in various ways, either following linguists and speaking of Germans, Celts, and Slavs, or else using the political terms used at the time, and writing of Franks, Picts, West Saxons, Obodrites, or whatever. It is important to remember that these are not racial terms either. Many subjects of the Anglo-Saxon kings in the eighth century were descendants of Welsh-speaking citizens of the Roman Empire, yet by then those 'Celts' (or Romans) spoke Old English and thought of themselves as Anglian or Saxon. Many or most of those calling themselves 'Franks' by the seventh century were descendants of GalloRomans who had been ruled by the Franks since the fifth or sixth century. Thus we have a great variety of so-called 'barbarian' kingdoms, ranging from those in which a small minority of barbarians ruled a largely Roman populace, as in Gaul, to those in which not even Roman ideas like Christianity had penetrated, such as the kingdoms in Norway or Russia. And the historian could categorize them in other ways. There were those barbarians who had taken part in the migrations of the fourth to sixth centuries, and those who had not. And there were those barbarians who in the early Middle Ages learnt the art of writing, and who left some record of themselves, and those who still existed in a prehistoric or protohistoric state, like the Picts or the Scandinavian and Slavic peoples, about whom we can only know in this period from the garbled accounts of foreign contemporaries or from the speculative researches of modern archaeologists.

The tendency of historians until recent times to think in racial terms, of German, Celt, Slav, or Roman, has concealed very real similarities between the various barbarian kingdoms of northern Europe. There is no reliable evidence from this period about Slav society, but later evidence suggests that even the Slavs shared in these general patterns. Barbarian society was strictly stratified, with slaves and semi-free at the bottom, and some kind of aristocrats and royalty at the top. Aristocratic birth normally determined membership of this group, but entry might be gained by sufficient landed wealth, acquired often as a result of service to the king. A man's legal status was rigidly defined by the law codes; each man had his 'man price'

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