Britain in the Middle Ages: An Archaeological History
Francis Pryor
This ebook edition does not include illustrations.As he did in ‘Britain B.C.’ and ‘Britain A.D.’, eminent archaeologist Francis Pryor challenges familiar historical views of the Middle Ages by examining fresh evidence from the ground.The term 'Middle Ages' suggests a time between two other ages: a period when nothing much happened. In his radical reassessment, Francis Pryor shows that this is incorrect and that the Middle Ages were actually the time when the modern world was born. This was when Britain moved from Late Antiquity into a world we can recognize: roads and parishes became fixed; familiar institutions, such as the church and local government, came into being; industry became truly industrial; and international trade was now a routine process.Archaeology shows that the Middle Ages were far from static. Based on everyday evidence, Pryor demonstrates that the British agricultural and industrial revolutions had their roots in this era – as did the explosion of British maritime power in the late 1700s. It stresses the strength of development at the expense of 'revolution' and the profound effect the Black Death had on loosening the grip of the feudal system.The Middle Ages can now be seen in a fresh light as an era of great inventiveness as the author examines such topics as 'upward mobility'; the power of the Church; the role of the Guilds as precursors of trade unions; and the importance of transport infrastructure such as roads, bridges and shipbuilders.
BRITAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
An Archaeological History
FRANCIS PRYOR
DEDICATION (#ulink_1da788a6-3505-529e-aee3-a91176eb5e84)
This book is dedicated to the memory of
DR CHRIS SALISBURY
friend, doctor and archaeologist
CONTENTS
Cover (#udc5d407b-983d-56de-82c1-eb54f7c26fc1)
Title Page (#u10b41316-7c13-5154-8ba2-14309b2d70a2)
Dedication (#u0bfd8773-82a1-5535-bfe7-3b1010269a48)
Table: Dates and Periods (#u3d84309d-992a-58ad-9f67-6f5bce5dd25b)
Introduction: Archaeology and the Medieval Period (#u597916cb-c06e-55c8-9d37-7e6958ef49b2)
PART I: On Britons, Saxons and Vikings (650–1066) (#u92f36d5a-871e-54c6-aa40-fca0f342c021)
1 The North/South Divide of the Middle Saxon Period (#u13c82ed3-0db4-53b4-84e4-b1cca0e33e26)
2 Enter the Vikings (#u9ba8607a-ded2-5e0f-b8d8-cf4505ac1907)
3 Rural Life in Late Saxon Times (#litres_trial_promo)
4 Urban Life in Late Saxon Times (#litres_trial_promo)
PART II: The Middle Ages (1066–1550) (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Urban Life in the Middle Ages (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Rural Life in the Middle Ages (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Trade, Industry and Security (#litres_trial_promo)
8 The End of the Middle Ages? (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Excavating the Past: Francis Pryor talks to Louise Tucker
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten History/Archaeology Books (#litres_trial_promo)
A Writer’s Life (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
Archaeology and History in Times of Change
Read on (#litres_trial_promo)
Have You Read?
Find Out More (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
DATES AND PERIODS (#ulink_b8875057-ee1d-5731-87b2-980cfbe21fdb)
Terms placed in quotes are used in a general sense. They are not archaeological periods sensu stricto.
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_7a0dabb5-98f2-58dc-a752-bf6583aec70a)
Archaeology and the Medieval Period
I found the archaeological exploration involved in the writing of my previous book, Britain AD, so fascinating that I decided I had to carry the story forward in time. By comparison with Britain AD, I have fewer axes to grind in this book. This is probably because hypothetical mass-migration and invasion are not contentious issues after the three centuries that followed the Roman withdrawal of AD 410.
In this book I want to take an archaeological look at medieval Britain. The word ‘medieval’ can be taken to mean many things. Here I will use it as a chronological label, which for present purposes begins around AD 650, the end of the period known to archaeologists as the Early Saxon. The finish date is harder to pin down, and later we will see that there are good reasons for this, but here I will follow most archaeological opinion by selecting the mid-sixteenth century, say 1550, and the death of Henry VIII (1547).
This is not a textbook, nor is it a book of social or political history.
(#litres_trial_promo) If you are looking for an authoritative account of the Tudors, the Plantagenets or the Peasants’ Revolt, then this is not it. This will be what used to be called a ‘narrative history’ – except that there is more here about archaeology than about history. I have made greater efforts to explain fields and hedges, waterfronts and trade than the achievements of individual rulers. Another way of describing a narrative account is to see it as a diary or journal of the author’s own exploration of a particular subject. That, I think, is closer to what I have attempted to do.
Being a prehistorian of the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, I am most familiar with the sites and objects of the last four millennia BC, as revealed by excavation. This experience gives me an unusual perspective on medieval times. As we will see shortly, I tend to view the past in the long term. I am more concerned with the processes of social and political change than with a detailed chronicle of the events that marked the progress of those changes. To use a phrase that is currently popular, this book is an attempt to write a sort of ‘joined up’ archaeology, where the changes seen in the ground can be related to their causes in the ancient world. This approach is perhaps easier for historians, who are good at identifying key events, their causes and consequences. Archaeologists, on the other hand, have found that the techniques available to them make the identification of historical events a problem.
One example will suffice. We know for a fact that Boudica, the rebellious Queen of the Iceni, nearly threw the occupying Roman troops out of Britain during her uprising in AD 60 and 61. In the course of that revolt her forces set fire to parts of towns in eastern England. Accordingly, when archaeologists working in that region find evidence for burning around the middle of the first century AD, they often attribute it to the Boudican revolt. In that way the ‘evidence’ for large-scale destruction is increasing every year. But in antiquity, just as today, fires are not always started deliberately. Very often they happen by accident, and the archaeologist is presented with the near-impossible task of differentiating between Boudica and, say, the results of a bakery fire. To make matters worse, nowadays the press are always on the prowl for news stories, and fresh evidence for the heroic warrior queen’s prowess always makes excellent copy.
This inability to tie down specific historical events has led archaeologists to turn their attention to the longer-term processes that lay behind the development of society in various parts of the world. Today the profession is branching out. There is a proliferation of fresh approaches to the past. Some, the so-called culture-historicists, stay with historical reconstruction. Others (processualists) prefer to work with problems to do with social process; their way of working is heavily influenced by anthropology. But there are many other ways of ‘doing’ archaeology today, ranging from Marxist to cognitive to neo-structuralists and various strands of post-processualists, who take their ultimate inspiration from post-modern philosophers such as Derrida.
(#litres_trial_promo) Some of their ideas, deconstruction for example, have proved very useful. I believe this diversity of approach gives our discipline strength and resilience. My own approach is a hybrid of at least three of these methods – I think.
The colourfully misnamed Dark Ages mark a return of sorts to prehistory, so far as the archaeologist is concerned. During the half century or so of post-Roman times and the subsequent Early Saxon Period (AD 450–650), reliable written documents are rare, and provide us with far less information than the abundance of new archaeological discoveries, whose sheer quantity today is almost overwhelming. Whether or not you accept the argument of Britain AD, that the indigenous population of Britain did not fall victim to Anglo-Saxon ‘ethnic cleansing’, as the distinguished historian David Starkey suggested in the first episode of his television series Monarchy (2004), it is hard to deny that archaeology is revealing a huge amount about Dark Age Britain. But what about the subsequent periods: does archaeology have a role to play in times when documentary evidence becomes more abundant?
There was a rapid increase, indeed ‘explosion’ would scarcely be an exaggeration, of written documentary sources in the mid-thirteenth century. These documents are mainly about day-to-day transactions, to do with trade, dwellings and land tenure. They are of enormous importance to the study of the way people lived their lives, in both town and country. But do they allow us to paint a full picture of life in the Middle Ages? The archaeologist Paul Stamper thinks not: ‘traditionally, few historians exhibited any interest whatsoever in material culture, whether it be the layout of a village’s fields, the design of its houses, or the range of their contents. That was especially so with regard to peasant society, which was assumed to be (in every sense) rude, crude and unworthy of scholarly investigation.’ He then explains that most historical records are ‘terse, factual memoranda’. They throw little light on how or why certain things took place. ‘Archaeology’s ultimate access to a much larger dataset, and to one with a degree of detail denied to the historian, makes the investigation of explanation far more feasible.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
It is generally believed that day-to-day documents, such as deeds or records arising from other transactions, are by their very nature reliable; but as a farmer who has to deal with the welter of impossibly long forms and other bureaucratic nonsense that has recently sprung up, I have my doubts: this modern documentation can tell a cautionary tale that is relevant to history. Recently the government told farmers that it was illegal to bury dead animals. In future, they announced, all fallen stock was to be disposed of by licensed operators, who would burn the carcasses. This procedure would be accompanied by appropriate and abundant paperwork. But typically of what so often happens today, no practical provision was made for the collection of carcasses. Licensed operators were hard to find, or were miles away. Like other farmers, I tried to follow the new law, but became disgusted by the stench of rotting flesh as a dead animal decomposed for a week in the June heat while it waited for collection. So I buried it. And I may even have buried a few more. The point is that for several months most farmers did what I did – since there was no other option. But my farm paperwork gives no hint that this was happening, because I have no wish to incriminate myself. However, in a hundred years’ time an archaeologist digging in my wood could tell from the ear tags on the dead animals that I was breaking the letter of the law. So the documents would say one thing and the archaeology another. And I know which one I would trust.
I do not want to become embroiled in an unconstructive argument between archaeologists and historians, because I believe their two subjects are slowly becoming closer. But wherever possible I will try to make use of those comparatively rare individuals, such as Colin Platt, Tom Williamson, Paul Stamper and Chris Dyer, who seem equally at home in both worlds. I also like the work of historians with a breadth of vision, able to deal effortlessly with great expanses of time and space. For me Jacques Le Goff is just such a historian, and his recent book The Birth of Europe has helped me see the wood through the medieval trees.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is also perhaps worth noting that certain historians still seem to be oblivious – sometimes even comfortably oblivious – to the existence of archaeology. I console myself with the thought that as time passes they will have to change.
I have spent over thirty years excavating sites of the last five millennia BC and the first millennium AD, mostly in eastern England. In the course of this work I have taken a long view of the past. This extended perspective partly reflects the imprecision of current dating methods – for example, radiocarbon dates are often accurate only to two or three centuries – but it also results from theoretical approaches that have been adopted by prehistorians since the 1960s. In the last four decades of the twentieth century prehistorians became less interested in one-off events and turned their attention to the gradually evolving processes of social change.
There was also a move away from a straightforward, or functionalist, view of the past. This new approach laid greater emphasis on the roles of symbolism, ritual and structure within the processes of change. Other post-modern approaches have been highly influential. Archaeological evidence, for example, lends itself readily to deconstruction. The result has been a long-term or strategic overview of the past which non-specialists find appealing, because it is often relevant to current issues, such as the development of political authority or the role of religion within society. I think these are positive trends, because archaeology must be relevant to modern life, or it will not survive for long.
It would perhaps be useful if at this stage I gave an indication of my long-term view of the human past. I will take an essentially British perspective. The story begins with Prehistory, which can be subdivided into three: Early Prehistory, being everything from the arrival of the first humans about half a million years ago until the appearance of Homo sapiens, around 40,000 years ago; Middle Prehistory ends with the introduction of farming about 5000 BC, or slightly earlier; Late Prehistory extends through the Neolithic and most of the Bronze Age, until the early first millennium BC, after which we are in the Iron Age and the next of my three main periods, Antiquity.
In Britain and France, Early Antiquity ends with the arrival of the Roman Empire, but in north-western Europe outside the Roman Empire there is a seamless transition into Middle Antiquity in the early centuries AD. Late Antiquity starts in the latter part of the Roman period and ends sometime around 600–650, when major social, economic and political changes begin to happen.
The last of my three eras is the Modern Period. Its Early phase starts in Britain around AD 650 with the start of the Middle Saxon period. This was a time of rapidly growing trade networks and the emergence of the first early medieval European states. Soon we have the establishment of the first true post-Roman towns. It ends around 1350 with the Black Death (1348). The Middle Modern or ‘Transitional’ Period ends around 1550, the date that most archaeologists regard as the close of the Middle Ages; this book will be about the Early and Middle Modern periods, as defined here. The Late Modern Period starts around 1550 and extends until the present. I should also add here that I regard currently fashionable attempts to define a new ‘post-industrial’ era as being premature. We are far too close in time to view our culture with any clarity at all. Maybe historians in a hundred years’ time will have acquired suitable perspective. Maybe.
I described how I would divide up my ‘long view’ of the human past because it provides at least partial justification for why I do not regard the Middle Ages as being ‘Middle’ at all. The term was first used in the Renaissance to describe the period between the Classical world and that of the Renaissance. This was a perspective which viewed that Classical world through modern eyes. That way of looking at the past has little or nothing to do with hard historical or archaeological reality. It has more to do with value judgements about art, literature and knowledge than the development of human culture or society.
Historians generally end the Middle Ages with the Battle of Bosworth (1485), whereas archaeologists, who, Paul Stamper believes, are more attuned to the material world, tend to continue it for another half-century, into the 1540s and the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII. Again, some historians and many lay people see the Middle Ages as starting with the Norman Conquest, but I want to extend them back in time to include the earliest kingdoms of Saxon England and the Scandinavian (Viking) presence. I also want to bridge the gap between the world of written history and that historical (but not archaeological) twilight zone the Dark Ages, which had certainly come to an end by AD 650. The Synod of Whitby, which sorted out the direction the Church in Britain would take for the next millennium, took place in 664. It also makes little sense to ignore the early-tenth-century survey and reapportionment of the countryside – one of medieval archaeology’s most important contributions to the study of the period. This great survey, which happened in the decades after 900, provided the essential framework for subsequent developments.
The term ‘Middle Ages’ suggests a time between two other ages which were marked by major social and cultural advances. Being betwixt and between, the Middle Ages are often portrayed as a period when nothing much happened. As I researched this book I realised that this is very far from the truth. I am in no doubt that the centuries of the Middle Ages were the time when the modern world was actually conceived and started the process of development, at first slowly, but latterly with gathering pace. This was when Britain moved from the realms of Late Antiquity into a more familiar world: roads and parishes became fixed; institutions such as the Church and local government came into being and industry became truly industrial, with manufacturing starting to be organised on a national basis. Midway through the period international trade had become routine.
For too long the Middle Ages have been portrayed as a period of slow progress, characterised by feudalism and superstition. Certainly that was the impression I gained at school. Industry was seen as small in scale, farming was held back by the manorial system, and life in town was hidebound by guilds and, of course, the repressive power of the Church. More recently, archaeology has shown that the Middle Ages were far from static. The Church did not exert a dead hand. There was real progress, which happened remarkably swiftly. The latest archaeological evidence shows beyond any doubt that Britain was an integrated part of Europe in the four centuries before the Norman Conquest. This has been a major revelation that I will discuss at some length in the first three chapters of this book. It seems now that the Reformation and the Renaissance were natural processes that had to happen if the progress made in the medieval period was to continue.
I am not alone in bemoaning some current perspectives on the Middle Ages which see the period as somehow irrelevant to the modern world because (it is said) very little actually changed. This view has it that the developments that were to lead to the modern world took place during and after the Renaissance. As I hope this book will show, nothing could be further from the truth. However, despite those reasons to the contrary, I shall continue to use the term ‘Middle Ages’, because it’s a label that has stuck, and besides, my term ‘Middle Modern’ has too many ‘M’s and is confusingly similar to the one it tries to replace.
I have mentioned some of the theoretical differences between archaeology and history, but now I want to address a practical issue arising from these contrasts. It concerns the organisation and layout of this book. While our knowledge of the documentary sources relating to Britain before the Norman Conquest remains essentially static, new archaeological discoveries are having a very profound effect on our understanding of the Middle and Late Saxon periods.
The four centuries prior to 1050 are known as the Middle (650–850) and Late (850–1066) Saxon periods, which I will sometimes lump together in the deliberately vague ‘Later Saxon’. The term ‘Saxo-Norman’ is also sometimes used to describe the overlap between Late Saxon and early Norman in the mid-to-late eleventh century. As I have already suggested, it is now appreciated that the first four hundred years of the medieval period were fundamental to the development of British society in the Middle Ages. It was the time when Britain acquired its county system and its basic administrative geography. It was the time, too, when English became the accepted language in the most populated areas. It was, of course, also the period of the Vikings, who we must now see as far more than the rapists and pillagers in horned helmets beloved of movie-makers. For me the story of Later Saxon and Saxo-Norman Britain is as exciting as archaeology gets, because it is currently going through a period of major reappraisal. Turmoil might be a better term. Nothing seems beyond dispute, whether it be the role of the Vikings or Britain’s place within Charlemagne’s Europe. The more we understand about Viking Britain and the earliest England, the more we realise that their inhabitants did not dwell in Little Britain. They were part of a far larger world.
These are the reasons why I have decided that this book will depart from the usual convention of dismissing Saxon Britain in a chapter, before devoting the rest of the text to the high Middle Ages. Instead I have divided the medieval period into two Parts (I and II) of four and five centuries each. Part I will mainly be about Britons, Scots, Saxons and Vikings; Part II will be about aspects of town and country in the Middle Ages which are separated from the Saxon period by the Norman Conquest of 1066. I have attempted to be fair in the way I have apportioned chapters. But when it came to writing the book I was forcibly struck by the fact that there was far more interesting new material emerging about the pre-Norman, or Saxon, periods than about the Middle Ages. Furthermore, as much of this new work is taking place in southern Britain the book will, I am sorry to say, be biased towards the south and east in its geographical coverage. I regret this, but as I shall reiterate from time to time, this is not a textbook. I want it to reflect the way ideas are changing. The new information about Later Saxon England is having a profound effect on the way we view what happened later. So it cannot be ignored. As a result, the first four chapters are slightly longer than the following four.
While I was writing I became increasingly aware that the archaeology of buildings was a major new field in its own right. Today it involves detailed drawings, but also techniques of remote sensing that range from digital photography to enhanced forms of computer-aided design. I would very much have liked to discuss this in the pages that follow, and I must confess that I tried to put something on paper, but sadly none of it worked. I simply lacked the necessary hands-on experience to write with any conviction. So rather than fake it, I decided to leave it out.
Another important development has been the study of medieval woodworking and carpentry. I was introduced to this subject by my wife Maisie Taylor, who had begun to research the development of Bronze Age carpentry joints we encountered at Flag Fen. So she invited the leading expert on medieval carpentry, Cecil Hewitt, to come and see them. At the time he was recovering from a stroke, but even with slightly impaired speech he managed to give us one of the most exciting and rewarding days of our professional lives. Cecil’s excitement knew no limits, and was instantly transferred to both of us. The great man made us both look at our Bronze Age timbers through fresh eyes. What I didn’t know then was that Hewitt’s work was just one aspect of a rapidly growing new field of study which I will briefly touch on in Chapter 7.
I acquired an enormous respect for medieval archaeologists when I was a student in the mid-1960s. In fact I nearly forsook the True Path of prehistory to follow them. One of my teachers at Cambridge was Brian Hope-Taylor, who today is rightly regarded as an extraordinarily innovative pioneer. We all liked Brian. He was down to earth and never gave himself airs or graces. He was also a perfectionist, and refused to compromise on quality. His reports were beautifully illustrated, because earlier in his life he had been a professional artist and illustrator. He was particularly famous for the cover he had drawn for the Ordnance Survey Map of Britain in the Iron Age (sadly out of print).
While I was a student Brian was in the final throes of writing his most famous work, a huge report on his excavations at Yeavering, in Northumberland. Yeavering, or Ad Gefrin, to give it its Saxon name, was an Anglo-British palace complex beside a major pre-Roman hillfort, known as Yeavering Bell. The area was also stiff with prehistoric remains, which was why I was sitting at Brian’s feet. I had no intention of staying for more than the first lecture of his course, because then he would start on the post-Roman material. In the event I attended the entire course, and I even bought his great report shortly after it appeared in print in 1977, for the then huge sum of £33.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is still one of the most treasured books in my library. At the time Brian was one of a small group of medieval archaeologists who believed in ‘open area’ excavation. This was a new style of excavation that has now become commonplace: it involves the exposing of huge areas of land to get a clear impression of the totality of a site.
Brian didn’t just expose single buildings. Instead he looked at the spaces between and around the various structures, and in the process was able to build up a picture of a developing royal centre. His excavations took place over several seasons, mainly between 1953 and 1962, and seemed to touch on all aspects of life, from graves to humble dwellings, halls both great and small, and even a huge timber grandstand-like theatre. This was a vision of the seventh century AD that I desperately wanted to paint for earlier periods. It was quite simply inspiring, and it fundamentally affected my own style of archaeology.
Brian was a pioneer in the developing study of (in his case early) medieval archaeology. Medieval archaeology is still a very young discipline. The national learned society devoted to the subject, the Society for Medieval Archaeology, was founded in 1957, four years into the Yeavering project. This can be compared, for example, with my own field, where the Prehistoric Society came into being in 1935, as a development from the earlier Prehistoric Society of East Anglia (1908–35). There are many reasons for this relatively late academic acceptance of subjects like medieval and post-medieval archaeology (1967). In part one can blame simple academic snobbery along the lines of: ‘If it’s earlier it’s got to be better and more important.’ I also once detected (thankfully I think it has largely vanished) an attitude to these more recent subjects, among certain colleagues, which implied that the archaeology of recent times is somehow easier to do, and makes fewer intellectual demands on its practitioners. Nothing, but nothing, could be further from the truth.
But I must return to my own early exposure to medieval archaeology. Like every archaeological student in Britain, I had heard of the Wharram Percy deserted medieval village project in Yorkshire. The project was one of the longest-running research programmes in England (1950–90), and reports on various aspects of the work are still appearing in print. The results from Wharram continue to surprise. For example, recent work by Dr Simon Mays on the bones from the village churchyard has produced some unexpected results: babies were breast-fed until they were eighteen months old.
(#litres_trial_promo) During this period they thrived, but then began to fall behind when compared to modern infants. Comparisons between the rural population at Wharram and the nearby city of York show that although life in the country was generally healthier, women in the city did less demanding physical work. The urban population was exposed to a greater risk of infection, which also resulted in greater disease resistance. The rural population did not escape all the urban ailments. One would expect them to suffer from the ‘bovine’ form of tuberculosis, which they would have caught from animals, whereas they were actually infected by the ‘human’ form, which they probably contracted from regular visits to York, where the disease was relatively common. Only four of the 687 skeletons from Wharram showed signs of violent death, which was in stark contrast with the smaller Fishergate cemetery in York, where no fewer than nineteen people – mostly men – had met untimely ends.
Simon Mays’ work shows vividly how archaeology can illuminate history. What documents could possibly have differentiated between the two forms of tuberculosis and thereby have told us something new about town – country relations in the Middle Ages? Wharram Percy has been a most remarkable project, and I will return to it in some detail later, but medieval archaeology is now such a diverse subject that we cannot confine our attention to field projects, such as Wharram, alone. In these respects I think medieval and post-medieval archaeologists are facing considerable challenges of synthesis and comprehension. It would be so easy to lose oneself in detail. But somehow the best of them, people like Professor Richard Hodges at the University of East Anglia, can cope with the mountain of information and make it tell a fascinating story.
I’m aware that terms like ‘mountain of information’ are emotive and do not actually tell us very much, but in truth that ‘mountain’ has been produced by a quantum leap in archaeological activity. In this instance it is almost impossible to avoid superlatives, because the changes brought about by better advice to local planning authorities have transformed the way archaeology is practised in Britain. I will try to explain what has happened, and I apologise in advance for the acronyms, which are as unavoidable as the hyperbole.
In 1989 government in Whitehall issued a document called Planning Policy Guidance No. 16, known universally in archaeology as PPG-16. Despite its dreary title, PPG-16 has revolutionised the way archaeologists work – and think. PPG-16 established the principle that the ‘polluter pays’. In other words, if a developer is going to make a huge profit from building houses on top of, say, a deserted medieval village, he must first pay to have the site properly excavated and recorded. If a discovery made in the commercial excavation warrants it, he must also be prepared to accommodate what the archaeologists have revealed – perhaps in a museum or beneath an open space within the housing estate.
PPG-16 has now ‘bedded in’, and similar schemes exist across Europe. Many archaeologists have reservations about the competitive tendering that takes place between contracting archaeological companies for the big development contracts, but at least something is being done, and something is much better than wholesale destruction. Some of the discoveries have been spectacular. In Britain BC I described at least three PPG-16 commercial projects (in Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley), and in Britain AD I could not possibly have ignored the astounding Anglo-Saxon ‘royal’ grave at Prittlewell on the outskirts of Southend. All of these sites were found by commercial excavations in advance of development schemes such as new roads, gravel quarries and housing estates. To give some idea of the scale of modern commercial archaeology, the total spend on British archaeology in the years just before the introduction of PPG-16 was in the order of £3–4 million. In 2004 it was £40–50 million.
This more than tenfold increase in excavation has brought with it a huge number of finds. There are millions and millions of them. Museum stores have ceased to cope, and many contractors are leasing warehouses, or simply dump what they cannot store after a few years. As someone who occasionally looks at prehistoric flint and pottery produced from commercial projects, I always find it much harder to persuade a contractor to take the finds back when I’ve done with them than I do to get them delivered in the first place.
A modern excavation, if it’s properly undertaken, will produce a representative sample of the range of pottery types, for example, that were being used on the site. So a small Anglo-Saxon farm would produce a relatively restricted range of kitchen and household wares, whereas finds from a major trading site would also include household vessels, plus finer table wares and a few exotic traded items. Assuming that the pottery found on the site does indeed represent what was being used in the past, the range and origin of the finds will tell us much about the status, tastes and preferences of the people who lived there. Although at first glance one might suppose that pottery can tell us less about life in the past than coins, which usually have known mints, dates and values, the statistical analysis of pottery (which computers now allow us routinely to perform) is having a huge effect on our understanding of the Middle Saxon period. We will see shortly that this was the first time since the Roman period that pottery began to be produced and distributed on an industrial scale. Richard Hodges considers this period to have been the first industrial revolution.
The huge increase in commercial archaeology has brought with it problems. New data is being produced daily,* (#litres_trial_promo) but nobody is in a position to grapple with what it all means. As a result it simply remains dead data, and never makes that all-important step to become something of interest, which one might label ‘information’. A digest of the raw data is included in reports that archaeological contractors produce for their clients and which are housed in the various Sites and Monuments Records (SMRs) of the counties and self-governing cities of Britain. These client-reports form what is known in archaeology as the ‘grey literature’. Unlike ‘proper’ reports, submitted to established journals or monograph series, they are not peer-reviewed, and sometimes – I put it as mildly as I can – they are not very good. The good ones, usually of large-scale projects, can be excellent, but even the worst sometimes contain the basic information that someone who understands what he or she is doing can subsequently extract.
The basic information contained in the ‘grey literature’ reports is extracted to the records in the SMR, which today is computerised and linked to a map-based Geographical Information System, or GIS. Again I apologise for the sleep-inducing acronyms, but I shall use them all together just once: the combination of new data from PPG-16 projects, combined with the rapidly growing picture of ancient settlement patterns revealed by GIS in the county SMRs, has made it vastly simpler to place individual sites in their landscape contexts. And this has had a crucially important influence on the way we now think about early towns and the hinterland around them. At last, as we will shortly discover, our analyses of past landscapes can truly be considered ‘joined up’.
Many country Sites and Monuments Records also include information taken from aerial photography. This is a field which grew by leaps and bounds in the later twentieth century. In the best county SMRs the information on air photos is accurately transposed straight into the GIS, using sophisticated computer rectification software. Most air photos are not taken by flying directly above the site or landscape being surveyed. If the pictures are taken from an oblique angle, which may be necessary if slight humps and bumps on the ground are to show up in low sunlight, the images must be ‘rectified’ – i.e. straightened out – before they can be traced onto a map. Hence the need for the clever software.
The results of these processes can be little short of astonishing. Again I make no apologies for the language, because there really has been an information ‘explosion’ in aerial archaeology and its sister sub-discipline, Remote Sensing. Remote Sensing is a way of mapping ancient landscapes from the air, using radar and other techniques aside from photography. It’s still relatively young, but is already producing exciting results. Conventional aerial photography, on the other hand, is probably in its heyday.
Aerial photography has had a profound effect on archaeology since its first widespread use as a tool of reconnaissance during the Great War. In lowland England years and years of ploughing have removed most of the humps and bumps from the actual surface of the ground, but long-vanished features such as trackways, field ditches, even house foundations, can be seen as dark marks in growing crops. In a dry year, and only in a dry year, the roots of growing crops such as wheat and barley need to dive deep to find moisture. Directly above buried and long-filled-in ditches, wells or rubbish pits, the roots find dampness and the crops grow thick, lush and luxuriant. This darker growth, known as a cropmark, shows up clearly from the air.
The summer of 1976 was one of the driest on record, and it produced fabulous cropmarks. Subsequently we have had about a dozen good years for aerial photography, and much of this new material is slowly finding its way into local SMRs and the three National Monuments Records.
(#litres_trial_promo) It would seem that global warming does have a few beneficial side-effects. Cropmarks are particularly important in rural areas that have been subjected to intensive arable agriculture. They reveal the remains of farms, fields, roadways and settlements, some of which may already have been destroyed by farming and only survive as differences in soil texture. After some practice one can begin to ‘read’ a map of cropmarks and separate Bronze Age barrows and livestock fields from Iron Age farms and arable fields; one can also follow the extent of early medieval fields and the development of the ridge-and-furrow fields that have been so seriously denuded in the last two decades of the twentieth century. It is fair to say that this book could not have been written without the new information provided by commercial archaeology and aerial photography. It has affected not just the quantity of what we now know about the past, but its quality too. By learning more about them, modern archaeologists have gained huge respect for the humanity and achievements of the people they are privileged to study.
If my correspondence is anything to go by, there is a growing interest amongst the public at large in ‘real’ history and archaeology. A recent piece in the authoritative popular journal BBC History Magazine suggests that teachers are being told by their pupils that they have too much of Hitler and the twentieth century, and want to learn more medieval history.
(#litres_trial_promo) If their elders fail to grasp the point, brighter younger people now realise that the roots of the modern world lie in the Middle Ages. It is a period which demands reassessment from the bottom up: for too long it has been viewed from the perspective of the Normans, the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses. Certainly these were important dynasties and political events, but they were no more crucial to the development of the modern world than were the activities of millions of anonymous builders, merchants, farmers, mariners and miners. These people, and the inspired artists, architects and managers who supervised their work, were the true ancestors of today’s Britain.
Walk beneath the magnificent lantern above the transept of Ely Cathedral atop its ‘island’ of drier ground in the East Anglian Fens. Look up into the soaring space at the eight massive shaped oak trees that appear like so many distant gilded matchsticks, and you will be convinced that this is a modern building in every sense of the word. It was built by modern people who just happened to be living in an age of faith. Does that make them fundamentally different from us? I think not.
Religion and piety are foreign to many in the increasingly secular West. Speaking personally, I find the power exerted by religion over rational people quite inexplicable. But that simply reflects the fact that I do not believe in God. Today many people in Britain share my views, or rather lack of them, but my atheism does not make me somehow more modern than a person who has faith. Besides, faith and religion were never exclusively confined to the Middle Ages. The works of that great eighteenth-century genius J.S. Bach are suffused with faith. In Victorian times Charles Darwin encountered fierce public opposition, led by the Church of England, when he published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Even today, biblical creation and ‘directed evolution’ or ‘intelligent design’ are increasingly hot topics of debate. Many people in numerous countries across the modern world are perfectly content to live their lives within social and political contexts that are structured around faith. A strong belief in the power of God and the Church does not place the medieval world somehow outside our own times.
But to return to Ely, I find the achievements of those medieval master craftsmen still speak directly to me in a way that surpasses simple reason and logic. The construction of that soaring octagon high above the transept, apart from being one of the greatest achievements of medieval carpentry, required modern technical expertise, combined with modern thought and vision. I just cannot see the people with the minds to imagine, build, rebuild, maintain and support Ely as being significantly different from us today. I am aware, of course, that I am reading too much into one building, but it was the octagon at Ely that set me thinking. So I have reason to be thankful for that afternoon in the Fens. I looked upwards at the right time and in the right place. It was that single transporting moment that provided me with the motivation to write this book. Now it is time to start the story.
PART I On Britons, Saxons and Vikings (650–1066) (#ulink_952f52ed-2625-57a4-a098-feacfb00a224)
FIG 1 Principal places mentioned in Part I.
CHAPTER ONE The North/South Divide of the Middle Saxon Period (#ulink_21f43280-6aa4-5a46-9d3f-a912cd448261)
THIS CHAPTER will mainly be about the emergence of England. First, however, I must say a few words about the state of the countryside in general in the three centuries or so after the departure of the last Roman troops in AD 410, the generally accepted date for the end of the Roman presence in Britain. To summarise briefly, in the years prior to about 1960 it was believed that the British countryside reverted to a state of near wilderness when everything collapsed after the Roman withdrawal. The term often used to describe the situation was a ‘waste’ or ‘wasteland’, in which forests covered the land and the sun was excluded from the ground. Then waves of new settlers from across the North Sea arrived in Britain, felled the forests and pushed the few inadequate natives west towards Wales. The new people brought with them an entirely new way of life.
In Britain AD I discussed how archaeology and environmental science have shown that there was in fact very little forest regeneration, and that if anything the post-Roman landscape became more open, and the styles of farming more diverse. All the evidence points to continuity in the landscape: there was no wholesale disruption, such as one might expect if the entire population of what was shortly to become south and east England had in fact changed. Most towns and cities were indeed abandoned, but this was a process that had begun long before, in a remarkably sudden and coordinated fashion shortly after AD 300 – a full century prior to the Roman departure. The distinguished scholar of Roman Britain Richard Reece has suggested that this was because towns in Roman Britain were an idea ahead of their time, and that their grip on the population was at best tenuous – and soon slipped. Whatever the explanation, and I find Reece very convincing, Romano-British town life effectively ceased in the early fourth century and there was a (consequent?) rise in rural prosperity, which included the construction or enlargement of many elaborate country houses, known to everyone today as Roman villas.
To the north and far west the British population at large was less affected by the Roman presence, and many aspects of Iron Age life continued right through to post-Roman times. This is not to say that rural settlements here were grubby hovels, because the pre-Roman inhabitants of these areas had developed their own ways of living in what was sometimes quite a wet and windy environment. As we will see when we look at life in the Bernician royal centre at Yeavering in Northumberland, these people were perfectly capable of achieving a remarkably sophisticated style of life.
Plague may have played a role in keeping the population of Britain down in Early Saxon times. Bede mentions it on several occasions with reference to the seventh century.
(#litres_trial_promo) The problem I have with this is that the seventh century was a time when town life in Britain was pretty much non-existent, and it was in the crowded towns of the fourteenth century that the Black Death reaped its most devastating harvest. It affected rural areas too, but not as much. As we will see when we come to discuss that particular outbreak, plague tends to recur again and again, and it seems odd to me that it should die out at more or less the precise time that towns, in the form of the Middle Saxon wics, begin to come into their own.
It is also worth noting that the impact of the Black Death in 1348 was so devastating that the southern British population could not have retained any vestiges of immunity from earlier infections. In other words they must have been completely free from it – and for several generations. It seems to me that the plagues Bede writes about are unlikely to have wiped out whole swathes of the British population, thereby releasing land for huge numbers of people from across the North Sea to settle on. It is, however, entirely possible that plague in the seventh century could have played a role in freeing the survivors from restrictive ties and obligations.
(#litres_trial_promo) Just as we will see in the four-teenth century, the greater availability of land ultimately led to prosperity – which was such a feature of southern Britain in the Middle Saxon period.
For these and other reasons I suggested in Britain AD that the Anglo-Saxon invasion was more a spread of ideas than of actual people, as there is no convincing archaeological evidence for war cemeteries or for David Starkey’s ‘ethnic cleansing’. In a few decades I feel sure that genetics will be able to sort the problem out, one way or another. If it is indeed found that wholesale population replacement did take place, the challenge to archaeologists will be to work out how this could have happened. What was the social mechanism that enabled such a huge ethnic transformation to occur without, it would seem, major social disruption and conflict?
Maybe we can learn something here from the story of the Vikings, who were successful invaders, but who also seemed hell-bent not so much on rape and pillage (which certainly happened) but on settling down and becoming English peasant farmers. The Viking army, however, left clear and unambiguous documentary and archaeological evidence for warfare – something which is still lacking in the archaeological record of the Dark Ages. Perhaps some other, more subtle and archaeologically undetectable, process was at work in Early Saxon times. Maybe strict new codes of marriage introduced by the arriving Anglo-Saxons prevented native British women from having children; maybe too there was some other form of eugenic apartheid. As yet we simply don’t know, but one day we might find out. Either way, it will require some creative thought.
In Britain AD I also discussed the events that led up to the Synod of Whitby (AD 664), at which it was decided that the future of England lay with the Roman rather than the Celtic Church. From a very long-term perspective this was a most important decision, because it ensured that thenceforward British intellectual and spiritual attention would be directed towards Europe. The medieval period was also a time when the authority of the Church played a central role in most aspects of the life of the nation. Before Whitby the Church was altogether more fragmented, and its growth more organic. After Whitby it became both more centralising and more institutional, and soon became a significant power in the land. The increasing importance of the Church also promoted literacy and gave rise to a greater and more widespread use of written documents.
By the early seventh century the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of what was later to be England were beginning to emerge, and we know of a series of very rich or ‘royal’ burials at places such as Sutton Hoo, Taplow and Prittlewell. I described these graves in Britain AD, and I will not repeat myself here, other than to say that these lavish finds show that society was clearly becoming increasingly hierarchical, and that powerful ruling elites had begun to emerge.
(#litres_trial_promo) By the end of the Early Saxon period Christianity was of growing importance, as is well illustrated at Prittlewell (AD 650), where an otherwise pagan chamber burial, with roots that can be traced back to the pre-Roman Iron Age, had been ‘Christianised’ by the addition of two gold foil crosses.
The documentary evidence for Middle Saxon England is much better than that for Early Saxon times. Among the sources available to us, two stand out. The first has to be the work of that great genius of northern Britain, the Venerable Bede, who wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. But there is also a most remarkable eleventh-century source, a tax assessment known as the Tribal Hidage. This document gives us an important glimpse into the earliest geography of England, and I will consider it further in Chapter 3, when we come to discuss the development of administrative units such as the shires.
I mentioned Brian Hope-Taylor in my Introduction. His remarkable excavations at Yeavering in Northumberland transformed our knowledge of Earlier Saxon high-status architecture. His work has given us a vivid picture of life within a royal household in northern Britain prior to the onset of Viking raids. Strictly speaking, Yeavering was in use in the decades just before 650, the notional start of the Middle Saxon period, but dates such as these are for convenience only – and it is convenient for me to ignore them now. First I want briefly to discuss life in Britain north of, say, Yorkshire. Then we will turn our attention further south. The contrast between the two regions will help explain the phenomenon that has come to be known as the Vikings.
It is strange how certain bits and pieces of what you learned at school or university stay with you in later life. Sometimes these half-remembered fragments are of little consequence: does it really matter, for example, that one could have walked across the North Sea 12,000 years ago? Although I was quite interested in the archaeology of early medieval Britain, I never really got to grips with what was happening in the north of the island, except to marvel over the illuminated pages of that superb masterpiece in the British Museum, the Lindisfarne Gospels. This came to the museum in 1753 as part of its ‘Foundation collections’, which also included the only copy of that remarkable Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf..
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Before Brian Hope-Taylor’s excavations and the great growth in Scottish and northern archaeology that has happened since, the main sources of information on early medieval Britain were carved stone crosses, inscriptions, and of course those superb illuminated manuscripts. Their rich decoration owed much to various influences from within Britain, and the style has come to be known as the ‘insular tradition’. Here the term ‘insular’ is not meant to be pejorative; it simply signifies that the manuscripts produced on the island of Britain were quite distinct from those being produced elsewhere in Europe. They were also just as good as, or even better than, anything on the Continent. Besides the Lindisfarne Gospels there are two other famous examples, the Books of Durrow and of Kells (both in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin).
(#litres_trial_promo) All three are Gospels and are particularly renowned for their intricate ‘carpet pages’ of elaborate interlaced design whose vivid 3-D effects would actually make them lethal if woven into floor coverings. The spirit behind the restless movement of this work recalls, for me at least, the unquiet world of pre-Roman, so-called ‘Celtic’ Art. There is little here of the Roman Church, or indeed of Roman culture.
The suggestion of ‘Celtic’ influences summons up images of Ireland, but one should not be misled into thinking that the insular tradition was about Ireland, or those Irish settlers in Scotland, the Scotti, alone. English, or rather Anglo-Saxon, influences were also very important contributors to this rather heady graphic cocktail. We saw in Britain AD how there is growing evidence for mobility in Anglo-Saxon England, and the same can be said for the lands around the western seaways.
(#litres_trial_promo) The art of the insular tradition is clearly a fusion of both English (Anglo-Saxon) and British traditions, but its great flowering was sometime after the Synod of Whitby. The Book of Durrow and the Lindisfarne Gospels are probably mid-seventh century, and Kells is slightly later (late eighth). It may have been the stability provided by the new post-Whitby political and ecclesiastical regime that provided the environment for the new style to emerge and flower. One is tempted to reflect that it is far easier to alter the outward form of religious rituals than the feelings and emotions that lie behind them.
At college we learned in some detail about the glories of these three great works. I also remember seeing the Book of Kells as a small boy when I was taken by one of my Irish uncles, Esmonde, to the library of Trinity College, Dublin, where he himself had been a student. Esmonde was to become a historian of Hitler’s pre-war policy at London University, but at that stage his life in Dublin was rather wild and included some very colourful friends, like the playwright Brendan Behan. Esmonde taught me by example that the past was far too important to be taken too seriously. In the drab days of the 1950s those huge, colourful pages, glinting with gold, made a lasting impression on me. The Book of Kells features large animals, strange beasts and the huge-eyed faces of biblical characters such as the Gospel writers. It has always been among my favourite works of art.
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One might suppose that such great art was produced in a well-endowed culture where people had the time and resources to lavish upon such things. Indeed, that was how life in northern Britain was seen when I first learned about the Celtic Church. Brian Hope-Taylor’s excavations at Yeavering, if anything, reinforced this view of a heroic age that could still find the time to encourage the contemplative life of men such as Bede, or the masters who created the great illuminated manuscripts. That term ‘heroic age’ says it all. But what does it really mean?
The best answer I have come across has been provided by the greatest scholar of northern Britain in early medieval times, Professor Leslie Alcock, who has just published a magisterial review of his subject.
(#litres_trial_promo) Alcock makes it clear that this was indeed a heroic age in which great feats of valour on the battlefield were celebrated in verse and song; but there was more to it than just fighting. Many sources refer to scenes from the life of Christ, and it is apparent that the essentially pagan ideals of the heroic age were transferred to Christian beliefs. The ideals of a warrior elite were tempered by the humanity of those who, like Bede, opted for the quieter life of the soul.
The political situation in what is now northern England in the seventh – ninth centuries was extremely unstable. This is remarkable, because the eighth century saw what has been called a Northumbrian Renaissance, epitomised by scholars such as Bede and religious houses such as Lindisfarne. To the north and east, occupying the land in England and Scotland around the Cheviot Hills, was the kingdom of Bernicia, with Deira to the south, centred around the fertile Vale of York. Deira was taken over by Bernicia in the mid-seventh century, and both were then subsumed within the large kingdom of Northumbria, whose borders fluctuated quite widely, especially when campaigns against its northern neighbours took a turn for the worse. Southwestern Scotland was occupied by the Scots (or Scotti in Latin), who were in fact settlers from Ireland. North of the Firth of Tay were the Picts. During the heroic age much of the warfare took place between Angles from Bernicia and the Picts or the Scots further north.
Yeavering is about as far north in what is now England as it is possible to go. It is located in the Cheviot Hills, at the heart of Bernicia, just below a prehistoric hillfort known as Yeavering Bell. If you struggle over the ramparts of this hillfort in late winter, when the rough grass is low, you can clearly see the circular outline of collapsed Iron Age roundhouses. The settlement is on gently sloping ground at the foot of Yeavering Bell, whose commanding presence is everywhere, and which must have been the principal reason why the site was selected as a royal centre. The inhabitants of Yeavering could claim descent and protection from the ancestral figures who constructed the great hillfort.
This Bernician royal settlement – and I use that loaded word advisedly – went through a number of different phases. Great timber halls appear, are modified and replaced. Cemeteries even grow, come and go. But throughout its development the site shows the clearest signs of organisation and thought. Alignments matter, and symbolism is significant. Sometimes as I read Brian Hope-Taylor’s report – which I still consider the finest excavation report produced by a field archaeologist working in Britain – I feel I am in the Bronze Age, where sites like Stonehenge were about alignments almost more than anything else. Just as the presence of the nearby hillfort had a political message, alignment on celestial phenomena such as solsticial sunrise (or sunset) was a way of linking the world of the living to the power and authority of another world. These things mattered in the Bronze Age, as in Saxon times – as indeed they do today. Ceremony and ritual are methods that society uses to confer special authority on those selected (by whatever means) to rule.
FIG 2 The Bernician royal settlement at Yeavering, Northumberland, at its climax in Phase III, in the 620s. Six timber halls and a kitchen building lie to the east of the Great Enclosure, an elaborately defended meeting place, with two circular entranceworks, one of which contained a timber hall. At the centre of the settlement is a tiered timber grandstand or viewing platform where public ceremonies would have taken place. The large hall A4 and the smaller building A1 were joined together by a post-built yard or enclosure..
Hope-Taylor was able to distinguish five phases of post-Roman occupation at Yeavering, of which the most elaborate was Phase III. This phase ended with a catastrophic fire which the excavator attributed to hostile action. I’m not certain that the evidence he cites is absolutely convincing, because timber and thatched buildings can burn like tinder in exposed situations. All it takes is a spark on a dry roof on a breezy day – or night. But if the fire was indeed caused by hostile action, it is likely to have been a British rather than a Viking raiding party, as Viking raids had yet to get under way. Leslie Alcock has reassessed Hope-Taylor’s dating and is unable to link the great fire to any known historical event. Taking the evidence together, he suggests that the most elaborate and extensive phase (III) of occupation happened in the 620s. The later two phases (IV and V) may have continued into the 640s.
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Just to the east of the settlement was the Great Enclosure, with two circular entranceworks, one of which contained a hall. The enclosure is a massive affair, perhaps resembling a lowland hillfort, and was surrounded by two ditches and two sets of triple palisades of posts. This has to be seen as a fortification of some sort, but at the same time it does seem strange that the largest halls were positioned outside it. I think we are looking here at some form of gathering place that was meant to instil confidence in those who met there. Maybe it was a marketplace that was given royal protection – and the elaborate defences were also a way of reminding people that they were only able to trade there safely thanks to a powerful ruler.
In post-Roman Phase III the settlement consisted of at least six rectangular timber halls, one of which, Hall A4, was truly huge: 80 x 37 feet (24.4 x 11.3 metres); this gives a floor area of 3,000 square feet (275 square metres) – the largest known hall of the Saxon period. The settlement also included a cemetery and a unique timber grandstand or viewing platform. Hope-Taylor suggests that the shape of this structure would fit with the focus being on some sort of throne. The curved wall to the rear of the possible throne would have helped to project the voice of anyone addressing the audience from it. Perhaps a single post behind the throne carried some sort of royal standard or emblem.
The buildings at Yeavering were grand in the extreme, but the finds from the site were strangely unexciting, comprising perhaps two or three boxes of locally made pottery, a handful of coins, clay loom-weights, some metalwork and a quite a few iron nails. Compared to the ‘productive’ sites of Middle Saxon southern Britain, which I will discuss shortly, this is a less than lavish collection of material. The underlying concept of what constitutes royal pomp, or panoply, at Yeavering contrasts hugely with what we know about contemporary sites in the south, at places like Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, where the ship-grave of King Raedwald of Essex (who died in AD 625) contained treasures from all over Europe and the Mediterranean world. Yeavering seems to be more introspective, to be about impressing people with grand buildings and awe-inspiring structures rather than with wealth pure and simple. It also suggests that the royal house of Bernicia was probably more concerned with local relationships and hostilities than with long-distance trade. Again, this attitude to political life is markedly at variance with what was happening further south – and indeed with what was happening, and was about to happen, in monasteries in the north, at places like Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, where those masterpiece manuscripts of the ‘insular school’ were to be created.
Yeavering was not unique in its large timber halls. Other early examples have been found across Northumbria (there are a dozen at Thirlings) and in southern Britain, at sites like South Cadbury in Somerset and West Stow in Suffolk, which I will discuss further shortly.
(#litres_trial_promo) We know from sources such as Bede that these great halls were spaces where feasting and general carousing took place under the approving eye of the lord. But they were also about more than simple pleasure. They were places where justice was dispensed, and their arrangement was intended to show – display would perhaps be a better word – the lord and his family to good advantage. The guests were either the lord’s subjects or neighbouring nobility who attended his table as part of the continuing business of regional diplomatic relations. The great halls played an important part in the development of early medieval society in Britain.
The rarity of finds at Yeavering tends to be a feature of early medieval sites in northern and western Britain. Coins too tend to be rare, and it would seem that the economy was mainly based around barter. In situations such as this we should be careful of simply assuming that somehow coins = trade. In actual fact exotic coins can be collected as beautiful objects in their own right, they can be used as a way of storing wealth, and of course the royal name and portrait carried on many of them is a political statement in itself – and one which would only be seen by members of the upper echelons of society.
Throughout northern and western Britain there is evidence for trade with the Mediterranean region and Gaul. Usually this comes in the form of amphora fragments. Amphorae were large, robust vessels in which wine and oil were exported from the Mediterranean. Fine table wares were often made in north Africa. Coins do not appear to have been used in these transactions, and it is usually assumed that other items were exchanged, such as tin (in Cornwall) or copper, lead, silver or gold (elsewhere). Other items produced in north-western Britain probably included hides, fur and slaves. Wool and cloth do not seem to have been produced in exportable quantities.
Many sites, such as forts and rural settlements, echo Yeavering in revealing fine buildings but a rather small inventory of finds. One exception is the early Christian community at Whithorn Priory in south-west Scotland. This remarkable site has produced many fine buildings, which were accompanied by a large collection of pottery, glass and other objects.
(#litres_trial_promo) Many of these were imports. The site developed into a very significant settlement that has been described as proto-urban – not quite a town, but almost. The large numbers of finds might in part reflect the high quality of the excavation, but then Yeavering, to name just one example, was dug to equally high standards and produced little. One key to what might be special circumstances at Whithorn was provided by the distribution of the sixty-five coins, which mainly occurred around the church doorway. This could possibly suggest that there had been a church collection point of some sort here, and that the coins around it were mislaid offerings. However, it doesn’t explain how the people who made the offerings obtained their coins in the first place.
So if the coins at Whithorn cannot be linked directly to trade, what about the many imported Mediterranean, Gaulish and Continental objects? Surely these indicate extensive trade? In fact a close study of the various types of exotic pottery shows that they were actually imported rather sporadically and over quite a long period, from the late fifth to the eighth century. What was the nature of the trade between north-western Britain and elsewhere? Some would have taken place through Anglo-Saxon middlemen at places such as York, where we know that a coin mint had been established in the late seventh century. Some took place under the aegis and protection of the Church, as at Whithorn. But was there regular to-ing and fro-ing; was there continuous and active communication? On the whole I think not. Contacts had been established and could be called upon when needed, which is another way of saying that this was essentially a command economy.
Professor Charles Thomas has suggested that the trade between the Mediterranean region and his site at Tintagel Castle in north Cornwall would have involved ships which loaded up at various Mediterranean ports and then headed towards Britain, probably via the Spanish and Portuguese coast.
(#litres_trial_promo) Maybe this happened every few years, we cannot tell, but it was never the constant and increasingly active, coin-based trading network that we now realise existed around the southern North Sea basin from at least the later seventh century. That was something altogether different, and both north-western Britain and Ireland lay outside it.
In 1970 I briefly flirted with the idea of transferring my academic allegiance from prehistory to the Saxon period. There were several reasons for this. First and foremost, I suddenly felt daunted by the prospect of directing my first major excavation at Fengate, in Peterborough. This was already one of the best-known prehistoric sites in Britain, and its sheer complexity was very challenging. I also knew that the following spring I would have to turn talk into action, and like many young men I had been quite free in voicing my criticisms of the previous generation. Now I would have to prove whether or not I could dig as well as them – and secretly I knew that many of them had been very good indeed. Prehistory was also going through a rather complacent period; by contrast the archaeology of the Saxon period seemed very exciting. New discoveries were being made on an almost daily basis. It wasn’t just a matter of finding new sites and artefacts, but people were coming to grips with what seemed to be a wholly new world. In the 1950s the post-Roman centuries were seen as retrogressive, a return to barbarism and incompetence, but in the sixties and seventies this was reversed. It was realised that the Saxon landscape was not cloaked in forests of neglect. People did not live in muddy holes – so-called Grübenhaus ‘pit-dwellings’ – in the ground. Instead, new buildings, settlements and landscapes of great sophistication were being revealed. Vitally important excavations at places like York, Lincoln, London, Thetford and Southampton were radically transforming our knowledge of Saxon and Viking towns.
I watched all this and I freely admit I wavered, but I then decided to stay a prehistorian. Now I’m quite sure it was the right decision. But I recall one lunchtime on the first excavation at Fengate that I directed, back in 1971. In those less Health and Safety conscious days we would go to the pub for beer and sandwiches, and then – I’m now ashamed to admit this – sometimes I’d drive heavy machinery in the afternoon. Anyhow, I was standing at the bar listening to our Inspector from the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments at the Department of the Environment, Brian Davison. He was telling us how his dig a few years previously at Thetford had thrown light on the way Saxon townspeople organised their rubbish collection.
(#litres_trial_promo) I almost choked on my beer. That was precisely the sort of detail I wanted to reveal about the Bronze Age. But where was I to find the evidence? For that brief moment I bitterly regretted my earlier decision. Then, as happens, the feeling wore off when I returned to site.
Archaeology often seems to advance in fits and starts. First there will be a period of major reassessment brought about by new discoveries, then things will calm down while people consider the implications of what has just happened. Sometimes there is then a long period of stability – some would call it complacency – when every new discovery is seen to support the status quo. Finally the first hints begin to appear that all might not be as it seems – and the whole cycle starts again. These major changes in outlook and interpretation (theorists refer to them as ‘paradigm shifts’) tend to happen one by one in the different sub-disciplines of the subject. Thus prehistory today is just recovering from a major change of direction when straightforward functional interpretations, often based around economics, gave way to so-called ‘post-modern’ approaches, which placed symbolism and ceremony at the heart of ancient culture.
A big change in direction has just happened in the world of early medieval studies, and we now find ourselves at the second stage, when the implications of what has happened are being considered. As often occurs in archaeology, the shift in thought appears at first to have been triggered by new discoveries – in this instance thousands of metal finds, many of them coins – but the new information has come at the right time to support a radical new view of Europe in earliest medieval times.
The principal exponent of the new approach is Michael McCormick, Professor of History at Harvard University, whose huge new book will take most people some time to assimilate.
(#litres_trial_promo)I won’t attempt a summary of its 1,101 pages, but some of his conclusions are directly relevant to our story. We will shortly be discussing trade in greater detail, but to understand what was going on we have to look at the bigger picture, because trade cannot take place in a vacuum. People trade with each other not just because they need what others can supply, but because they have the means to do so and have established reliable lines of communication. Trade and communication are inextricably linked. Professor McCormick has shown that sometimes the communication can take place over very long distances indeed.
McCormick’s reconstruction of trade in the fourth to the ninth centuries is based on a number of sources, but especially on an exhaustive study of Mediterranean travellers’ records, findspots of Arab and Byzantine coins, and ship movements in the Mediterranean Sea, which in turn are based on contemporary records such as customs registers. These sources have provided a huge amount of information on the way that people and ships moved around Europe, and McCormick fully acknowledges that many Arabic records have yet to be tapped.
Europeans have a tendency to regard Europe as the wellhead from which all culture springs, following the flowering of Classical Greece in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. The modern concept of ‘the West’ is of a culture which is entirely European and essentially self-generated. The one or two acknowledged non-European influences, such as Christianity, are the exceptions that prove the rule. This Europe-centred world view is dangerously flawed, one-sided and misleading. Currently the Muslim world is seen by some as being in direct opposition to the West. It is viewed as having different attitudes to democracy, women’s rights and the relationship of Church and state. Laying aside the validity or otherwise of these modern perceptions, it might be helpful to show how the early flowering of culture and science in the rapidly expanding Muslim world played a significant role in fostering the development of early medieval Europe. The cultural traffic has by no means been in one direction only. But first, some essential dates and facts.
The Prophet Mohammed (the name means ‘praised’ in Arabic) was born sometime around 570 and died in 632. The Muslim or Arab Empire expanded rapidly between the year of the Prophet’s death and 650.
(#litres_trial_promo) From the mid-seventh to the mid-eighth century this vast empire was ruled by the Umayyad dynasty from their capital in Damascus, Syria. They were considered impious and tyrannical by many – especially in Iraq – and were replaced in 750 by the Abbasids, whose capital was in Baghdad. The Abbasids claimed direct descent from the Prophet, via his uncle Abbas. The Shi’ites disputed this claim, holding that true direct descent could only be via the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and her husband Ali.
FIG 4 Distribution of Arab and Byzantine coins in Carolingian (750–900) Europe. Some of the findspots contained more than one coin. The findspot in north-west England is the Viking hoard from Cuerdale, Lancashire, which included many Arab and Byzantine coins.
The sheer scale of the cities of the early Islamic Empire dwarfs anything in contemporary Europe. We still do not know the precise size of Baghdad under the Abbasids, because no accurate survey exists, but it was probably in the order of seventy square kilometres.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their royal city at Samarra, 125 kilometres north of Baghdad, has been described by Alastair Northedge as the largest archaeological site in the world. It was built and occupied for less than a century, yet its streets and houses covered a staggering fifty-eight square kilometres after only twenty years. Although now entirely deserted, it is still visible from the air, where mile after mile of carefully-laid-out gridiron streets can clearly be seen. Within the city were hunting reserves, racecourses and gardens. There were also numerous palaces, one of which was approached by a massive processional way, perhaps resembling The Mall in London.
The rulers of the Muslim world were known as caliphs (from the Arabic khalifa: ‘deputy of God’), and the caliphate of the great Abbasid, Harun al-Rashid, who ruled from 786 to 809, and who features in the Arabian Nights, was truly vast. It extended from modern Tunisia through Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran and what was once Soviet Central Asia. Oman, Yemen and much of Pakistan were also within his power. This great empire was no flash in the pan. Harun’s capital Baghdad was the largest city in the known world, and spread for miles on either bank of the Tigris. By this time the early internal conflicts within the Muslim Empire had been resolved. We know that Harun was in contact with Charlemagne, because he gave him, among other things, a superb and highly decorated enamel water jug on the latter’s coronation by the Pope in Rome in the year 800. During this time the Caliphate and Byzantium were in almost permanent conflict. Harun’s son, al-Ma’mun, who eventually succeeded him and ruled from 813 to 833, was an enlightened ruler, a great builder and supporter of science and the arts. But following Harun’s death, Baghdad and the Caliphate began to be plagued by civil war. Baghdad itself eventually fell to Shi’ite attacks in the mid-tenth century.
McCormick (following the work of earlier Belgian historians) has shown that trading contacts with the thriving economic, cultural and scientific world of the Caliphate played an important part in the development of Europe, most of which was under the control of Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire (about 750–900). It was contact with the Caliphate and Byzantium (once the eastern Roman Empire) that helped to kick-start early medieval Europe following the disruption caused by the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Westerners tend to think of the Carolingian Empire as huge and magnificent, but it would have appeared less significant and perhaps somewhat peripheral to someone like Caliph Harun. It was the Carolingian Empire which ultimately fuelled the growing trade around the southern North Sea.
Slaves, many of them from Britain and mostly captured on military campaigns, were the principal ‘commodity’ exported to the Arab Empire. The trade had been very brisk between 650 and 750, but received a boost when sometime around 750 the Caliphate suffered an attack of bubonic plague. European traders from Venice, Byzantium and the Carolingian Empire filled the gap in the Arab labour market. The scale of this trade was truly remarkable:
The last five decades of the eighth century were also the era when the Carolingian conquests could well have flooded the market … through the capture of large numbers of war slaves … As the slaves flowed out in these final decades of the eighth century, Arab coins, eastern silks, new Arab drugs, and old eastern spices surged into Italy. The slave market fuelled the expansion of commerce between Europe and the Muslim world.
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The new vision of early medieval Europe differs profoundly from the existing ‘conventional wisdom’. As McCormick puts it, this is a Europe
which is not the impoverished, inward-looking, and economically stagnant place many of us learned about in our student days. On the contrary, in its origins, Europe’s small worlds came to be linked to the greater world of Muslim economies … These links were perhaps more modest compared with what had once existed [in Roman times] and with what would develop … but they were real and, in economic terms, they counted, especially given Europe’s small scale.
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He goes on to point out that trade brings with it cultural contact, and that at the time Arab science was far ahead of anything happening in Europe. The trading contacts were also with Byzantium, which was not then the sealed-off world within the walls of Constantinople that it was later to become. McCormick sees early medieval Europe as more culturally open than at any other time in its history, before and in all probability since. We know that Charlemagne would have been acquainted with Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Lombards and Visigoths, but McCormick points out that he would also have had Venetians, Arabs, Jews, Byzantines and Slavs among his many contacts. It is thus surely not completely absurd to imagine an Arab or Venetian merchant walking through the streets of Lundenwic, as London was then known.
How did this flowering of early medieval trade affect life in Middle Saxon England? To find the answer we have to consider the origins of the first towns, because these were the safe places in which trade could take place. I will discuss the flourishing of Later Saxon towns in Chapter 4. Here I am concerned with the origins and roots of urbanism. Put simply: how and why did towns develop? What was the wider economic picture that encouraged their growth? Had I been asked those questions twenty years ago, I would probably have replied with a stock anthropological answer – as befits a prehistorian. I would have said that elites in various communities were competing with one another to control certain key natural resources such as salt, water, ores or productive land. But in the last two decades simple ideas such as this have been blown out of the water by a mass of new information. What sparked, and continues to fuel, controversy within the profession is that this new information was produced by hobby metal detectorists. These people are non-academics, and almost every archaeologist’s Aunt Sally. But are they wholly evil? I think not. Far from it, in fact.
Even so, I have to admit I am not happy about metal detecting. In archaeological terms it is fundamentally wrong to wrest objects out of their contexts for personal gain. Responsible metal detectorists might reply, with justification, that often they donate their best objects to museums, and that in any case the ‘context’ from which they removed their finds had usually been eradicated by intensive modern agriculture. That may be true, but for every responsible metal detectorist there are others who prefer to conduct their hobby less openly. I was president of a local detectorists’ club in the 1980s, and I well recall that our weekly meetings were attended by two or three dealers in antiquities who often had extended ‘conversations’ with club members in the car park.
In the 1980s metal detecting grew rapidly in popularity. Even if they had wanted to – and many did – archaeologists would never have been able to make the hobby vanish. It was clear that it could never be banned, because the law could not possibly be enforced: detectorists would be driven underground, and if that happened, any chances of monitoring what they were finding would disappear. As it is, it’s hard enough to prevent dedicated illegal ‘nighthawks’ from detecting over legally Scheduled Ancient Monuments (sites of national importance granted statutory protection).
While the attitude of most archaeologists in the early 1980s was hardening, one exceptional and farsighted individual, Tony Gregory, began to work with detectorist clubs in Norfolk. Pretty well single-handed he started to change archaeological attitudes. He was a close friend of mine (sadly he died in 1991 of cancer), and I spent several smoky evenings upstairs in Norfolk pubs while club members showed him their latest finds and he made notes of where they had been found. As he pointed out, it was bad enough that the finds were being removed in the first place, but it was an archaeological catastrophe that their findspots were being lost too. Those findspots are archaeologically every bit as important as the objects themselves.
Eventually the government bowed to archaeological pressure to regulate what was going on. In 1997 it sponsored the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which exists to ensure that findspots are recorded and major new finds are saved for the nation.
(#litres_trial_promo) This work is carried out by regional FLOs, or Finds Liaison Officers, who have the tricky task of retaining the trust of both archaeologists and detectorists. Even despite the Portable Antiquities Scheme, I still find the haphazard removal of finds from their contexts a very difficult moral dilemma, and one made no simpler to resolve by the outstandingly important new information that has recently begun to emerge.
This new information is transforming our understanding of trade and exchange in northern Europe between the seventh and tenth centuries, and it is doing this by means of so-called ‘productive’ sites. The term was coined (pun unintended) by numismatists, and would never have been chosen by archaeologists, who might have dubbed them ‘rich’ or ‘significant’ sites. To me, ‘productive’ is a word one might attach to an oil well. That quibble aside, ‘productive’ sites have turned the world of Middle Saxon archaeology upside down – with more than a little help from some distinguished specialists in ancient coinage.
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The four hundred years between 600 and 1000 (the seventh to eleventh centuries) are now seen to have been a period of economic renewal following two centuries when northern Europe was searching for new identities and direction, following the demise of the official Roman Empire in the west. I say ‘official’ because some form of Romanised authority did continue, but it had now been devolved to local and regional government. The Church, which had become the favoured religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine from AD 324, also played an important role in maintaining such government during a period which archaeologists and historians now refer to as Late Antiquity.
The new economic order seems to have been arranged around a series of major commercial centres, known as emporia in Latin and wics in Anglo-Saxon or Early English. Finds from the emporia in Britain and on the Continent are characterised by their richness and range. Most importantly they provide clear and unambiguous evidence for long-distance trade. These sites sprang up quite rapidly around the coasts of northern Europe, and their arrival coincided with the appearance of a widely adopted silver coinage which became the common currency for the emerging states around the shores of the North Sea. The importance of the emporia has been recognised for some time, and it was believed that they came into existence in the earlier seventh century as seasonally occupied trading centres, operated by independent merchants who worked outside aristocratic or elite control.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was believed that from about the 670s they began to come under such control. But following discoveries such as the magnificent burial at Prittlewell (AD 650) at the emporium or wic of Ipswich, we now realise that these places were probably under royal or elite control from the outset. That is not to say, however, that they were not also well integrated into the local economy, or that specialist traders were not also involved. They almost certainly were.
The emporium system was essentially elite-driven: it was all about power, prestige and display in the highest echelons of society. We now understand that while such motives were undoubtedly significant, many more people were involved, and it has become possible to see the whole process in far broader terms. It is becoming clear that the emporia formed the pinnacles of an integrated trading system that was united not just by ships and the sea, but by the network of good roads that had been established by the Romans, and had never been completely abandoned.
The true significance of ‘productive’ sites has only slowly filtered into the academic literature, largely because the realms of academia and metal detecting rarely come into contact. Archaeologists and numismatists are rather better at making such contacts, so the new discoveries have gradually been surfacing in journals and websites devoted to those particular interests. As the information is largely derived from metal detectors it is biased in favour of non-ferrous finds, because most of the machines used today have a discriminator function which allows iron to be screened out. The reason is that the modern ploughsoil is richly scattered with millions of old nails, many of them derived from the ash of scrap timbers burnt on farmyard muckheaps to add potash to the manure. Signals from these nails tended to drown out other signals in the metal detectorist’s headphones. Iron nails, it must also be said, are of no commercial value. So all iron finds, and usually non-metal finds too, such as pottery, tend to be ignored, thereby biasing the information enormously. Were archaeologists to excavate and metal detect ‘productive’ sites, they would plot and keep everything.
This mass of new information is appearing not just in England, but in Europe too. Places like Holland and Denmark have decided to cooperate with the detectorists, and as a result information is flooding in. Elsewhere, however, in Germany, France and Italy, for example, the hobby is still illegal, so new discoveries in these countries are happening very much more slowly, and through traditional means, such as official excavation. We know that illegal finds from these countries are entering the black market. We also know that some are being given false provenances in countries where detecting is less frowned upon.
It is becoming clear to numismatists working with this new material that there was something approaching an explosion of coin-making around AD 700. To give some idea of its scale, the volume of money then in circulation in southern England was not to be paralleled until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The situation in Britain was mirrored on the Continent, and it is now quite clear that the ‘explosion’ in currency production represents a sudden increase in trade across large parts of northern Europe.
There is good evidence to suggest that the coins from ‘productive’ sites were still more or less in situ when the detectorists found them. This would suggest that at such sites coin-loss equates with coin-use. In other words, we can safely assume that the coins were mislaid during trade, and were not placed in the ground as offerings, or concealed in hoards for safekeeping in times of strife. This assumption is based on the distribution of finds from ‘productive’ sites, which are spread across the landscape and do not occur in small, tight clusters. Numismatists have shown, moreover, that the coins found on one site reflect those from others. Changes in currency tended to happen across regions, which again suggests trade rather than hoarding and burial (often hoards contain antique or outdated coins kept purely for the value of the gold or silver they contain).
Analysis of the coin finds from ‘productive’ sites and other smaller ‘hot spots’ is still at an early stage, and so far no new mints have been identified, but we can be reasonably sure that the patterns revealed in these new and very early distributions are ‘real’ – in the sense that they reflect ancient trade. One example will suffice. Detectorists have discovered an isolated ‘hot spot’ of late-seventh-century Early Saxon coins, known as ‘primary porcupine sceattas’,* in the upper Thames Valley. We know from other evidence, including coinage, that this was to be an important area for the production of wool, starting in the mid-eighth century. The new ‘hot spot’ suggests not only that the wool trade in the chalklands of this region was under way much earlier, but that it began less gradually than was previously supposed.
It would be a mistake to view trade in early medieval Europe as being part of a free market economy, any more than it was in the Bronze Age. In the past, just as in certain parts of the world today, trade was controlled or encouraged by influences other than purely market forces. Usually these non-market forces represented figures or centres of power within the structure of the state, such as kings, landowning nobles, military leaders and, increasingly, the Church. Protectionism – in the sense of the protection of vested interests – is not just a modern phenomenon. Having said that, the evidence provided by emporia and ‘productive’ sites does strongly indicate that genuine trade did take place within the contexts of a rapidly developing political structure. The question that has to be asked is, to what extent did these power politics affect the growth and development of early medieval commerce?
Two recent studies have suggested that royal power was used both in the Baltic area and in Rouen to influence the arrangement and location of the trading quarters in major emporia.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the Baltic example the Danish King Godfred relocated all the merchants from the original settlement to one over 130 kilometres distant in the early ninth century. In the French example an essentially organic trading landscape of ports and trading posts, many of them owned and run by monasteries, was centralised by royal authority, reacting to increasing Viking raids, around Rouen, which then became an important urban centre, but one very much under royal control. In neither instance was trade discouraged by these changes.
Studies of eighth-century coin distributions suggest that trade within the various regions of northern Europe was tightly-knit and integrated. There were consistent patterns that developed over time and space. There does not seem to be evidence (yet) for currency stopping short at national boundaries. Although we know that the process of state formation was under way at this time, there is as yet no evidence that this was impeding or adversely affecting the development of wider patterns of trade.
The relatively recent recognition of ‘productive’ sites, ‘hot spots’ and other smaller centres within the hinterland of the major emporia does raise the question of the extent to which non-royal patronage and influence could affect the day-to-day business of trade in such places. It seems inherently unlikely that the hand of royalty extended to these more remote and distant places. So did these places develop as a result of simple private enterprise? The general consensus, while acknowledging that individuals and individual motives undoubtedly played a significant role, prefers to see the Church as the engine or inspiration for these smaller centres of trade. Some of the English ‘productive’ sites in Suffolk, Norfolk and the Isle of Wight were located at or near former ecclesiastical sites, and for others in, for example, East Anglia, the change was the other way around, with seventh- and eighth-century ‘productive’ sites acquiring a religious dimension by the eleventh century. There is other evidence too that the Church played an important part in the growing economies of southern Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries.
What were these ‘productive’ sites like? Were they towns, administrative centres, trading posts, religious houses, settlements – or what? Here we are confronted with the biggest problem of all: none in Britain has yet been thoroughly or totally excavated. So the short answer is that we don’t know. But some work on the setting of these sites has been done, and of course we do have the non-ferrous metal finds themselves to guide us. As we will see shortly, most are located on rivers or at spots where roads are readily accessible. It’s possible that some ‘productive’ sites were temporary fairs, but so far this has not been demonstrated for certain. Many of the finds – which we must remember are a highly biased selection – compare well with what one might expect to find at a settlement. So it does seem likely that people were actually living at these places.
It is possible to view the growth and development of individual British ‘productive’ sites in two ways. They might have sprung up as trading centres because of their location close to rivers and roads. Prehistorians have found that a safe or ‘neutral’ position at some distance from a large centre of population might help in the establishment of such a place, where trade and exchange could happen with some assurance of security. After a while the trading post would grow as a settlement and soon it would acquire other facilities, such as the provision of justice, administration and financial services – a mint, for example.
But there is another way of looking at the situation. J.D. Richards, basing his remarks on fieldwork he carried out at Cottam, a ‘productive’ site in East Yorkshire, wonders whether we are placing the cart before the horse by putting so much stress on the productiveness of ‘productive’ sites.
(#litres_trial_promo) He asks whether, if they had been found by more conventional archaeological techniques, they would simply have been seen as important regional communal centres – rich settlements, in other words. Although he seems at first glance to be taking a less dramatic, and rather more conventional, view of the period, I find his ideas ring archaeologically true. His suggestion is persuasive because it helps to demystify the concept of ‘productive’ sites, which otherwise seem to lack a rationale.
It is not often that I come across an academic paper that excites me so much that its implications keep me awake at night, but it happened recently when I read Ben Palmer’s thoughts on emporia and ‘productive’ sites in southern England.
(#litres_trial_promo) It happened to be the first chapter I read in Tim Pestell and Katharina Ulmschneider’s Markets in Early Medieval Europe: Trading and ‘Productive’ Sites, 650–850, a collection of essays that I have already drawn upon quite heavily and that will undoubtedly have a profound effect on the way we think about the archaeology of early medieval Europe for years to come. Palmer’s paper is original because it focuses on what used to be called inter-site (as opposed to intra-site) archaeology. Most archaeologists spend their time wondering how people led their lives or conducted ceremonies on one specific site. This inevitably follows the process of excavation, which is intensely focused and usually has the archaeologist ‘by the throat’ – I speak from personal experience. Plainly one looks at other sites for comparisons and parallels, but that tends to happen very late in the post-excavation period.
Such short-sighted introspection is discouraged if the information is coming from a number of separate places, and when detailed excavation and survey are usually not involved. The result is what the prehistorian Robert Foley termed ‘off-site archaeology’, where one studies what was happening between rather than on sites. This approach helps one to understand both what it was that held the network of sites together, and why the system appeared on the landscape in the first place.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ben Palmer’s paper is an excellent example of the genre. He confines his attention to south-eastern England, the main region of rapid economic growth in the Middle Saxon period.
The first impression I had when I read Ben Palmer’s paper was of geographical ‘connectedness’. This paper could never have been written about prehistoric Britain, and it certainly did not resemble anything I knew on the archaeology of the post-Roman ‘Dark Ages’. These periods were simply too remote, and lacked the necessary information. It took just two centuries for that to change. The world he was discussing was a working, functioning trading system. We don’t know whether they had such things, but it would have been possible to compile road maps showing places where one could stay the night, get a meal and find fresh horses. It seems to me that the false emphasis on loot – on coins and ‘productive’ sites – tends to obscure the fact that Middle Saxon southern England was about more than just trade in objects from foreign parts: these networks were also about people living their daily lives – selling their wool, making their clothes and growing their food. We can now discern coherent trading landscapes where we can observe the relationship of the town to the countryside – and how each supported the other. To my eyes this paper showed the first signs of a geography that was recognisably modern.
There has been some debate as to whether the three major centres (emporia or wics) at Ipswich, Lundenwic (London) and Hamwic (Southampton) were ‘true’ towns, in the sense that they supported a large population and were self-governed. Pre-Viking York (Eoforwic) is another likely contender for wic status. Personally I’m in little doubt that these settlements were fully urban, as we would understand the term today, because I cannot see how places with such a density of settlement could survive and prosper in any other way. Further, a significant proportion of the population must have spent all their time being merchants or artisans. They would have had little or nothing to do with the production of food from the land.
But I will leave that particular discussion aside, because I’m not sure it’s either relevant or interesting. What matters is that these places are something altogether different from anything that had gone before: not only are they larger and richer, but they are positioned at key points in a much larger network of settlement, trade and communication. It cannot be a coincidence that they are all more or less the same distance apart, and straddle the south-eastern approaches, like the open mouth of a vast trawler net being slowly towed towards the North Sea. The traditional view of wics and emporia is that they were one-offs, isolated and before their time. Ben Palmer describes the old view of them as a failed experiment in kingdom-building. They owed their existence to the fact that they were ‘gateway communities’ that stood on the periphery of the developed core of western Europe, represented by Francia, the Empire of the Franks.
FIG 5 South-eastern England in the Middle Saxon period, showing the location of the three major centres (emporia or wics) at Ipswich, Lundenwic (London) and Hamwic (Southampton). ‘Productive’ sites and other significant settlements or trading centres are shown by dots.
Here I must briefly break off to say a few words about Charlemagne and the Franks. Charlemagne is often seen as the father of modern Europe, and his empire the true ancestor of the European Community. Jacques Le Goff takes a more sceptical view. For him, Charlemagne produced an abortive Europe that nevertheless left behind a legacy.
(#litres_trial_promo) This is a view with which most archaeologists would probably agree.
The Franks were a Germanic people who expanded west across the Rhine in the late fifth and sixth centuries, under the command of their remarkable king Clovis (died c.511), to occupy most of central and eastern Gaul (France). This expansion was continued by their greatest emperor, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne (771–814). Under his leadership the Carolingian Empire was to occupy most of western Europe, excepting Spain and southern Italy. Charlemagne, who was barely literate himself, reformed and expanded the power of the Church and encouraged the development of art and letters. While he was in sole charge his empire was stable and very prosperous. The tradition of scholarship was continued by his successors Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald, but the old flair had gone, and Europe now entered a less stable period when political allegiances were shifting. By the mid-tenth century the driving force of the Carolingian Empire shifted towards Germany, with the accession of Otto I in 936.
The traditional view is that the wics and emporia stood at the boundary of the developed core (Francia) and the underdeveloped periphery, represented by Britain and Scandinavia. In today’s politically correct world we would doubtless refer to the latter as ‘developing’ – which the new archaeological evidence would suggest was factually correct too. As in subsequent core/periphery relations between an imperial centre and outlying regions, it was held that the wics and emporia were the places where raw materials were exchanged for luxury goods from Europe. Put cynically, the periphery produced the things that mattered, and received showy trinkets in exchange.
This view of the setting up and operation of wics and emporia was given added weight by scholars such as Richard Hodges, who analysed these processes in the contexts of European macro-economics. He reasoned that trade and exchange only make sense if you look at the whole picture. His approach was anthropological, and rings sort-of true to a prehistorian like myself. I say ‘sort-of’ because there are no such things as permanent, static laws in anthropology, and Hodges’s seminal study of the subject, which appeared in 1989, now seems to me at least somewhat dated and mechanistic, although at the time it deservedly had a huge impact.
(#litres_trial_promo) His views on the social and economic forces behind the growth of wics and emporia in the seventh and eighth centuries are still very influential, and are essentially based on the competitive relationship between the governing elites in the various emerging states and kingdoms.
Anthropologists love relationships. They believe that the way humans react to each other is governed by forces other than instinctive or emotional likes or dislikes. So anthropologists hold that a married man will tend to have strained relations with his mother-in-law because she resents the loss of her daughter, and he feels that his wife is reluctant to leave her original family because her mother wants her back. Such competitive relationships have also been found in the world of tribal politics, where family considerations also complicate matters. The competitive nature of the relations between ruling elites was first discussed in detail by the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). He studied the exchange of gifts between the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, and realised that the exchange formed part of a complex system of social obligation known as the Kula cycle. This cycle was based on what anthropologists refer to as ‘Malinowski’s principle of reciprocity’ – a sonorous phrase which suggests that no gift-giving is without some form of motive. As the words imply, each ‘gift’ was actually nothing of the sort, because it carried with it the prospect of something in return: either another gift later, or some form of social obligation. Malinowski also realised that these exchanges encouraged competition between the elites on different islands. So a particularly lavish gift was less a generous donation than an expression of power on the donor’s part.
Malinowski was an extraordinary man who also established the ground rules of anthropological fieldwork. Among other achievements he pioneered the process of structured interviews, which allowed him to compare the responses he received from different people right across the huge island archipelago he studied. Today his approach is seen as ‘functionalist’. In other words he based much of what he observed on common-sense observation and a rather masculine (dare I say it, simplistic) view of human relationships, perhaps summed up by: ‘one good turn deserves another’. Subsequent workers, most famously Margaret Mead in her wonderful book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), showed that there was a great deal more to human relationships in the Pacific – and of course elsewhere – than could readily be defined by laws of reciprocity alone. Returning to ancient trade and exchange, more recent studies such as The Gift by Marcel Mauss (1950) and Stone Age Economics (1974) by Marshall Sahlins have been far less functionalist than Malinowski; but even so, his fundamental principle still seems to apply.
(#litres_trial_promo) Reciprocity and exchange are now seen as organising structures that are about more than the giving of gifts: they underlie most social, economic and administrative processes in both ancient and modern societies.
Archaeologically speaking it is very hard to distinguish between the exchange of gifts and trade, pure and simple, because each involves reciprocity of one form or another. Moreover, where exchange at an elite level happens, it is not unusual to find other, smaller transactions also taking place further down the social ladder. Transactions of this sort do resemble trade, when seen in the archaeological record, because a large variety of objects – even coinage – may be involved.
One useful rule of thumb that can help us define what was going on concerns the nature of the places where transactions took place. Traditionally the emporia and wics have been seen as rather isolated phenomena that contrasted markedly with the not-so-very-prosperous rural settlements that surrounded them. There are signs too that they were laid out by a central authority: for example, streets were arranged on a grid pattern, and many buildings seem to have been erected simultaneously. The finds include exotic items such as wine containers and pottery imported from the area around the Rhine. Taken together, these clues suggest that the wics and emporia were set up by powerful elites to control trade to and from the territories they ruled. The reason they wanted to control the trade was simply to establish a royal monopoly on prestige goods, which they could then use to grease the wheels of power both externally, as regards foreign policy, and internally, by rewarding the loyalty of key families and individuals. In a command economy which was based on the exchange of prestige goods, the control of commerce led naturally to the control of people.
It was believed that the establishment of the wics and emporia by royal patronage did not protect them forever, which is why they began to decline. They lost their central role by, and just after, the end of the eighth century. There was then a gap of about a century, during which time there was effectively no substantial urban presence in Britain. This apparent hiatus coincided with the first period of Viking raids and settlement (we will see that their first raid, on the monastery at Lindisfarne, took place in 793). The next set of major urban foundations were the fortified burhs, which we know for a fact were established by royal command, first as a defensive measure against raids and then as protection from Viking forces present in Britain. I will return to the burhs in the next two chapters, but the important point to make here is that the bulk of them were established in the late eighth and early ninth centuries.
The conventional wisdom on early towns and the separation of the earlier wics and emporia from the later burhs only really makes sense if we can detect good evidence for discontinuity – which in archaeology must always be proved, and never assumed. The idea of discontinuity also subsumes that of abandonment. In other words, one system replaces another after a period when people either moved elsewhere or the system itself collapsed in some way. Notions of discontinuity were more fashionable in the past, when there was far less data to play with. Archaeology was constructed with a textbook or a historical account in one hand – to provide some form of context – and site notebooks and photographs in the other. You concentrated on the details of the site you had just excavated, and only towards the end of the operation did you attempt to place it all in context. Nowadays all of that has changed, because context is being provided by new archaeological finds, as well as by documents.
I have touched on metal detecting, but a far more significant factor in shaping the way we view the past has been the explosion of new information from commercial archaeology, which I discussed in the Introduction. Thanks to computers and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) this store of new information is now available to archaeologists and others. To be more specific, this means that we now have the information to re-examine the way that wics and emporia have traditionally been interpreted.
Two questions spring immediately to mind. The first is perhaps the most obvious: were they isolated, one-off royal foundations that existed to promote and exploit a royal monopoly of imported prestige goods? The answer to that is relatively simple: yes they were, and no they were not. They were, inasmuch as they show all the signs of royal involvement, but they were not isolated, nor did they monopolise all trade – or even most of the trade that was taking place in and around them. There was simply too much going on to attribute everything to some form of royal prerogative. One glance at the map of southern England see (page 47 (#ulink_9b49f6dc-28da-5379-adf0-6f7d522defb8)) showing the three wics at Ipswich, London and Southampton reveals that the hinterland of these three places was liberally peppered with subsidiary, but still very significant, settlements and ‘productive’ sites which are positioned close to either Roman roads, ancient routes or navigable rivers. It is most noticeable that none is positioned on the more remote hills of the southern Midlands, in East Anglia or the South Downs. Good access and easy communication were clearly essential. These must be seen as trading places, but that of course does not mean they could not have been settlements or small towns in their own right. It does suggest, however, that royal power was not employed to confine all trade and exchange to the major wics and emporia. The evidence suggests that Middle Saxon trade was indeed organised around the wics and emporia, but that these formed just one part of an integrated system in which many people played an active part.
The second question that we can re-examine with the benefit of so much new information concerns the demise of the wics and emporia. Can we still confidently assert that the best part of a century of abandonment separated the appearance of the first burhs from the last feeble gasps of the declining wics? This suggestion becomes increasingly hard to support if the wics were indeed part of an integrated system, because if they declined and vanished, then surely the system as a whole must also have collapsed. But there is no evidence to suggest that anything of the sort happened. Yes, the wics and emporia declined in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, but certainly Lundenwic never disappears off the map. Nor do ‘productive’ sites simply vanish. Trade within Britain has slowed down by, say, 850, and the Late Saxon successors to the widely traded pottery known as Ipswich Ware (Thetford Ware, Stamford Ware, etc.) were never as widely distributed as their Middle Saxon precursor. This winding down can be attributed in part to political turmoil within the Carolingian Empire across the Channel, and to increasing Viking raids and conflict within Britain. But trade within Britain certainly didn’t cease. There was no hiatus; the Late Saxon economy never hit the buffers.
The emphasis on coins and metalwork from both the wics and the smaller ‘productive’ sites has tended to obscure the true nature of much of the trading that was taking place. I’ve already mentioned that Richard Hodges considers that something of an ‘industrial revolution’ was happening in the eighth century, and the best evidence for this comes in the form of Ipswich Ware.
I remember when I first came across this starkly functional, unglazed, dark grey pottery. I was with my friend and colleague Keith Wade, who had been the deputy director of the Saxon and medieval dig, which I had co-supervised in 1970, at North Elmham Park in central north Norfolk. In the late summer, when digging ended, I went with Keith in search of Ipswich Ware, which he rightly felt was very important because it represented the beginnings of a major Saxon industry. I don’t think either of us realised back then just how important Ipswich Ware was to become. I recall looking at my first sherds and noticing that they were lightly dimpled on the outside, and Keith explaining that this was an example of the slow-wheel technique of manufacture, where the vessel being formed was on an unpowered turntable that was revolved by a sideways flick of the thumb on the vessel itself, which left the distinctive ‘girth grooves’. Thanks to the Ipswich Ware Project we now realise that this pottery was produced in very large quantities and was distributed widely across southern England, presumably along the same roads and rivers that linked the various wics and ‘productive’ sites. If we are not looking at actual batch-based mass production, then we must be getting very close to it. Whatever the true situation, we have now moved well beyond a simple craft-based rural manufacturing tradition to something more standardised and, indeed, industrial.
I have to admit that I was only slightly aware of its importance at the time, but when I was working at North Elmham one of us found a sherd – actually it was a handle – of fine dark pottery which somehow seemed to have acquired a diamond-shaped piece of tinfoil which had stuck to its outside – as if it had accidentally stuck there when the Christmas turkey was being cooked.
(#litres_trial_promo) The digger who found it had the good sense not to scrape the foil off with his finger – as I fear I might have done in my naïveté – and he showed it to Keith, who stared at it with eyes like saucers. ‘Good grief,’ he said (actually he used a stronger term), ‘it’s Tating Ware!’ And off he hurried to the director, Peter Wade-Martins, in the site hut. Peter was absolutely delighted, because Tating (pronounced ‘Tarting’) Ware mostly came from the Rhineland, and was the finest and most skilfully produced pottery in late-eighth- or ninth-century Europe.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was very high-status stuff indeed, and the best evidence possible for trade.
As I have already mentioned, Keith and I went in search of pottery and pottery kilns when we had finished at North Elmham. In the autumn I visited him on a dig behind a farmyard at the beautiful Essex village of Wicken Bonhunt. The first find he showed me when I got there was another sherd of Tating Ware.
In the early 1970s the gradually increasing quantities of exotic early imported pottery were causing something of a stir. What did it all mean? Today, because we have the coins and metalwork provided by the detectorists, we can see that it was part of a larger pattern of trade. At the time we put the presence of this exotic material down to the Church. There was good evidence that the ruined church at North Elmham, known locally as the Old Minster, which stood just outside the excavations, might in its early stages have been the minster church* (#litres_trial_promo) of the Saxon see (or seat of the bishop) of the diocese of Elmham, which incorporated most of the northern part of the kingdom of East Anglia (i.e. most of Norfolk). When the dig had finished and all the finds were assessed, it became clear that North Elmham had produced about 30 per cent of all the imported sherds of pottery known from Norfolk. I had chosen the right dig to take part in.
It would now appear that we may not have been wrong in assuming a link with the Church. Other important places and ‘productive’ sites, such as Barking Abbey (Essex), Burgh Castle and Caister-on-Sea (Norfolk), have produced exotic imports and are known to have had links to the Church. So, rather like the links to the ruling elites, it would appear that the Church also wanted its slice of the action, and probably took an active part in encouraging trade: God and Mammon shared the same interests.
So far, evidence for the vigorous trade in Middle Saxon southern Britain comes from coins and other metal objects, from Ipswich Ware and from imported pottery such as Tating Ware; but what were the other products being traded? I have already mentioned wool in the Thames Valley, and there are good indications that wool and indeed finished cloth were important commodities produced and manufactured in rural British sites. In modern terms the farmers of Middle Saxon England were ‘adding value’ in a significant fashion to their basic product, wool. The evidence for this comes from several sites, including Shakenoak in the Upper Thames, where sceattas (those early silver Saxon coins) were found associated with loomweights. Clear evidence that the trade was not always just for money, and involved the exchange of imported goods as well, comes from the Anglo-Saxon village at West Stow in the sandy Breckland of north Suffolk.
(#litres_trial_promo) What makes West Stow so interesting is its early date. Middle Saxon Ipswich Ware only makes its appearance in the village’s final phase, and it declines in importance during the seventh century. During this time families moved off the sandy knoll where the original settlement was positioned, probably towards the church of the existing village of West Stow nearby.
West Stow was a pioneering excavation by Stanley West, who successfully achieved what we are trying to do at Flag Fen in Peterborough. He excavated the village in 1965–72 and then set about reconstructing it, using authentic techniques. It became a major visitor attraction, and is growing in popularity year on year. Somehow he managed to obtain support from the local authorities, and this has made all the difference to the operation. I go there regularly in the springtime, and having lived with sticky, wet Fenland clay all winter, it makes a wonderful change to stand on warm, dry sand and listen to the wind in the Scots pines, or watch siskins feed on alder cones in the damp valley at the bottom of the knoll. It can be a magical spot.
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The excavations at West Stow produced a large number of finds, many of which were metal, and although this is a site where coins are rare because of its early date, it is hard not to imagine that had it been systematically worked over by competent detectorists, it would have proved very ‘productive’ – to reuse that slightly distasteful term. So was it a trading centre of some sort? A quick glance through the list of finds might suggest that it was. No fewer than thirteen buildings produced fragments of querns made from a volcanic lava which occurs in central Europe. There was abundant evidence for weaving, not just the familiar fired-clay loomweights, but an iron ‘weaving batten’ – a tool used to beat down and compact the threads. Trade was well under way by the late sixth century, when pottery made by an important group of regional workshops based around Lackford appears at West Stow. Other objects, such as the fine bronze brooches, together with glass and amber beads, found on bodies in the cemetery, suggest that many of the inhabitants could afford exotic finery. In the late phases trade with the outside world was expanding. We see this not just in the quantities of Ipswich Ware being brought to the site, but in very upmarket and unusual things, such as a cowrie shell and two silver miniature shields, probably worn around the neck as pendants.
There is nothing at West Stow to suggest that the inhabitants had access to, or controlled, any unusual resource such as salt or ore. Stanley West is convinced that this prosperous community earned its wealth by farming and by selling the surpluses it produced, such as wool (cloth), hides, meat and so forth. It’s quite possible that they sold slaves as well – an unpleasant trade for which there is good archaeological and documentary evidence in Saxon times. It’s hard not to conclude that it was this pattern of trading essentially rural products that was taken forward into the eighth and ninth centuries. In other words, by the mid-seventh century exchange and commerce were an integral part of rural life, and provided the goods that were traded from the emporia and ‘productive’ sites – many of which would have housed people who were also making and producing things.
If the economy at West Stow seems to have been mainly centred around wool, cloth and hides, other later sites show signs of greater specialisation. Sometimes the specialised production was encouraged by a local church; in other instances it seems to have been private enterprise by landowners and farmers. I’ve already mentioned Keith Wade’s site at Wicken Bonhunt in Essex, which produced many pig bones, suggesting that it specialised in the production of pork. Very close to where I am currently writing, a group of Fenland sites on the silty banks of tidal creeks surrounding the Wash were most probably cattle farms specialising in beef.
These cattle stations, as they might be called in Australia, were first revealed by Bob Sylvester and his colleagues of the Fenland Survey around 1984 when they spotted scatters of Ipswich Ware lying on the surface (being dark, it shows up quite well in dry weather, when the silty soil turns pale).
(#litres_trial_promo) Contrary to popular opinion, the Fens are not all boggy areas, and the so-called ‘Marshland’ soils around the Wash are naturally well-drained; they mainly consist of Iron Age tidal silts, which are actually quite porous because the individual particles of silt are halfway in size between sand and clay, so there are spaces for the water to pass through. This silty soil is very fertile – my vegetable garden grows sprouting broccoli the size of small trees – and it also makes excellent cattle pasture, being sufficiently dry on the surface to prevent foot problems in most animals.
Bob’s work was particularly important because it shows how archaeology can be used to extend and amplify the historical record. It has long been known from documentary sources that the silty marshland west of King’s Lynn was a very wealthy area. This wealth derived mainly from livestock, especially sheep, but salt was also extracted from the creeks around the Wash, and the proximity of the prosperous and growing port of King’s Lynn certainly aided this process. If we rely on documentary sources alone, it would seem that the wealth of the region began to increase from the time of Domesday (1086) until the thirteenth century, by when it was a very prosperous area indeed. There were, however, no reasons to suppose that Marshland was particularly important in Saxon times until Bob Sylvester and Andrew Rogerson started methodically to survey the Norfolk parish of Terrington St Clement.
I first met Andrew when I was working at North Elmham in 1970, and I knew him to be an imaginative but essentially hard-nosed specialist in early medieval archaeology. He was never one to jump onto bandwagons, and he scrupulously avoided exaggerated claims, which is why I well remember his huge enthusiasm about discoveries at a site named Hay Green, just outside the village. It was the scale that was so extraordinary. Andrew and Bob revealed a vast scatter of about a thousand Ipswich Ware sherds along the banks of an extinct tidal creek, or roddon. From the air you can see a network of pale, silt-filled roddons snaking their way across the landscape. At ground level they show up as low silty mounds which would have been where Middle Saxon communities placed their homes, their farms and their stockyards. This was the land that rarely flooded, even after the heaviest rains.
Bob and Andrew found Ipswich Ware across thirteen fields, covering about seven hectares (over seventeen acres) and extending along the roddon for a distance of 1.5 kilometres. This was a truly massive spread, but what was even more interesting was that Hay Green was almost entirely Middle Saxon – there was only very little later material, probably because by then Late Saxon and Norman settlement had moved to Terrington, just north of the fine medieval church. On the face of it, this might suggest that the life of the Middle Saxon farming settlement was short and sharp. The scatter was large, but it was difficult to say any more about it without digging some selective holes. This happened a few years later, when some of the most important sites revealed in the Fenland Survey were given a closer look.
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It would now seem that Hay Green was not alone. The Fenland Survey revealed six other comparable sites that were evenly spaced out across the Marshland silts. This arrangement strongly suggested that these farms or settlements were part of a Middle Saxon planned development. It was also suggested, in line with what we know happened somewhat later, that the individual farms or settlements could have been linked to upland estates on the higher ground of ‘mainland’ Norfolk, to the east.
Like all good surveys, the ‘field-walking’ was more than just a pot-pick-up.* (#litres_trial_promo) Metal detectors were also used, but to everyone’s surprise they failed to find significant quantities of coins (sceattas) or any other metalwork. This was most peculiar, given the huge quantities of quite high-quality pottery. The surface survey also revealed a number of animal bones, many of which had been burnt. It was all rather mysterious. Everyone was agreed: trenches must be dug.
They decided to excavate at Hay Green and two other sites of the remaining six. All three sites produced a number of archaeological features, which was a relief to the excavators, who had feared that most would have been destroyed by modern farming. Big ditches had been dug along the roddon, and at Hay Green these ended in a series of large pits which were filled with quantities of animal bone and debris. Much of the animal bone showed obvious signs of butchery (butchery marks are now well-studied in archaeology), and it was clear that this had happened in situ. It therefore appears that meat was being exported from the site as joints or sides, rather than ‘on the hoof’.
So far no clear evidence for settlement has been found, but this probably reflects the fact that larger, ‘open area’ excavation was not possible. The excavators believe it is likely that the six sites were only occupied in the summer months, when the grazing was at its best and the risk of flooding was minimal. So this livestock enterprise represents the planned exploitation of an underused natural resource at a time when conventional history might have us believe that the economy was still largely underdeveloped. It shows not only that these farmers had the wealth to buy in quantities of pottery, but that their products could be distributed efficiently to markets that were sufficiently rich to justify such a large-scale enterprise. The more we look at the Middle Saxon period in southern Britain, the more we realise that it was about far, far more than mere subsistence farming.
Ben Palmer is of the opinion that some rural sites may have had access to traded goods because of their location close to one or more roads or rivers. Laying aside the fact that the same can be said for most settlements, he points to rural sites such as Lake End Road near Maidenhead which do not seem to have anything special to offer, but which contain traded goods. This site lies close to the Thames, and has produced imported pottery, lava quernstones and Ipswich Ware from filled-in pits. So far, and despite extensive excavation, there is no clear evidence for metalwork or for permanent settlement. Whoever frequented this rather enigmatic site could also ‘tap in’ to passing trade. That is the theory. Palmer also suggests a nearby Thames-side site at Yarnton in Oxfordshire as a place that benefited from the passing trade along the river. But in this particular case I think it was rather more than that.
I first came across Gill Hey’s complex multi-period project at Yarnton when I found my wife Maisie, a specialist in ancient woodworking, standing at the kitchen sink examining a waterlogged Bronze Age notched-log ladder. She had collected it the week before from the store at the Oxford Archaeological Unit, and was working indoors because it was bitterly cold in our barn, where she normally did such things. The ladder had been excavated by Gill Hey at Yarnton, which had also revealed a large Iron Age community, Roman settlement, Early Saxon and now Middle and Late Saxon occupation. Most of these important sites were later destroyed, either by gravel quarries or road schemes.
Maisie had known Gill as a student when Gill was doing research into Peruvian pottery, of all things. Subsequently she quit South America for the Thames Valley and began her remarkable project at Yarnton, which I first mentioned in Seahenge, my autobiographical book on Bronze Age religion.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yarnton is that rare thing, a large-scale excavation which also happens to be a thoroughgoing landscape project.
Gill recently published her report on the Saxon period at Yarnton.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yarnton lies on the very edge of the gravel terrace, on land that would have been just outside the limit of the river’s winter floodplain. This location ‘at the edge’, as it were, was deliberately chosen both in the Bronze and Iron Ages, as in Saxon and medieval times. The Thames floodplain is dressed with a thin layer of flood clay, known as alluvium, every time the river is in spate. This material is very fine, and is rich in natural fertilisers. As a result the grass gets away to a very good start in the spring, and gives young lambs and calves what farmers refer to as ‘a good bite’. In the past, before we learned how to ignore traditional ways of doing things, this land was never ploughed. Today it is, and surprise, surprise, the soil washes away and clogs up streams and drainage dykes.
Good arable land was to be found on the light, well-drained gravel soils around the villages that clustered at the edge of the floodplain, and up the gentle slopes of the valley sides to the north of them. Beyond this arable belt was another landscape of rough pasture, woodland and scrub. This was where most of the building material for houses and fences was grown. It was also a good ‘emergency reserve’ of fodder in wintertime and in very dry summers. Most grazing animals are quite happy to browse (in other words to eat the leaves of trees and shrubs) if grazing is running short – in fact my sheep prefer browsing the young shoots of hawthorn hedges around the fields to the rich Fenland grass at their feet. So Yarnton and the villages around were carefully positioned not just to be safe from flooding, but to exploit their natural surroundings as efficiently as possible.
Yarnton has produced huge quantities of Iron Age and Roman pottery. I can remember being in the finds shed surrounded by trays and trays of pottery stacked up to dry. This is what one would expect of an Iron Age site in the Thames Valley. But archaeology isn’t always predictable. As a general rule of thumb, in areas where pottery is common in the Iron Age, it remains popular in post-Roman times. The converse also applies, so in places like the west Midlands around Cirencester, the Iron Age is almost aceramic – presumably people used basketry and wooden bowls instead – then the usual types of semi-mass-produced Romano-British pottery appear in the Roman period. At the close of the Roman period people revert to their old ways and pottery vanishes from the scene. But at Yarnton, despite the richness of its Iron Age pottery, post-Roman sherds are rare. This is particularly odd given the size and seeming prosperity of the Saxon settlements. These were not pokey, subsistence-style farmsteads clinging onto a blasted hillside somewhere in the mountains, but a thriving and vigorous set of expanding communities in the heart of the pastoral lushness that is the Thames Valley. So what was going on?
Yarnton and other sites around it revealed Early Middle and Late Saxon settlements, yet the total number of pottery fragments found there was just 117, weighing a fraction more than two packets of sugar (actually 2.192 kg). I would have expected something more like a quarter of a tonne, comprising anything from 10–50,000 sherds. We must assume that there isn’t a simple physical reason for the rarity of potsherds, like very acid ground water, which can dissolve shell and other calcareous components of the pottery. So the answer has to be cultural. For some reason the people living in Saxon Yarnton didn’t make or use much pottery. To an archaeologist, and probably only to an archaeologist, that might seem odd. But it isn’t. In fact the decision not to use pottery is perfectly rational, if unusual, because good containers can be made from wood or basketry, and of course birch bark, which we happen to know was used in the Thames Valley in prehistoric times. These organic containers will only survive in waterlogged conditions, where the air needed for fungi and bacteria to break down organic materials is absent. Such containers are durable, they don’t shatter when dropped, and they don’t require complicated technology to make. In fact it’s interesting to note that two probable Iron Age pottery kilns are known from Yarnton. But in Saxon times they wanted none of it, and preferred instead to use local materials such as willow and birch bark that would have grown plentifully nearby. To me, this seems a perfectly reasonable choice.
The pottery that did manage to survive was very interesting, and Gill’s pottery specialist, Paul Blinkhorn, made the most of what little he had to work on.
(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps the most remarkable result actually took very little analysis: the features of the Saxon settlement contained more Iron Age and Roman pottery (3.5 kg) than Saxon. This was material that was lying around on the surface when the Saxon houses were built, ditches were dug and so forth, a strange inversion of what one might normally expect. During the life of the settlement this earlier debris slipped into the various ditches, pits, wells and post-holes, along with fragments of the few contemporary Saxon pots.
The Saxon pottery included nine sherds of Ipswich Ware, and Yarnton is so far the most westerly site to have revealed this early form of mass-produced pottery. Paul Blinkhorn has pioneered a sophisticated form of chemical analysis, known as ICP-AES (or Inductively-Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectroscopy), which has shown that all the Ipswich Ware we currently know about was made from clays occurring in Ipswich. It can therefore be considered a very reliable indicator of Middle Saxon trade. Ipswich Ware was made between about 720 and 850, but was not traded outside East Anglia until about 730. At the height of its popularity it was traded as far north as York and as far south as Kent. Huge quantities have been found in the emporium at London, and it is assumed that Yarnton would have been within its trading area. Recently other sites in the Thames Valley have revealed Ipswich Ware, so it would seem reasonable to suggest that Yarnton was part of this trading network. As at other non-East Anglian sites, the Ipswich Ware from Yarnton included just a few vessels (around seven), the majority of which were large jars that probably originally contained some traded commodity such as salt or oil. It is always a problem, when it comes to pottery, to determine whether the vessels were bought for themselves, or for what they may once have contained.
FIG 6 The Middle Saxon settlement in the Thames Valley at Yarnton, Oxfordshire (AD 700–900).
There have been relatively few recent excavations of Middle Saxon settlements, so Gill Hey’s work at Yarnton is most important. A series of radiocarbon dates has indicated that occupation began in the late seventh century and lasted through the ninth (say 700–900). There was occupation in and around Yarnton in the Early Saxon period, but Gill is keen to emphasise the contrast between that and what followed: ‘The contrast between the Early and Middle Saxon settlements at Yarnton is strong. There are radical differences in the size of the settlement area, in the degree of organisation within it, in building type and in the variety of structural remains and other features … but the coherence of the [Middle Saxon] settlement plan suggests that it was organised on this large scale from the beginning.’
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The settlement involved, for the first time, substantial timber buildings in addition to the more traditional building form of the Early Saxon period, the SFB or sunken feature building, which essentially consisted of a single-storey structure with a wooden floor over a cellar-like space beneath.
(#litres_trial_promo) This space probably served to keep the floor dry and would have helped the floor joists resist wet-rot.
The large buildings were a series of post-built rectangular halls and their outbuildings, including an impressive circular poultry house. These buildings were set within enclosures that were defined by ditches, and perhaps by hedges too. Gill notes that from the eighth to the tenth centuries the use of space within the settlement became increasingly formalised. She suggests that this may have been a reflection of two things: greater social control and authority, coupled with a growing shortage of land.
The changes visible in the layout of the settlement are mirrored in the surrounding countryside, where analysis of botanical samples suggests that farming was changing quite rapidly. Hay meadows were being laid out, major boundaries between larger holdings were being constructed, and manuring (using manure from farms and settlement) was introduced as a regular part of the farming cycle. Farming, in other words, was becoming more organised and intensive, yet at the same time it was also more diverse, with a greater variety of crops being grown. Technological improvements included the probable introduction of the mouldboard or heavy plough, which allowed soil to be cast to one side to form a true furrow.
The new form of plough was invented sometime in the mid-first millennium AD, and was one of the great unsung technological developments of the early medieval world. Suddenly proper ploughing became possible: the soil was cut, lifted and folded back on itself. This had all sorts of beneficial effects. The top growth of weeds was denied light beneath the surface, and died. Any manure spread on the surface was taken down into the ground, where the earthworms could give it their undivided attention. Earlier, non-mouldboard ploughs were known as ‘ards’ or scratch-ploughs. They were invented in the Near East in the fifth millennium BC, and were most effective if used in two directions, a pattern known as ‘cross-ploughing’. The best British example of the marks left by cross-ploughing with an ard was found below the mound of the South Street long barrow, just outside Avebury in Wiltshire, and dating to the fourth millennium BC.
(#litres_trial_promo) I once had the doubtful pleasure of actually using an ard. It was pulled by two oxen, took all my strength and weight to keep it in the ground, and I only managed to make it penetrate about four inches deep. It really was a struggle, despite the fact that the two oxen were remarkably tame and behaved themselves excellently. I concede that ancient farmers would have had generations of skill and practice to guide them, but even so, I found it extraordinarily difficult. These earlier ploughs acted more like a huge hoe or a modern tractor-towed sub-soiler, which simply breaks up and lifts the soil as it passes through. All the effort goes into encountering the soil’s initial friction and resistance; less attention is paid to what happens as the ploughshare passes through. It’s a subtly different way of looking at the problem and the process of ploughing.
This pattern of intensification coupled with new technology is also seen at other Middle Saxon sites in the Thames Valley. It echoes, too, what we saw in the Fens of the Norfolk Marshland – and there are many other examples that show how the Middle Saxon period was one of stability, increasing social control and rapid economic development, at home and abroad. These changes in the countryside were combined with the growth of the first towns and the spread of international trade. It must have been a remarkably dynamic time in which to have lived.
Michael McCormick’s view of early medieval Europe accords well with what we now know about the Middle and Late Saxon period in southern Britain. Increasingly archaeological evidence is revealing this as a time of vigorous change, trade and development, with regular communication over long distances. It seems no exaggeration to say that in the four centuries before the Norman Conquest, Later Saxon southern Britain was very much a part of Europe, and not just as a matter of economic convenience. The ties were also cultural, scholarly and ecclesiastical. Perhaps rather surprisingly, given the fact that William the Conqueror was a Norman with Viking family ties, the close relationship between Saxon England and its Continental neighbours failed to develop much further under him or his offspring. If anything, the Plantagenets and other high medieval monarchs took England in a more insular direction – whatever they might have claimed by way of territory across the Channel.
There is now no doubt that close links existed between Later Saxon southern Britain and its neighbours around the southern North Sea basin. Further north and west the situation was rather different. As we have seen, development here was slower and less affected by outside influences, a situation which was soon to be exploited by those remarkable entrepreneurs the Vikings. Our understanding of the period has changed in two important respects. First, we now see the Middle Saxon period in southern Britain as altogether more dynamic and cosmopolitan than hitherto. Second, we no longer see the Vikings as just being a force for evil – a view, as we will see, that was fostered by King Alfred, who is increasingly being acknowledged as a master of political propaganda. So what were the Vikings really like?
CHAPTER TWO Enter the Vikings (#ulink_b3b0e144-f02b-5c3b-a7f7-f82f2f45ea23)
THE LATE SAXON PERIOD (850–1066) has been poorly taught at schools, and I cannot blame the teachers altogether for this. There are too many kings with strange names beginning with Æ. Viking armies seem to whizz about the place generally wreaking havoc, and worst of all, it seems somehow rather uncivilised. In actual fact, and largely thanks to archaeology, we now realise that many of the advances made in Middle Saxon times were consolidated and built upon in the Late Saxon period. Indeed, it must now be seen as one of the most creative periods in English history. Certainly there was strife and conflict, but at the same time the administrative framework of the country was being established. The Church was gaining a firm foothold, patterns of land ownership and tenure were being established, and urban life was to be transformed by the setting up of the first burhs.
Maybe the neglect of archaeology is a reason why so many popular history books relegate the entire Saxon period to a single introductory chapter which usually reads as a prologue to the main business, which happened after 1066. Having considered the Middle Saxon period in the barest outline in Chapter 1, I plan to devote this and the next two chapters to the Late Saxon period. Although it will be impossible to avoid some degree of overlap, the present chapter will mainly be about the Vikings and the historical events surrounding their conflict with the Saxons. Chapters 3 and 4 will consider more general themes, such as the changes that took place in the administration of town and country.
The Late Saxon period is very much better documented than the Middle Saxon period, largely thanks to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which as we will see shortly were set up in the late ninth century. But in both the Middle and Late Saxon periods evidence from field archaeology is having a most dramatic effect on the way we now view the first four centuries of medieval Britain. If one takes the historical record at face value, it would appear that people thought about Dane and Viking raids almost obsessively. Little else, it would seem, occupied their thoughts. But it now appears that the reality was rather different. Yes, raiding did affect people, especially in eastern and northern Britain, but as we have seen, farming, trade and communication were very much more important. But now we must come to grips with the bare bones of the political history – which is another way of saying that it is time to introduce the Vikings.
At first glance there is something wonderfully romantic, even ‘prehistoric’, about those wild Scandinavian warriors. They are strangely attractive, in a horribly bloodthirsty way. I remember on my first visit to Denmark meeting a university colleague who specialised in the archaeology of the Earlier Neolithic. Like me he was fair-haired, with an orange beard. As he shook my hand he said with a broad smile, ‘So you are Viking, I think?’ Suddenly – and quite irrationally – I felt I was part of a Band of Brothers. Had he offered me a horned helmet I would have grabbed it with both hands.
In fact horned helmets are part of the romanticising of the Vikings which began in the nineteenth century. Sadly, despite their evocative profile and terrifying appearance, they were never worn by Nordic warriors. I do, however, know of a very fine Late Iron Age example (probably first century BC), complete with rather fat, straight horns, which was dredged from the River Thames at Waterloo Bridge in 1868.
(#litres_trial_promo) Its Celtic-style decoration firmly marks it as being some eight centuries earlier than the first Viking raids.
The word ‘Viking’ does not appear in any contemporary accounts of the period. Instead we read of raids by Danes or Norsemen. Sometimes they simply referred to their attackers as ‘heathen’. The word (which is Old Norse in origin) gained public acceptance in the nineteenth century with the publication of the Icelandic Sagas, and the heroic deeds of the semi-mythical Viking sailors and warriors that appear in them. The Sagas were enormously popular and influential in Victorian Britain, and indeed across much of northern Europe. Today archaeologists tend to use ‘Viking’ as shorthand for ‘Anglo-Scandinavian’, which is the correct way of describing the Norse-influenced way of life to be found at places such as Jorvík (York). In general terms, what one might term the ‘Viking Age’ ends in England in the mid-eleventh century with the Norman Conquest, but we should not forget that places like the Western Isles of Scotland and the Isle of Man remained under Viking rule until 1266. Orkney and Shetland were Norwegian until as late as 1469.
The warlike reputation of the Vikings was justified, because we do know that they raided extensively in northern Europe, and even crossed the Atlantic to Greenland and Newfoundland in Canada. But there was a great deal more to them than that. Raiding was part of what they did, but it was probably a relatively minor part. In fact they were very much more constructive and, dare I say it, useful. Today many archaeologists question whether there was ever a group of people who saw themselves as distinctively Viking, as opposed to something less immediately identifiable, such as Nordic or Norse. It is also questionable to what extent the term Viking can actually be attached to a defined ethnic group. This is perhaps understandable: viewed from the perspective of a Saxon peasant in eastern England, it wouldn’t matter a jot whether the raiders were members of the same tribe, nation or kingdom, because they were all equally unwelcome.
The Vikings are as popular in print as they have ever been, and some of the more recent accounts are also very well illustrated.
(#litres_trial_promo)The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles contain the earliest account of a Viking raid on a British monastery, which took place on 8 January 793 on the island of Lindisfarne, just off the Northumberland coast. The ‘heathen’ raiders sacked the buildings, killed several monks and took others captive. They also desecrated altars and helped themselves to valuables which may have included the richly decorated original covers of the world-famous Lindisfarne Gospels, now in the British Museum.
The picture of heathens from abroad mercilessly raiding Christian shrines is a vivid one, but raiding was characteristic of the times. We know of many raids, especially around the Irish Sea, by British on Irish and vice versa. The Vikings were not the only people doing it. We also tend to think of northern and eastern England – what was soon to be called the Danelaw – as the main object of Viking depredations. But in fact other parts of the British Isles also received many and repeated visits from Viking raiders and settlers. It was a complex picture, not least because the Vikings were coming from many parts of Scandinavia. As a rule of thumb, people from Norway colonised the north and west of Britain, and Ireland. Danes came to eastern England and north-west France (Normandy).
FIG 7 The general pattern of Viking raids and migrations in north-western Europe from just before AD 800 until the eleventh century.
Their non-existent horned helmets aside, the Vikings are justly celebrated for their superbly graceful, clinker-built sea-going vessels, known as longships. The tradition of clinker building in northern Europe predates the Vikings, and was to persist until the fifteenth century for large sea-going vessels, when it was replaced by carvel or frame construction.* (#litres_trial_promo) The Viking longship was a superb vessel. I remember coming across one in a rather run-down state, very dusty and liberally spattered with pigeon droppings, in a shelter on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. A faded plaque declared that she was a full-scale replica that had been sailed across the Atlantic for the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Viking, as she was named, was a copy of the Gokstad ship which was discovered in Norway in 1880.
(#litres_trial_promo)Nobody was around, so I had a Viking longship that had crossed the Atlantic all to myself for an hour or so, until it started to get dark. It was an experience I will never forget.
The first thing that struck me about the Viking was her size. She seemed tiny for a vessel that could take the worst that the North Atlantic had to offer. I was reminded of this ten years later when I visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, in 1987. I was on a circuit of Continental tourist attractions as part of the feasibility study I undertook before we opened Flag Fen to the public. I had spent the morning sampling the delights of Legoland, and was eager to escape clever things made from plastic bricks, so I headed out to Roskilde. I was looking across the harbour when I noticed that in amongst the yachts and pleasure craft was a replica Viking ship (a large one, but not one of the ocean-going warships), with another, much smaller boat moored at the shore. By modern standards they were tiny.
Maritime archaeologists have realised that many of the handling characteristics of full-sized vessels can be replicated in half-scale models, with the help of some simple mathematics.
(#litres_trial_promo) These smaller vessels also present the shipwrights involved in their construction with most of the technical challenges faced by their ancient counterparts, but at considerably reduced expense. So far half-scale models have been constructed of a smaller Viking-age vessel, the fourteen-metre clinker-built Graveney boat, which it is estimated could have carried a cargo of six to seven tonnes. This vessel, which was abandoned in the mid-tenth century, was carrying a cargo that included (presumably Kentish) hops – comprehensively destroying the myth that all medieval ale was unhopped. The half-scale model of the Sutton Hoo ship, a twenty-eight-metre vessel, has been named the Sae Wylfing. I have seen her in action, and I was particularly impressed by her lightness – she could easily be dragged up onto a sloping beach by her crew, and would not require a quay unless heavily laden. The constructors of the Sae Wylfing were so impressed with her handling in rough water that they were inclined to attribute much of the political success of the builders of her original to such vessels.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is thought that the Sutton Hoo vessel was buried within a barrow mound to commemorate or conceal the last remains of King Raedwald of Essex, one of the Wuffingas, the early kings of Saxon East Anglia.
Boat or maritime archaeology has become a sub-discipline in its own right, and landlubbers are advised to walk its companionways with extreme caution. Its practitioners can be as ferocious as Captain Bligh. So the point I want to make has to be simple: yes, ocean-going Viking longships were quite probably the finest open clinker-built vessels ever built, but they were not the only ships afloat at the time – we know of many humbler boats from Viking Britain – and they were not ‘the reason’, as I was taught at school, that the Vikings voyaged abroad. The Vikings came first, the ships second. In other words, the longships were built because the men who sailed them wanted to travel and had the necessary skills to build them.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was not the other way around.
It should also be stressed that Viking longships did not appear, as it were, out of the blue. They can be seen to form part of an evolutionary tree whose roots probably extended back to the Early Bronze Age, around 1900 BC, when the first plank-built boats (found at Ferriby on the Humber) made their appearance. These boats could have crossed the Channel, and were probably used for trade along the coast. By the Late Bronze Age (say 1000 BC) trade and exchange around the North Sea was taking place on a regular basis. During Roman times Britain exported huge amounts of grain across the Channel to feed the later Roman field armies. We know that the Anglo-Saxons were excellent sailors, and we have evidence for this in the clinker-built ship from Sutton Hoo, dating to around AD 625. This vessel superficially resembles a Viking longship, and would have been perfectly capable of crossing the North Sea. And of course in the previous chapter we saw the extent of trade throughout northern Europe in the Middle Saxon period and afterwards. So Viking ships, like the Viking phenomenon in general, were part of a process that had roots many centuries old.
Viking warships, and some Viking art, were intended to strike terror into their enemies, and in this they undoubtedly succeeded, because images of Viking ships, such as that in wrought iron on the door of Stillingfleet Church, North Yorkshire, continued to appear even after the immediate threat had passed.
If we are to appreciate the impact of the Vikings on southern Britain, we must briefly go back to the Middle Saxon period and say a few words about the relationship of the Vikings, in what would later be known as the Danelaw, to the two major Saxon territories west of them, the Mercians in the Midlands and the West Saxons in Wessex. Many will know of Wessex and King Alfred the Great in the ninth century, but Mercia, under great rulers such as Offa, was of comparable power in the previous century.
Those of us who have the good fortune to live in the middle of England have always believed that we live in the belly of the place. What the Midlands digests, England consumes; this is the part of the country where we are proud to make and grow things, and where you find the best beer and the warmest people. In the Saxon period the Midlands was synonymous with the kingdom of Mercia. It was the most powerful kingdom of Anglo-Saxon England in the first part of the Middle Saxon period (late seventh and eighth centuries). The heart of Mercia was the middle Trent Valley. This is where its episcopal centre, Lichfield (founded 669), and two royal sites, at Tamworth and Repton, were located. As we will see, Repton is currently being excavated, and is producing very exciting results. Mercia’s early kings Penda and his son Wulfhere were aggressive soldiers, and managed to exact tribute payments from all around: from southern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, from British kingdoms to the west, and from Northumbria.
Mercian power peaked in the eighth century with two kings, Æthalbald* (#litres_trial_promo) and Offa (757–96); the latter is mainly remembered today for the construction of Offa’s Dyke, a massive earthwork which runs north – south for 192 kilometres between England and Wales. It consists of a bank to the east and a ditch to the west, so defenders could stand atop the bank and shower attackers with rocks, spears, arrows and anything else that came to hand while they struggled across the ditch and up the steep slope. The positioning of the bank behind the ditch clearly suggests that the earthwork was built to defend the territory of Mercia from attacks from Wales and the west. At first glance Offa’s Dyke seems like a single massive construction, but research by Sir Cyril Fox in the 1950s showed it to have been built in a series of sections, some of which don’t marry up too well.
(#litres_trial_promo) Fox suggested that it was essentially a symbolic ‘line in the sand’ created by the might of Mercia against the altogether more puny Welsh. More recently, detailed survey and excavation by Dr David Hill of Manchester University has shown that it was constructed in earnest as a defensive work against concerted attacks from the powerful Welsh kingdom of Powys.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a serious piece of military engineering, probably regularly patrolled by Mercian troops and linked to a system of warning beacons. Anglo-Saxon beacons were an important military tool and consisted of large thatched bonfires which were always at the ready.
FIG 8 The principal kingdoms of Britain in the late eighth century (Middle Saxon period).
Contrary to popular belief, Offa’s Dyke does not extend from sea to sea across the entire eastern approaches to Wales. In fact the original Mercian earthwork is only found across the central part of Wales – a stretch of just over a hundred kilometres. The rest is unprotected, and David Hill believes that this stretch represents the boundary between Mercia and Powys, the source of the principal recurrent threat. Mercia was not at war with the kingdoms of Gwynedd to the north, or with Ercing or Gwent to the south. So that was the boundary Offa defended – there was no point in doing any more. This tells us that boundaries and political treaties were generally honoured. It also tells us that Offa was a pragmatist, and was not about to do anything that was not strictly necessary. It is known that Offa lost Mercian land to the kingdom of Powys in the mid-eighth century, and David Hill regards the Dyke as a fallback position to ensure that there were no further incursions into his territory.
The massive expansion of Mercia in the eighth century gave it control of land to the south and east, including, as we have seen, London, Kent and Sussex. If not actual control, Mercia also managed to impose significant influence on Essex, Surrey and East Anglia. Wessex somehow retained its independence. After Offa’s death these new territories were kept within Mercian control by Cenwulf (796–821), but his successor, Beornwulf, could not stem the tide of increasing resentment against Mercia. In the year 825 he was defeated by King Egbert of Wessex at the Battle of Ellendun, and with the battle went Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex.
We have seen how the Norse raids began a few years before 800, and for the next three centuries Scandinavian raiders, soldiers and settlers were to play an active part in the development of early medieval Britain. It would be a mistake to think of this time as some sort of ‘Viking Period’, because many parts of Britain remained largely unaffected by these events. It would also be an exaggeration, because although Scandinavian people did influence certain areas a great deal – Viking York or Jorvík, which was captured by the Danish ‘great army’ in 866, is the obvious example – the language and basic culture of most of Britain remained fundamentally the same. In England, families born to the new arrivals often adopted Christianity and soon spoke the native language (Old English). The changes brought about by the Scandinavian ‘presence’, as J.D. Richards* (#litres_trial_promo) has termed it, were much less far-reaching than the earlier adoption of an Anglo-Saxon way of life, which happened in the three or so post-Roman centuries.
The earliest Viking raids were essentially hit-and-run affairs aimed at rich coastal targets such as monasteries. Monkwearmouth, made famous some sixty years previously by that extraordinary genius the Venerable Bede, was just such a site. After persistent raiding it, and its twin monastery at Jarrow, were abandoned by the monks around 800. Scandinavian raiding turned to settlement quite rapidly in certain outlying areas of Britain, such as the north-western isles of Scotland and the Isle of Man. Strangely, perhaps, Wales seems to have been missed. The story of Norse raiding and settlement in England is recorded in some detail in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. This, or rather these, accounts are a fascinating mixture of history and propaganda.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles is one of the most important pre-Norman histories of Britain.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was established by King Alfred sometime in the 890s. In form it was an annal written in Old English, which was maintained and updated at major ecclesiastical centres, where the monks’ choice of the events worthy of record often reflected local concerns, such as the appointment of a new bishop. Happenings in more distant parts of Britain often failed to get a mention. Julian Richards describes his excitement on being allowed actually to read a copy of the Chronicles in the library at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
(#litres_trial_promo) Like most archaeologists he was extremely keen to read at first hand the account of the Lindisfarne raid of 793. But he was to be sadly disappointed. The copy before him had been made in Winchester, where such far-off events were not thought worthy of inclusion.
The Chronicles begin with the Roman invasion, the account of which was mainly based on Bede, and they were still being updated in the mid-twelfth century, when the project was dropped. Surviving manuscripts are associated with Canterbury, Worcester, York and Abingdon. As Julian Richards discovered, the Chronicles can be patchy as a reliable source on early events, but are much better in their later coverage of the reigns of Alfred (871–99), Æthelred (865–71), Edward the Confessor (1042–66) and the Norman kings. Initially King Alfred set the project in motion for political ends. It was written to glorify his deeds, his reign and the emerging English nation. It does not give the other side of the story. For that, we will shortly turn to archaeology.
We learn from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles that there was a ‘great army’ from Denmark in eastern England from 865. This force was highly mobile, and it took York the following year. It then went on to capture additional territory in the north of England (Northumbria), the Midlands (Mercia) and East Anglia. This was the land which became known in the eleventh century as the Danelaw – the area in which customary or day-to-day law (for example the rules of land ownership and local government) was influenced by Danish practice.
Alfred, King of Wessex, who ruled from his capital at Winchester from 871 to 899, is generally acknowledged as the first king of England. According to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles his reign was largely given over to wresting eastern England back from Viking domination. Historians have painted him as an appropriately heroic figure. He is seen as the Great Man who founded England. As the Chronicles which he so astutely set up portray him, he is very much the English hero to the Viking villain. His principal contemporary biographer, Bishop Asser, was a churchman who was recruited to the royal court by Alfred. He wrote his Life of Alfred by 893, and this is the source that most historians draw upon. Laying aside the question of its authenticity, it can hardly be seen as unbiased, written as it was by someone who enjoyed the fruits of royal patronage. Moreover it draws heavily upon The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which were themselves a source of pro-Alfred propaganda. Subsequent historians and politicians have added much to this already impossibly noble image. We probably lack the independent sources to form a truly balanced picture of Alfred, but recent work suggests that he may at least have been human rather than superhuman.
(#litres_trial_promo) It cannot be denied that while he was a sufficient master of ‘spin’ to make many modern politicians green with envy, his real and lasting achievements were many. He was a ruthless ruler who understood the importance of public opinion. He was the right man for the times in which he lived.
The bare facts of Alfred’s life are clear. He was the youngest brother of King Æthelred I of Wessex. Æthelred fought the first Danish waves of attack on Wessex, which were launched in the autumn of 870 from bases in East Anglia. Eventually he was killed on campaign in April 871. Alfred inherited the throne of Wessex aged just twenty-two. He had already assisted his elder brother in his campaigns against the Danes, and he continued the war vigorously. The Danish Great Army was to be no pushover, however.
In 873–74 the Great Army overwintered at Repton on the Trent. It was not an accident that the Danes chose the Mercian capital. Their presence made an important political statement. According to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles the Great Army at Repton consisted of two elements. The first was the remainder of the original Viking Great Army that had arrived in East Anglia in 865; these men were under the leadership of Halfdan. The second force was the Summer Army of Guthrum, which had arrived two years earlier, in 871. Between 875 and 877 the army campaigned in Wessex. Meanwhile members of the Great Army were settling down, and in 877 a sizeable contingent settled in Mercia when the Great Army divided the province between itself and the Mercian ruler Ceowulf. So the opposition to Alfred may not have been as numerous as was once thought, because significant numbers had taken to farming. But it was battle-hardened and very well led by Guthrum.
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