Romanization

Now, Velitrae, we're talking about Alban Hills kind of territory.

Again, a Roman colony had been set up there quite some time ago, actually, in the very early 5th century, but it wasn't really thoroughly a Romanised location before perhaps it starts having that Volscian influence coming through again.

So obviously another sort of contested location, I would say.

Yeah.

But the partitions of the ninth century differ from those of the sixth in this, that they represent lines of division destined to become permanent.

The Romanized West was severed from the more German East.

Italy fell away from the North.

Aquitaine and Burgundy became for a time partly or wholly independent.

In Gaul, the Franks found at least two peoples of earlier settlement, the Gauls a Celtic race, formed of the peasantry of the conquered lands.

They were not exterminated or driven out as the Britons were by the Anglo-Saxon invaders of this country, but became hewers of wood and drawers of water to their conquerors.

Above these were the Romanized inhabitants, men of many races who had settled in the empire at an earlier time and had become Roman in language and ideas.

Between these and the newcomers, friendly relations gradually grew up, and the influence of this Roman civilization modified by degrees the language and character of the Franks of the West, while those who remained on the other side of the Rhine retained their Teutonic language and customs.

And so surely they had kids and grandkids and great-grandkids.

And so at least in this region, it starts to make you ask, wait, what did colonization mean if it didn't actually mean the movement of people into colonies? This is a kind of Romanization without Romans.

That's

just one example.

Nobody else need die because of me.

And kind of nobly and Romanized commits suicide.

And, you know, even Tacitus, who hates everybody, who's a historian, who hates absolutely everybody, recognizes what a noble act that was.

So it actually brought out the best in Offo.

But then if you sort of contextualize his writing in the context of his actual biography as somebody who just couldn't quit with marching out and making wars against the barbarians in Germania and being fixated not just on stoic virtue, but also on Romanitas, on being as Roman as possible.

And this idea that what the world really needs is to be more Roman and to be more Romanized.

So I think people sometimes depoliticize antiquity and depoliticize stoicism, but other elements of antiquity too.

Yeah, I totally agree as a non-expert on this call.

Osric in 750 lives in the kingdom of Wessex, but his cultural identity, like so many cultural identities in the Middle Ages, is made up of numerous overlapping parts.

He is a person, after all, who lives in an ancient Celtic territory that became Romanized, who speaks a Germanic language, practices an Eastern religion, and speaks Latin to similar clerics from present-day Ireland, Wales, France, Scotland, England, France, Germany, Italy, and on and on.

What survives of early medieval literature was on the whole set down by centuries of Osrics, polyglot professionals whose compound identities contravene stereotypes about the Dark Ages as parochial and backward.

Osric, on any given day, might have joked around in the monastery dormitory in Anglo-Saxon, tried to remember vowel affections in Old Irish with a visitor at the guesthouse, and imagined and corresponded in the intercontinental and ancient world of Latin, and to him this was just plain old ordinary life.

It's been going on for thousands of years.

Just in the Western world, very few knew about it, 'cause we're so Romanized in Babylon, in the land of Nod, [laughs] right? Okay.

Now, there's this guy.

I'm gonna end with this.

Roman law reached into the questions of property and inheritance, and the contracts that had always been settled by local custom.

Martin Millett, whose work on how Britain became Roman, remains central to the argument that this administration integration, the roads, the towns, the tax system working together, was the real m- engine of Romanization.

More powerful in the long run than any legion.

So let's pull the two threads of this episode tight because they must be held together or the whole story goes false.

First of all, the population, Gallo-Roman at bottom, receiving a Germanic admixture of Saxons and Franks long before the coming of the Northmen, but still predominantly non-Germanic in its racial type.

Next, language, determined by the process of Romanization and persisting as a Romance speech in spite of Saxon and Frank and Northmen until in the earliest monuments of the 11th century we can recognize the beginnings of modern French.

Then law, the Frankish law, which the Northmen were to absorb, perpetrate, and carry to England.

Fourth, religion, the Christian faith, triumphing only with difficulty in a land largely rural and open to barbarian invasion, but established firmly by the 6th century and already reinforced by monastic foundations which were to be the centers of faith and culture to a later age.