for whom war was the amusement of summer months and seldom led to the conquest of territory, were transformed into stratified societies with a powerful monarchy and a landed aristocracy accustomed to a military way of life. This militarization of society even affected the one part of the former Roman Empire which did not succumb to barbarian rule, but was forced to defend itself from barbarians under its own kings: Wales. The Welsh poem the Gododdin, which portrays an aristocratic life of fighting and feasting, where the young warrior sought glory and, if he was lucky, worldly renown, does not show us a society differing very much from that of the better-known Old English poem Beowulf. The male graves from the new Germanic kingdoms in the north show, from the late fifth century onwards, the new status that warriors had in society: weapons, spears, one-sided swords (the sax or scramasax) or, in the case of aristocrats, long-swords with gold-foil hilts and golden jewelled pommels, were laid with the man in his grave. Those royal graves which survive show that royal families paraded their dominance (or attempted to buttress it) by spectacular displays of conspicuous expenditure.

To survive politically, the king had to reward these warriors. He might give them gold, in the form of coin or jewellery; and he might, particularly in the case of those retiring from his household service, give land, or the use of land for the lifetime of his follower. Gifts in barbarian society imposed duties on the recipient--to such an extent that Lombard law recognized the right of someone to use force to recover a gift if he had never received a gift in return. They could be used therefore as a political tool; by the giving of gifts a king could ensure loyal service. And from all sides he was told that generosity was the most desirable quality in kings. The problem was, to find the wherewithal. The Frankish kings had fewer problems than any others. Not only did they acquire vast estates in the course of their take-over, including most or all of those which had been imperial estates, but they had also taken over the Roman taxation system, which may have been somewhat ramshackle by that time but was still capable of supplying them with considerable quantities of gold and goods in kind. They also

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