THE STUDENT,

AND

INTELLECTUAL OBSERVER.

MAY, 1868.

WOMANKIND:

IN ALL AGES OF WESTERN EUROPE.

BY THOMAS WRIGHT, F.S.A.

(With a Coloured Plate.)

CHAPTER III.

THE FRANKS IN GAUL.

Ir was the beginning of the fifth century of our era, when the different branches of the great Teutonic race were making their grand and final movement upon the Western Empire. The name of Germans was known to the Romans at a rather early period, as embracing the numerous cognate tribes who occupied the centre of Europe, and who, no doubt pressed forward by the movements of other peoples from behind, were continually seeking to advance towards the west. Cæsar, when he entered Cæsar, when he entered upon the conquest of Gaul, encountered the Germans on the borders of that country, and drove them back. It continued to be the policy of the Romans to repress and conquer these peoples through the whole period of their supremacy in the west. Tacitus, before the close of the first century after Christ, describes their manners and condition, which appear to have borne a sufficiently close resemblance to those of the Gauls before they were Romanised. As with the ancient Gauls, the Germans were accompanied in war by their wives and families-it was, in fact, a necessary consequence of the migratory state in which

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they lived-and their women cheered and encouraged them in battle, and attended to the wounded. Like the Gauls, in regard to their Druidesses, the Germans looked upon Womankind as possessing something divine in its character, and as communicating with the gods more easily than men; and Tacitus mentions as instances of the veneration thus paid to the sex, the examples of Velleda, and Aurinia, “and many others" (et complureis alias). Like the Gauls, as I have said on a former occasion, the men wore the braccæ, or breeches. They wore also a dress which fitted close to the body, and over it a sagum, or mantle. Tacitus tells us that the women adopted much the same clothing as the men, except that they were more usually clad in linen garments dyed purple, and that they did not extend the upper part of the dress into sleeves, but went with the whole arm naked, as well as the upper part of the breast.* This, as it will be remembered, was the costume of the goddesses in the Eddas, and it explains a provision, in that part of the early Frankish laws which was made for the protection of the female person. By the Salic law, if a free man squeezed a free woman's arm below the elbow, he was liable to a penalty of twelve hundred denarii; if it were above the elbow, the fine was raised to fourteen hundred denarii; and if he touched her breast, he was punished by a fine of eighteen hundred denarii. Women who required this protection evidently went with bare arms and bare breasts. We learn from the same laws that the Frankish women of this early period had their hair bound up on the head by a sort of cap or coif called an obbo, for one law provides that, "if any one derange a woman's hair, so that her obbo fall to the ground, he shall be condemned to a fine of fifteen solidi.+"

Tacitus praises highly the chastity of the German women, and assures us that the Germans were almost the only people among the barbarians who lived satisfied each with one wife, "except a very small number, who, not through licentiousness, but as a mark of nobility, seek to have many wives."‡ Polygamy we have seen, in the preceding chapter, among the Teutonic gods, and we shall soon find it prevailing among the Teutons who obtained possession of Gaul.

* "Nec alius feminis quam viris habitus, eosque purpura variant, partemque vestitus superioris in manicas non extendunt, nude brachia ac lacertos, sed et proxima pars pectoris patet."-Tacitus, "Germania," c. 17.

"Si quis mulierem excapillaverit ut ei obbonis ad terra cadat, solidos xv. culpabilis judicetur."-" Lex Salica," c. 75.

Nam prope soli barbarorum singulis uxoribus contenti sunt exceptis admodum paucis, qui non libidine sed ob nobilitatem plurimis nuptiis ambiuntur."-Tacitus, "Germania," c. 18.

Tacitus goes on to say that, among the Germans of his time, it was not the wife who brought a dower to the husband, but the husband who gave it to the wife. This was of course the morgane-ghibu, or morning-gift, the morgen-gifu of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, a sort of marriage settlement, which was arranged on the eve of the marriage, but was given by the husband to the wife on the morning after the marriage was completed. It was, in itself, a sort of acknowledgement of woman's position. The historian adds that the parents and kindred were present to see that the terms of the gift were duly performed, and that it consisted not of objects intended for feminine indulgence, or for the gratification of female vanity, but of oxen, and a horse with its bridle, and a shield with spear and sword. These were the symbolical gifts-for symbolism prevails largely in the childhood of people-by which the wife was to understand that she was henceforth to consider herself the companion of her husband in his labours and dangers, to share with him his fortunes in peace and in war.

The Romans sought to conquer these Germans, and, during the flourishing period of the empire, they were successful, and drove them far back from the borders of Gaul; but as the Roman power in the west fell more and more into decline, the imperial government was first obliged to conciliate those whom it had formerly defied, and afterwards to rest upon their support. Captives taken in war were always treated as slaves, and at an early period Gaul began to receive large accessions of Teutonic servile population. Then the Romans adopted the policy of encouraging the German tribes to place colonies in the northern parts of Gaul, where the population was very thin, and, in return for the protection they received, they formed on this side the guard of the Roman province. They thus formed an extensive military colony, and the Romans knew them by the name of læti, in which we can hardly avoid recognizing the same word as the modern German leute, people. More than this, the Romans found that the Germans made better soldiers than any of their other barbarians, and they enlisted them into their armies and disciplined them. It was the impetuous charge of the German cohorts which decided the victory at Pharsalia. From this time it was the pride of successive emperors to possess German troops, and they made their body guards of German soldiers. After a while they formed the main force of the empire, and they were everywhere introduced into the offices of state, and even reached the imperial throne in the person of the Goth Maximinus, in the first half of the third century. In the fourth century the great officers of the

imperial court and army, and those who occupied the novel charges of counts of the domestics, dukes of the frontiers (limites), and masters of the soldiery (magistri militia), were almost all Franks, or Alemanni, or Goths, or Burgundians. Such a state of things could not constitute a permanent strength, and accordingly, the Western Empire presented a scene of continual turbulence, which encouraged the Teutonic peoples outside to seek their fortunes in it, while they began towards the fourth century to be pushed forward by the advance of masses of peoples of other races from behind. The Salian Franks, driven by the Saxons from their primitive establishment in the interior of Germany, established themselves in the country to the extreme north of Gaul, between the Scheldt and the Meuse, in the middle of the fourth century. But it was at the beginning of the century following that the great invasion of the Teutons began, and within a few years the whole of Gaul was divided in three great independent kingdoms, between the Franks, the Visigoths, and the Burgundians. In the first years of the sixth century, as the result of a long series of intrigues and wars, nearly the whole of Gaul fell under the domination of the Franks.

We can trace little of the social condition of the Teutonic conquerors of Gaul during the long period of the wars of invasion, and can only suppose that, as far at least as concerned the Franks, it differed not considerably from that described by Tacitus. No doubt the invaders were accompanied in their expeditions by their women and families, for we have a remarkable story in confirmation. One of the most formidable of the Frankish chieftains in the invasions of the earlier half of the fifth century was named Chlodio. His head quarters lay between Brussels and Louvaine. Having sent explorers to report upon the attractions of the country to the southward, he assembled the leaders of his people, caused himself to be elected their military leader, and plunged with the whole tribe into the forest of Charbonnière (Carbonaria), a part of the Ardennes. Issuing from the depths of the forest, these Franks suddenly made their appearance on the banks of the Scheldt, and after taking and destroying Tournai and Cambrai, and massacring their inhabitants, they overrun the country as far as the banks of the Somme. It was at the time when the great Aetius was commanding the Roman armies, and victoriously protecting the empire against the new invasions of the barbarians, and he hurried from Brittany, crossed the Somme, and found the Franks encamped at a place named by the Latin historians Helena, but supposed to be Lens in Artois. They were so far from anticipating the probability of an attack,