Dark Age Economics A New Audit 9780715636794

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Dark Age Economics

A NEW AUDIT

Richard Hodges

Bristol Classical Press

First published in 2012 by

Bristol Classical Press

an imprint of

Bloomsbury Academic

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square

London WC1B 3DP, UK

Contents Preface

VIl

List of illustrations

XIll

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Hodges All\rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording or othE;lrwise,

without the prior permission of the publisher.

CIP records for this book are available from the

British Library and the Library of Congress

ISBN 9780715636794

Typeset by Ray Davies

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

MPG Books Group Ltd

1

1. The debate 2. 'Forget the Trobriand Islands, the Kula Ring'? Models for early medieval economics

19

3. A golden age of the peasantry:the 'original affluent society'?

41

4. Shrine franchises: monastic cities and the transformation of the European economy

67

5. Debating the history of 'mushroom cities'

91

6. Audit: the 'hypostatic union of idea and material'

116

Bibliography

139

Index

157

www.bloomsburyacademic.com

v

For Kiinberly

Preface ... it seems commonly to be overlooked that the excavators of Tarsus have found no Cloth Hall, that all ancient cities lacked the Guildhalls and Bourses which, next to the cathedrals, are to this day the architectural glories of the great niedieval cities of Italy, France, Flanders, the Hansa towns, or Eng­ land. Contrast the Athenian Agora with the Grande Place in Brussels. It is no oversight on the part ofPausanias when he omitted that class of building from his sneer about the little town in Phocis (Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (1999): 137-8).

My original Dark Age Economics: the origins of towns and trade (1982; hereafter DAE) focussed upon the rise of towns and trade rather than economics as such. In particular, it concentrated upon the emerging role of markets in the post-Roman world, defining components of medieval European society. What it did not do was chart the early medieval journey from the consumption cities of antiquity to the centres ofproduction in the Middle Ages. Nor did it explain, to any great extent, how this happened. Any 'imaginary' world involving, for example, the ritual economy was well beyond its purview (see the critique of DAE in Theuws 2004). Now, with a wealth of new archaeological evidence available, such questions, posed forty years ago by Moses Finley in bald and unequivocal terms, are closer to our grasp as the emphasis has swung towards understaJlding agency and the human engagement with materiality.­ As any scholar would now acknowledge, using the pejorative periodisa­ tion~term~ 'Dark Age' to separate off a period from the civilised eras before and after is today anachronistic (see Moreland 2010: 7). The 1970s, however, when DAE was written, were a different time when post-war 'progress' was undermined by economic challenge and the menace of nuclear war. 'Dark Age' had a powerful contemporary resonance. Yet in choosing this title, with its implicit homage to Marshall Sahlins' Stone Age Economics (1972), I was actually attempting to reach beyond the Renais­ sance perception that this was a primitive and barbarous era. " It is thirty years since fJAE was published in Colin Renfrew's Duck­ worth series, New Studies in Archaeology. Looking back now, the book seems like an ethnographic odyssey from another era, conceived when the archaeology of the Middle Ages was in its infancy, essentially practised to illustrate the margins of the written texts. DAE attempted to challenge the rhetoric of these texts, employing the then uneven archaeological evidence from north-west Europe. Nevertheless, it still belonged to a

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Dark Age Economics paradigm, beginning with the dorlrinant nineteenth-century Austro-German model, of historical evolution, that by way of gradual stages, including feudalIsm, charted the triumph of European modernism (see Shaw 2008: 12; also Devr~ey 2006: 520-1). Today the archaeology of this era is Im~e~surably rIcher, the debates about its meaning have accordingly lost theIr Innocence, and the positivist treatment of the material and written ~ources has, been repla?ed by an increasingly fascinating debate about the Issues and InterpretatIOns of the material itself rather than about differ­ ent strains of historical practice, , I had studie~ trade as culture process with Renfrew and was hugely Influenced by his ground-breaking Emergence of Civilisation (1972) _ 'one of the most important books in archaeology from the second half of the ~wentieth century' (Ch~rry 2010: xxvi). DAE incorporated many of his Ideas that I had used In my doctoral th~sis on Southampton's traded pottery of the seventh to ninth centuries (subsequently published as Hodges 1981)- In his ~nvi~ation to write,for ~is series, Renfrew encouraged me ,to make It ~ccesslble to archaeologIsts In Tucson', As we were experi­ e~cI~g the ze~th of the ,so-~alled New Archaeology in the UK at that time, WInnIng AmerIcan admIratIOn was a seal ofapproval. Without doubt, DAE O\~ed a great deal to Renfrew's brilliant teaching and inspiring scholar­ S~I~. It also ?wed much to Klavs Randsborg, whose ground-breaking The VLkLng Age Ln Denmark also appeared in Renfrew's Duckworth series ~ (Ra~dsb?rg 1980). ~ooking back, I was also influenced by my debates with ChrIs WICk~am, wI~h wh~m I collaborated on field projects inTtaly. From hours of frIendly dIscussIOns, I believed his historical models were too mech~nistic - too ?ooki~h. Total history, as it used to be called, involved ' gras~Ing the r~latIOnshIp ?etween all the different sources. Today, Wick­ ham s ~ram~ng the MLddleAges (2005), encyclopaedic in scale, summarIses hIS views cogently; .with friencl.ly·admiration;"ollce again, I ~hall .challenge some of them here. One final, but no less important Influence -yvas Bronislav Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). This great romantic economic history established a benchmark for the arguably comparable spirit of the. North Sea Frisian merchants and their will to trade in the seventh and eighth centuries. DAE set out to develop a systemic interpretation for the evolution of ~owns, trade and social complexity in post-Roman northwest Europe. At ItS core ,was Karl, Polanyi's thesis of a substantivist as opposed to a (modernIst) form~lIst e,cono~y, and the contention that it was inappropri. ate to use ~conomlC ratIOnalIty as the operating mode for the tribal polities of the perIOd (as Moses FinIey had argued was the case for classical ~~tiquity) (Polanyi 1957; cf. SaIler 2005; Devroey 2006: 588-91). Context IS Important. T~e 1970s ~arked the high-water mark of the 'golden age' of great debates In economIC anthropology. Later, taking a 'cultural turn' (Hann and Hart 2011: 84), French Marxist anthropology began to win over those who had been 'tilting at windmills in the superstructure instead ~f

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Preface analysing the economic base' (Hann and Hart 2011: 73-4). By c~ntrast, traditional archaeological thought in the 1970s p~aced emphaSIS ,upon excavating trading sites and interpreting these USIng the few, a~aIlable historical sources. Issues of dating the settlements and a fetIshIsm for origins as well as continuity with a Roman past concerned most a:chae­ ologists (cf. Biddle 1976). Explaining the re-emergence of towns lI~, the post-Roman era was treated, as Matthew Johns~n has ~rgued, In, a particularistic manner and in many w~ys t~at -yvere riddled :v:th menta~Ist arguments (with references to innate rekindling of the spIrIt of trade or 'the trading spirit of the Frisian peoples') (Johnson 1999: 70!. . DAE took the North Sea area as a region within which SOCIal complexIty and the rise of towns and trade were connected by systemic feedback loops. D nderpinning this was the gradual evolution of ~ chiefdom ~ociety with a variable control of the production and circulatIOn of prestIge goods (cf. Earle 2011). The more successful a chief was at c.ontr~lling the ,flow of goods, the more he could reward his followers With gIfts that In turn generated reciprocal obligations. The rise of a smal~ number o~ mono­ polistic urban centres (emporia) in the seventh to mnth centurIes was interpreted as an attempt to control production and distribution. The planning of these emporia, I contended, reflected central control and therefore royal patronage of dendritic central-place systems. DAE ~lso attempted to set the processes of urbanisation in north-west Europe In a larger anthropological context. These models, needless to say, based largely upon the work of the anthropologist and geograp~er, Ca~ol ~. Smith (1976), merited carefultreatment in terms ~fthe partIcular historI­ cal circumstances. Yet the processes, I believed, mIght be tested by further archaeological excavations. , . Since the publication