8 - Mirror Histories: Frisians and Saxons from the First to the Ninth Century AD

Summary

FOR THE FIRST CENTURIES of their documented existence, neither Frisians nor Saxons are particularly well defined. They appear in Roman writing as two among a host of barbarian groups active at the northern periphery of the empire, sometimes as enemies of the Romans, sometimes as allies or soldiers in the Roman army. Descriptions are short and circumstantial, and tend to conform to deeply ingrained ideas about the uncivilized inhabitants of the North, who were expected to be, by turn, strong, brave, stubborn, tempestuous, cruel and prone to excess. Few educated Romans who picked up Tacitus’ Historiae would have travelled beyond the northern frontier, but they would have understood a story about the inhabitants of Cologne, who were able to overcome a formidable fighting force made up of Chauci and Frisians by plying these Germani with copious amounts of food and drink (Historiae, 4.79). Some centuries later, the Gallic bishop Sidonius Apollinaris was still upholding a venerable literary tradition when he treated one of his sea-bound friends to an unsolicited exposé on the religious customs of the Saxon pirates presently threatening the coasts of Gaul: among other unsavoury practices, these Saxons were said to sacrifice every tenth one of their human prisoners (Epistulae, 8.6.14).

In so far as Roman observers located them in space, Frisians and Saxons were typically linked to the coastal areas of the North Sea, with both groups being associated with seafaring and piracy. Tacitus’ Germania (c. AD 98) offers a slightly more precise area of habitation: the Roman historian mentions two Frisian nationes, whom he specifies as the minor and the major Frisians and locates in the wetlands between the Rhine and the ocean (ch. 34). Significantly, Tacitus’ extensive ethnography of the peoples of Germania failed to mention Saxons. Some fifty years after Tacitus, the Alexandrian cartographer Ptolemy did mention them, assigning the Saxons to the Jutland Peninsula above the Elbe, with the Frisians being once again located on the Dutch coast left of the river Ems. The two groups were separated, in Ptolemy's view, by the Chauci, who inhabited the coastal regions between the Ems and the Elbe (Geographia, 2.11.11). The absence of Saxons from Tacitus’ Germania fits a more general pattern.