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Editorial note –‘The Bloodfeud of the Franks’

The following essay by Ian Wood ‘The Bloodfeud of the Franks: a historiographical legend’, is a version of a paper delivered at a conference on ‘The Peace in the Feud’ held at the University of Manchester on 28–29 October 2005. The conference was held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Max Gluckman’s Custom and Conflict in Africa , a work that has had a great influence on historians, and in particular on historians of early medieval Europe. Blackwells were the original publishers of Gluckman’s work, and they generously supported the Manchester conference. The conference examined the relationship between anthropologists and historians in the light of the encounter between Max Gluckman and Michael Wallace-Hadrill, which took place when both held Chairs at Manchester University in the 1950s. As Ian Wood’s typically scholarly and thoughtful investigation reveals, the sense that this encounter was dynamically productive is something of legend, and the conference revealed that the legend had been nurtured by historians rather than anthropologists. It became clear that historians had been excited by Gluckman’s writing because it addressed one of their perennial concerns: how to explain how order might be maintained in societies with weak state institutions. To many anthropologists, this functionalist approach now appears dated and is of little interest. The encounter in Manchester 2005 turned out to be fascinating, revealing and thought-provoking.