between retainers and tenants is only important in the beginning, in order to show that the dependence of free men came about in two ways. The two types of vassals very soon merged inseparably, in name as well as in fact. It became more and more customary for the big beneficiaries to commend themselves to the king, so that they were not only his beneficiaries but also his vassals. It was in the interest of the kings to make the magnates, bishops, abbots, counts and vassals swear the oath of allegiance to them personally (Annales Bertiniani 837** and other documents of the ninth century); consequently the distinction between the general oath of the subject and the specific oath of the vassal was bound to disappear soon. Thus all the great men gradually became vassals of the king. The slow transformation of the big landowners into a special estate, an aristocracy, was herewith recognised by the State, incorporated into the State structure and became one of its officially functioning elements.

Similarly the retainers of the individual big landowners gradually became tenants. Apart from providing board at the manorhouse, which after all could only be done for a small number of people, there was but one way of assuring oneself of retainers, that is by settling them on the ground, by granting them land as a benefice. A numerous militant retinue, the main prerequisite for the existence of the magnates in those times of perpetual fighting, could therefore only be obtained by granting land to the vassals. Consequently landless retainers gradually disappear from the manor while the mass of those settled on the lord’s land grows.

But the more this new element penetrated the old structure, the more it was bound to weaken the latter. The old direct exercise of State power by the king and the counts was more and more replaced by an indirect method; the seignior, to whom the common free men were increasingly tied by personal allegiance, now stood between them and the State. The count, the mainspring of the mechanism of State, was bound to recede into the background more and more, and so he did. In this situation

Charlemagne acted as he generally used to do. First he encouraged the spread of the vassal relationship, as we have seen, until the independent small free men had almost disappeared, and when the weakening of his power to which this led became obvious, he tried to help it on its feet again by State intervention. Under such an energetic and formidable ruler this could be successful in some cases, but the force of circumstances created with his help asserted itself inexorably under his weak successors.

Charlemagne’s favourite method was to send out royal emissaries (missi dominici) with plenipotentiary powers. Where the ordinary royal official, the count, was unable to stem the spread of disorder, a special envoy was expected to do so. (This has to be historically substantiated and amplified.)

There was, however, another method, and this was to put the count in such a position that he had at his disposal material means to enforce his authority which were at least equal to those of the magnates in his county. This was only possible if the count too became a big landowner, which again could be brought about in two ways. Certain estates could be attached to the office of the count in the various districts as a sort of endowment, so that the count of the day administered them ex officio and received the revenue they yielded. Many examples of this kind can be found, especially in documents, from as early as the end of the eighth century, and this arrangement is quite usual from the ninth century onwards. It is self-evident that such endowments come for the most part from the king’s fiscal estates, and as early as the time of the Merovingians we often find counts and dukes administering the king’s fiscal estates situated in their territory.

Strangely enough there are also a good many examples (and even a formula for this purpose) of bishops using Church property to endow the office of the count, of course in the form of some sort of benefice since Church property was inalienable. The munificence of the Church is too well known to allow of any other reason for this but dire need. Under the growing pressure of neighbouring secular magnates no other resort was left to the Church but to ally itself with the remnants of the state authority.

These appurtenances associated with the count’s post (res comitatus, pertinentiae comitatus) were originally quite distinct from the benefices which were granted personally to the count of the day. These too were usually distributed generously, so that, éndowment and benefices taken together, countships, originally honorary positions, had by then become very lucrative posts, and since Louis the Pious they were, like other royal favours, bestowed

The Frankish Period Tt

on people whom the king wanted to win over to his side or of whom he wanted to be sure. Thus it is said of Louis the Stammerer that he “quos potuit conciliavit [sibi], dans eis comitatus et abbatias ac villas’ (Annales Bertiniani 877).2 The term honor, formely used to designate the office with reference to the honorary rights connected with it, acquired the same meaning as benefice in the course of the ninth century. And this necessarily caused a substantial change in the character of the count’s office, as Roth rightly emphasises (p. 408). Originally the seigniory, in so far as it was of a public character, was modelled upon the office of the count and invested with some of the count’s powers. Then, in the second half of the ninth century, the seigniory had become so widespread that it threatened to outweigh the count’s office and the latter could only maintain its authority by more and more assuming the characteristics of seigniory. The counts increasingly sought, and not without success, to usurp the position of a seignior vis-a-vis the inhabitants of their districts (pagenses) with regard to both their private and their public relations. Just as the other “lords” sought to subordinate the small people in their neighbourhood, so the counts tried, in an amicable way or by force, to induce the less well-off free inhabitants of their district to become their vassals. They succeeded the more easily as the mere fact that the counts could thus abuse their official power was the best proof that the remaining common free men could expect very little protection from the royal authority and its organs. Exposed to oppression from all quarters, the smaller free men had to be glad to find a patron, even at the cost of relinquishing their allodium and receiving it back as a mere benefice. Already in the Capitulary of 811 Charlemagne complained that bishops, abbots, counts, judges and centenarii” by continuous legal chicanery and repeated summonses to the army reduced the small people to such a state that they agreed to transfer or sell their allodium to them, and that the poor bitterly lamented that they were being robbed of their property, etc. The greater part of free property in Gaul had in this way already passed into the hands of the Church, the counts and other magnates by the end of the ninth century (Hincmar, Annales Remenses 869). And somewhat later no free ‘landed property belonging to small free men existed any longer in

some provinces (Maurer, Einleitung, p. 212).* When the increasing power of the beneficiaries and the declining power of the Crown had gradually caused benefices to become hereditary, the count’s office as a rule became hereditary too. If we saw the beginnings of the subsequent nobility in the large number of royal beneficiaries, here we see the seed of the territorial sovereignty of the future princes that evolved from the district counts.

While thus the social and political system changed completely, the old constitution of the army, based on the military service of all free men—a service which was both their right and their duty—remained outwardly unchanged, except that where the new relations of dependence existed, the seignior interposed himself between his vassals and the count. However, year by year the common free men were less able to carry the burden of military service. This consisted not only of personal service; the conscript had also to equip himself and to live at his own expense during the first six months. This. continued until Charlemagne’s incessant wars knocked the bottom out of the barrel. The burden became so unbearable that in order to rid themselves of it the small free men | began en masse to transfer not only their remaining property but also their own person and their descendants to the magnates, and especially to the Church. Charlemagne had reduced the free warlike Franks to such a state that they preferred to become bondsmen or serfs to avoid going to war. That was the consequence of Charlemagne’s insistence on maintaining, and even carrying to the extreme, a military system based on universal and equal landownership by all free men, at a time when the bulk of the free men had lost all or most of their landed property.

The facts, however, were stronger than Charlemagne’s obstinacy and ambition. The old army system was no longer tenable. To equip and provision the army at the expense of the State was even less feasible in that age of a subsistence economy run practically without money or commerce. Charlemagne was therefore obliged to restrict the liability to service in such a way that equipment and food could still remain the responsibility of the men themselves. This was done in the Aachen Capitulary of 807, at a time when

the wars were reduced to mere border fights, and the continued existence of the empire seemed, on the whole, ensured. Firstly all the king’s beneficiaries without exception had to turn up, then those owning twelve hides (mansi) of land were to appear clad in armour, and therefore presumably also on horseback (the word caballarius—knight is used in the same Capitulary). Owners of three to five hides of land were also obliged to serve. Two owners having two hides of land each, three owners having one hide of land each, or six owners each possessing half a hide of land, had to send one man equipped by the others. As to free men who had no land at all but persqnal property worth five solidi, every sixth of them was to take the field and receive one solidus as pecuniary aid from each of the other five men. Moreover the obligation of the varieus parts of the country to take part in the fighting, an obligation which applied fully when the war was waged in the neighbourhood, was in the case of more distant wars reduced to between one-half and one-sixth of the total manpower, depending on the distance from the theatre of war.*

Charlemagne evidently attempted to adapt the old system to the changed economic position of the men liable to military service, to rescue what he could still rescue. But even these concessions were of no avail, and he was soon compelled to grant further exemptions in the Capitulare de exercitu promovendo.” The whole contents of this Capitulary, which is usually regarded as antecedent to that of Aachen, shows that it was undoubtedly drawn up several years later. According to it, one man has to do military service from every four hides of land, instead of three as previously. The owners of half a hide of land and those without land appear to be exempt from military service, and as regards beneficiaries their obligation is also restricted to the provision of one man for every four hides of land. Under Charlemagne’s successors the minimum number of hides of land obliged to provide one man seems even to have been raised to five.

It is strange that the mobilisation of the armoured owners of twelve hides of land seems to have encountered the greatest difficulties. At any rate, the order that they must turn up clad in armour is repeated innumerable times in the Capitularies.

Thus the common free men disappeared to an increasing extent. Just as the gradual separation from the land had driven

part of them to become vassals of the new big landlords, so the fear of being completely ruined by military service actually drove the other part into serfdom. How rapidly this submission to servitude proceeded can be seen from the polyptychon (land register) of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés monastery, which then still lay outside Paris. It was compiled by abbot Irminon early in the ninth century, and among the tenants of the monastery it lists 2,080 families of colons, 35 of lites, 220 of slaves (servi), but only eight free families.* In the Gaul of those days, however, the word colonus definitely denoted a serf. The marriage of a free woman to a colonus or slave subjected her fo the lord as defiled (deturpatam) (Capitulary of 817). Louis the Pious commanded that “colonus vel servus” (of a monastery at Poitiers) “ad naturale servitium velit nolit redeat”. They received blows (Capitularies of 853, 861, 864 and 873) and were sometimes set free (see Guérard, Irmino).“ And these enthralled peasants were by no means of Romance stock, but according to the testimony of Jacob Grimm (Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, I, p. [537]), who examined their names, “almost exclusively Frankish, far outweighing the small number of Romance ones”.

This huge rise in the unfree population in its turn changed the class relations of the Frankish society. Alongside the big landlords, who at that time rapidly emerged as a social estate in its own right, and alongside their free vassals there appeared now a class of unfree men which gradually absorbed the remnants of the common free men. But these unfree men had either themselves been free or were children of free men; those who had lived for three or more generations in hereditary bondage formed a small minority. Moreover, for the most part they were not Saxon, Wendish, or other prisoners of war brought in from outside, but natives of Frankish or Romance origin. Such people, especially when they began to constitute the bulk of the population, were not as easy to deal with as inherited or foreign serfs. They were not yet used to servitude, the blows which even the colonus received (Capitularies of 853, 861, 873) were still seen as a humiliation and not as something natural. Hence the many plots and risings of unfree men and even peasant vassals. Charlemagne himself

The Frankish Period 8]

brutally crushed an uprising of the tenants of the bishopric of Reims. In a Capitulary of 821 Louis the Pious mentions slaves (servorum) plotting in Flanders and Menapiscus (on the upper Lys). Risings of the liege men (homines) of the Mainz bishopric had to be put down in 848 and 866.* Orders to stamp out such plots are reiterated in capitularies from 779 onwards. The rising of the Stellinga in Saxony** must likewise be included here. The fact that from the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the ninth gradually a definite limit was fixed for the obligations of the unfree men, and even of the settled slaves, and that this limit, which was not to be exceeded, was laid down by Charlemagne in his Capitularies, was obviously a consequence of the threatening attitude of the enthralled masses.

The price therefore which Charlemagne had to pay for his new Roman Empire*° was the annihilation of the social estate of common free men, who had constituted the entire Frankish people at the time of the conquest of Gaul, and the division of the people into big landlords, vassals and serfs. But with the common free men the old military system collapsed, and with these two the monarchy went down. Charlemagne had destroyed the foundation of his own power. It could still sustain him, but under his successors it became evident what the work of his hands had been in reality.

NOTE: THE FRANCONIAN DIALECT 47

This dialect has received curious treatment from philologists. Whereas Grimm let it disappear into French and High German,” more recent ones grant it a spread extending from Dunkirk and Amsterdam to the Unstrut, Saale and Rezat, and in some cases even as far as the Danube and, through colonisation, to the Riesengebirge. While even a _ philologist like Moritz Heyne constructs an Old Low Franconian language‘ from a manuscript of the Heliand prepared in Werden,* a language that is almost pure Old Saxon with a very faint tinge of Franconian, Braune lumps together all the truly Low Franconian dialects without further comment as Saxon here and Dutch there.“ And finally

Arnold limits the territory conquered by the Ripuarians to the area north of the watershed of the Ahr and the Mosel, letting everything situated to the south and south-west be occupied, first by Alamanni, later exclusively by the Chatti (whom he also lumps together with the Franks), thus letting them speak Alamannic- Chattish.?

First let us reduce the Franconian language area to its real limits. Thuringia, Hesse and Main Franconia have no other claim whatever to be included in it except that in the Carolingian period they were part of what was called Francia. The language spoken east of the Spessart and Vogelsberg and the Kahler Asten is anything but Franconian. Hesse and Thuringia have their own independent dialects, being inhabited by independent peoples; in Main Franconia a mixed Slav, Thuringian and Hessian population was permeated with Bavarian and Frankish elements and evolved its own peculiar dialect. Only if one employs as the main criterion the extent to which the High German sound shift penetrated into these dialects can these three linguistic branches be assigned to Franconian. Yet as we shall see, it is precisely this procedure which creates all the confusion when the Franconian language is assessed by non-Franks.

Let us commence with the oldest records and first view Moritz Heyne’s* so-called Old Low Franconian in the correct light. The so-called Cotton Manuscript of the Heliand, prepared in Werden and now preserved in Oxford, is supposed to be Old Low Franconian because it was produced in the monastery of Werden, still on Frankish soil though close to the Saxon frontier. Here the old tribal boundary is, to this day, the boundary between Berg and Mark; of the abbeys situated in between, Werden belongs to Franconia, Essen to Saxony. Werden is bounded in the immediate vicinity, to the east and north, by indisputably Saxon communities; in the plain between the Ruhr and the Lippe the Saxon language pushes forward in places almost to the Rhine. The fact that a Saxon work is copied in Werden, obviously by a Frank, and that here and there this Frank has let slip from his pen Franconian word forms, is far from being sufficient reason to declare the language of the copy to be Franconian. Apart from the Cotton Heliand Heyne considers as Low Franconian a number of

* Kleine altsdchsische und altniederfrdinkische Grammatik by Moritz Heyne,

Paderborn, 1873.

fragments from Werden that show the same character, and the remains of a psalm translation,* which according to him originated in the area of Aachen, whereas Kern (Glossen in der Lex Salica)” states quite simply that it is Dutch. In fact it does contain purely Dutch forms on the one hand, but also genuine Rhenish Franconian forms and even traces of the High German sound shift. It obviously originated on the frontier between Dutch and Rhenish Franconian, say between Aachen and Maastricht. Its language is much later than that of the two Heliand manuscripts.

The Cotton Heliand alone is enough, however, for us to establish beyond doubt from the few Franconian forms that occur in it some of the main differences between Franconian and Saxon.

I. In all Ingaevonian dialects the three persons of the present indicative plural all have the same ending, namely a dental preceded by a vowel: Old Saxon -d, Anglo-Saxon -dh, Old Frisian -th (which probably also stands for -dh). Thus Old Saxon hebbiad means ‘“‘we have, you have, they have’”’; similarly, all three persons of fallan, gewinnan are the same: fallad, winnad. It is the third person that has taken over all three, but, mark well, with the specifically Ingaevonian loss of n before -d or -dh, the loss affecting all the three dialects mentioned. Of all living dialects, only Westphalian has preserved this peculiarity; to this very day Westphalian has wi, 71, se hebbed, etc. The other Saxon dialects no longer retain this feature, nor does West Frisian; they differentiate the three persons.‘

The West Rhenish psalms“ have, like Middle High German, -n in the first person plural, -t in the second, -nt in the third. However, at times the Cotton Heliand has, besides the Saxon forms, quite different forms: thol6nd—they suffer, gornénd—you complain, and as the imperative, mdrient—announce, seggient— say, where Saxon requires tholod, gornéd, mariad, seggiad. These forms are not merely Franconian, they are in fact genuine local Werden, Berg dialect to this day. In Bergish we also find that all three persons of the present plural are the same, but end not as in

Saxon in -d, but as in Franconian in -nt. As opposed to Markish wi hebbed, there right on the border they say wi hant, and as in the above imperative seggient they say seient ens—[German] sagt einmal (tell me). On the basis of this simple observation, that here in Bergish the three persons have been levelled, Braune and others* have quite simply declared the entire Bergish highlands to be Saxon. The rule certainly advanced into the area from Saxony; unfortunately, however, it is put into effect in the Franconian manner, thus proving the reverse of what it is intended to prove.

The loss of n before dentals in the Ingaevonian dialects is not restricted to this case; it is less common in Old Frisian, but fairly widespread in Old Saxon and Anglo-Saxon: mudh—Mund [mouth], kudh—kund [known], us—wuns [us], odhar—etn anderer [other]. The Frankish copyist of the Heliand in Werden twice has the Franconian form andar for odhar.” The Werden tax registers * alternate between the Franconian form of the names Reinswind, Meginswind and the Saxon Reinswid and Meginswid. The psalms of the left bank of the Rhine,° on the other hand, regularly have munt, kunt, uns; only once have the so-called Lipsius Glosses” (excerpted from the lost manuscript of these psalms) farkutha abominabiles instead of farkuntha. Similarly, the Old Salic records have consistently preserved the n in the names Gund, Segenand, Chlodosindis, Ansbertus, etc., which is irrelevant. The modern Franconian dialects regularly have the n (sole exception in Bergish is the form os—vwuns [us)).

II. The linguistic records from which the so-called Old Saxon grammar is usually constructed all belong to south-western . Westphalia, Münster, Freckenhorst, Essen. The language of these records shows a few essential deviations not only from the general Ingaevonian forms, but also from such forms as have been preserved for us in proper names from Engern and Eastphalia as genuine Old Saxon; however, they are in curious agreement with Franconian and Old High German. The latest grammarian of the dialect, Cosijn, therefore even terms it Old West Saxon.*

Since in this investigation we must almost totally rely on proper names in Latin documents, the demonstrable differences in form between West and East Saxon can only be few in number; they are restricted to two cases, but these are very important.

1. Anglo-Saxon and Old Frisian have -a in the genitive plural of

all declensions. Old West Saxon, Old Franconian and Old High German, on the other hand, have -d. So what is the correct Old Saxon form? Should this dialect in fact deviate from the Ingaevonian rule on this point?

The documents from Engern and Eastphalia provide the answer. In Stedieraburg, Horsadal, Winethahtisen, Edingahisun, Magathaburg and many other names, the first part of the compound is in the genitive plural and has -a. Even in Westphalia the -a has still not entirely disappeared: the Freckenhorst Roll once has Aningera l6 and Wernera-Holthison, and the -a in Osnabriick is likewise an old genitive plural.

2. Similarly, the weak masculine in Franconian, as in Old High

German, ends in -o, as opposed to Gothic-Ingaevonian -a. In Old West Saxon -o is likewise established as the rule; thus another deviation from Ingaevonian usage. But this by no means applies to Old Saxon as a whole. Not even in Westphalia did -o apply without exception; alongside -o the Freckenhorst Roll already has a whole succession of names in -a (Siboda, Uffa, Asica, Hassa, Wenda, etc.,); the Paderborn records in Wigand*’ nearly always show -a, only exceptionally -o; in documents from Eastphalia -a dominates almost exclusively; so that Jakob Grimm (Geschichte der deutschen Sprache)” already comes to the conclusion that there can be no mistaking the fact that -a and -an (in oblique cases) was the original Saxon form common to all parts of the nation. The advance of -o instead of -a was not restricted to Westphalia either. At the beginning of the 15th century the East Frisian men’s names of the chronicles, etc., almost regularly have -o; Fokko, Occo, Enno, Smelo, etc., as opposed to the earlier -a still preserved in odd cases in West Frisian.

It may therefore be taken for established that both deviations of West Saxon from the Ingaevonian rule are not originally Saxon but caused by foreign influence. This influence is easily explained by the fact that West Saxony was formerly Frankish territory. Only after the departure of the main mass of the Franks did the Saxons move across the Osning and Egge gradually up to the line that even today divides Mark and Sauerland from Berg and Siegerland. The influence of the Franks who remained behind and have now merged with the Saxons shows in those two cases of -o

8*

instead of -a; it is still unmistakable in the present-day dialects.

III. A peculiarity of the Rhenish Franconian language which extends from the Ruhr to the Mosel is the ending of the 1st [person] present indicative in -n, which is best preserved in cases * where it is followed by a vowel: dat don ek—das tue ich [I do that], ek han—ich habe [I have] (Bergish). This verb form applies to the whole lower Rhine and the Mosel, at least as far as the Lotharingian border: don, han. The same peculiarity is already found in the left-bank Rhenish psalms: biddon—ich bitte [I ask], wirthon—ich werde [I become], though not consistently.” This-n is lacking in the Salic dialect; there even the oldest record” has ec forsacho, gelobo. It is also missing in Dutch. Old West Saxon is here distinct from Franconian in so far as it knows this -n in one conjugation only (the so-called second weak): skawén—ich schaue [1 look], thionén—ich diene [I serve], etc. It is quite alien to Anglo-Saxon and Old Frisian. We may therefore assume that this -n is also a Franconian remnant in Old West Saxon.

Apart from the numerous proper names preserved in documents, etc., and the glosses of the Lex Salica, which are often distorted past recognition, we have almost no remains of the Salic dialect at all. Nevertheless, Kern (Die Glossen in der Lex Salica) has removed a considerable number of these distortions and established the text, in many cases with certainty, in others with great likelihood, demonstrating that it is written in a language that is the immediate precursor of Middle and Modern Dutch. But the material reconstructed in this way is naturally not directly applicable for the grammar. Apart from this, all we possess is the brief abjuration charm‘ added to the Capitulary of Carloman of 743 and probably drawn up at the synod of Lestines, thus in Belgium. And here we come across two characteristic Franconian words right at the outset: ec forsacho—ich entsage [I renounce]. Ec for ich [I] is widespread among the Franks even today. In Trier and Luxemburg eich, in Cologne and Aachen éch, in Bergish ek. Though written Dutch has ik, ek is often heard in the vernacular, particularly in Flanders. The Old Salic names Segenandus, Segemundus, Segefredus are unanimous in showing e for 1.

In forsacho, ch stands for g between vowels: this occurs elsewhere in the records (rachineburgius) and is even today a sign

of all the Franconian dialects from the Palatinate to the North Sea. We shall return to these two chief characteristics of Franconian— e often for i, and ch between vowels for g—in the individual dialects.

As the result of the above investigation, which may be compared with Grimm’s statements about Old Franconian in the Geschichte der deutschen Sprache at the end of the first volume [p. 547], we may posit this thesis, which anyway is hardly disputed now: that in the 6th and 7th centuries Franconian was already a dialect of its own, forming the transition between High German, in particular Alamannic, and Ingaevonian, in particular Saxon and Frisian, and at that time still completely at the Gothic-Low German stage of shifting. But once this has been conceded it has also been acknowledged that the Franks were not a mish-mash of different peoples allied by external circumstances, but a main German people in their own right, the Iscaevonians, who _ probably absorbed foreign constituents at different times but also had the strength to assimilate them. Similarly we may regard it as proven that each of the main branches of the Franconian people already spoke a peculiar dialect at an early stage, that the language divided into Salic and Ripuarian and that many distinguishing peculiarities of the old dialects still live on in the present-day vernacular.

Let us now move on to these still living dialects.

1. There is no longer any doubt that Salic lives on in the two

Netherlands dialects, Flemish and Dutch, and at its purest in the areas that have been Frankish ever since the 6th century. For after the great tidal waves of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries had wiped out almost all .Zeeland and formed the Zuider Zee, the Dollart and the Jade, thus breaking the geographical, and also the political, cohesion of the Frisians, the remains of old Frisian liberty succumbed to the pressure of the surrounding landed gentry,” and with it, almost everywhere, the Frisian language, too. To the west it was hemmed in or wholly suppressed by Dutch, to the east and north by Saxon and Danish, in all cases leaving behind strong traces in the invading language. In the 16th and 17th centuries the old Frisian area of Zeeland and Holland became the centre and mainstay of the struggle for independence in the Netherlands,” just as they were already the seat of the main trading towns of the country. Thus it was chiefly here that the modern

written language of the Netherlands came into being, absorbing Frisian elements, words and word forms, which can be clearly distinguished from the Franconian foundation. On the other hand, the Saxon language advanced from the east on to formerly Frisian and Frankish territory. It must be left to detailed research to draw up the exact boundaries; purely Salic are only the Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium, North Brabant, Utrecht, along with Gelderland and Overijssel with the exception of the easterly, Saxon areas.

Between the French linguistic boundary on the Maas and the Saxon boundary north of the Rhine, the Salians and the Ripuarians clashed. We shall discuss later the matter of the demarcation line, which here too has yet to be ascertained by detailed study. But first let us consider the grammatical peculiarities of Dutch. |

As for the vowels, we see at once that 7 is replaced by e in the true Franconian manner: brengen—bringen [bring], kreb— Krippe [crib], hemel—Himmel [sky], geweten—Gewissen [conscience], ben— bin [am], stem—Stimme [voice]. This is even more frequently the case in Middle Dutch: gewes—gewiss [certain], es—ist [is], selver— Silber [silver], blent—blind [blind], where Modern Dutch has gewis, is, zilver, blind. Similarly in the vicinity of Ghent I find two places, Destelbergen and Desteldonck, according to which Distel [thistle] is to this day Destel. Middle Dutch, raised on pure Franconian soil, is here in exact agreement with Ripuarian, while the Modern Dutch written language, having been exposed to Frisian influence, is less so.

Further, again in agreement with Ripuarian, o replaces u before m or n plus following consonant, though not so consistently as in Middle Dutch and Ripuarian. Beside konst, gonst, kond, Modern Dutch has kunst, gunst, kund [art, favour, known]; yet both agree in having mond—Mund [mouth], hond—Hund [dog], jong—jung [young], ons—uns [us].

In contrast to Ripuarian, the long 7 (ij) has become ei as far as pronunciation is concerned, which does not yet seem to have been the case in Middle Dutch. However, this ei is not pronounced as High German ei=ai, but really as e+1, though not quite as thin as, e.g., the e7 of the Danes and Slavs. Scarcely divergent from this sound is the diphthong written not 74 but ei. Corresponding to High German au we find ou, ouw.

The umlaut has disappeared from the inflexion. In the declension singular and plural have the same stem vowel, as do indicative and subjunctive in the conjugation. On the other hand,

umlaut does occur in word formation in two forms: 1. in the [mutation] of a to e by 1 common to all post-Gothic dialects; 2. in a form peculiar to Dutch that did not develop until later. Middle Dutch and Ripuarian still both have hus—Haus [house], brun— braun [brown], rum—gerdumig [roomy], tun—Zaun [fence], plural huse, brune. Modern Dutch has only the forms huts, bruin, ruim, tuin (ui1=High German eu), which are alien to Middle Dutch and Ripuarian. On the other hand, eu is already displacing short o (High German u) in Middle Dutch: jeughet, beside joghet, Modern Dutch jeugd—Jugend [youth]; doghet— Tugend [virtue], dor— Tür [door], kor— Wahl [choice], alongside the forms with eu; Modern Dutch permits the forms deugd, keur, deur only. This is in perfect agreement with the eu that developed from the 12th century in Northern French for Latin stressed o. Kern draws attention to a third case*: the mutated form ei from é (ee) in Modern Dutch. All these three forms of umlaut are unknown in Ripuarian, as in the other dialects, and are a special characteristic of Dutch.

Ald, alt, old, olt, uld, ult turn into oud, out. This transition is already present in Middle Dutch, in which, however, guldin, hulde, sculde still occur alongside goudin, houde, scoude (sollte) [should], so that it is possible to establish roughly the time when it was introduced. It is also peculiar to Dutch, at least as opposed to all the other continental Germanic dialects; it does, however, exist in the Lancashire dialect of English: gowd, howd, owd for gold, hold, old.

As far as the consonants are concerned, Dutch has no pure g (the guttural Italian, French or English g). This consonant is pronounced as a strongly aspirated gh, which in certain sound combinations does not differ from the deeply guttural (Swiss, Modern Greek or Russian) ch. We have seen that this transition of g into ch was already known in Old Salic. It is also found in a part of Ripuarian and the Saxon dialects that developed on formerly Frankish soil, e.g. in Munsterland, where, as in Bergish, even initial 7, especially in foreign words, on occasion sounds like ch, and it is possible to hear Choseph and even Chahr (Jahr) [year]. If M. Heyne had taken this into account,” he might have spared himself his difficulty with the frequent confusion and mutual alliteration of j, g and ch in the Heliand.

In some cases Dutch retains the initial wr: wringen—ringen [ring], wreed—cruel, harsh, wreken—rdchen [avenge]. There is also a remnant of this in Ripuarian.

The softening of the diminutive -ken to -tje, -je is derived from Frisian: mannetje—Médnnchen [little man], bietje— Bienchen [little bee], halsje— Hadilschen [little throat], etc. But k is also retained: vrouken — Frauchen [little woman], hoedeken— Hiitchen [little hat]. Flemish better preserves the k, at least in the vernacular; the famous little man in Brussels is called Manneken-Pis.° The French have thus borrowed their mannequin, and the English their manikin, from Flemish. The plural of both endings is -s: vroukens, mannetjes. We shall come across this -s again in Ripuarian.

In common with Saxon and even Scandinavian dialects, Dutch shows the loss of d between vowels, especially betwen two e’s: leder and leer, weder and weer, neder and neer, vader and vaer, moeder and moer— Mutter [mother].

The Dutch declension shows a complete mixture of strong and weak forms, so that, as the plural umlaut is also lacking, the Dutch plural forms only in the rarest cases agree with even the Ripuarian or Saxon ones, and this, too, is a very tangible characteristic of the language.

Common to Salic and Ripuarian and all the Ingaevonian dialects is the loss ot the nominative indicator in er, der, wer [he, the, who]: Dutch hy, de (article) and die (demonstrative pronoun), we.

To go into the conjugation would take us too far. What has been said here will suffice to distinguish the present-day Salic language everywhere from the neighbouring dialects. Closer examination of the Dutch dialects is bound to bring to light much of importance.

II. Rhenish Franconian. With this term I denote all the remaining Franconian dialects. I do not place Salic in opposition to Ripuarian in the old manner, and there is a very good reason for this.

Even Arnold* has drawn attention to the fact that the Ripuarians in the proper sense occupied a relatively limited area, the southern boundary of which is more or less marked by the two places Reifferscheid near Adenau and near Schleiden. This is correct in so far as in this way the purely Ripuarian territory is demarcated linguistically tog from the territories occupied by genuine Ripuarians after, or at the same time as, other German tribes. Since the name Low Franconian has already acquired another meaning which also includes Salic, I am left only with the

term Ripuarian—in the narrower sense—to denote the group of closely related dialects which extend from the Salic linguistic boundary up to this line.

1. Ripuarian. The dividing line between this group of dialects

and the Salic by no means coincides with the Dutch-German border. On the contrary, the major part of the district Rees, where in the area of Wesel Salic, Ripuarian and Saxon meet, still belongs to Salic on the right bank of the Rhine. On the left bank the areas of Kleve and Geldern are Salic, roughly as far as a line drawn from the Rhine between Xanten and Wesel, south of the village of Vluyn (west of Mors) and from there south-west towards Venlo. A more exact definition of the boundary is only possible on the spot since many Ripuarian names have been preserved on the maps in Salic-Dutch form as the result of many years of Dutch administration not only in Geldern but also in the county of Mors.

From the area of Venlo upwards the greater part of the right bank of the Maas seems to be Ripuarian, so that here the political border nowhere crosses Salic territory but only Ripuarian and this extends almost as far as Maastricht. Names in -heim (not -hem) and the specifically Ripuarian ending -ich occur here in great numbers on Dutch territory, further south already names in -broich (Dutch -broek), e.g. Dallenbroich near Roermond; likewise in -rade (Bingelrade near Sittard, plus Amstenrade, Hobbelrade and 6 or 7 others); the little piece of German territory that has fallen to Belgium to the right of the Maas, is entirely Ripuarian (cf. Kriitzenberg, 9 kilometres from the Maas, with Kruisberg, north of Venlo). Indeed, left of the Maas, in the Belgian so-called Limburg I find Kessenich near Maaseyk, Stockhetm and Reekheim on the Maas, Gellik near Maastricht as proof that no purely Salic population lives here.

The Ripuarian border with Saxony starts from the area of Wesel, running south-east at an increasing distance from the Rhine, between Milheim on the Ruhr and Werden on the Franconian side and Essen on the Saxon side, to the border between Berg and Mark, here even now the border between the Rhine Province and Westphalia. It does not leave this border until south of Olpe, where it proceeds eastwards, dividing the Siegerland as Franconian from the Saxon Sauerland. Further east, the Hessian dialect soon takes over.

The above-mentioned southern border with the dialect which I term Middle Franconian is in rough agreement with the southern borders of the old districts of Avalgau, Bonngau and Eiflia, and from there runs westwards to Wallonia, keeping rather to the

south. This area thus circumscribed includes the big old district of Ripuaria as well as parts of the districts adjoining it to the north and west.

As already stated, Ripuarian agrees in many respects with Dutch, but in such a way that Middle Dutch is closer to it than Modern Dutch. Ripuarian agrees with Modern Dutch in its pronunciation of ei=e+i and ou for au, the transition of 7 to e, which goes much further in Ripuarian and Middle Dutch than in Modern Dutch: the Middle Dutch gewes, es, blend, selver (silver) are still good Ripuarian to this day. Similarly, and consistently so, u changes into o before m or n with a following consonant: jong, lomp, domm, konst. If this following consonant is a d or a ft, this changes to g or k in some dialects; e.g. honk— Hund [dog], plural héng, where the softening to g is an aftereffect of the loss of the final vowel, e.

However, the situation as regards umlaut in Ripuarian is very different from that of Dutch; it is in general agreement with High German, and in odd exceptions with Saxon (e.g. hanen for Hahne [cocks]).

Initial wr has become hardened to fr, retained in fringen—to wring water out of a cloth, etc., and fréd (Dutch wreed) with the meaning hardy, weather-beaten.

For er, der, wer it has hé, dé, wé.

The declension is midway between High German and Saxon. Plural forms in -s are common, but are hardly ever in agreement with the Dutch; this -s becomes -r in local High German in correct memory of the linguistic development.

The diminutive -ken, -chen is changed to -schen after n: mannschen; the plural has -s as in Dutch (mdnnsches). Both forms extend all the way into Lorraine.

r is lost before s, st, d, t, z, the preceding vowel remaining short in some dialects, being lengthened in others. Thus hart [hard] becomes hatt (Bergish), haad (Cologne). In the process st becomes scht through Upper German influence: Durst [thirst]— doascht (Bergish), ddscht (Cologne).

Similarly, initial sl, sw, st, sp have become schl, etc., through High German influence.

As in Dutch, pure g is unknown in Ripuarian. Some of the dialects on the Salic border, as well as Bergish, have aspirated gh for initial and medial g, though softer than in Dutch. Thé rest have j. Final g is everywhere pronounced as ch, though not like the hard Dutch sound, but like the soft Rhenish Franconian ch, which sounds like a hardened j. The essentially Low German

character of Ripuarian is attested by terms such as boven for oben [above].

The majority of the voiceless consonants are everywhere at the first stage of the sound shift. Only t and medial and final k, occasionally p, show the High German sound shift in the southern dialects: they have lésze for loten—lassen [let], holz for holt [wood], rich for rik—reich [rich], éch for ek—zich [I], pief for pipe— Pfeife [pipe]. But et, dat, wat and a few others are retained.

It is this not even consistently carried out intrusion of the High German sound shift in three cases on which the usual demarcation of Middle and Low Franconian is based. But in this way a group of dialects that belong together on. account of definite features in the sound system, as demonstrated, which are still recognised in the popular mind as belonging together, are torn apart arbitrarily and on the basis of a characteristic that is here quite fortuitous.

Quite fortuitous, I say. Each of the other Central German dialects, Hessian, Thuringian, Upper Saxon, etc., is generally speaking at a specific stage of the High German sound shift. They may show rather less shifting on the Low Saxon border and rather more on the Upper German border, but that is at most only enough to justify local differences. Franconian, on the other hand, shows no shifting at all on the North Sea, Maas and Lower Rhine, on the Alamannic border almost entirely Alamannic shifting; in between there are at least three intermediate stages. The shift thus penetrated into Rhenish Franconian when it had already developed independently, splitting it up into several pieces. The last trace of this shift need not by any means vanish on the border of a particular group of dialects that was already in existence; it may die out in the midst of such a group, as it in fact does. On the other hand, the truly dialect-forming influence of the shift, as we shall see, does indeed cease on the border of two dialect groups that were already different beforehand. And did not the schl, schw, etc., and the final scht come to us from High German in a similar way and at an even later date? These however—at least the first—even go deep into Westphalia.

The Ripuarian dialects formed a fixed group long before some of them learnt to shift t and medial and final k and p. How far this change was able to advance within the group was and remains for the group a matter of chance. The dialect of Neuss is identical with that of Krefeld and München-Gladbach—apart from minor differences that a stranger cannot hear at all. Nevertheless, one is supposed to be Middle Franconian, the other Low Franconian. The dialect of the Berg industrial country merges into that of the

94 | Frederick Engels

south-west Rhine plain in imperceptible stages. And yet they are supposed to belong to two totally different groups. For anyone who is at home in the region it is obvious that book-learning is here forcing the living dialects, with which it is scarcely acquainted if at all, into the Procrustean bed of characteristics constructed a priort.

As a result of this purely superficial distinction the southern Ripuarian dialects are lumped together into a so-called Middle Franconian with other dialects from which they diverge, as we shall see, far more than they do from the so-called Low Franconian. Owing to the same superficial distinction, a narrow strip is held back because you are at a loss what to do with it and are finally obliged to declare one part Saxon and another Dutch, which is in glaring contradiction to the state of affairs in these dialects.

Let us take, for instance, the Bergish dialect, which Braune without much ado calls Saxon.’ It forms, as we have seen, all three persons plural of the present indicative in the same way, but as in Franconian, with the ancient form -nt. It regularly has o instead of u before m and n followed by a consonant, which according to the same Braune is definitely un-Saxon and _ specifically Low Franconian. It agrees with the other Ripuarian dialects in all the characteristics set out above. While it imperceptibly merges into the dialect of the Rhine plain from village to village, from farm to farm, it is most sharply separated from the Saxon dialect on the Westphalian border. Perhaps nowhere else in all Germany is there such an abruptly drawn linguistic border as here. And what a distance between the languages! The whole vowel system seems to _ be turned upside down; the sharp Low Franconian ei contrasts abruptly with the broadest ai, just as ou contrasts with au; not one of the many diphthongs and vocalic glides is in agreement; here sch as in the rest of Germany, there s-ch as in Holland; here wi hant, there wi hebbed; here the dual forms get and enk used as the plural (German ihr and euch), there only i, 72, and wt, jii; here the sparrow is called common Ripuarian Moédsche, there common Westphalian Liining. Not to mention other peculiarities specific to the Bergish dialect which also suddenly vanish here on the border.

The individuality of a dialect is most apparent to the stranger if the person in question is not speaking dialect but High German, which is more intelligible to the stranger, and which in the case of most Germans is, of course, strongly coloured by their respective

dialect. But then the allegedly Saxon inhabitant of the Berg. industrial district is for the non-native quite indistinguishable from the inhabitant of the Rhine plain, who is supposed to be Middle Franconian, except for the somewhat more harshly aspirated gh, where the other says 7, A man from Heckinghaus in Berg (from Oberbarmen, left of the Wupper), however, and a man from Langerfeld in Mark, who lives scarcely a kilometre further east, are further apart in the local High German of everyday life than the man from Heckinghaus and one from Coblenz, let alone anyone from Aachen or Bonn.

The advance of the shift of t and final k makes such a small impression on the Rhenish Frank himself as a linguistic boundary that even in an area well known to him he will first have to reflect where the border runs between t and z, k and ch, and that, when crossing this border, he finds that one comes almost as naturally to him as the other. This is made even easier by the many High German words with shifted sz, z, ch and f that have entered the dialects. A striking example is afforded by the old Bergish penal code from the 14th century (Lacomblet, Archiv, I, p. 79 ff.*). There we find zo, utss (aus), zween, bezahlen; alongside them in the same sentence: setien, dat nutteste (niitzeste); likewise Dache, redelich beside reicket (reicht); Upladen, upheven, hulper (Helfer) beside verkouffen. In another paragraph p. 85 it has alternately zo and tho—zu. In short, the dialects of the mountain and the plain are continually getting mixed up without this disturbing the scribe in the slightest. As usual, this final wave with which the High German sound shift washed over Frankish territory was also the weakest and shallowest. It is surely of interest to mark out the line showing how far this wave extends. But this line cannot be a dialect boundary; it is not able to tear apart an independent group of anciently and closely related dialects and provide the pretext for allocating the fragments thus violently divided to more distant groups in contradiction with all linguistic facts.

2. Middle Franconian. From the above it is quite obvious that I

place the northern border of Middle Franconian much further to the south than is customary.

From the fact that the Middle Franconian region on the left bank of the Rhine seems to have been in the possession of the Alamanni at the time of Clovis, Arnold” finds reason to investigate

the place-names there for traces of Alamannic setthement, and comes to the result that it is possible to prove the existence of a pre-Frankish, Alamannic population as far as the line Cologne- Aachen; the traces, most numerous in the south, naturally becoming rarer and rarer to the north. The place-names, so he says, point to

‘“‘a temporary advance by the Alamanni as far as and beyond the area around Coblenz and Aachen, and also a longer occupation of the Wetterau and the southern areas of Nassau. For the names with the genuine Alamannic endings -ach, -brunn, -felden, -hofen, -ingen, -schwand, -stetten, -wangen, and -weiler, which nowhere occur in purely Frankish territory, are found scattered from Alsace onwards over the entire Palatinate, Rhenish Hesse and Rhenish Prussia, only they become rarer to the north, giving way more and more to the Franconian names par excellence in -bach, -berg, -dorf, -born, -feld, -hausen, -heim, and -scheid” (Deutsche Urzeit, p. [140)).

Let us first examine the allegedly Alamannic names of the Middle Franconian country. I have not found the endings -brunn, -stetten, -felden, -wangen anywhere on the Reymann map” (which I am using here, let it be said once and for all). The ending -schwand occurs once: Metzelschwander Hof near Winnweiler, and then again Schwanden north of Landstuhl. Thus both in the Upper Franconian Palatinate, with which we are not concerned here. In -ach we have along the Rhine Kreuznach, Bacharach, Hirzenach near St. Goar, Riibenach near Coblenz (Ribiniacus of the Spruner- Menke District Map”), Andernach (Antunnacum of the Romans), as well as Wassenach. Now, as the Romanised Celtic ending -acum occurs generally the whole length of the left bank of the Rhine in Roman times— Tolbiacum (Ziilpich), Juliacum (Jülich), Tiberiacum (Ziewerich) near Bergheim, Mederiacum—in the majority of these cases the choice of the form -ach for -ich, at most, might betray Alamannic influence. Only one, Hirzenach (=Hirschenbach), is definitely German, and this was formerly called Hirzenowe, Hirschenau, not Hirschenbach, according to the district map. But how then do we explain Wallach, between Biderich and Rheinberg, close by the Salic border? At any rate it is certainly not Alamannic.

In the Mosel region there are also a few -ach: Irmenach east of Bernkastel, Waltrach, Crettenach near Trier, Mettlach on the Saar. In Luxemburg Echternach, Medernach, Kanach; in Lorraine on the right of the Mosel only: Montenach, Rodelach, Brettnach. Even if we wished to concede that these names indicate an Alamannic settlement, then it is only a thinly scattered one, which, moreover, does not extend beyond the southernmost part of the Middle Franconian territory.

There remain -wetler, -hofen, and -ingen which require closer examination.

Firstly, the ending -weiler is not properly speaking Alamannic but the provincial Latin villarium, villare, and is found only very exceptionally outside the old frontiers of the Roman Empire. The Germanisation of villare to weiler was not the privilege of the Alamanni, but they had a predilection for using this ending also for new settlements in large numbers. In so far as Roman villaria occurred, the Franks too were obliged to take over the ending, Germanising it as wilare, later weiler, or drop it altogether. Probably they did now one, now the other, just as they certainly gave new settlements names in -wetler here and there, but far more rarely than the Alamanni. Arnold* cannot find any important places in -weiler north of Eschweiler near Aachen and Ahrweiler. But the present importance of the place has nothing to do with it; the fact of the matter is that on the left bank of the Rhine the names in -weiler extend almost as far as the Salic border to the north (Garzweiler and Holzweiler are less than five miles from the nearest Dutch-speaking place of the Geldern area) and north of the line Eschweiler-Ahrweiler there are at least twenty of them. They are, understandably, commonest in the vicinity of the old Roman road from Maastricht via Julich to Cologne, two of them, Walwiller and Nyswiller, even being on Dutch territory; are these Alamannic settlements too?

Further south they hardly occur in the Eifel at all; the Malmedy section (Reymann, No. 159) has not one single case. In Luxemburg, too, they are rare, as on the lower Mosel and as far as the crest of the Hunsrtick. Yet they frequently occur on the upper Mosel on both sides of the river, becoming increasingly common towards the east, becoming more and more the dominating ending to the east of Saarlouis. But this is where the Upper Franconian language begins, and here it is not disputed by anyone that the Alamanni had occupied the country before the Franks.

Thus for the Middle Franconian and Ripuarian area the -weiler do not indicate Alamannic setthkement any more than do the many -villers in France.

Let us move on to -hofen. This ending is still less exclusively Alamannic. It occurs throughout the Franconian area, including present-day Westphalia, which was later occupied by the Saxons. On the right bank of the Rhine just a few examples: Wehofen near Ruhrort, Mellinghofen and Eppinghofen near Duisburg, Benningho-

fen near Mettmann, another Eppinghofen near Dinslaken, in Westphalia Kellinghofen near Dorsten, Westhofen near Castrop, Wellinghofen, Wichlinghofen, Niederhofen, two Benninghofens, Berghofen, Westhofen, Wandhofen, all on the Hellweg, etc. Ereshofen on the Agger, Martis villa, reaches back into pagan times, and the very designation of the god of war as Eru proves that no Alamanni are conceivable here: they called themselves Tiuwari, thus calling the god not Eru but Tiu, later shifted to Ziu?

On the left bank of the Rhine it is even more difficult to demonstrate the Alamannic derivation of -hofen. There is another Eppinghofen south-east of Xanten, hence possibly Salic already, and from there on to the south the whole Ripuarian area is teeming with -hofen, alongside -hof for single farms. But if we proceed to Salic country, it gets even worse. The Maas is accompanied by -hofen on either side, from the French linguistic boundary onwards. For the sake of brevity let us pass to the west bank straight away. In Holland and Belgium we find at least seven Ophovens, in Holland Kinckhoven, etc; for Belgium let us first turn to the section for Léwen (Reymann, No. 139). Here we find Ruykhoven, Schalkhoven, Bommershoven, Wintershoven, Mettecoven, Helshoven, Engelmannshoven near Tongern; Zonhoven, Reekhoven, Konings-Hoven near Hasselt, further west Bogenhoven, Schuerhoven, Nieuwenhoven, Gippershoven, Baulershoven near St. Truyen; most westerly Gussenhoven and Droenhoven east and north-east Tirlemont (Thienen). The section for Turnhout (No. 120) has at least 33 -hoven, most of them on Belgian territory. Further to the south-west the -hove (the dative -n is regularly dropped here) skirt the entire French linguistic border: from Heerlinkhove and Nieuwenhove near Ninove, which is itself a Romanised -hove,— omitting the intermediate ones, about ten in number—to Ghyverinckhove and Pollinchove near Dixmuyden and _ Volckerinckhove near St. Omer in French Flanders. Nieuwenhove occurs three times, which proves that the ending is still living among the people. In addition a great number of single farms in -hof. On this basis the supposedly exclusively Alamannic character of -hofen may be judged.

Finally to -ingen. The designation of common descent with -ing, -ung, is common to all the Germanic peoples. Since settlement took place by kin, the ending plays an important part in place-names everywhere. Sometimes it is linked, in the genitive plural, with a local ending: Wolvarad-inga-husun near Minden, Snotingaham

(Nottingham) in England. Sometimes the plural alone stands for the designation ‘of place: Flissingha (Vlissingen), Phladirtinga (Vlaardingen), Crastlingi in Dutch Frisia; Grupilinga, Britlinga, Otlinga in Old Saxony. These names have mostly been reduced to the dative nowadays, ending in -ingen, rarely in -ing. Most peoples know and employ both forms; the Alamanni, so it seems, chiefly the latter, at any rate now.* Since, however, this also occurs among the Franks, Saxons and Frisians, it is very audacious to immediately deduce Alamannic settlement from the occurrence of placenames in -ingen.

The above mentioned names prove that names in -ingas (nominative plural) and -ingum, -ingon (dative plural) were nothing unusual either among the Frisians or among the Saxons, from the Schelde to the Elbe. Even today the -ingen are no rarity throughout Lower Saxony. In Westphalia on either side of the Ruhr, south of the line Unna-Soest, there are at least twelve -ingen, alongside -ingsen and -inghausen. And as far as Franconian territory extends, we find names in -ingen.

On the right bank of the Rhine we first find in Holland Wageningen on the Rhine and Genderingen on the Ijssel (and we exclude all possibly Frisian names), in the Berg country Huckingen, Ratingen, Ehingen (close behind them on Saxon territory Hattingen, Sodingen, Ummingen), Heisingen near Werden (which Grimm derives from the Silva Caesia of Tacitus© and which would thus be very ancient), Solingen, Husingen, Leichlingen (on the district map ° Leigelingon, thus almost a thousand years old), Quettingen and on the Sieg Bédingen and Rocklingen, not counting two names in -ing. Honningen near Rheinbrohl and Ellingen in the Wied area provide the link with the area between Rhine, Lahn and Dill, which at a low estimate counts 12 -ingen. It is pointless to go any further south, since here begins the country that indisputably passed through a period of Alamannic settlement.

* Riimmingen near Lorrach was formerly (764) called Romaninchova, so that

sometimes the Swabian -ingen are also only of recent origin (Mone, Urzeit des badischen Landes, I, p. 213).4 The Swiss -kon and -kofen have nearly all been contracted from -inghofen: Zollinchovun—Zollikhofen, Smarinchova—Schmerikon, etc.

Cf. F. Beust, Historischer Atlas des Kantons Zürich,» where there are dozens of them on map 3, representing the Alamannic period.

Left of the Rhine we have Millingen in Holland above Nimwegen, Liittingen below Xanten, another Miullingen below Rheinberg,: then Kippingen, Rodingen, Héningen, Worringen, Fiihlingen, all further north than Cologne, Wesselingen and Kottingen near Brith]. From here the names in -ingen follow two directions. In the High Eifel they are rare; we find near Malmedy on the French linguistic border: Biillingen, Htinningen, Miirringen, Iveldingen, Eibertingen as a transition to the very numerous -ingen in Luxemburg and on the Prussian and Lotharingian upper Mosel. Another connecting line follows the Rhine and the side | valleys (in the Ahr area 7 or 8) and finally the Mosel valley, likewise after the area above Trier, where the -ingen predominate, but cut off from the great mass of Alamannic-Swabian -ingen first by the -wetler and then by the -heim. So if we, according to Arnold’s demand, “consider all the facts in their context”,* we shall come to the conclusion that the -ingen of the upper German Mosel area are Franconian and not Alamannic.

How little we need Alamannic help here becomes even clearer as soon as we trace the -ingen from the French-Ripuarian linguistic border near Aachen on to Salic territory. Near Maaseyk west of the Maas lies Geystingen, further west near Brée Gerdingen. Then we find, turning back to section No. 139, Lowen: Mopertingen, Vlytingen, Rixingen, Aerdelingen, Grimmersingen, Gravelingen, Ordange (for Ordingen), Bevingen, Hatingen, Buvingen, Hundelingen, Bovelingen, Curange, Raepertingen, Boswinningen, Wimmertingen, and others, in the area of Tongern, St. Truyen and Hasselt. The most westerly, not far from Lowen, are Willebringen, Redingen, Grinningen. Here the connection seems to break off. But if we move on to territory that is now French-speaking but from the 6th to the 9th century was in dispute between the two languages, we find from the Maas onwards an entire belt of French -ange, a form which corresponds to -ingen in Lorraine and Luxemburg too, stretching from east to west: Ballenge, Roclenge, Ortrange, Lantremange, Roclange, Libertange, Noderange, Herdange, Oderinge, Odange, Gobertang, Wahenges; slightly further west Louvrenge near Wavre and Revelinge near Waterloo form the link with Huysinghen and Buisinghen, the outpost of a group of over 20 -inghen, stretching south-west of Brussels from Hal to Grammont along the linguistic boundary. And finally in French Flanders: Gravelingen, Wulverdinghe (thus exactly the Old Saxon Wolvaradinges-hisun), Leubringhen, Leulinghen, Bonninghen, Peuplingue, Hardinghen, Her-

melinghen, near St. Omer and as far as behind Boulogne Herbinghen, Hocquinghen, Velinghen, Lottinghen, Ardinghen, all sharply distinguished from the even more numerous names in -inghem (= -ingheim) in the same area.

Thus the three endings which Arnold regards as typically Alamannic turn out to be every bit as much Franconian, and the attempt to prove an Alamannic settlement on Middle Franconian territory before the Franconian one on the basis of these names must be considered to have failed. While the possibility of a not very strong Alamannic element in the south-eastern part of this territory can still be conceded.

From the Alamanni, Arnold leads us to the Chatti. With the exception of the Ripuarians proper, they are supposed to have occupied the area south of the Ripuaria district, the same one, in other words, as we call Middle and Upper Franconia, after and alongside the Alamanni. This too is substantiated by references to the Hessian place-names found in the area beside the Alamannic ones.

“The agreement in the place-names on this and the other side of the Rhine as far as the Alamannic border is so peculiar and so striking that it would be a miracle indeed if it were coincidental; on the other hand, it seems quite natural as soon as we assume that the immigrants gave their native place-names to their new domiciles, as still occurs in America all the time.” ?

There is little to object to in this sentence. But all the more to object to in the conclusion that the Ripuarians proper had nothing to do with the settkement of the whole Middle and Upper Franconian country, that we only find Alamanni and Chatti here. Most of the Chatti who left their home for the west seem to have - joined the Iscaevones from time immemorial (as did the Batavi, Canninefates and Chattuari); and where else should they turn? In the first two centuries A. D. the Chatti were only linked with the other Herminones in the rear through the Thuringians; on the one side they had the Ingaevonian Cherusci, on the other the Iscaevones, and before them the Romans. The Herminonian tribes, which later appear united as Alamanni, came from the heart of Germania, having been separated ‘from the Chatti for centuries by Thuringians and other peoples and having become more alien to them than the Iscaevonian Franks, with whom they were allied by a centuries-old brotherhood in arms. The Chatti’s participation in the occupation of the area in question is thus not doubted. But the exclusion of the Ripuarians is. This can only be

Q*

proved if no specifically Ripuarian names occur there. The situation is quite the reverse.

Of the endings stated by Arnold* to be specifically Franconian, -hausen is common to Franks, Saxons, Hessians and Thuringians; -heim is Salic -ham; -bach Salic and Lower Ripuarian -beek; of the others, only -scheid is really characteristic. It is specifically Ripuarian, just like -ich, -rath or -rade and -siepen. Further, common to both Franconian dialects are -loo (-loh), -donk and -bruch or -broich (Salic broek).

-scheid occurs only in the mountains and, as a rule, in places on the watershed. The Franks left this ending behind throughout Westphalian Sauerland as far as the Hessian border, where it occurs, only as mountain names, as far as eastern Korbach. On the Ruhr Old Franconian -scheid encounters the ending in its Saxon form, -schede: Melschede, Selschede, Meschede; in the near vicinity, Langscheid, Ramscheid, Bremscheid. Frequent in the Berg area, it is found as far as the Westerwald and into it, but not further south, on the right side of the Rhine. Left of the Rhine, however, the -scheid understandably do not commence until the Eifel*; in Luxemburg there are at least 21 of them, in the Hochwald and Hunsrtick they are common. But as south of the Lahn, here too, on the eastern and southern sides of the Hunsrück and Soonwald, they are joined by the form -schied, which seems to be a Hessian adaption. Both forms together move southwards across the Nahe as far as the Vosges, where we find: Bisterscheid west of Donnersberg, Langenscheid near Kaiserslautern, a plateau called Breitscheid south of Hochspeyer, Haspelscheid near Bitsch, the Scheidwald north of Liitzelstein, and finally as the southernmost outpost Walscheid on the north slope of the Donon, even further south than the village of Hessen near Saarburg, the most advanced Chattic outpost in Arnold.”

Also specifically Ripuarian is -ich, from the same root, Gothic -ahva (water), as -ach; both are also German forms of the Belgian-Roman -acum, as proved by Tiberiacum, on the district map‘ Civiraha, today Ziewerich. It is not very frequent on the right side of the Rhine; Meiderich and Lirich near Ruhrort are the most

* In the plain I can only find Waterscheid, east of Hasselt in Belgian Limburg,

where we have already observed a strong Ripuarian mixture above [see this volume,

p- 90].

northerly, from where they skirt the Rhine as far as Biebrich. The plain on the left of the Rhine, from Biiderich opposite Wesel onwards, is full of them; they cross the Eifel as far as the Hochwald and Hunsrück, but vanish in the Soonwald and the region of the Nahe, even before -scheid and -roth stop. In the western part of our territory, however, they continue to the French linguistic border and beyond. The Trier area, which has a lot of them, we shall pass over; in Dutch Luxemburg I count twelve, on the other side, in the Belgian part, Tornich and Merzig (Messancy—the spelling -1g makes no difference, etymology and pronunciation are the same), in Lorraine, Soetrich, Sentzich, Marspich, Daspich west of the Mosel; east of it Kuntzich, Penserich, Cemplich, Destrich, twice Kerprich, Hibrich, Hilsprich.

The ending -rade, -rad, on the left bank of the Rhine -rath, also considerably exceeds the bounds of its old Ripuarian homeland. It fills the whole Eifel and the middle and lower Mosel valley, as well as its side valleys. In the same area where -scheid mixes with -schied, -rod, -roth occurs alongside -rad and -rath on both banks of the Rhine, also of Hessian origin, except that on the right bank, in the Westerwald, the -rod extend further north. In the Hochwald the northern slope has -rath, the southern slope -roth, as a rule.

The least advanced is -siepen, shifted -seifen. The word means a small stream-valley with a steep fall and is still in general use with this meaning. Left of the Rhine it does not extend far beyond the old Ripuarian border; on the right it is found in the Westerwald on the Nister and even near Langenschwalbach (Langenseifen).

To examine the other endings would take us too far. But at any rate we may assert that the countless -heim, which accompany the Rhine upstream from Bingen deep into Alamannic territory and are found everywhere where the Franks settled, are not Chattic but Ripuarian. Their home is not in Hesse, where they rarely occur and seem to have entered later, but in the Salic country and the Rhine plain around Cologne, where they occur alongside the other specifically Ripuarian names in almost equal numbers.

Thus the result of this investigation is that the Ripuarians, far from being held back by the stream of Hessian immigration at the Westerwald and Eifel, on the contrary overran the entire Middle Franconian area themselves. And more strongly in a_ southwesterly direction, towards the upper Mosel area, than to the south-east towards the Taunus and the area of the Nahe. This is also corroborated by the language. The south-western dialects, right into Luxemburg and western Lorraine, are much closer to Ripuarian than the eastern ones, particularly those on the right

bank of the Rhine. The former might be regarded as a more High German shifted extension of Ripuarian.

The characteristic thing about the Middle Franconian dialects is firstly the penetration of the High German sound shift. Not the mere shift of a few tenues to aspirates, applying to relatively few words and not affecting the character of the dialect, but the beginning shift of the voiced-stopped consonants, which brings about the peculiarly Middle and Upper German confusion of b and p, g and k, d and t. Only where the impossibility of making a sharp distinction between initial b and p, d and t, g and k appears, in other words what the French particularly mean by accent allemand—only then does the Low German feel the great cleft which the second sound shift has torn through the German language. And this cleft runs in between the Sieg and the Lahn, the Ahr and the Mosel. Accordingly, Middle Franconian has an initial g which is lacking in more northern dialects, whereas medially and finally it still pronounces a soft ch for g. Furthermore, the ei and ou of the northern dialects turn into ai and au.

A few genuinely Franconian peculiarities: in all the Salic and Ripuarian dialects Bach, unshifted Beek, is feminine. This is also true at least of the largest, western part of Middle Franconian. Like the numerous other -bachs with the same name in the Netherlands and on the lower Rhine, the Luxemburg Glabach (Gladbach, Dutch Glabeek) is also feminine. On the other hand, girls’ names are treated as neuter: it is not only das Madchen, das Mariechen, das Lisbethchen, but also das Marie, das Lisbeth, from Barmen to Trier and beyond. Near Forbach in Lorraine the map, originally made by the French, shows a “ Karninschesberg” (Kaninchenberg). Thus the same diminutive -schen, plural -sches, which we found above to be Ripuarian.

With the watershed between Mosel and Nahe and on the right bank of the Rhine with the hill-country south of the Lahn, a new group of dialects begins:

3. Upper Franconian. Here we are in a region which was

indisputably first Alamannic territory by conquest (disregarding the earlier occupation by Vangiones, etc., of whose tribal affinities and language we know nothing) and where a fairly strong Chattic admixture can be readily conceded. But here too the place-names, as we need not repeat, indicate the presence of not insignificant Ripuarian elements, especially in the Rhine plain. And the language even more so. Let us take the southernmost definable dialect which at the same time has a literature, that of the Palatinate. Here we again encounter the general Franconian

inability to pronounce medial and final g in any other way but as a soft ch.* They say there: Vöchel, Flechel, geleche (gelegen) [lain], gsacht— gesagt, licht—liegt, etc. Similarly the general Franconian w instead of b in the medial position: Bûwe—Buben, glâwe—glauben (but i glâb), bleiwe, selwer—selbst, halwe—halbe. The shift is far from being as complete as it looks; there is even reverse shifting, particularly in foreign words, i.e. the initial voiceless consonant is shifted not one stage forwards, but backwards: t becomes d, p becomes b, as will be seen; initial d and p remain at the Low German stage: dun—tun, dag, dame, diir, dodt; but before r: trinke, trage; paff—Pfaff, peife, palz—Pfalz, parre—Pfarrer. Now as d and p stand for High German t and Pf, initial t is shifted back to d, and initial p to b, even in foreign words: derke—Türke, dafel—Tafel, babeer—Papier, borzlan—Porzellan, bulwer—Pulver. Then the Palatinate dialect, agreeing only with Danish on this score, cannot tolerate any tenues between vowels: ebbes—etwas, labbe—Lappen, schlubbe—schlüpfen, schobbe—Schoppen, Peder— Peter, dridde—dritte, rodhe—raten. The only exception is k: brocke, backe. But in foreign words g: musigande— Musikanten. This is also a relic of the Low German stage of the sound system which has spread out further by means of reverse shifting*; only because dridde, hadde remained unshifted could Peter become Peder and the corresponding High German t receive the same impartial treatment. Similarly, the d in halde—halten, alde—alte, etc., remains at the Low German stage.

Despite the decidedly High German impression it makes on Low Germans, the dialect of the Palatinate is far from having adopted the High German sound shift even to the extent that our written language has preserved it. On the contrary, by means of its reverse shift the Palatinate dialect is protesting against the High German stage, which, having entered from without, proves to be a foreign element in the dialect to this day.

This is the place to look at a feature that is usually misunderstood: the confusion between d and t, b and p and even g and k among those Germans in whose dialects the voiced-stopped consonants have undergone the High German sound shift. This confusion does not arise as long as everyone speaks his own

* All quotations are from Fröhlich Palz, Gott erhalts! Gedichte in Pfälzer Mundart, by K. G. Nadler, Frankfurt am Main, 1851.

dialect. On the contrary. We have just seen that the native of the Palatinate, for example, makes a very nice distinction here, so much so that he even shifts back foreign words in order to adapt them to the requirements of his dialect. The foreign initial t only becomes d for him because written German t corresponds to his d, foreign p only becomes b because his p corresponds to written German pf. Nor do the voiceless consonants get mixed up in the other Upper German dialects as long as people speak dialect. Each of these dialects has its own, precisely applied sound-shift law. But the position is different as soon as the written language or a foreign language is spoken. The attempt to apply to it the shifting law of the dialect concerned—and this attempt is made involuntarily—collides with the attempt to speak the new language correctly. In the process the written b and p, d and t lose all fixed meaning, and thus it is that Börne, for instance, in his letters from Paris complains that the French were unable to distinguish between b and p, because they obstinately insisted that his name, which he pronounced Perne, commenced with a p.

But back to the Palatinate dialect. The evidence that the High German sound shift was foisted on it from without, so to speak, and has remained a foreign element to this day, not even reaching the sound-system stage of the written language either (far exceeding which the Alamanni and the Bavarians on the whole preserve one Old High German stage or another)—this proof alone suffices to establish the predominantly Franconian character of the Palatinate dialect. For even in Hesse, which is much further north, the shift has, on the whole, been carried further, thus reducing the allegedly chiefly Hessian character of the Palatinate dialect to modest proportions. In order to offer such resistance to the High German sound shift hard by the Alamannic border among the Alamanni that remained behind, there must have been at least as many Ripuarians alongside the Hessians, who were themselves essentially High Germans. And their presence is further proved—apart from the place-names—by two generally Franconian peculiarities: the preservation of the Franconian w instead of 6 medially, and the pronunciation of g as ch in medial and final positions. To this may be added a lot of individual cases of agreement. With the Palatinate Gundach—“guten Tag”—you will get by as far as to Dunkirk and Amsterdam. Just as ‘“‘a certain man” is ein sichrer Mann in the Palatinate, in the entire

Netherlands it is een zekeren man. Handsching for Handschuh [glove] corresponds to the Ripuarian Händschen. Even g for j in Ghannisnacht (Johannisnacht [midsummer night]) is Ripuarian and extends, as we have seen, into the Münster area. And baten (to improve, be of use, from bat—better), common to all the Franks, and the Netherlanders too, is in current use in the Palatinate: ’s badd alles nix—it’s all no use—where the t is not even shifted to High German tz but is softened to d between vowels in the Palatinate manner.