For a distinguished Franco-German historian, the early medieval idea of a dynasty arose out of the Merovingian family’s success in imposing the recognition of their exclusive royal power (principatus) over the Franks and the provinces of Gaul.I Like the former Roman emperors, the Frankish kings established that a ruler must succeed another in his political power, and so the idea of the state and the dynasty grew hand in hand. Once the Merovingians had established this very desirable mechanism of political power, other powerful families took to the idea. The Agilolfings of Bavaria established this same sort of identity between family and principality in the early seventh century. Other attitudes reinforced this lineal trend. Early royal families, like the Merovingians, looked back to a heroic forebear to establish the root of their family’s glamour and charisma; an idea that the former barbarian peoples grafted onto the Roman notion of public power and pre-eminence of the ruler.
Writers on early kings and kingship in the British Isles long ago made the point that, since descent from a hero or a deity was important in the recognition of a person’s royal charisma (for the English as much as the Britons), society in general was very conscious of family lineage and identity. The earliest surviving writings from amongst the newly-Christianised English include detailed genealogies for the major royal lines. But in England the coming together of the linked ideas of royal dynasties, peoples and territories came later than on the Continent. In England, it was the intervention of the Church which ultimately led to the formulation of the idea of the dynasty of the kings of England. Right from the sixth century, the Roman Church had adopted the misconception that there was one English people, who might be ministered to by an English church under one metropolitan archbishop. By the eighth century, the Mercian rulers had adopted this idea and postured as emperors of all the English, an ideology inherited by the West Saxon dynasty in the ninth century. It was the West Saxon kings who finally succeeded in uniting theory with political practice, and so the first royal dynasty of England emerged in the mid tenth century.
It was perfectly natural for the people of the eighth century to think in terms of royal dynasties. By the time Rollo the Viking landed on the
Seine estuary, it was accepted that there were families holding titles less than that of king who might be regarded as dynasties too. Where a prince wielded hereditary power over a distinct region of France with its own identity, even though he was not a king, his family might be regarded as exalted enough for a father to hand on the prindpatus he wielded to his son, as if he were a king. By the mid tenth century, there were such non-royal dynasties established in the ancient regions of Aquitaine, Brittany and Burgundy, and the newer Marches of Neustria and Flanders. More would soon join them. It was in this environment that it became possible for Rollo and his descendants to establish their identity as the princely dynasty of the Normans, a process that had been consummated before the death of Duke Richard I in 996.
The regional power of such dynasties could be corrosive of royal power, and competitive with it. Much of the civil discord in the tenth century was caused by troubles between these hereditary princes and the Carolingian royal family. Successive tenth-century kings of France handled these new tensions so poorly that royal power was weakened and subverted in France for nearly two centuries, until the Capetian dynasty under Philip II Augustus (d. 1223) began in turn to subvert princely power. In England, under its West Saxon kings, such princely dynasties did not arise because - although there were powerful ealdor-men and earls - there never was before 1066 that narrow conjunction between family, lineage and region that produced the French sovereign dukes and counts. The Vikings had more or less eliminated those lesser royal dynasties that might have had the capacity to transform themselves into regional princes under the West Saxon kings. After 1066, only Cheshire and the Welsh Marches produced anything resembling dynastic principalities to trouble the Norman kings.
World History
