Offa's Dyke Between Nature and Culture

Paolo Squatriti

AT THE END of the twentieth century, postclassical Europe basked in the warm glow cast by a revisionist historiography that emphasized the early Middle Ages' many accomplishments. This was quite an achievement for a period often disparaged as the Dark Ages. But in the decades after the Second World War, specialists delved deeper into the surviving documents, including the non-narrative ones earlier historians neglected, until their researches had illuminated what began to look like a golden age of European peasantries, when landlords proved less efficient at extracting surplus than they had been or were to become after A.D. 1000.1 Other early medievalists re-evaluated the post-Roman economy to show its agricultural vitality, its multiple commercial linkages, and its industrial strengths: In this they were aided by the new field of medieval archaeology, whose discoveries built up knowledge of early medieval Europe's production, distribution, and demand.2 Despite some residual skepticism among those who clung to the "miserabilist" conception of the prevalent social and economic forms, and to the traditional idea of decline and fall from Roman splendor into barbarian gloom, much more sanguine views of how things were in the seventh to tenth centuries took hold of the practitioners of early medieval history.3 Their optimism even began to infect medievalists preoccupied with later portions of the Middle Ages, and its impact is visible in the more even-handed treatment of the entire medieval millennium in current American college textbooks.4	1
This rehabilitative surge also affected views of the capacities of early medieval governments. The activities of the powerful are, of course, a traditional field of inquiry for all historians, and early medievalists were not exceptional in lavishing attention on rulers and administrative tools. The change involved the recognition of postclassical rulers' ability to affect their subjects' lives. More historians now believe that the barbarian successor states that replaced the western Roman empire after the 400s shaped people's lives through all manner of informal methods as well as through the formal institutions and hierarchies familiar to people who inhabit modern states.5 One symptom of the new respect accorded to early medieval political capacities is the ongoing effort to rewrite the period's military history. Rather than the puny, underequipped armies that the scholars of the early 1900s envisioned doing battle in unstrategic, messy ways, we are now expected to think of (say) eighth-century Frankish armies as large, highly structured, well trained, and endowed with enviable logistical support.6	2
Figure 1. Offa's Dyke. Offa's Dyke on the west slope of Hergan Hill, Salop, showing the bank on the counterscarp. Cyril Fox. Offa's Dyke: A Field Survey of the Western Frontier—Works of Mercia in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries A.D. (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1955).   . . . There are about 9727 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.