Goffart, The Recruitment of Freemen Into The Carolingian Army, Or, How Far May One Argue From Silence

2
The Recruitment of Freemen into the Carolingian Army,

or, How Far May One Argue from Silence?*
Walter Goffart
The Carolingian rulers kept armed forces busy year after year throughout the eighth
century and into the ninth. With his troops, Charlemagne completed the conquest
of Aquitaine, annexed Lombard Italy, invaded Spain, seized control of Bavaria,
plundered the Avars, and, not least, conquered Saxony and forcibly converted its
population to Christianity. He doubled the extent of the lands he inherited. These
are well-known facts. Einhard filled a large part of his biography with a rundown
of Charles’s campaigns, and everyone reads Einhard.1 Thousands of Carolin-
gian subjects served in Charles’s and his predecessors’ armies, crisscrossing the
kingdom to carry out their leaders’ wishes to subdue enemies. Yet the mechanisms
that called them to service, the rations that fed them, and their exertions in reaching
the battlefronts and returning home, have drawn little attention in recent years. The
conquests are familiar, but not the means by which they were achieved.2
Much though armies were a weighty presence in the Carolingian world, they
put us in mind, at present, of a “strangely neglected topic.”3 There is recent
specialist work (notably the articles by Timothy Reuter, cited in n. 25 below),
but general accounts are muted. Three comprehensive books on the Carolingian
empire – by Heinrich Fichtenau, Jacques Boussard, and Rosamond McKitterick
– do not include any discussion of the army.4 The same omission occurs in
Donald Bullough’s fine The Age of Charlemagne.5 Hans-Werner Goetz, writing
* This paper was written with the support of a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship.
1 Einhardi vita Karoli magni, ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz, Georg Waitz, and Oswald Holder-Egger,
MGH SS rer. Germ. 25 (Hanover, 1911), cc. 5–15 (pp. 7–17); English translation: Paul Dutton,
Charlemagne’s Courtier. The Complete Einhard (Peterborough, ON, 1998), pp. 18–25. There
are many other translations. My list of conquests is not exhaustive.
2 “Or la machine guerrière à l’origine de ces succès est encore méconnue”: Étienne Renard, “La
politique militaire de Charlemagne et la paysannerie franque,” Francia 36 (2009), 1–33, at 1.
3 The quoted phrase is from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (London, 1954), ch. 1, whose hero, a
fledgling historian, says ironically that his learned article redresses the neglect.
4 Heinrich Fichtenau, The Carolingian Empire, trans. Peter Munz (Oxford, 1957); Jacques Bous-
sard, The Civilization of Charlemagne, trans. Frances Partridge (London, 1968); Rosamond
McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751–987 (London, 1983).
5 Donald Bullough, The Age of Charlemagne (New York, 1966). Another fine work omitting
a Carolingian army is Edward James, The Origins of France. From Clovis to the Capetians,
500–1000 (London, 1982).
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18 Walter Goffart
on “Social and Military Institutions” in the would-be authoritative The New

Cambridge Medieval History, allots the army a few lines only, and perpetuates
the discredited idea that stirrups contributed to its success. In the same volume,
Janet Nelson writes on “Kingship and Royal Government” with only a fleeting
reference to an army.6 Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome, 650 pages
destined for a general audience, disposes of the Carolingian army in little more
than a single page; his longer Framing the Early Middle Ages grants it barely
ten lines, though somewhat more than is given to the same subject in Rudolf
Schieffer’s Carolingian volume of the standard Gebhardt Handbuch.7 Compa-
rably slight attention is paid to the subject in major books by Johannes Fried
and Dieter Hägermann.8
The practice of passing lightly over Carolingian military institutions is not
new. Justly celebrated as a Carolingianist, François-Louis Ganshof wrote the
following lines (referring to both Frankish dynasties) in a compact account of
“The Institutional Framework of the Frankish Monarchy”:
Having said [in three pages] something of the institutions which were supposed to
guarantee the peace (pax) within the Regnum Francorum, we must make some mention
of the institution which was employed for its external conflicts: the army.
The army was composed of all freemen, Franks, other Germanic tribes and Gallo-
Romans. Under the Merovingians its organization seems to have been far from uniform
and often exceedingly primitive. Apart from a few elite groups of warriors, Merov-
ingian armies fought as savage and undisciplined hordes. Under the Carolingians, a
reduction in numbers, and efforts to improve the offensive and defensive armament
and to set up a good cavalry, were seemingly not without fruit; the growth of vassalage
6 Hans-Werner Goetz, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, 8 vols. (Cambridge, 1995),
2:451–80; Janet Nelson, ibid., pp. 383–430.
7 Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome (London, 2009), pp. 100, 214; Chris Wickham,
Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005), p. 150. Rudolf Schieffer, Die Zeit der karo-
lingischen Grossreichs (714–887), Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, 10th ed., 24
vols. (Stuttgart, 2005), 2:116. Schieffer accepts the idea of an army of drafted freemen, which
is considered just as possible as one of magnates leading military retainers by Friedrich Prinz,
Europäische Grundlagen deutscher Geschichte, Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte,
10th ed. (Stuttgart, 2004), 1:493.
8 Johannes Fried, Der Weg in die Geschichte. Die Ursprünge Deutschlands bis 1024, Propyläen
Geschichte Deutschlands, 11 vols. (Berlin, 1994), 1:335; Dieter Hägermann, Karl der Große.
Herrscher des Abendlandes. Biographie (Berlin, 2000), pp. 485–86, 489–90. Charlemagne is
without his army in Eric Russell Chamberlin, The Emperor: Charlemagne (London, 1986),
Andreas Kalkhoff, Karl der Grosse: Profile eines Herrschers (Munich, 1987), and Siegfried
Fischer-Fabian, Karl der Grosse: der erste Europäer (Bergisch-Gladbach, 1999). Creditable
accounts of Carolingian warfare are in Alessandro Barbero, Charlemagne, Father of a Conti-
nent (Berkeley, 2004), pp. 249–71, and Johannes Fried, Karl der Grosse. Gewalt und Glaube:
eine Biographie (Munich, 2013), pp. 149–53. A brief but competent synopsis is in a picture
book, Philippe Depreux, Charlemagne et les Carolingiens (Paris, 2002), pp. 40–41; the same
in the popular Philippe Depreux, Charlemagne et la dynastie carolingienne (Paris, 2007),
pp. 40–42. See also Leif Inge Ree Petersen, Siege Warfare and Military Organization in the
Successor States (400–800 AD). Byzantium, the West and Islam (Leiden, 2013).
Recruitment of Freemen into the Carolingian Army 19
provided the Frankish kings with a nucleus of troops who were in practice permanent
soldiers, well armed and well mounted.9
Vassals excepted, the Carolingian share of Ganshof’s summary takes up two

lines and omits the arresting facts that the troops were draftees and self-financed.
So much for the instrument that affected all Frankish freemen and procured their
conquests. It is little wonder that, with Ganshof as a model, some of today’s
surveys of Frankish practices have almost eliminated discussion of military
organization.
In the mid-1900s, those beginning a study of Carolingian institutions could
inform themselves about the royal army in Louis Halphen’s enduring Charlemagne
et l’Empire carolingien. Halphen said,
Every year, therefore, all subjects of the Empire could be called on to take arms at
the first summons …[T]he freemen – the only ones involved – were affected by the
summons and … required to comply with the “army order.” … Everyone had to equip
himself at his own cost and … also bring [food], clothes, weapons, and equipment for
six months, carriage, too, being at his cost … [A]ll evasion was considered an infraction
of the “ban” (bannus) or order of the sovereign … subject to a fine of 60 shillings.10
This is a good summary of what may be inferred from normative sources, notably
a set of capitularies, which range from 802 to 830 with a few continuations.11
Every year or almost, it would seem, the roads of the Carolingian kingdoms saw
impressive caravans of armed men, some on horseback, making their way with
laden baggage trains of ox-drawn carts and pack animals to the royal assembly
point and from there to the year’s campaign. But recent books and articles seem
reluctant to supply even this basic information. Halphen’s summary or any other
like it is simply ignored.
Halphen merits attention. According to him, the freemen of the Frankish
world summoned to army duty were a legal, not a social, category. They ranged
from the loftiest personages – magnates, dignitaries, bishops and abbots, high
9 François-Louis Ganshof, “The Institutional Framework of the Frankish Monarchy” (1958), in

Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy. Studies in Carolingian History, trans.
Janet Sondheimer (London, 1971), pp. 86–110, at 92 (as elsewhere). Ganshof steered clear of
Carolingian armies in all his works; he emphasized vassals.
10 Louis Halphen, Charlemagne et l’Empire carolingien (Paris, 1947), pp. 167, 168, 169, 172;
available in English translation as Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire, trans. Giselle De
Nie (Amsterdam, 1977); the translation here is mine. There seems to be a contradiction between
“all subjects of the Empire” and, a little later, “The freemen – the only ones involved,” but I
think this was not meant as a deliberate contrast. For Halphen’s purposes here, “all subjects”
were the freemen.
11 The capitularies are edited by Alfred Boretius and Viktor Krause in MGH Leges, Capitularia
regum Francorum [hereafter Capit. with volume number.], 2 vols. (Hanover, 1892–97). See
Alfred Boretius, Beiträge zur Capitularienkritik (Leipzig, 1874), pp. 151–69 (Appendix): the
military capitularies (Lombard as well as Frankish), which Boretius’s book is mainly about, are
conveniently grouped in this appendix, but all from older editions than the MGH standard.
20 Walter Goffart
royal servants, seniores, royal vassals – down to middling landowners and even
to poor freemen without any land. All were obliged to obey summons to war.
The mansus, the unit of property assessment cited in this connection, referred
only to the scale of freemen’s service, not to their liability to recruitment, which
was a personal obligation applying to everyone regardless of wealth. Allow-
ance was made for inequalities of fortune so that all freemen, poor as well as
rich, were able to serve in the king’s army (many by proxy).12 If they evaded
mobilization, they were heavily fined; the haribannus was a penalty, not a tax, a
capital levy amounting to half the culprit’s moveable property.13 What Halphen
related in 1947 had already been accepted doctrine in 1928 and well before:
“[Under the Carolingians] military service remained obligatory for all freemen
and at their own cost.”14 The undifferentiated freemen summoned to military
service by royal command went to undifferentiated war – domestic or foreign,
offensive or defensive.15 They paid their own way, a notable feature of Caro-
lingian organization: the Frankish king provided no wages for his levied troops
or equipment and weapons; he did not need a war budget.16 “The army” was
called up according to need; it did not exist in the enduring way that a volunteer
professional army does, except perhaps for standing units of “guards” in the
12 A major old controversy centered on whether army service was a personal (Paul Roth) or a
proprietary (Georg Waitz) obligation; see Boretius, Beiträge, p. 71. A fact bearing out the
personal side of recruitment is that the haribannus was a personal penalty for shirking the
exercitus, exacted from the culprit’s moveable goods only (his lands, if any, were unaffected);
regardless of landed possessions, serving in the army was a duty attached to being a freeman,
punished if shirked (the haribannus is comprehensively presented in Capitulare missorum in
Theodonis villa datus secundum, generale [Capit. 1:125, c. 19], and often elsewhere). But the
extent of military service (whether on horseback or with lesser equipment, such as a sword or
bow and arrows) depended on landed wealth, measured in mansi. A self-supporting recruit had
a minimum of four mansi (or so), and allowances were made for poorer ones. For an author-
itative (but not conclusive) account of the mansus, see Étienne Renard, ‘Pour une meilleure
compréhension du monde paysan du haut Moyen Âge’, vol. 2 (unpublished doctoral thesis,
Université de Namur, 2006–07), pp. 28–34 (with thanks to the author for sending me these
pages). The mansus has been much discussed (for good reason; misconceptions of it abound);
see Walter Goffart, “Frankish Military Duty and the Fate of Roman Taxation,” Early Medieval
Europe 16 (2008), 167–73 (and passim).
13 As noted above. The haribannus is widely misunderstood: Timothy Reuter, “Carolingian and
Ottonian Warfare,” in Maurice Keen, ed., Medieval Warfare. A History (Oxford, 1999), pp.
23–24; Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley,
400–1000 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 153–5; John France, “The Composition and Raising of the
Armies of Charlemagne,” Journal of Medieval Military History 1 (2002), 61–82, at 75; Guy
Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450–900 (London, 2003), pp. 55, 76–77;
Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, p. 114 n. 148.
14 Ferdinand Lot, Christian Pfister, and François-Louis Ganshof, Les destinées de l’Empire en
Occident (Paris, 1928), p. 557.
15 France, “Composition and Raising,” p. 66: “[I]t is difficult to draw a sharp distinction between
offensive and defensive warfare.”
16 Heinrich Mitteis, Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt (Weimar, 1933), p. 188. Mitteis, not alone in
affirming this feature of the Frankish army, set out the subject particularly well. The question
as to where food came from needs separate attention.
king’s entourage, serving as the core of an enlarged force (little is known about
them). Freemen were summoned, not all at one time or from the same recruiting
grounds, engaged in the king’s campaigns, and were dismissed to their homes,
normally in part of one year.17
Going to war was the main royal exaction from the freemen of the kingdom.
Exercitus was a tax or more precisely a liturgy, that is, a compulsory public
service required from full-fledged “citizens” (“freemen”) at their own cost in
the Frankish kingdoms. It was called a functio publica, the generic term for state
demands (“taxation”) since Roman times.18 As already noted, if freemen shirked
this obligation, and were detected evading it, they were heavily fined; harib-
annus was the reverse side of exercitus.19 When someone too aged to campaign
petitioned the king to be excused, he was liberated from both exercitus and
haribannus – the self-financed liturgy and the fine for non-performance.20 “The
burden of armed service is understandable as an income tax” (Calmette);21 “The
system of unpaid service [in the Frankish realms] weighed more heavily than
a Roman tax” (Roth); it was “the heaviest burden that could be imposed on a
population” (Fustel de Coulanges); “the heaviest burden of the Frankish subject
… a very heavy burden” (Verbruggen).22 Roth wrote in 1850 and Fustel de
Coulanges in 1888; their comments and, much later, Calmette’s and Verbruggen’s
17 Heinrich Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte [hereafter DRG], 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1887–92), 2:203
(2nd ed., p. 271), made the useful point that “the army” was a pool of freemen out of which
individual armies were constituted as circumstances demanded; one should speak cautiously
about “the Carolingian army.” Similarly, Bernard Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare. Prelude
to Empire (Philadelphia, 2001), p. 51; and others. On palace forces, see ibid., p. 65.
18 Capit. 1:330, c. 2 (825), “hostem et reliquas publicas functiones.” A large selection of passages
is in J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden, 1976), p. 457, s.v. functio,
showing that the “tax” sense was fully understood in Frankish times. For the background,
Theodor Mommsen, ed., Codex Theodosianus (repr. Berlin, 1962), bks. 11–12. In its classical
origins (costly magistracies and services), functio, active “performing (at one’s expense),” was
more central to public exactions than passive “paying.” For exercitus as a publica functio in
Gregory of Tours, see n. 59, below.
19 See n. 13, above. For an extensive collection of instances of the word in context, see Niermeyer,
Lexicon, p. 481, s.v. haribannus. 1. Also “haribannitores.” None of the Carolingian citations
has to do with a payment in lieu of military service (scutage). The haribannus was too expen-
sive (half the culprit’s moveables) to be scutage.
20 Formulae Salicae Merkelianae 41; Cartae Senonicae 18; Collectio Pataviensis 3, all in
Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, ed. Karl Zeumer, MGH Legum sectio V, Formulae
(Hanover, 1882–86), pp. 257, 193, 458.
21 Joseph Calmette, Charlemagne (Paris, 1951), p. 49: “C’est plutôt comme impôt sur le revenu
qu’est entendu la charge de service armé.”
22 Paul Roth, Geschichte des Beneficialwesens (Erlangen, 1850), p. 395; Numa Denis Fustel
de Coulanges, La monarchie franque (Paris, 1888), p. 302; J. F. Verbruggen, “L’armée et la
stratégie de Charlemagne,” in Wolfgang Braunfels ed., Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und
Nachleben, 5 vols. (Düsseldorf, 1965–7), 1:420–36, at 426: “la charge la plus lourde du sujet
franc.” See also Roger Collins, Charlemagne (London, 1998), p. 19: “In part the obligation to
military service, however organised, represented the replacement for the system of taxation that
had existed under the Roman Empire, whose rulers had used it primarily to pay their armies.”
The details of the comment are arguable, but its direction is sound.
22 Walter Goffart
have been sidelined or disregarded by the majority of recent authors. Much is

said about the disappearance of Roman taxation, without it being observed that
an onerous public charge, Roman-derived or not, was actively inflicted almost
annually and complied with.23 The Carolingian kings did not need a war tax to
pay for their military exertions; their campaigns, presumably costly, were paid
for mainly by the men who fought them, rich and poor. Exercitus, the military
service carried out without charge as a functio publica, was the Carolingian
(and Merovingian) war tax. This “revenue” should be taken into account when
appraising royal resources.24 Much of the kings’ “military budget” was borne
directly by their troops.
The armed force of duty-bound, self-financed freemen just described is remark-

able; these would have been the troops that followed the early Carolingian kings
and, under their leadership, achieved amazing results with the expansion of the
Frankish kingdom. But this vision is now contested. A series of historians in the
twentieth century and twenty-first centuries have worked to undermine the notion
of the fundamental role of obligated freemen in the Frankish army and to portray
the fighting forces as restricted to “magnates and their retainers.” The most heeded
of these has been Timothy Reuter, in four articles of which the most important are
“Plunder and Tribute in the Carolingian Empire” (1985) and “The End of Caro-
lingian Military Expansion” (1990).25 He and others before and after expressed
their arguments without engaging in a debate with more conservative views, such
as those of 1928 and 1947 quoted above. It is as though the revised version were
wholly in possession of the field without having to contest the older account, and
permitted to set it quietly aside, disregarded. But my recent examination of Caro-
23 Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992), p. 29: “Had ninth-century rulers really been
able to collect a generalized army–tax ….” Nelson envisaged a redistributive tax; but unpaid
service is a tax (more precisely, a liturgy, i.e., compulsory public service), and the Carolingians
enforced it. (Note that a royal “army–tax,” if exacted from the freemen, unless used to hire
mercenaries, would have necessitated a reciprocal payment to the troops [as rations in the
Roman scheme] not visible in the Carolingian system.) Wickham, Framing the Early Middle
Ages, pp. 82, 85, 804, 805, playing up the disappearance of Roman fiscality, took account only
of redistributive taxation; but angariae, labor services, for example, were also a tax (liturgy).
24 It is a notable absentee from the account of royal resources in Ganshof, “Institutional Frame-
work,” pp. 95–101.
25 Timothy Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute in the Carolingian Empire,” repr. in Janet Nelson, ed.,
Medieval Politics and Modern Mentalities (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 231–50, originally in Trans-
actions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 35 (1985), 75–94; “The End of Carolingian
Military Expansion,” also repr. in Nelson, ed., Medieval Politics, pp. 251–67, originally in Peter
Godman and Roger Collins, eds., Charlemagne’s Heir (Oxford, 1990), pp. 391–405. All my
citations from these two articles are from the reprintings in Medieval Politics (where, unfortu-
nately, they are repaginated). See also Reuter, “The Recruitment of Armies in the Early Middle
Ages: What Can We Know?” in Anne Nørgård Jorgensen and Birthe L. Clausen, eds., Military
Aspects of Scandinavian Society in a European Perspective, AD 1–1300 (Copenhagen, 1997),
pp. 32–37; and Reuter, “Carolingian and Ottonian Warfare,” in Maurice Keen, ed., Medieval
Warfare. A History (Oxford, 1999), pp. 13–35. Reuter was a wide-ranging and talented histo-
rian, prematurely deceased and much mourned.
lingian “home defense” (defensio patriae/lantweri) has disclosed a wide-reaching

flaw in the way this result has been obtained.26 The new teaching, arising from
the mistaken premise that there was a tradition-based home defense (to which
ordinary freemen were confined), is based on a technique of arguing unduly from
eighth-century silence, that is, from the absence of evidence, especially in the
documents called “capitularies.”27
Recent commentators, then, have turned their backs on the army of obligated,
self-financed freemen outlined above and preferred a select force. This position
is almost unanimous among the latest generations of historians; one recent state-
ment of it, by Étienne Renard, summarizes what is generally believed:
In the eighth–ninth centuries, most Frankish military expeditions set in play troops
whose effectives were limited in numbers but well equipped, very mobile and battle-
hardened: the permanent warrior entourage (trustis), the vassals and dependents of the
king and of the magnates were the spear-point of Carolingian offensives.28
There is a problem, though, often overlooked: namely, that the early ninth-
century capitularies, the crucial source, do not substantiate the idea of a compact
army of magnates and their retinues. Reuter recognized this weakness and
argued that there had been a change in military organization. Charlemagne’s
eighth-century army, he proposed, was select, as in the Renard quotation above,
but it was superseded after 800 by the army documented by the capitularies –
drafted freemen, rich and poor, needed for the defense of a far-flung empire.
The absence of military ordinances in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centu-
ries, Reuter suggested, coincided with the first-rate army of the Carolingian
conquests, whereas the capitularies after 800 recorded a reform: the enlargement
of military recruitment by the drafting, for the first time, of ordinary freemen.29
26 Walter Goffart, “Defensio patriae as a Carolingian Military Obligation,” Francia 43 (2016), 21–39.
27 Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard, eds., The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (New
York, 2011), pp. 64–65, “arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many
examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray.” On the capitularies, see, lately,
Collins, Charlemagne, pp. 10–12; Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Making of a
European Identity (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 233–63.
28 Étienne Renard, “Une élite paysanne en crise? Le poids des charges militaires pour les petits
alleutiers entre Loire et Rhin au IXe siècle,” in François Bougard, Laurent Feller, and Régine
Le Jan, eds., Les élites au haut Moyen Âge. Crise et renouvellements (Turnhout, 2006), p.
320 (my translation). Other recent works presenting Charlemagne’s army as consisting of
magnates and their followers are Rosamond McKitterick, “Politics,” in McKitterick, ed., The
Early Middle Ages: Europe 400–1000, Short Oxford History of Europe 3 (Oxford, 2001), p.
49; France, “Composition and Training,” p. 63; Matthias Becher, Charlemagne, trans. David
Bachrach (New Haven, 2003, original ed. 1999), p. 113; Halsall, Warfare and Society, pp. 69,
76; Matthew Innes, Introduction to Early Medieval Western Europe, 300–900. The Sword,
the Plough and the Book (London, 2007), p. 403; Kelly DeVries and Robert D. Smith, Medi-
eval Weapons. An Illustrated History of Their Impact (Santa Barbara, 2007), p. 14; Wickham,
Inheritance of Rome, p. 214; Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Simon Maclean, The
Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2011), p. 172; Petersen, Siege Warfare, pp. 193, 218.
29 Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute,” pp. 244–46; “End of Expansion,” pp. 261, 282–83, 266–67.
24 Walter Goffart
Reuter’s argument rests mainly on inferences from silence.30 Reasoning of this

kind about the Carolingian army did not begin with him. It was an entrenched
idea of earlier commentators (reaching back well into the nineteenth century) that
soon after 800 there was a marked reordering of military rules, though not along
the lines Reuter proposed. Belief in an “army reform” (Heeresreform) by Char-
lemagne in 804–08 is deeply entrenched.31 The authoritative Paul Roth (1850)
and Georg Waitz (c. 1870), who differed on much concerning the Carolingian
army, agreed on a pronounced change after 800. Their claim was not uncon-
tested. Alfred Boretius, editor of the capitularies, denied that a change had taken
place; the inferences Roth and Waitz drew from the lack of evidence, he claimed,
were not compelling.32 There were varied opinions as to what the modifications
were. It was said, for example, that the troops of the eighth-century conquests,
often called out, were overburdened and needed relief; or that a too-large eighth-
century army was improved by streamlining. But almost all – Boretius aside
– agreed that the capitularies of the early 800s, whatever their goal, legislated
marked changes in military organization, even a reform.
The condition of the sources was the reason for this near-unanimity among
commentators. Virtually nothing is documented about the eighth-century Caro-
lingian army, or the seventh-century one for that matter, besides the wars and
campaigns themselves, sketchily reported in reticent annals.33 It is only in the
30 On such arguments, see n. 27 above. In Reuter’s wake, Halsall, Warfare and Society, p. 76,
reasoned that eighth-century capitularies speak about benefices but not about military recruit-
ment; therefore, Charlemagne was concerned with benefices but not with recruitment. Again
(p. 89): Charlemagne began to be concerned with recruitment after 800 (implicitly, he was
uninterested before). An obvious objection is that the capitularies before 800, particularly thin
on military matters, are not a fair basis for inferring Charlemagne’s thinking (even about bene-
fices). It is essential to have adequate silence. (For military matters in capitularies before 800,
see n. 33 below.) Similarly, Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, e.g. pp. 69, 286, 288,
290, 299, resorts intensively to arguments from silence.
31 For details, the historiographic account of Werner Hechberger, Adel im fränkisch-deutschen
Mittelalter. Zur Anatomie eines Forschungsprobleme (Ostfildern, 2005), p. 208, is useful.
32 Boretius, Beiträge, p. 71, highlighted the agreement of Roth and Waitz. A more recent advo-
cate of a Heeresreform is Josef Fleckenstein, “Adel und Kriegertum und ihre Wandlung im
Karolingerreich,” Settimane di studio dell’Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 27 (1981),
67–100, at 85–86; Fleckelstein endorsed the more than century-old belief that the recruitment
“clubs” found in Charlemagne’s military capitularies were innovations meant to lighten the
burden of poorer freemen. For recruitment “clubs,” see the capitulary quoted below at n. 51.
These were a method for taking account of the resources of poorer freemen. Freemen who did
not have the property to go to war at their sole expense (four “manses”) were to form consortia
(“clubs”) with complementary freemen up to the four-“manse” minimum (e.g., a one-“manse”
person with a three-“manse” one). One member of the club, financially assisted by his peers,
would actually go to war, while all members were understood to fulfill their military obligation
(and avoid being fined). Clubs will be mentioned frequently below.
33 An examination of the early capitularies shows that the army features very rarely: clergy not to
go “in exercitu” (Capit. 1:25, c. 2, a. 742); behavior when going to join the army (1:43, c. 6,
a. 768); persons joining the king “ostiliter” (army-ready) (1:65, c. 7, a. 789); everyone having
to go army-ready to the assistance of the king (1:67, c. 6, a. 792); no one to spurn the king’s
“ostile bannum” (mobilization) (1:93, c. 7, a. 802); the “haribannus” (1:205, c. 2, a. 801, Italy);
early 800s that this situation improves. “[A]lmost all the capitularies on all
topics date from after 800 and we have no proper basis for making a compar-
ison with what earlier material might have said.”34 A set of military ordinances
begins in the last years of Charlemagne and continues into the reigns of Louis
the Pious and Charles the Bald, detailing almost everything found in modern
discussions of the subject. Historians of military matters are faced with extreme
poverty of evidence down to 802, followed by riches, at least for some decades.
From this glaring disparity of evidence came the temptation to argue from
silence. As noted above, an early form of this argument – the notion that Char-
lemagne engaged in a Heeresreform – has been in circulation since the mid-
nineteenth century. It was taken for granted that the first military capitularies,
from 802, did not just record the status quo, as they might have done, given their
wording; they were thought to document a new direction in military organiza-
tion. One might speak, as Renard did recently, of Charlemagne’s “new mili-
tary policy” (“nouvelle politique militaire”) and his “reform of army service”
(“réforme du service d’ost”).35 Early understandings of this Carolingian army
reform took it to be an effort to restore the strength of overburdened freemen by
lightening their military obligation; now, after Reuter, it is envisioned as Char-
lemagne’s institution for the first time of host service by the mass of freemen.36
Yet this idea of innovation is not a necessary, compelling inference from the
primary records. The contents of the capitularies were not necessarily motivated by
special circumstances, such as a change of the army from offensive to defensive,
desertion (ibid., c. 3). The first comprehensive clauses about the army come in the Capitu-
lare Aquisgranense of 802–3, Capit. 1:171, cc. 9–10. A continually repeated injunction (from
Pepin, 765, well into the 800s, and in the Ansegis capitulary collection) concerns benefices (not
explicitly military): these are to be faithfully tended and not stripped to enrich the beneficiary’s
hereditary property; for citations, see François-Louis Ganshof, “Benefice and Vassalage in the
Age of Charlemagne,” Cambridge Historical Journal 6 (1939), 147–75, at 161 with n. 71, 173
with n. 127. Too little attention is paid to this thought-provoking series of capitula.
On the annals, see Wilhelm Wattenbach and Wilhelm Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen
im Mittelalter. Vorzeit und Karolinger (Weimar, 1952–53), pp. 161–63, 180–92, 245–66; Rosa-
mond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004), pp.
84–119; ead., Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), ch. 3.
34 France, “Composition and Raising,” p. 66. This may be exaggerated; there were major capit-
ularies before 800, but France was right as regards military matters (as noted above). Also,
Eckhard Müller-Mertens, Karl der Grosse, Ludwig der Fromme und die Freien. Wer waren die
Liberi homines der Karolingische Kapitularien (742/743–832)? Forschungen zur mittelalterli-
chen Geschichte 10 (Berlin, 1963), p. 48: the years 802–30 were “einer eigentlichen Aera der
Kapitularien.” McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 256–63, 271, has a meticulous analysis of the
capitularies (see n. 49, below) without denying that the years after 802 were a distinct period.
35 Renard, “Politique militaire,” pp. 26–27. And not only of army organization. In the wake of
Reuter, “End of Expansion,” Halsall, Warfare and Society, pp. 89–90, applied the change to the
end of Charlemagne’s wars of expansion: “Significantly, it is about this time … that the earliest
detailed legislation about military service appears.” The contrast between before and after 800,
based on the shift to written military regulations, is enlarged into not just a Heeresreform, but
a deliberate change by Charlemagne from an offensive to a defensive military policy.
36 Hechberger, Adel im Mittelalter, p. 208.
26 Walter Goffart
or Charlemagne’s taking pity on his overworked soldiers, or a widening of recruit-

ment to include ordinary freemen because more troops were needed for empire-
wide defense. The capitularies themselves do not assert that their prescriptions
were new in whole or in part.37 They might simply document the existing military
“custom” (antiqua consuetudo), comparable to our “Articles of War,” that used
to be transmitted orally and continually reaffirmed by the army leadership in the
frequent mobilizations. The notion that the military capitularies instituted innova-
tions derives wholly from modern commentators. When stripped of modern glosses,
the earlier army regulations, sustained orally, might well have resembled what was
finally written down, notably in 807–08. “The tendency to set the administration
down in writing (Verschriftlichung der Verwaltung) increased markedly after the
imperial coronation.”38 A necessary response to the arguments from silence is to
suggest that the reform had been not of army regulations themselves (which were
not markedly changed from the near past), but rather of the documentation about
them; to apply the famous saying of Marshall McLuhan, the medium – here, the
use of writing, Verschriftlichung – is the message.39
Reuter carried arguments from silence to great lengths. He proceeded on the
premise that the lack of sources about the army, especially capitularies, in the
700s bore eloquent witness to eighth-century conditions. The dearth of military
clauses before 800 in itself persuaded him of the reason of their absence – the
contentment of a victorious, plunder-acquiring army. Amplifying Reuter’s inter-
pretation, Matthew Innes wrote, “In the period of successful expansion before
800, the attraction of the war-trail was such that there was no need for rules
and regulations about the obligation to serve; local elites wanted to fight … In
a new context of defensive warfare after 800, the sociology of military service
changed. Legislation about military service was sparse until the first decade of
the ninth century, when it exploded ….”40 It would seem that ordinances were
37 For example, Renard, “Politique militaire,” p. 24, has the capitularies of 807–08 “inaugurate”
a new system of recruitment. But the rules in question are not presented as being new.
38 Karl Ubl, Die Karolinger. Herrscher und Reich (Munich, 2014), p. 57 (my translation).
Regarding antiqua consuetudo, see n. 68, below.
39 Mark Federman, “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?” (23 July 2004). http://
individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm [accessed 17 January
2018]. McLuhan’s phrase dates to 1984. The faulty inference from the appearance of the capitu-
laries discussed here appears too in Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. Michael
Jones (Oxford, 1984), p. 24, alleging on the basis of silence that the high command had no
interest in recruitment in the eighth century because they had all the troops they wanted, and, by
contrast, after 800, “formulae became more precise.” Precise or not, there had been no written
formulae before 800: army summonses, like much else, were transmitted orally. It is certain
that freemen did not have the option of staying away from the army before the injunction of
802: “ut ostile bannum domni imperatori nemo praetermittere presumat” (“let no one dare to
disregard the army order of the lord emperor”) (Capit. 1:93, c. 7). The rule was surely not new.
It simply had not been written down before (in any extant records).
40 Matthew Innes, “What was Charlemagne’s Government,” in Joanna Story, ed., Charlemagne.
Empire and Society (Manchester, 2005), pp. 71–89, at 84. Rules and regulations cannot have begun
with their appearance in capitularies. Note the case of rules regarding the heribannus at n. 57 below.
superfluous until after 800. Silence could then justify a second inference, now
positive (this is Reuter speaking): “there was little if any evidence for a general
military obligation on all freemen in sixth-, seventh- and eighth-century Francia,
except that everyone was obliged to turn out if their local region was under
threat.”41 In other words, until the capitularies began, ordinary freemen were
kept from the royal armies and were subject only to the duty of home defense
(a duty which has now been shown not to have existed). Renard’s four-line
description of the army quoted above shows he concurs with the view that Caro-
lingian conquests were carried out by armies of magnates and their vassals, with
no need for ordinary freemen. In other words, “The conquerors of the Saxons
and Avars need to be reimagined as war-bands of noble youths in the follow-
ings of lords, competing with each other (individually or as groups) for glory
and loot.”42 As a model, Reuter invoked the comitatus of Tacitus’s Germania,
written 700 years before – a leader and his devoted satellites (comites) – its
composition and obligations, he suggested, continuing to prevail.43 So handled,
silence had a positive as well as a negative function. Ordinary freemen were not
only not required in, but also apparently absent from a royal army composed of
magnates and their followers, enthused by the prospect of enriching themselves
alongside their victorious leaders.
Reuter’s argument went still further. A major change came about after 800,
he proposed, when the Carolingian military posture was reordered from offen-
sive to defensive. Too few to cope with empire-wide defense, magnates and
their retainers in the exercitus had to be reinforced by the conscription of free-
men.44 Reuter observed (as quoted above) that nothing substantiated the idea of
a “general military obligation” down to 800, except as regards home defense
(an interpretation anticipated by Delbrück and Ganshof).45 Because the pauperi
liberi had been absent before, the capitularies from 802 on displayed major
41 Reuter, “Recruitment of Armies,” p. 34. An obligation to turn out for defense is not documented
either. On its non-existence, see my article cited in n. 26, above.
42 Janet Nelson, “Violence in the Carolingian World and the Ritualization of Ninth-Century
Warfare,” in Guy Halsall, ed., Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge,
1998), pp. 90–107, at 95.
43 Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute,” p. 239: Carolingian “warrior” followings “were essentially the
comitatus of Tacitus’ time.” The implications of this idea are more than merely decorative. A
further Tacitean antecedent occurs on p. 237. Might a recent tendency be the “antique-ing” of
the Merovingian and Carolingian Franks – armies consisting of “warbands” led by “warlords”
along a “war trail”; evocations of Beowulf (247)? The idea of Carolingian war as “normal
plundering-expeditions” (245), and offensive war abating when rich neighbors for plundering
ran out, also align with this way of thinking. There is no trace of this coloring in, e.g., Brunner,
Halphen, or Ganshof.
44 Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute,” p. 245; “End of Expansion,” p. 261.
45 Hans Delbrück, History of the Art of War, trans. Walter J. Renfroe Jr., 4 vols. ([1923]; Westport,
CT, 1982), 3:14; François-Louis Ganshof, Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne, trans. Bryce
and Mary Lyon (Providence, RI, 1968), p. 59. Quoted in Goffart, “Defensio patriae,” p. 22 nn. 4,
6. Delbrück and Ganshof claimed that although military obligation was general, most conscripted
men were destined only for territorial defense when invasions occurred (defensio patriae).
28 Walter Goffart
innovations. Most centrally, they documented the mobilization of all freemen,

down to the poorest, into the royal army, but destined most of them for defense,
not campaigning. Silence, so it was claimed, bore witness to the absence of
ordinary freemen from the exercitus before 800.46 Capitularies having shown
that this had changed, it followed that the high command must have had a
reason – more troops for defense, Reuter said – for enlarging the army out of the
formerly disregarded pool of manpower. Slightly disagreeing, Renard proposed
that Charlemagne simply needed to enlarge the army for his various military
undertakings, including the manning of defensive marches.47 For one reason or
another, poorer freemen now inundated the exercitus. This, it seems, was the
great change in the military after the turn of the century.
Müller-Mertens in 1963 made a judicious observation about the nature of
capitularies: “it must be taken into account that, by and large, the capitularies
did not establish new institutions, but that they meant to reform and stabilize
an already existing order.”48 In other words, capitularies might attest to a pre-
established state of affairs as well as to its amendment, if any. Further, “most
[capitularies] issued by Charlemagne [after the 780s and 90s] are administra-
tive communications to or about the missi dominici rather than legislation.”49
Reuter, however, stood in a line of commentators who read the military capitu-
laries in a different, more dynamic way. As early as Roth and Waitz (at least),
Charlemagne’s army regulations were taken to embody innovative measures.
Following his predecessors, Brunner had them remedy the exhaustion of over-
worked subjects: “[The capitularies] shed light [on the fact] that the mass of
freemen began to feel the burden of war service as a heavy weight” and so
needed relief.50 The device of recruitment clubs was designed to limit war
46 Because little more is attested in writing before 800 than the existence of an army, silence could
equally imply that “magnates and their followers” were as absent as poorer freemen.
47 Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute,” and “End of Expansion”; Renard, “Politique militaire,” pp. 26–27.
48 Müller-Mertens, Karl der Grosse, p. 50, “Dabei muss bedacht werden, dass die Kapitularien im
grossen und ganzen keine neuen Institutionen etablierten, sondern dass sie eine bereits beste-
hende Ordnung reformieren und stabilisieren wollten.” See also François-Louis Ganshof, “The
Impact of Charlemagne on the Institutions of the Frankish Realm” (1965), in Ganshof, Caro-
lingians, pp. 143–61, at 146: “In the field of military matters we have no article of a capitulary
enacting [the ‘clubbing’ system]: we find only the means of applying this rule in 806, 807, and
808. Either the capitularies concerning these matters have disappeared or provisions dealing
with them were never cast in the shape of articles.”
49 McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 256. In keeping with McKitterick’s explanation that the
eighth-century capitularies were “programmatic,” instituting reforms (pp. 237–43), it might
rightly follow, arguing from silence, that the lack of military clauses in these enactments
implies that Charlemagne had no plans for fundamentally altering or “reforming” his army.
See also François-Louis Ganshof, Recherches sur les capitulaires (Paris, 1958), pp. 78–79.
50 Brunner, DRG, 2:204: “Aus ihnen [the capitularies] erhellt, dass die Masse der Gemeinfreien die
Last des Kriegsdienstes als schweren Druck zu empfinden begann” (cf. 2nd ed. by Schwerin, p.
272, somewhat altered). The same opinion was anticipated by Roth, Beneficialwesens, p. 393.
For Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute,” p. 245 n. 74, “[t]his is common ground,” i.e., generally
agreed (see e.g. Fleckenstein, “Adel und Kriegertum”). The capitularies do not in fact show that
the freemen felt overburdened; they simply illustrate a mechanism (“clubbing”) for liberating
service by poor freemen. Other provisions were also taken to be innovations.

The undocumented former army was assumed, e silentio, not to have had such
adornments. These were ninth-century creations.
Although there are noteworthy anticipations in 806 and 807, Charlemagne’s
reputedly innovative military measures are best tested by the first clause of a
capitulary of 808 whose careful redaction and heading suggest that it was a
“model” military code even if (as some have said) meant to serve a special
need for troops:
Summary of enactments which the royal missi must have for mobilizing the army.
1. That every free man who has four occupied mansi of his own or in benefice from
another should equip himself and go on his own behalf to join the host, either with
his lord (if his lord goes) or with his count. A man who has three mansi of his own
should be joined by someone who has one and who can give him assistance so that he
can go on behalf of both. A man who has only two mansi of his own should be joined
by someone who also has two, and one of them should go to join the [army], with the
other giving him assistance. A man who has only one mansus of his own should be
joined with three others in a similar situation who can give him assistance: he alone
should go, and the three who give him assistance should remain at home.51 [More
clauses follow, not on recruitment, to be examined shortly.]
most poor freemen from active service while nevertheless having them contribute to the army
(see n. 32, above). Nothing shows that clubbing, or something like it, did not exist before 800;
the most that may be said is that it was not documented then. (This was also Ganshof’s opinion;
see n. 48, above.) None of the 806–08 capitula intimates that they embodied something new.
The haribannus is a point of comparison (as shown presently). Ganshof rightly inferred from
the clubbing system that the army was thereby reduced in size, i.e., streamlined; whereas Reuter
proposed an army without freemen until the 800s, thus an enlargement at that point (“Plunder
and Tribute,” p. 246; “End of Expansion,” p. 261).
51 Henry R. Loyn and John Percival, trans., The Reign of Charlemagne. Documents on Carolin-
gian Government and Administration (London, 1975), p. 96; Capit. 1:197: “Brevis capitulorum
quam missi dominici habere debent ad exercitum promovendum. C. 1, Ut omnis liber homo,
qui quatuor mansos vestitos de proprio suo sive de alicuius beneficio habet, ipse se praeparet
et per se in hostem pergat, sive cum seniore suo si senior eius perrexerit sive cum comite suo.
Qui vero tres mansos de proprio habuerit, huic adiungatur unus qui unum mansum habeat et det
illi adiutorium, ut ille pro ambobus possit. Qui autem duos habet de proprio tantum, iungatur
illi alter qui similiter duos mansos habeat, et unus ex eis, altero illum adiuvante, pergat in
hostem. Qui etiam tantum unum mansum de proprio habet, adiungantur ei tres qui similiter
habeant et dent ei adiutorium, et ille pergat tantum; tres vero qui illi adiutorium dederunt, domi
remaneant.” To repeat (see n. 12, above), the mansus is a unit of agrarian assessment, used here
as a way to approximate the wealth of a landowner. Clubs of taxpayers are a traditional mech-
anism of tax collection, such as, in ancient Athens, the taxpayer associations (symmories) for
building warships. On this capitulary, see Renard, ‘Pour une meilleure compréhension’, p. 33:
“Un système de conscription sans antécédent direct … se mit en place au cours des années
807–808” – another argument from silence: there is no “antecedent,” because the 700s lack
any capitularies, i.e., written evidence, on this subject. See Ganshof’s comment in n. 48, above.
The anticipations of a few years earlier are: Capit. 1:134–35 (c. 2), 136 (c. 2). At c. 8 the 808
capitulary (138) carefully orders that four copies are to be made and distributed four ways (one
kept at the palace). Nevertheless, the text, “für das Gesamtreich wichtige,” survives in only
30 Walter Goffart
Reading these lines, and recalling the silence of the eighth century, one might
take them as new law. Several features had definitely not been seen before in
Carolingian sources: the presupposition that there were many poorer freemen in
the army; the four-mansus floor for going to war at one’s own expense; and the
existence of recruitment clubs for regulating the call-up of freemen with fewer
than four mansi. The larger part of the quotation is taken up by making allow-
ances for various grades of “poverty.”52
Does any of this have to be new? The law gives no indication of instituting
rules that had not been in force before. The reader is informed of the status quo –
for example, that possessors of four or more mansi (three to five mansi in 807)53
were to equip themselves at their cost and join the host. That’s how it was;
there is no reason to believe that it had not been so before. The clubs might be
interpreted in the same way (as by Dopsch and Ganshof).54 The undocumented
army before 800 is also likely to have had a method, this one or a variant (as in
a capitulary of 806), for sorting recruits by their relative assets.55 Something of
the kind is attested in the eighth-century Lombard kingdom; the need for such
gradations – variable fortunes – was not mysterious.56 The king ordering his
subjects to war reminded rich and poor of the standing rules of recruitment. No
innovation was mentioned or implied.
The recruitment rules quoted here were not the only part of the capitulary
of 808 bearing on the question whether or not it embodied a change of military
legislation or rather a reaffirmation of standing rules. Continuity of an estab-
lished order (“Articles of War”) is clearly implied by the four clauses concerning
the haribannus, the royal fine for dodging military service. These have not been
taken into account by the historians we have encountered.57 Surviving eighth-
one tenth–eleventh-century manuscript; see Hubert Mordek, “Karolingische Kapitularien,” in

Mordek, ed., Überlieferung und Geltung normativer Texte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters,
Vier Vorträge (Sigmaringen, 1986), p. 43 n. 108. In other words, the importance of a capitulary
should not be judged by its transmission.
52 “Poverty” is too strong. Men with three mansi were not poor, neither (perhaps) were men with
one. I use the term only by contrast with the “rich” – four mansi and up. “Fortune” might be a
more appropriate word. See Régine Le Jan, “Pauperes et paupertas dans l’Occident carolingien
aux IXe et Xe siècles,” Revue du Nord 50 (1968), 169–87, at 170–71; Philippe Depreux, Les
sociétés occidentales du milieu du VIe à la fin du IXe siècle (Rennes, 2002), p. 142.
53 Capit. 1:134, c. 2: “Quicumque liber mansos quinque de proprietate habere videtur, similiter
[as c. 1] in hostem veniat; et qui quattuor mansos habet, similiter faciat; qui tres habere videtur,
similiter agat”; for lower totals, clubs are instituted. With the comparable clauses in 806 and
808, it appears that the limit for service at one’s sole expense was adjustable to varying condi-
tions; the base line was multiple mansi.
54 See n. 63, below.
55 The 806 capitulary (Capit. 1:136, c. 2), without organizing clubs, specifies that if the campaign
is to a distant theater, one of six in the army is to go with support from the other five, if to to
a nearer theater, one of three supported by the other two. A grading of recruits by fortune is
not undertaken.
56 For the Lombard army, see Boretius, Beiträge, p. 165 (capitulary of King Aistulf, 752).
57 Capit. 1:137–38, cc. 2–7; trans. Loyn and Percival, pp. 96–97. For misunderstandings of the
haribannus, see n. 13, above. A typical misinterpretation: “[T]he Carolingian haribannus was
century capitularies do not address the haribannus any more than recruitment.
Did this silence prove that the fine was unnecessary or disregarded in that
century? Was army service so desirable then, with ample plunder as its entice-
ment, that no one (or insignificantly few) evaded service? That, surely, cannot
be true.58 A standing obligation such as (expensive) military service could never
have been so uniformly alluring as not to need enforcement. The haribannus
is attested in the sixth century and in the seventh. Gregory of Tours showed
it being enforced; it is in Lex Ribvaria as a royal fine of 60 solidi;59 Merov-
ingian charters of 662–75 and 767 document the haribannus obligation;60 the
penalty exists in model charters (formulae).61 The fine, a capital levy of half the
culprit’s moveables (up to a 60s. maximum), was long-established by law and
was almost certainly exacted as much in the eighth century, barely documented,
as in previous centuries and in the amply documented ninth.62 So understood,
the administrative instructions in the 808 capitulary concerning the application
of the haribannus – as it happens, fuller instructions than for recruitment – are
solid evidence for the existence of an enduring customary military regulation
(“Articles of War”) that was prolonged, clarified, and amended, not initiated,
an incident on free men from whom military service was not expected and used as a means of
maintaining the army” (Innes, State and Society, p. 154). The Carolingians had no mechanism
for central “maintaining” of their armies.
58 Halsall, Warfare and Society, p. 76: “Throughout the eighth century … there is little or no
discussion of military obligation or the heribannus.” Halsall deduces that where there was no
(written, capitulary) “discussion,” the “thing” was also absent; again, an argumentum e silentio.
59 Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri decem 5:26, 6:12, 7:42, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm
Levison, MGH SS rer. Merov. 1, part 1, 2nd ed. (Hanover, 1939–51), pp. 232–33, 283, 364; Lex
Ribvaria, 68:1–2, MGH Leges nat. Germ. 3/2 (Hanover, 1954), p. 119 (charges 60s. for failure
to comply with a royal command “in hoste,” i.e., to join the army). Neither passage mentions
haribannus, but each clearly applies to this institution. The first passage mentions bannos, i.e.,
royal fines, in the appropriate context of failing to obey the order for mobilization; the second
is also clear. Gregory, Hist. 5:26 does not tell us who normally was mobilized; those mentioned
are somehow involved with the Church and claimed to be exempt (the same goes for 7:42),
i.e., a very small fraction of those liable. Gregory exploited the occasion to vent his biases
(against government exactions, violation of exemptions, King Chilperic, etc.), not to supply
an exhaustive list of those subject to army fines. Note that, in Hist. 5:26, exercitus is called a
publica functio (= tax).
60 DMerov nos. 99 and 188, ed. Theo Kölzer, MGH Diplomata regum Francorum e stirpe Mero-
vingica (Hanover, 2001), pp. 254, 471. DMerov no. 143 (694), ibid., p. 361, recalls a high
official neglecting to join a royal campaign and having to pay 600s. as a result. This looks like
someone redeeming his life (a wergeld) when penalized for abandoning the army, rather than
paying a fine for failing to join it.
61 Formulae Salicae Merkelianae 42, ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, p. 257, “Cognoscatis quia
nos … nomine ille concessimus, ut … de omnibus hostibus et de omnibus haribanis …
securus exinde valeat resedere.” Also, Cartae Senonicae 19, p. 193; Collectio Pataviensis 3,
pp. 457–58. On the formula collections, see Rudolf Buchner, Beiheft: Die Rechtsquellen, in
Wattenbach-Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter. Vorzeit und Karolinger,
pp. 49–55; Alice Rio, Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages: Frankish
Formulae, c. 500–1000 (Cambridge, 2009).
62 See n. 13, above, especially the capitulary cited there.
32 Walter Goffart
when capitularies in writing, such as that of 808, began to be issued. Even

without noticing the haribannus clauses and their significance for illustrating
the passage from unwritten to written army regulations, Brunner, Dopsch, and
Ganshof all believed that rules found in Charlemagne’s early military capitu-
laries were anticipated by former, unrecorded, and so lost enactments.63
Reuter has an arresting sentence: “It will not do simply to take the capitulary
provisions of the period 800–30 and project them indefinitely into the Frankish
past.”64 Indefinite projection is obviously wrong; Clovis (d. 511) and, perhaps,
Dagobert (d. 639) are too ancient to be relevant. But Reuter’s caution cannot be
limited to the distant Frankish past; its immediate effect is to forestall short-term
continuity from the conquering but organizationally undocumented Carolingian
army of the 700s to the army of the capitularies in the early 800s. If that was
Reuter’s reasoning, his dismissal of short-term continuity – sustained only by
the lack of eighth-century and earlier evidence – was uncalled for.65 There is no
reason, except a putative and disputed change from offensive warfare to defen-
sive (or some other similarly indemonstrable explanation), why the composition
and organization of Charlemagne’s army in the last years of his reign (800–14),
documented by the capitularies, should not have closely resembled that, undocu-
mented, of the conquering force of his earlier years (768–99). A defensive army
does not greatly differ from an offensive one; indeed, the same army can engage
in both types of activity.66 Even if Charlemagne altered his strategic posture
(which is uncertain),67 the army and its rules of recruitment did not need to
be comprehensively reordered. Nothing in the quoted 808 capitulary (or those
of 806 and 807) bears out a wide-ranging “reform” and modification of the
army status quo if we reject the assumption that its terms are to be contrasted
with eighth-century silence. The clauses concerning the haribannus, meanwhile,
offer special confirmation of a prolongation of long-standing military law.
63 Brunner, DRG, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1906–28), 2:373, 376, implied that the clubbing practice
found in the capitularies antedated Charlemagne. Alfons Dopsch, The Economic and Social
Foundations of European Civilization, trans. M. G. Beard and Nadine Marshall (London,
1937), p. 219: these provisions decree no innovation; they repeat fundamental principles
already in force. François-Louis Ganshof, “L’armée sous les Carolingiens,” Settimane di studio
dell’Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 15 (1968), 109–30, at 114–15: the practice of
having multiple freemen equip one, applied in 806 (and later, “clubbing”), is “une réglementa-
tion qui est évidemment plus ancienne, sans que nous puissions cependant nous risquer à même
suggérer une date pour son adoption.” Note also Alfons Dopsch, Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung
der Karolingerzeit, 2 vols. (Weimar, 1913), 2:18: the military provisions of the capitularies “are
not, as formerly thought, innovations of Charlemagne’s in the sense of a reform of existing
practices, but rather the repetition of already standing rules” (my translation).
64 Reuter, “End of Expansion,” p. 259.
65 Reuter was not alone, as seen above (nn. 31, 32, 35, 36), in the belief that the pre-800 army
was reformed by the rules found in capitularies, and thus differed from the army after those
capitularies.
66 Rightly pointed out by France, “Composition and Raising,” p. 66. Goffart, “Defensio patriae,”
pp. 25–37, shows that defensio patriae was invariably associated with the royal exercitus.
67 For doubts, e.g., France, “Composition and Raising,” pp. 78–79.
If Charlemagne’s army was governed by accepted, orally transmitted rules

until (some of) its regulations were stated in writing, the capitularies of 807–08
would record well-established dictates enforced as custom and now written
down. It would follow that poorer freemen, no less obliged to joining the exer-
citus than richer ones, had always formed part of the army; rich freemen always
had a baseline for their self-financed service (four mansi or otherwise); and
poorer freemen would have long been sorted out according to their fortunes,
either through clubs or by another method. In other words, the old, undocu-
mented pre-800s rules, antiqua consuetudo, would have been in keeping with
what we see in the capitulary of 808. The regulations in Charlemagne’s mili-
tary capitularies are found again, little changed, in capitularies of Louis the
Pious and Charles the Bald.68 The continuity of rules governing recruitment
and the haribannus after Charlemagne are a good reason for believing that his
own recruitment rules, before as well as after being written down, reaffirmed
standing regulations or, at most, modified details. Eighth-century silence does
not imply that a serious change of army regulations was instituted in 806–08.
The now prevalent belief is that the military obligation of most Frankish freemen
was limited to a defensive mass levy in cases of emergency. This is a mistake.
As I have shown in a recent article, the Carolingian countryside was not popu-
lated by freemen only obliged to fight invaders of their homeland. The sole
military charge in the Carolingian world was the duty to answer to the king’s
summons to his army, exercitus/hostis. This was an ancient, customary obligation
documented as much in the days of the Merovingian kings as in the empire of
Charlemagne. It was not exclusively Frankish. In Anglo-Saxon England, army-
service, expeditio, was one of the trinodae necessitates burdening the popula-
tion.69 Like its English cousin, the Carolingian trio, occasionally documented,
knew nothing of defensio patriae. Not channeled to mere local defense, pauperi
ingenui were and had normally been called to the royal exercitus and took part
in active service. Poorer men were needed. Accompanied by baggage trains of
slow-moving ox carts, armies could not hasten their movement by increasing
the percentage of horse-mounted troops. Pauperi ingenui could be useful as
infantry and light cavalry, but there was also work for them as field engineers:
fortifications to be built and besieged; roads and bridges to be improved; hostile
countrysides to be ravaged. Carolingian warfare demanded services for which
ordinary troops, footsoldiers, were better qualified than armored cavalry.
68 “Ancient custom”: Capit. 1:167, c. 8 (811). Later rules: Louis the Pious, Capit. 1:291, c. 27
(818–19); Capit. 2:10, c. 5 (829); Charles the Bald, Capit. 2:321–22, c. 27 (864). In Italy, Capit.
1:325, c. 3; 1:329, c. 1 (825); Capit. 2:94–5, c. 1 (866).
69 Nicholas Brooks, “The Development of Military Obligations in Eighth- and Ninth-Century
England,” in Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes, eds., England before the Conquest. Studies
in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge, 1971), p. 70.

Goffart, The Recruitment of Freemen Into The Carolingian Army, Or, How Far May One Argue From Silence

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The Recruitment of Freemen into the Carolingian Army,

on “Social and Military Institutions” in the would-be authoritative The New

Vassals excepted, the Carolingian share of Ganshof’s summary takes up two

9 François-Louis Ganshof, “The Institutional Framework of the Frankish Monarchy” (1958), in

have been sidelined or disregarded by the majority of recent authors. Much is

The armed force of duty-bound, self-financed freemen just described is remark-

lingian “home defense” (defensio patriae/lantweri) has disclosed a wide-reaching

Reuter’s argument rests mainly on inferences from silence.30 Reasoning of this

or Charlemagne’s taking pity on his overworked soldiers, or a widening of recruit-

innovations. Most centrally, they documented the mobilization of all freemen,

service by poor freemen. Other provisions were also taken to be innovations.

one tenth–eleventh-century manuscript; see Hubert Mordek, “Karolingische Kapitularien,” in

when capitularies in writing, such as that of 808, began to be issued. Even

If Charlemagne’s army was governed by accepted, orally transmitted rules

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