by Adams, Max;
Like Flixborough, Brandon and Portmahomack, Llanbedrgoch seems to have become a ‘productive’ settlement with wide trade links. Antler, non-ferrous metals and leather-working tools came from active workshops. Glass beads, a fragment of a Kufic dirham, hacksilver, lead trial-pieces and weights tell of a site and an island fully integrated into the maritime Atlantic world, ensuring its place on the mental Tube map of Viking Age Britain. More locally, it lay at the heart of a nexus connecting Chester and the Mercian hinterland with Dublin, Man, Whithorn on the Wigtownshire coast and York via the Ribble Valley. A number of clench nails and other ship-fittings from the site suggest the recycling of materials from time-expired (or wrecked or captured) marine craft. To add to the site’s period cachet, a Scandinavian-style ring-chain motif on a belt buckle, from a deposit above the floor of one of the buildings, replicates a motif on a cross at nearby Penmon Abbey.11
The extent to which Llanbedrgoch’s enhanced economic activity was a function of Norse takeover, or merely of Norse patronage, cannot be determined. The upturn in its fortunes may, equally, have been an indirect product of the revival of Chester as a centre of trade and production under Æðelflæd. Wherever Irish, Norse, British, Pictish and Anglo-Saxon met, whatever their conflicts, their cultures hybridized; so, probably, did their people.
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At the heart of the Irish Sea basin, Man (Ellan Vannin in Manx) was the hub around which a dynamic Atlantic Age spun. With its central peak, Snaefell, at 2,037 feet (621 m), Man is visible from Wales, Ireland, north-west England and south-west Scotland. Mariners of all ages have traded with, sheltered in and taken pilotage from good but infrequent harbours on both east and west coasts. Important Early Christian sites at Maughold, at St Patrick’s Isle and elsewhere, and annal entries recording its involvement in the dynastic rivalries of the Insular kingdoms, ensure the island’s continuing interest for historians and archaeologists.π At various times it was subject to Northumbrian, Irish and British overlordship. There has often been speculation that Merfyn Frych, founder of the great Venedotian dynasty that produced Rhodri Mawr and, later, Hywel Dda, came from Man—perhaps displaced by new Norse overlords like Ingimundr.12
It is surprising, perhaps, that the island was not settled by an overtly Scandinavian population any earlier than the very end of the ninth century. David Wilson, the former director of the British Museum who has made a special study of the island’s Viking archaeology, believes that a lack of existing commercial markets there, the fierce tides and currents of its coastal waters and ample opportunities for settlement elsewhere delayed what seems its inevitable subjugation.13 Gradual encroachment on the Irish Sea from settlements on surrounding coasts and the expulsion from Dublin in 902 seem finally to have propelled one or more warlords to displace its indigenous kings; but it is possible that Norse were already settling there independently. The physical evidence for a Norse presence is striking; so much so that Insular scholars look to Man for archetypes in farmsteads, building styles, burials and, later, the conversion to Christianity.
Man’s long north-east to south-west lozenge shape has three distinct zones. In the centre the Snaefell massif provides an internal barrier to settlement and landward communication. To the north the mountains are bounded by the Sulby River running east into the sea at Ramsey (Old Norse: hrams á, ‘wild garlic river’). The low-lying green coastal plains that look north towards Galloway are rich in Norse settlement and burial sites, Scandinavian place names like Jurby and Phurt jostling with Gaelic Ballaugh and Carrick. Jurby parish, on the north-west coast, boasts three ‘pagan’ graves of the Viking period. Gerhard Bersu’s pioneering excavation of the mound at Ballateare in the 1940s revealed the complex, structured burial of a warrior male interred with the trappings of his profession. The excellence of the excavation and a burial environment favourable to preservation afford us perhaps the most detailed and intimate portrait of a Norse Viking from the British Isles, paralleled most vividly in the poetry of Beowulf and the accounts of Norse burials among the Rus encountered by the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlán.14
The man interred at Ballateare was between eighteen and thirty years old. On his death a grave was dug into which his wooden coffin was placed. He was dressed in a cloak held fast at the throat by a ring pin absolutely diagnostic of Irish manufacture. With him inside the coffin were a knife, lying on his chest; a sword of Norwegian manufacture, its hilt inlaid with copper wire and silver, still sheathed in a scabbard of probable Anglo-Saxon design; and a spear. The sword and scabbard had been ritually ‘killed’ by breaking them into several pieces. Outside the coffin, perhaps laid on top in military fashion, were his shield and two more spears. The shield boss, like the sword, had been deliberately hacked; even so, some of the shield wood survived, with its colours remarkably intact: black and white striped bands with red dots—the insignia of his war band or family. Over the grave a mound of turfs, the earth of his new land, was constructed, still standing to more than 9 feet (3 m) high and nearly 40 feet (12 m) across when it was excavated. On top of the mound was placed the body of a female, executed by means of a single, devastating sword-blow to the back of the head, and above her lay the cremated remains of animals: ox, horse, sheep and dog. On top of the completed mound a wooden post had been erected.15
Scandinavian pagan burial was a highly engineered affair. The social and material effort invested in securing passage to the warrior’s hall at Valhalla was considerable, its symbolism profound. The ritual ‘killing’ of personal possessions ensured that there was no coming back—fear of revenants was widespread and deeply felt. The ceremonial and ritual elements and the time devoted to the burial of a powerful warrior and landowner, in so many ways reminiscent of the investment afforded to the holy men and women of the Age of Saints, reinforced ties to the land: of family, honour and reverence. Conspicuous consumption of labour, material possessions and the likely sacrifice of the man’s personal slave-girl reflected his wealth and prestige, and the honour due to him in death.
The apparent conservatism of this ancient suite of customs (even without the cremation rite of the legendary Beowulf) must be set against a backdrop of strong Christian affiliation on the island represented by stone sculpture and a landscape littered with churches; and, indeed, against the Insular context of prominently visible Bronze Age monumental burials that proclaimed ownership of and ties to land time out of mind. Tensions between old and new, Christian and pagan, native and incomer would be played out in the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) imagery of a new hybrid form of memorial art across the tenth and eleventh centuries, as Norse and Manx negotiated novel cultural expressions of their increasingly shared experience.
The southern third of Man, hillier and with a more rugged coastline than the north, shows an even greater density of Scandinavian burials and settlements, from the natural stronghold and sheltered harbour of St Patrick’s Isle at Peel in the west to the probable beach market site at Ronaldsway in the south-east. Hoards, graves and the likely Viking Age re-use of some of its many prehistoric promontory forts paint a picture of active settlement and a vigorous, outward-looking seagoing culture. At the Braaid, in Marown parish a little west of Douglas, the most impressive surviving remains of Scandinavian settlement south of Orkney give a strong impression of the ways in which Norse incomers carved out (or bought into) active agricultural landholdings.
Here, set among improved upland sheep pasture, the stone footings of a large native circular house, similar to those at the village of Din Llugwy on Anglesey, lie next to their replacements: a straight-sided stone byre with internal stalls and a bow-sided house, more than 60 feet (18 m) long and nearly 30 feet (9 m) wide, whose internal walls showed traces of the lateral stone benches so characteristic of Scandinavian houses further north. Timber-porched entrances at both ends must have created an impressive sense of space and grandeur for the home-cum-feasting barn of a substantial landowner: the mead hall of thegn or jarl, with an effect on the locals every bit as intimidating as the
Roman legionary boot on the British mainland in previous centuries.
Whether the inhabitants of the grand circular house next door were displaced, murdered, betrothed to or sold out to the new lords can only be a matter of speculation: the Norse Sagas provide plenty of more or less likely stories to choose from. Most of what must have been hundreds of distinctive native or Scandinavian buildings on Man eventually suffered the common fate of houses that outlive their design or use: they were rebuilt, dismantled, burned down or relocated elsewhere. Only very rarely do they survive, as here, for archaeologists to investigate.
34. THE BRAAID: Norse houses on the Isle of Man, replacing native dwellings (foreground) and perhaps displacing the natives.
The Braaid lies 1.5 miles (2.5 km) south of, and overlooks from a height of nearly 500 feet (150 m) above sea level, a natural pass through the hills formed by the valleys of the Rivers Neb and Dhoo, linking the ports of Peel in the west with Douglas in the east; and it is no coincidence that on this route lies the most famous of Manx institutions, the Tynwald (Manx Tinvaal, derived from Old Norse Þingvollr, an assembly place) whose origins must lie in the Norse period when Man and the Scottish islands formed the heart of a piratical thalassocracy: an empire of the Western seaways.
Appropriately, the expressive stamp of Norse warrior identity is also displayed in Manx boat burials. At the north end of the island, at Knock-e-Dooney, a burial mound excavated in 1927 revealed the remains of a vessel about 30 feet (9 m) in length dating from between 900 and 950, represented by some 300 iron rivets. The body, wrapped in a cloak, was accompanied by sword, shield and spear, and the more prosaic tools of fishing gear, hammer and tongs. At Balladoole, in Arbory parish on the south coast, the unmistakeable outline of a boat, its mound flanked with a kerb of boulders like those at Lindholm Høje on Limfjord in Jutland, was erected inside an existing Christian cemetery, itself occupying the site of a prehistoric enclosure. The burial beneath lay inside the remains of a real boat, some 36 feet (11 m) long.16
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The exposed western shores of the Outer Hebrides, Suðreyar to the Norse, are slowly yielding their Viking Age settlements, on the fertile machair plains of South Uist at Bornais and Cille Pheadair, on North Uist at the fort of Udal, and elsewhere;17 but the core of that empire lay far to the north. Orkney was, perhaps, the earliest of the Atlantic Norse settlements, an increasingly influential focus of power during a period when Norway’s kings were consolidating theirs and when Iceland was first being settled. Here the archaeological evidence for Norse cultural intervention is incomparably rich: campaigns of excavation at Brough of Birsay and Skaill, among other sites, have revealed the complex detail of daily life and domestic ritual over several centuries; hoards from Skaill and Stenness indicate how some of Orkney’s Viking wealth was accumulated, while Scandinavian-style interments, including a spectacular boat burial at Scar on Sanday, combine with abundant material culture to paint a picture of Norse conquest and integration much more nuanced than the sagas and annals allow.
35. THE OUTLINE OF A NORSE SHIP BURIAL at Balladoole, Isle of Man, looking out to sea. It overlies an earlier, Christian cemetery.
Brough of Birsay presents the visitor with one of those dramatic arrival scenes reminiscent of Iona and Lindisfarne, as if one has come to the world’s edge; more so, perhaps. It sits on a rocky island cut off from Orkney’s Mainland west coast at high tide: a great smooth slab of rock tilted slightly away from the land, its bluff bows pointing directly at the surf as if to ride out the relentless Atlantic storms of autumn and winter; absolutely treeless, but capped with green bent grass. The only conceivable harbour is a modified natural rock ramp butting the narrow neck at Point of Buckquoy and hard by the causeway, up which boats might be drawn. An indigenous Pictish settlement was established here long before any Scandinavian interest in the islands. Its elaborate symbol stone and evidence for metal and glass working suggest that a monastery was established close by, well before 800, alongside more secular habitation; perhaps St Findan knew it as a haven after his adventures at the hands of pirates. Orkney’s wealth of marine resources is, perhaps improbably, matched by the fertile, cultivable soils of its low plains; wind aside, very cold winters are rare, and from the Neolithic period onwards it supported a substantial population with an abundance of convenient, sheltered harbours. Orkney was anything but peripheral.
Birsay’s very evident stone foundations attracted early and continuing archaeological interest; but the most substantial and important excavations (and re-excavations) took place from 1974 under the direction of Chris Morris and John Hunter, following a campaign by Anna Ritchie close by on the Mainland at Bukquoy. Among Orkney’s key natural resources is easily quarried and split sandstone: tightly constructed drystone walls are the norm for domestic, agricultural, religious and memorial structures, from the stupendous chambered tombs of the Neolithic period onwards, allowing for marvellous sophistication in the architecture of every age.
The distinctive Pictish form is the figure of eight, a double circular cell arrangement looking, in plan, like a pair of handcuffs. Norse buildings, which replaced the indigenous form from the first half of the ninth century, are of familiar longhouse design in the ratio 3:1: often about 45 feet long by 15 feet wide (14 × 5 m), with various entrances designed to accommodate changing wind patterns. Stone flagged drains and side benches with carefully designed internal partitions (distinctively Orcadian ergonomics, matched only in Shetland, and at Mawgan Porth) are common.
Even without excavation reports to hand, the imagination can easily populate these substantial dwellings with the domestic fug of kitchen and hearth, straw-lined bed cubicle and wall cupboards: dwellings absolutely crammed with space-saving devices.∆ Timber and turf roofs insulated; peat provided the fuel. Spinning and weaving, metalworking, fishing and animal husbandry are all evidenced by the artefacts of industry: Birsay was a wealthy and busy place. This was a major power base of Pictish monastic and secular power and, later, of the Norse earls of Orkney.18
Those earls first come into focus in one of the most enduringly readable of Norse literary achievements: Orkneyinga Saga. None of the surviving written sagas are remotely contemporary with the events they describe and, in spinning the thin strands of Orkney’s history, its twelfth- to thirteenth-century compiler presents the sort of creation myth of Atlantic settlement that defies historical analysis. Even so, there are shards of reality here. Haraldr Hárfagri, Harald ‘Finehair’, whose successful rule over Norway can be placed across a swathe of decades either side of 900, and whose intemperate relations with his own people propelled many a longship across the seas, dominates the early part of a grand narrative. Much of the story is based on surviving fragments of Skaldic verse; some comes from sources now lost, or is sparsely supplemented by references in other sagas.
According to the Saga, Harald’s councillor and military ally, the celebrated Earl Rögnvaldr Eysteinsson, had five sons, among them that Hrólfr who became Rollo of Normandy** and founded his own successful expatriate dynasty, from whom William I and subsequent English kings are descended. After a long campaign during which Haraldr raided Norse pirate bases as far as the Hebrides and Man, he gave Orkney and Shetland to his faithful commander Rögnvaldr, both as reward and to hold them against potential competitors. Rögnvaldr in turn gave these lands to his brother Sigurðr. Sigurðr, so the saga says, became so powerful that he was able in his day to subdue much of Caithness, Moray, Argyll and Ross. His campaign against Maelbrigte, ‘Earl of the Scots’, ended in the latter’s defeat and death; but, according to the compiler, after Sigurðr strapped Maelbrigte’s severed head to the saddle of his horse in victory, his calf was pierced by the dead man’s tooth and the wound became infected: he died pathetically of sepsis.
One of Rögnvald’s sons, Hallad, was subsequently given control of Orkney and confirmed by Haraldr in the title of earl. But he found the onerous task of defending the islands’ farmers from Viking raids too much and returned to Norway in ig
nominy. The islands were subsequently seized, we are told, by two Danish chiefs, Thorir ‘Treebeard’ and Kalf ‘Scurvy’, whose nicknames rather speak for themselves. Rögnvaldr now sent his youngest, ‘natural’ son, slave-born on his mother’s side, to see what he could make of Orkney, although with little hope, it seems, of success. Torf Einar set out with Harald’s blessing, the earldom and a twenty-bench ship provided by his father.19 Tall, ugly and one-eyed, as the saga tells us, Torf Einar was nevertheless far-sighted: he killed his Danish antagonists, took control of Orkney and, in an odd aside that might account for his nickname, we are told that he was the first to dig peat, or turf, for fuel.†† The very real fortunes of the communities at Portmahomack and the lands of Fortriu around the Moray Firth fit somehow into this semi-historical context. Einar’s turf-cutting took place, appropriately, on ‘Torfness’: the Tarbat peninsula.20
Einar seems to have spent periods in exile in Caithness after the death of his father and a fallout with King Haraldr, which might have been precipitated by his increasingly successful rule of Orkney. In the end the two were reconciled and a deal was thrashed out, whose detail seems at least historically plausible and admirably pragmatic: