I was just watching a documentary on the early Franks and several precious objects recovered from King Childeric's gravesite were being discussed. Does anyone know if mail fragments have been recovered from the site? I have never heard of mail being found on that site, however being an important king, Childeric was no doubt buried in mail.

Here's a book which has a detailed list and description of the tomb:
"Le tombeau de Childéric Ier: roi des Francs, restitué à l'aide de l'archéologie et des découvertes récentes faites en France, en Belgique, en Suisse, en Allemagne et en Angleterre" by Jean Benoît Désiré Cochet.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Z3Y-AAAAYAAJ...CCwQ6AEwAA

As far as I saw (my French is far from perfect and I didn't read all of it), mail is not mentioned. Nor is a helmet.

It appears that he was buried with his weapons, but otherwise in civilian dress.

Thank you for the link. Its quite surprising that he wasnt buried in any armour whatsoever. According to Agathias who wrote in the early 6th century, the Franks did not make use of mail or greaves. But I always expected that the king would be the exception.

In Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks, there are a few mentions of mail armour being worn. King Clovis himself is said to have been saved by a coat of mail he wore to battle against King Alaric of the goths "Now when the king had put the Goths to flight and slain king Alaric, two of the enemy suddenly appeared and struck at him with their lances, one on each side. But he was saved from death by the help of his coat of mail as well as by his fast horse".

Is it possible that mail began to see use by the Franks in the aftermath of the battle of Soissons, when no doubt many Roman mail coats were captured? This would conflict with Agathias' account but it would certainly make sense.

Yep. Mail or scale/lamellar would both be contenders.

I think the "use your weapons in the afterlife" idea is only attested in Norse sources. Lots of graves didn't have a full weapon set. I think in most of mainland Europe weapon burials were a new feature of the migration era, and its dangerous to assume that religion in 5th century Gaul was the exact same as religion in 10th century Iceland!

These questions are very difficult. As Sean says, we don't have good written sources for the period - the sources we have say that most of the barbarians that entered the empire were heretics (Arian Christians), but scholars don't know exactly what that means (did they follow the teachings of Arius, or was this just a label given them by Roman Christians to mark them as different from the Romans?). The Franks quickly converted to Orthodox Christianity - but that doesn't tell us what any given Frankish individual believed. This is further complicated by the question of whose beliefs were represented in a burial - the beliefs of the dead individual, the beliefs of his family (we all know examples of people who had a pastor or priest at their funeral even though they never went to church), or the beliefs of the people in charge (it's always a good idea to throw a funeral that the king will like, especially if you're important enough to invite him to the occasion). And then there's the trouble of reading beliefs from a burial: does a body with a cross have to be that of a Christian, and does a man buried with a sword have to be looking forward to Valhalla?

There have been many different answers to these questions over the past two centuries of French archaeological work. The earliest view was that cemeteries full of men with weapons were evidence of a battle (a view encouraged, I suspect, because the French didn't want to admit that there were a lot of 'Germans' living in France permanently, so they wanted the believe that the bodies were from an army on the march). Archaeologists started arguing, around the middle of the century, that these bodies were those of settlers who lived near the cemeteries; many of them were buried in stone sarcophagi, for one, which would have been difficult to carve right after a battle. Eventually, the consensus was reached that bodies with weapons were Germanic (Frankish) invaders, and bodies without were local Gallo-Romans. While scholars at first argued that weapons were meant to be taken to the afterlife, they have long realized that many of these bodies were probably those of Christians, and that the weapons could have fulfilled many other symbolic functions (such as marking the power of the conquering ethnic group ['Look at my body, in life I conquered your people' sort of thing], or showing which people were important).

Recent work has challenged many of these ideas. Guy Halsall has argued that the bodies buried with weapons were actually those of local Roman elites, not barbarian Frankish invaders. Franz Theuws has argued something similar. Both authors point out that weapon burials began in the fourth century, before the barbarians settled France, and have a lot of imagery that implies that the bodies were trying to look like Roman officials (the style of their buckles and brooches, the symbolic meaning of the weapons with which they were buried - axes as a symbol of Roman authority [the fasces], spears for hunting [the favorite Roman elite pastime]). Personally, I have no idea what to think - there are good arguments on all sides of the questions. Childeric was definitely trying to look like a barbarian when he was buried, but whether that was a political or religious statement (or both, likely as not), or just the way he liked to dress in every day life, is hard to say. I have a friend who's trying to answer some of these questions in his dissertation, but it'll be a few more years before he'll have his answer ready to throw into the discussion.

This is all somewhat tangential to the question of Childeric's armor, my apologies! The upshot of all this is, we shouldn't take the absence of body armor in Childeric's grave as evidence that he didn't wear it when he was alive, because the one thing that most archaelogists today can agree upon is that the items put in a grave were put their deliberately by the people preparing the body, and they may have decided not to bury Childeric in armor for any number of reasons more complex than whether or not he owned any.

A very interesting topic, though we have to guess at much of it of course.
Are there any illustrations surviving of king Childeric that might shed some at least partial light on this?