had the inestimable advantage of enemies from whom they and their warriors could win booty with relative ease. Sometimes Frankish warriors were so eager for booty that they went ahead without royal permission and against royal advice, with disastrous results. But on the whole Frankish armies in the sixth century were remarkably successful. Their kings led them to victory over most of their neighbours, and after the Byzantine invasion of Italy in 536 they found themselves frequently involved in Italy, winning booty and subsidies alike from both Ostrogoths and Byzantines.

The importance of continual warfare as a means of bringing in land and booty for political survival can be seen also in England, where probably no shadow of the Roman taxation system survived. There it is the kingdoms which could continually push forward their borders which prospered. In the sixth century, before political boundaries had become firm, it was possible for kingdoms in the east, such as Sussex or Kent, to become militarily powerful and hence politically important. By the seventh century this was almost impossible: the kingdoms in the east stagnated, and it was those with frontiers to the west and north which did well. Northumbria's expansion was brought to an end only in 685, when King Ecgfrith and most of his army were killed at Nechtansmere, north of Dundee, while attacking the kingdom of the Picts. Ecgfrith's own subject Bede interestingly saw this defeat as God's judgement for the unjustified attack that Ecgfrith had made the previous year on the Irish, 'a harmless people always very friendly to the Angles', despite the warnings of the holy Egbert. Indeed, to the Irish the all-out wars of conquest of the Franks or the Angles must have seemed strangely perverse and wicked. The warfare of the Irish kings was usually no more than cattle-raiding or the attempt to win tribute from neighbouring kingdoms; territorial expansion was not their aim.

Three Barbarian Kingdoms

To write a political history of the northern barbarian kingdoms from the fifth to the eighth centuries would result in a confus-

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