by Adams, Max;
A number of sites have produced evidence that they were occupied before, during and after the Scandinavian settlement. If we cannot identify new Norse settlers in the landscape, can we tell when they took over existing settlements? The answer, frustratingly, is very rarely. The prevailing model of pre-Viking settlement is of dispersed farms and vill complexes with low population concentrations, often impermanently sited, unenclosed and with mixed agricultural economies: ceorls producing a broad range of food renders and craft products for their lords; lords consuming instead of farming. With the secularization of the minsters in the eighth century, regularly laid-out farmsteads and hall complexes enclosed by ditch or hedge, increasingly specialized in their output and tending towards nucleation,§§§ appear de novo or supersede earlier, less formal, layouts. The old, bullion-fed economy of folkland### and render was evolving towards heritable bookland and rents paid in cash, with surpluses heading for regional markets.
Excavations spanning the entire second half of the twentieth century at the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy, where generations of archaeologists have cut their teeth, have shown that, with patience, the telltale signs of Scandinavian influence can be detected. Wharram lies 20 miles (32 km) north-east of York in a dry valley on the high chalk Wolds. At the site of what became the South Manor, occupation has been proved continuously between the eighth and fourteenth centuries. In the late ninth to early tenth century the settlement was reorganized with formal boundaries and a wooden church was built whose successor still stands, roofless, in apparent isolation from modern life. At the South Manor a smithy continued to function through the turbulence of Viking occupation at York; and distinctly Scandinavian items—strap-ends, belt-sliders and sword hilts, and a Norwegian hone stone—were among its artefacts.36 This high-status establishment was either taken over by new Scandinavian lords, or its indigenous thegns were susceptible to their material luxuries. Given the lack of apparent violence in the Wharram record, we might offer the thought that this was an instance where an élite member of the Host married into the family of a local worthy. At the time of the Domesday survey in the 1080s, Wharram belonged to a Lagmann (Lǫgmaðr) and a Carli—distinctively Scandinavian names.37
24. THE RAMPARTS AT WAREHAM: a model Ælfredan burh, the site of an early royal monastery and the Viking camp of 875.
The vastly enlarged pool of evidence from excavation during the last thirty years has created a picture of regional variability, diversity of layout and complexity of interpretation: there is no model rural settlement of the ninth and tenth centuries. Increasingly, archaeologists are running shy of ethnic explanations of dramatic changes taking place in rural settlements in those centuries and concentrating instead on social and economic evolutions that may represent indigenous change but might have been triggered by the conflicts of the Viking Age.
Sometimes, settlement archaeology has to fill in for an almost complete lack of narrative history. The political fortunes of the Cornish peninsula, the lands of the West Wealas, are invisible. A fatal alliance with a Danish war band against Wessex in the days of King Ecgberht signalled the end of its independence. A last named British king, Dungarth, drowned ignominiously in 875.38 A thriving church, with a major minster at St Germans west of Plymouth, can be inferred from the proliferation of saintly and church enclosure place names. The modern names of Cornwall’s rural settlements, a mix of Brittonic and English, reflect slow and late Anglicization. Apart from Lundy (‘Puffin’) Island there are no accepted Scandinavian names. Ælfred built no burhs west of the River Tamar.
The distinctiveness of Cornish culture is striking. Its Christian stone sculpture has strong affinities with traditions in Ireland, Wales and Man. Its stone and turf ‘rounds’ remind one of Irish raths: tightly-packed complexes of circular houses inside embanked circular enclosures, dating from the late Iron Age and continuing into the post-Roman period. Cornwall may have lain outside the developing market economies of Wessex and the Danish territories, but it was by no means isolated from trade and international influence. A unique style of cooking vessel called bar-lug ware, designed for suspension over an open hearth, is found here in large quantities. It may have its origins in Frisia, and variants are found there, in Ireland and in the Baltic lands; and since it is generally regarded as dating between the eighth and eleventh centuries its presence is happily diagnostic of Early Medieval or Viking Age settlement.
Very few definitively Early Medieval settlements have yet been excavated on the peninsula; but at Mawgan Porth, a few miles north of Newquay on the Atlantic Cornish coast, three very unusual courtyard houses, prolific in their use and disposal of bar-lug pottery and preserved by the deep layers of windblown sand that sealed their fate, tell of a society that was anything but peripheral. In each case a longhouse, built on faced rubble foundations and divided in half to accommodate both cattle and people, lay at the centre of a complex of interconnected rooms clustered around a metalled courtyard.39 Each house seems to have been dug into the middens of its predecessor—these were long-established settlements, self-contained but outward looking. A single coin of Æðelred II, although poorly provenanced, proves that the site was still occupied in the late tenth century or later. The neat, compact internal arrangements—hearths, slab-sided cupboards and stone box-beds—are reminiscent of features found in houses in Orkney and Shetland. But there is no reason to think that this was a Norse settlement: more likely it reflects a broader shared culture of Atlantic maritime peoples whose lives and material cultures reflected common concerns such as shelter, warmth and domestic tidiness; economies based on small mixed farms occupying fertile soil but exposed to severe seasonal conditions. It is not impossible that, developing out of the indigenous tradition of the ‘round’, the Cornish courtyard longhouse farm itself served as a model for other Atlantic communities to follow.
*
The eighth- and ninth-century inhabitants of Flixborough, 5 miles (8 km) south of the confluence of the Rivers Trent and Humber in Lincolnshire, must have undergone an early and prolonged experience of Scandinavian contact. Many of the surrounding place names—nearby industrial Scunthorpe, as well as Althorpe, Appleby, Brigg and Normanby—have a strong Scandinavian flavour. After periodic exposure to coastal and estuarine raids from the beginning of the ninth century the Trent valley was penetrated early in the wars of the 860s; 20 miles (32 km) upstream the mycel here built their stronghold at Torksey in 872; and Lincoln was a Danish burh well into the tenth century. Flixborough’s location, on top of a scarp overlooking the Trent to the west from about 150 feet (45 m) above sea level, put it in the front line of Anglo-Danish relations. It shares many characteristics with that other riverine community, Brandon in the East Anglian Breckland.∫∫∫
It is not the excavated agricultural buildings of Flixborough—barns and workshops—that impress the archaeologist so much as its rubbish dumps, containing hundreds of thousands of animal bones, large quantities of pottery sherds, glass and metalworking fragments from both smithing and, in later decades, smelting; loom-weights and other weaving debris, indicating the production of woollen cloth and linen; and fine metal dress accessories.ΩΩΩ In its ninth-century prime the presence of window lead, writing styli and window glass indicates that Flixborough supported a literate, wealthy community. A remarkable hoard of woodworking tools found contained in a lead tank suggests that the community may have enjoyed the services of its own shipwright.40
The exceptional preservation of the accumulated dross of three centuries of Anglo-Saxon life (material apparently dumped in barrow-loads of alkaline wood ash) can be attributed both to the behaviour of its inhabitants and to the meteorological fates: the whole site, like that at Mawgan Porth, was later buried by 3 feet (1 m) and more of windblown sand. The excavators’ good fortune was boosted by the occurrence of dateable coins, personal adornments and pottery in key phases of the stratigraphic sequence, so the time-slicing archaeological exercise which allots activity and deposition to discrete phases
allowed a detailed narrative of Flixborough’s history to be constructed, even if some mixing and reworking of deposits made analysis a complicated process.
Well into the early ninth century Flixborough was connected widely to the outside world: to the pottery production and trading port at Ipswich, to its own Lincolnshire hinterland and to the Continent, whence exotic pottery and glass drinking vessels were imported. There is little doubt, from the nature and quantity of the material culture here, that this was a major estate centre, although there is ongoing debate about whether it was monastic or secular. That ambivalence may well be a signature of such sites; by the ninth century the distinction may be too subtle to matter.
Like Brandon, Flixborough has also been cited as an example of a so-called ‘productive site’: something between a minster and a wic, manufacturing objects for trade and importing luxury goods in return.41 It was well placed to exploit inland and coastal waterways and lay just 5 miles (8 km) west of the old Roman road, Ermine Street, that linked the Humber with Lincoln. A few surviving documents from the period suggest that estate surveys, of a sort common in Carolingian France, were becoming more frequent in the increasingly complex land management environment of lowland Britain.42 So the literate owners of Flixborough might have enjoyed reading reassuring lists of their assets during cold winter days when their barns were emptying of fodder and grain.
For the purposes of detecting Scandinavian influence at Flixborough, three features of the evidence stand out. Firstly, a major redevelopment occurred during the 860s or thereabouts.43 Secondly, that episode did not result in fundamental re-planning of the agricultural and industrial part of the site. It was cleared and rebuilt on a different pattern: under new management, perhaps, but not necessarily foreign management. There is no suggestion of the sort of wholesale destruction graphically encountered at Portmahomack and described so vividly at many other monastic sites. After the mid- to late ninth-century horizon there is less evidence of exotic material being imported to the site, and that is a general feature of the century. Craft products seem by then to have been destined for consumption on the estate. Thirdly, archaeologist Chris Loveluck suggests that what was once a single large estate, of the type recognized across Anglo-Saxon England, seems to have been subdivided, before being restored under single lordship at the time of the Domesday survey.44 The two parts, North Conesby, the ‘King’s settlement’, and Flixborough, ‘Flikkr’s fort’, both bear Scandinavian names.45
Lowland Britain underwent profound social and economic change in the ninth century. If historians and archaeologists are still frustrated in their attempts to detect the whiff of the smoking Scandinavian gun, they can at least begin to describe the geography and economic patterns which mark this age of transition. It may not matter, in the end, whether Viking prints are found on the trigger or not: the first Viking Age turned Europe on its head. Even so, despite the apparent chaos portrayed by the chronicles, the narrative of everyday life continued, altered but dynamically adaptive. People got by.
* In recent years they have been teased out brilliantly by a number of scholars, not least the pre-eminent contemporary historian of the Durham church, David Rollason, the Early Medievalist Alex Woolf in Scotland and the most recent editor of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, Ted Johnson South. Rollason 1989a; Woolf 2007; South 2002.
† The vills of the Historia and other sources often equate in size and shape to the townships that survive in the modern landscape.
‡ The community survived, however, judging by the number of coins found at the site minted by kings up until the 860s.
§ See below, Chapter 10.
# The site of one of these has been excavated by Deidre O’Sullivan and Rob Young at Green Shiel towards the north end of Lindisfarne. O’Sullivan and Young 1995.
∫ Ælfflæd, sister of King Ecgfrith, begged Cuthbert to advise her on the succession when it looked as though the king might get himself killed in the land of the Picts; as indeed he did in 685. See Adams 2013, 374ff.
Ω The site has not been identified. It derives either from Oswiu or Oswine, both significant royal figures of the seventh century. The topographic suffix ‘dun’ suggests a hill where royal inaugurations had taken place in the past. A small mound overlooking the Tyne from the south at Ryton, close to the tidal reach of the river at Newburn, would suit the topography and the narrative well. See map, p. 322.
≈ Armilia aurea. The sacred arm ring had already been recognized and deployed as a diplomatic tool by Ælfred in his dealings with the Host at Wareham, albeit with limited success. See above, p. 137.
∂ The idea that members of the nobility might become slaves seems odd to modern thinking. Enslavement might come about as a result of debt or poverty, capture during battle or as a punishment. In Guðroð’s case he may have been sold into slavery to reduce his chances of competing for the kingship of the Host. Now, it seems, his time had come.
π See map on p. 322.
∆ Roger of Wendover reports a story that King Offa (757–796) was buried in a chapel on the banks of the River Usk (Ouse) at Bedford; and a charter which may attest to his widow’s possession of a monastery at Bedeford is sometimes cited as supporting evidence. If there was, or had been, a royal mausoleum at Bedford it might explain its otherwise odd inclusion as a border marker, with access by both sides, for the purposes of the treaty. Giles 1849, 166–7; Whitelock EHD 79, 508.
** Ælfred’s own laws contain provision also for a class of six-hundred men, the sixhynde. Keynes and Lapidge 1983, 168.
†† Æðelred’s name only appears in connection with the battle in a thirteenth-century genealogy, as Edryd Long-Hair. The entry in the Annales Cambriae for 880 (corrected to 881) describes the battle as ‘vengeance for Rhodri at God’s hand’. Charles-Edwards 2014, 490; Morris 1980, 48.
‡‡ Its date is much debated: the inclusion of two Mercian towns, Worcester and Warwick, has suggested to many that the unified scheme dates from the reign of Ælfred’s son Eadweard. Others argue that the West Saxon king was able to influence the construction of burhs in Mercia via his son-in-law. The construction dates of the individual burhs are in most cases uncertain.
§§ The possibility that a fort constructed by the Danish army there in 875, or an earlier defensive perimeter for the minster, was Ælfred’s model cannot be discounted.
## Ælfred’s medical history has been much discussed. Asser reflects on his bodily infirmities in several passages. Several scholars have suggested that he suffered from Crohn’s disease, a painful and debilitating intestinal condition.
∫∫ The burghal towns were not, for the most part, designed with complete internal grids of streets. Martin Biddle has shown that centrally opposed gates linked by two roads crossing each other at the centre of the burh naturally developed into a grid of streets as the towns were populated over, perhaps, several decades. Biddle 1976.
ΩΩ The ancient salt route from Droitwich to Worcester is less than 5 miles (8 km) by either Roman road or along the River Salwarpe. From Worcester salt is likely to have been loaded into barges and floated down the River Severn to Gloucester, whence it could be transported overland to the head of the navigable Thames at Cricklade.
≈≈ The so-called Grately code, of about 930. See below, Chapter 9.
∂∂ Congresbury and Banwell; that is to say, he was to enjoy the income from their estates and exercise a role as absentee abbot. See below, Chapter 12.
ππ This is the same Bishop of Worcester who, in 872, had been forced to lease lands to raise tribute for the Host overwintering in London. See above, p. 117n.
∆∆ The Midland shires take their names from settlements which became important during the early tenth century. For earlier political divisions we have to go back to the Tribal Hidage of the seventh or eighth century, when that part belonged, perhaps, to the Chilternsæte of Middle Anglia.
*** See below, Chapter 8, p. 409.
††† The interpretation of place names as direct evidence f
or the distribution of settlers and especially of ethnicity is fraught with complexity. See Hadley 2006, 99, for example. I use it here in the most general way. But there is a stark geographical reality to this line, which I explore below in Chapter 8.
‡‡‡ See below, Chapters 7 and 8: p. 293 onwards.
§§§ The set of attracting processes by which geographers identify the origins of villages and towns.
### Land held for a life interest, or on lease, and subject to obligations of service or produce. It might be passed to the heirs of a tenant by the king’s permission.
∫∫∫ See above, Chapter 3, p. 105.
ΩΩΩ The excavations identified the craft and agricultural components of a more substantial, as yet unlocated complex lying to the east. Three or four sturdy buildings, with collateral workshops or outhouses clustered around a shallow valley that became a refuse dump, seem to have replaced one another over a period of three centuries of continuous occupation and activity. Loveluck 2007.
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES