I was able to turn up all the sources you mentioned (Wickham, France, Halsall, Costambeys et al). These is a very humbling bibliography to be arguing against, but I'm still dubious that things are as simple as they seem.France calls this passage (AB 859) 'crucial' for our understanding of the period, which seems to be dominated by the opinion that as the Carolingian kings consolidated power, they forbade peasants from arming themselves, and they enforced their law with the sword. As you might imagine, this story fits in well with Marxist perspectives, which want to emphasize class warfare, as well as military-minded historians, who tend to valorize the role of Great Men like Charlemagne whenever possible. Unfortunately, it depends upon an awkward bit of Latin in a text that had limited if any circulation at the time it was produced, and which survived to the modern period in only a handful of not-so-great copies. It also strikes me as jarring against reality—as the Carolingian empire was falling apart and viking raids were reaching a peak, I think it's more likely to see the Carolingian kings in a desperate scramble rather than at a moment of gathering power.Wickham suggests the passage is problematic by using it to raise questions, but then he charges recklessly forward without really resolving them. Halsall buries his assessment in a footnote, blithely stating: 'Earlier editors assumed that the passage must have referred to Viking potentiores but Nelson's rendering [that the vikings are the ones doing the slaughtering] seems more accurate' (263 n 168). And as we saw, Nelson makes the suggestion that this is how the passage should be read, but she doesn't put forth any argument to substantiate this reading. So there's really not too much to work from—a scholarly consensus, perhaps, but not one built on substantive argumentation.
He humbly suggests returning to the source, of which he offers his own translation. Here is the passage:
Dani loca ultra Scaldem populantur. Vulgus promiscuum inter Sequanam et Ligerim inter se conjurans adversus Danos in Sequana consistentes, fortiter resistit; sed quia incaute suscepta est eorum conjuratio, a potentioribus nostris facile interficiuntur.
The proper nouns are pretty clear: Dani/Danos are 'Danes,' Sequana/Sequanam is 'the Seine,' and thus 'inter Sequanam et Ligerim' is 'between the Seine and the Loire.' 'Scaldem' is the Scheldt, which was called Scaldis by the Romans, and this is thus a slightly bastardized Frankish version of that word.
I would read 'se conjurans adversus Danos in Sequana' around the verb, which is a cognate of 'conjured' in English; the etymology of that word is thus helpful.
...from Old French conjurer "invoke, conjure" (12c.) and directly from Latin coniurare "to swear together; conspire," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + iurare "to swear," from ius (genitive iuris) "law, an oath" (see jurist).
So the standard reading, that they formed a sworn association to fight the Danes ('adversus Danos') seems clear enough. Thus, the closing passage returns to their 'conjuratio,' which is the association that they 'conjured' into being; it says it was incaute, which is a word that people fight about how to interpret. The one writer I quoted above prefers 'unexpected' rather than 'without proper authority' or 'without due consideration.' A French translation gives it as "mais sa conjuration étant conduite sans prudence," which literally means 'but their conjuration/association was conducted without prudence,' prudence here being the virtue that was of such importance to Medieval clerics as it had been to the Greeks.
In any case, it's worth remembering that even in the face of outside threats like Viking raiders, your most chief and deadly enemy is always your own government. They would rather see the land ravaged by foreigners than yield power back to the people; this truth seems to hold across more than a thousand years.
