Sources and Historians: How We Know About the Early Middle Ages

The Early Middle Ages is in some ways one of the best-documented periods of premodern history, and in other ways one of the worst. The centuries after 500 produced an enormous body of writing - saints’ lives, annals, chronicles, capitularies, charters, homilies, and theological treatises - but most of it was produced by and for members of a narrow clerical elite. For large parts of Europe, especially in Scandinavia, the Slavic world, and the British Isles, the documentary record is sparse until well into the eighth or ninth century. Modern historians of the period have therefore had to develop sophisticated methods for extracting information from texts that were often formulaic, partisan, and silent about the daily lives of the people they nominally describe. Archaeology and visual evidence have become increasingly important in filling these gaps.

The textual sources

The bulk of what we know about the Early Middle Ages comes from a small number of textual genres. Each has its own biases, conventions, and limitations, and modern scholars have spent centuries learning to read them critically.

Chronicles and annals

Chronicles are narrative histories that organize events in chronological order, often beginning with biblical or classical antiquity and ending in the chronicler’s own time. Annals are year-by-year records of events, often terse and laconic. The most important chronicles of the early Middle Ages include:

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c. 731): The foundational text of English history, written by the Northumbrian monk Bede. It is a model of historical method, careful source criticism, and Latin prose. It is the principal source for the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England and for the early history of the English church.
The Chronicle of Fredegar: A Frankish chronicle, possibly written in Burgundy in the mid-seventh century, drawing on a wide range of earlier sources. It is one of the principal narrative sources for Merovingian Francia.
Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks (c. 591): A vivid, opinionated, and sometimes unreliable account of late Merovingian Gaul, indispensable for the social and ecclesiastical history of the sixth century.
Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards (late eighth century): The principal narrative source for the Lombard kingdom in Italy.
Nithard’s History of the Sons of Louis the Pious (c. 842): A contemporary account of the civil wars of Louis the Pious’s successors, written by a layman in a clear, almost vernacular Latin.
Widukind of Corvey’s Deeds of the Saxons (c. 968): A history of the Saxons and Ottonian dynasty, written in the late tenth century.

In the Byzantine world, the principal narrative sources are the works of Procopius (sixth century), Agathias, Menander Protector, Theophylact Simocatta, and Theophanes the Confessor (ninth century). These historians preserved a long tradition of Greek historical writing that began with Herodotus and Thucydides and continued throughout the medieval period. The chronicle of Theophanes is a particularly important source for the seventh and eighth centuries, including the early Arab conquests.

In the Islamic world, the great historical tradition was inaugurated by writers such as al-Tabari (839-923), whose vast History of the Prophets and Kings is the principal source for the early caliphate and the Arab conquests. Other important sources include al-Baladhuri, al-Waqidi, and later historians such as Ibn al-Athir.

Saints’ lives (vitae)

Saints’ lives were one of the most popular literary forms of the early medieval period. They told the stories of holy men and women, often emphasizing miraculous events, ascetic feats, and conversions of pagans. The most important include:

The Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius (fourth century): A foundational text of Christian monasticism.
The Life of St. Benedict by Gregory the Great (late sixth century): The principal source for the life of the founder of Western monasticism and the Rule that bears his name.
The Life of St. Columba by Adomnan of Iona (c. 700): A central text for the history of the Irish church in Scotland.
The Life of St. Boniface by Willibald (c. 760): The principal source for the English missionary Boniface and the Christianization of the German lands.
The Life of St. Ansgar by Rimbert (c. 870): The principal source for the Christianization of Scandinavia.

Saints’ lives are valuable sources for the history of devotion, monasticism, and mission, but they must be read with care. Their accounts of miracles and political events often follow literary conventions rather than historical fact, and they are typically silent about the lives of laypeople except as foils for the saint.

Legal and administrative texts

The early Middle Ages produced an enormous body of legal and administrative texts, including royal law codes, capitularies, and private charters. The most important include:

The Salic Law (Lex Salica): A Frankish law code traditionally attributed to Clovis, first written down in the late fifth or early sixth century and revised repeatedly thereafter. It is a central source for the customary law of the early Franks.
The Visigothic Code of Recceswinth (654): A comprehensive law code, the most important legal monument of Visigothic Spain.
The Anglo-Saxon law codes: Beginning with the code of Æthelberht of Kent (c. 600) and including those of Ine of Wessex, Alfred the Great, and Æthelstan, these codes preserve a rich body of customary law in vernacular Old English.
The Carolingian capitularies: A large and varied body of royal legislation issued by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. The capitularies are essential for the institutional history of the Carolingian Empire and for the Carolingian Renaissance.
Private charters: Monasteries and lay aristocrats produced thousands of charters recording grants of land, privileges, and rights. The charters are a crucial source for the social and economic history of the early Middle Ages, especially in France, Germany, and England, where large cartularies have survived.

Letters and treatises

Letters and theological treatises preserve the intellectual life of the period. Important collections include:

The Letters of Gregory the Great: A large and varied body of correspondence on the papal administration, the mission to the Anglo-Saxons, the conversion of the Lombards, and many other topics.
The Letters of Boniface: A central source for the organization of the early medieval church in the Frankish and German lands.
The De Institutione Laicali of Jonas of Orléans and similar treatises: Texts that document the pastoral concerns of the Carolingian church.
The writings of Bede, Alcuin, and the Carolingian scholars: Treatises on grammar, rhetoric, computus (the calculation of Easter and other dates), and theology.

Vernacular literature

The early Middle Ages also produced a body of vernacular literature in Old English, Old Irish, Old High German, Old Norse, Old Church Slavonic, and other languages. The Old English Beowulf is the most famous early medieval poem in any European vernacular, but there is a large body of other vernacular writing as well: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Heliand (a Saxon gospel paraphrase in Old Saxon), the Norse eddas and sagas, the early Welsh poems of the Mabinogion, and the Slavic hagiographic and homiletic texts translated from Greek. The Carolingian period in particular saw a conscious effort to develop vernacular literary traditions, often under the patronage of the court or the church.

Archaeological sources

For many parts of the early Middle Ages, and for many aspects of social and economic life, archaeology is the most important source. The archaeology of the period has been transformed since the mid-twentieth century, and modern scholarship relies on a wide range of material evidence.

Settlement and landscape archaeology

Modern field survey and excavation have transformed our understanding of the early medieval landscape. The late Roman villa system of much of Western Europe gave way in the fifth and sixth centuries to a more dispersed pattern of farmsteads and small villages. By the eighth century, nucleated villages, monastic estates, and seigneurial centers were emerging as the dominant pattern in much of Western Europe. In Scandinavia, the great hall and the chieftain’s center are visible in the archaeological record from the seventh century. In the Slavic lands, the gród, or fortified settlement, is the characteristic form from the seventh through tenth centuries.

Material culture and trade

The archaeology of early medieval trade has revealed the depth and complexity of long-distance exchange. The contents of royal ship burials such as Sutton Hoo in England, the Oseberg ship in Norway, and the princely graves of Apahida in Transylvania demonstrate the wealth and connections of early medieval elites. The presence of Byzantine silver, Anglo-Saxon jewelry, and Islamic glass in the same grave is a vivid demonstration of the integration of the early medieval world. Underwater archaeology has been especially valuable: the wrecks of the ninth- and tenth-century trading ports such as Dorestad, Hedeby, Birka, and London have yielded thousands of objects that document the everyday life and long-distance trade of the early Middle Ages.

Paleography and codicology

The physical evidence of the surviving manuscripts is itself an important source. The study of handwriting (paleography) and of the construction, materials, and decoration of books (codicology) has revealed the history of scriptoria, the development of regional styles of writing, and the political and religious contexts in which books were produced. The great codices of the early Middle Ages - the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Codex Amiatinus, the Utrecht Psalter, the Vienna Genesis - are not only literary and religious documents but also objects whose physical features can be studied to reconstruct the cultures that produced them.

Visual and material sources

The art and architecture of the early Middle Ages are essential sources in their own right, not merely illustrations of textual evidence. The great cycles of wall painting, mosaic, and relief sculpture preserved in places like Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the cave monasteries of Cappadocia document the development of Christian iconography. The architecture of the period - early Christian basilicas, Byzantine centralized churches, Carolingian and Ottonian cathedrals, Viking stave churches - is preserved in the surviving buildings of the seventh through tenth centuries, and in the foundation trenches of many more.

The decorative arts of the period are equally informative. The development of cloisonné enamelwork, the spread of Insular and Carolingian manuscript illumination, the emergence of the great treasure hoards of the Viking Age, and the techniques of gold- and silversmithing all document the technical, economic, and aesthetic life of the period. Many of the most important surviving objects of the early Middle Ages are religious: reliquaries, gospel covers, liturgical vessels, and processional crosses, often given by kings and aristocrats to monasteries and cathedrals.

Modern historians and their approaches

Modern study of the Early Middle Ages has been shaped by a succession of influential scholars and traditions.

The German tradition

The scholarly study of the period in the modern sense begins with the work of nineteenth-century German historians. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a project launched in 1826 by Karl Freiherr vom Stein, set out to publish the principal Latin and vernacular sources of the early medieval Holy Roman Empire. The MGH established a standard of source publication that is still followed in the field. The great historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - Georg Waitz, Karl Lamprecht, and the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt - shaped a generation of academic work on the period.

Among the most influential twentieth-century German historians of the Early Middle Ages was Karl Hauck, whose work on the early medieval gold hoard of Apahida and the iconography of the period helped to integrate the archaeology of the period with the textual evidence. The German tradition has been particularly strong in the study of Carolingian and Ottonian institutions, of the early medieval church, and of the Slavic world.

The French Annales school

The Annales school, founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, revolutionized the study of the early Middle Ages by emphasizing long-term structures, mentalities, and material conditions over the political narrative that had dominated earlier work. Bloch’s Feudal Society (1939-40) remains a foundational text for the comparative history of feudal institutions across Western Europe. Pierre Riché’s Les Carolingiens (1983) provided a comprehensive treatment of the dynasty and its cultural program. Georges Duby’s The Early Growth of the European Economy (1974) and The Three Orders (1978) reoriented the study of medieval society around the relations between the clergy, the nobility, and the peasantry. The French tradition has also been strong in the archaeology of the early medieval countryside, in the history of women and gender, and in the study of literacy and texts.

The Anglo-American tradition

Anglo-American scholarship on the early Middle Ages has been characterized by a strong empirical tradition, by a willingness to integrate archaeological evidence, and by a series of influential works on specific regions and institutions. Among the most important scholars of the period in the Anglo-American tradition are:

Patrick Wormald (1947-2004), whose The Making of English Law (1999) revolutionized the study of Anglo-Saxon legal history.
James Campbell (1935-2016), whose The Anglo-Saxons (1991) and Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (1986) shaped the study of early medieval England.
Chris Wickham (b. 1950), whose The Inheritance of Rome (2009) and Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) have set the agenda for the comparative history of the post-Roman West.
Peter Brown (b. 1935), whose World of Late Antiquity (1971) and The Rise of Western Christendom (1996) created the field of late antiquity and transformed the study of the Christianization of the Roman world.
Mayke de Jong (b. 1954), whose work on the Carolingian church and its rituals has reshaped the institutional and religious history of the period.
Walter Pohl (b. 1953), whose work on the barbarian successor states and on the construction of ethnic identity in the post-Roman world has been foundational for the history of early medieval Europe.

Italian and other traditions

Italian scholarship has been particularly important for the study of the Lombards, the papacy, and Byzantine Italy. The work of Gian Pietro Brogiolo, Andrea Augenti, and others has transformed the archaeology of early medieval Italy. The work of Paolo Delogu on the Lombard kingdom and of Nicola Cilento on southern Italy is foundational. Spanish scholarship has focused on Visigothic and early medieval Spain, and the work of Javier Arce, Isabel Velázquez, and others has been central to the study of the period in the Iberian Peninsula.

The Scandinavian and Polish historiographical traditions have, of course, played major roles in the study of Viking and Slavic Europe respectively. The British archaeological tradition has been especially important for the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, and the work of Martin Welch, Helena Hamerow, and John Hines has transformed the field.

The future of the field

The study of the Early Middle Ages continues to evolve. Several new directions are especially promising. First, the digital humanities have opened up new ways of studying large bodies of texts, charters, and archaeological data. The creation of corpora, electronic editions, and online databases has made it possible to ask questions that were difficult to address with the older, more labor-intensive methods. Second, the integration of scientific archaeology - including isotope analysis, ancient DNA, and remote sensing - with traditional historical methods has produced major revisions in the history of migration, trade, and diet. Third, the expansion of the field to include the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, and the comparison of the early Middle Ages with other periods and regions, has produced new global perspectives on the period.

For a more detailed look at the major events that these sources describe, see the Timeline and Key Dates and The Early Middle Ages: A Complete Overview. For a survey of how the geography of Europe was transformed in these centuries, see the Post-Roman Geography of Europe.