5 - Power and Identity in the Southern North Sea Area: The Migration and Merovingian Periods

Summary

The southern North Sea area of the 5th to 7th centuries ad can be seen as an important ‘cultural bridge’ linking two power blocks: the late Roman Empire and its Frankish successor kingdom to the south, and the Scandinavian kingdoms to the north. This paper discusses how such a bridge function is reflected in the material culture found along the southern North Sea coasts of the Netherlands, Germany and south-eastern England, and how this material culture relates to the rise of kingdoms and the expression of group identities. The discussion will focus on jewellery and other ornaments of gold and silver, which can be assigned to five ‘cultural phases’ (Nicolay 2014, 234–63). First, the cultural relations with surrounding areas, as reflected in the ornaments’ shape and decoration, will be examined for each phase. Second, an attempt will be made to link the geographical distribution of ornaments that were executed in a specific style to the expression of group identity at a regional or supra-regional level – as a reflection of the extent of specific elite networks, which are assumed to represent the territories of early-medieval kingdoms.

The premise for this analysis is the assumption that access to gold and silver in earlymedieval Europe was limited to a small group of people. It was regional or supra-regional kings who controlled the importation of these precious metals, which probably reached the North Sea world both as political gifts and through a more commercial form of longdistance exchange (for the latter, see Näsman 1991). Besides these ‘horizontal’ relations among leaders, networks of ‘vertical’ relations were established and consolidated by the distribution of valuable items as gifts between leaders (the patrons) and their followers (the clients) (Bazelmans 1999). As members of the royal and lower retinues would have their own groups of followers, this resulted in the well-known pyramidal structure of patron–client relations, in which a person's status was directly related to his or her ‘distance from the king’.

Gold and silver were exchanged not only as gifts, but probably also as a form of currency between members of the elite and their followers – as indicated by the frequent occurrence of gold coins not transformed into jewellery.