Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  In 916, taking advantage of a distracted Wessex–Mercian leadership to pursue more local interests, the king of Brycheiniog in southern Wales killed an abbot, called Ecgberht, with his companions, provoking the vengeful wrath of the Myrcna hlæfdige. She sent a force to his llys at Brecenanmere, the crannog on Llangorse lake, stormed it and captured his queen with more than thirty others.†† Æðelflæd at this time appears to be all-seeing, in absolute command of political developments in her increasing orbit and capable of immediate, effective military response.

  Frustratingly, there are dislocations between the several versions of the Chronicle in the middle years of the decade which are hard to reconcile. The result is an unsatisfactory scrapbook of events that makes a straightforward linear narrative almost impossible to construct. One is in danger of reversing the order of raid and counter-raid, fort construction and submission; the rhythmic click-clack of Newton’s cradle becomes a chaotic racket. With that proviso, one can pick out a new pattern from the year 917: the tattoo of invasion.

  Before Easter, Eadweard refortified the old Roman fort at Towcester, not far from Northampton, right on the line of Watling Street and lying close to the head of the north-east flowing Great Ouse. He constructed another at the unidentified Wigingamere.‡‡ A co-ordinated Danish leadership sent forces from Leicester and Northampton and ‘north from there’ to lay siege to Towcester. Its defences were too strong, however, and a relief force arrived to disperse the Danish army. In response they took to raiding at night, ‘taking considerable spoil both in captives and cattle between Aylesbury and Bernwood’.11 Another Host now came into the field from Huntingdon, joining forces with an army from East Anglia and constructing a fortress of their own at Tempsford, a few miles north-east of Bedford at the confluence of the Rivers Great Ouse and Izel. The Chronicle tells us that the fort at Huntingdon was now abandoned and that the Host came to focus its forces on this crucial front line close to Bedford and Watling Street. Their first new venture was to attack Bedford itself; but the garrison there sallied and put them to flight.

  Now, at the height of summer of 917, a second Host came out of East Anglia and East Mercia. They laid siege to the new fort at Wigingamere, attempting to storm it; again they were repelled. Eadweard’s response was to gather a strong army from the surrounding garrisons. He:

  7 foron to Tæmeseforda 7 besæton ða burg 7 fuhton ðæron oð hi hie abræcon 7 ofslogon þone cyning, 7 Toglos eorl, 7 Mannan eorl his sunu...

  Marched to Tempsford and besieged the burh and attacked it until they took it by storm, and slew the king, and Jarl Toglos and his son Jarl Manna and his brother and all the garrison who put up a resistance, making prisoners of the rest and seizing everything inside the fortress.12

  Seizing the initiative, Eadweard now assembled a force from Kent, Surrey and Essex and sent them to attack Colchester, ransacking it and killing all its inhabitants ‘except those who escaped over the wall’. Again the Host fought back, bringing their forces, and those of ‘pirates whom they had enticed to their aid’ against Eadweard’s new burh at Maldon. Once more a relieving army saw them off.

  As autumn wore on the pace of events did not slacken. Eadweard brought the levies of Wessex to protect the garrison at Towcester while they reinforced its walls with stone (the first mention of such construction at a new burh). The Scandinavian commanders in the area around Northampton submitted to him. Part of the Wessex levy was now relieved and a new force came into the field to take and repair the abandoned fort at Huntingdon, deep inside Danish territory. They moved on to Colchester and occupied it too; and as autumn turned to winter the Host at Cambridge and the people of East Anglia came to Eadweard and submitted to him.

  The king could not have left his Mercian flanks unprotected during this furiously hectic campaigning year; but nor did his sister sit idly by in support. Before Lammas 917 (i.e. between 1 August and 1 September, the month of harvest) the Mercian Register records that Æðelflæd:

  Won the borough called Derby with God’s help, together with all the region which it controlled: four of her thegns, who were dear to her, were slain there within the gates.

  And in 918:

  In the early part of this year, with God’s help, she secured the possession of the borough of Leicester by peaceful means; and the majority of the Mercian forces that owed allegiance to it became subject to her.13

  The first two towns of the Five Boroughs of Danish Mercia had fallen, not to Eadweard but to the forces of the Myrcna hlæfdige, Ælfred’s daughter. The fighting at Derby was bloody even if, as some historians have suggested, the town’s main force was absent, occupied in fighting against Eadweard’s levies;14 Leicester was won by negotiation, either through the acclamation of its inhabitants or by bare-faced bribery.

  *

  Since the burhs of East Mercia were invisible to the chroniclers during a period of more than forty years, their history under Danish rule is obscure: it is not at all clear from the historical sources what had been going on beyond the frontiers of West Mercia and Wessex. We can, I think, say that any idea of a model Anglo-Scandinavian burh is a non-starter. The excavated evidence is patchy or non-existent in many towns; and those where archaeology has produced detailed evidence of ninth- and tenth-century life through its version of keyhole surgery may well be atypical of the wider settlement, let alone other towns. Even attempts at basic classification will defeat the unwary. To take the so-called Five Boroughs as a starting point, we might read too much into their debut in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 942, in a poetic list of territories conquered by King Eadmund (939–946) which included:

  Burga fife, Ligoraceaster 7 Lindcylene 7 Snotingaham, swylce Stanford eac Deoraby.15

  The names are immediately recognizable as Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Derby. Four of these would become the shire towns of counties; and historians naturally see these as the five principal strongholds and trading centres of the Danish-controlled Midlands. But what of those other places that seem to have enjoyed similar status under Danish rule? Northampton was fortified and became a shire town; the same goes for Bedford. Torksey, the Viking camp and production site on the Trent, appears to have manifested some urban characteristics; Repton, too, boasted defences. In Essex, Benfleet might qualify. In East Anglia, Norwich, Thetford, Ipswich, Huntingdon and Cambridge were all towns before the Norman Conquest; and of these Ipswich, at least, shows continuity of urban function, including pottery production, from the early eighth century onwards. Coins were minted in this period in at least four of the Anglo-Scandinavian towns: York, Norwich, Lincoln and Stamford.

  Can we characterize these places by the nature of their supposed pre-Scandinavian status? Yes... and no. Leicester had been a Roman town; Lincoln no less than a colonia, a regional provincial centre supporting a settlement of retired legionary veterans. A Roman fort stood close to Derby; but not at Nottingham, Bedford, Northampton or Cambridge. Leicester, Lincoln, probably Northampton and Derby and possibly Stamford were the sites of important minsters before the middle of the ninth century. Leicester was, and Lincoln may have been, the seats of the bishops of Mercia and Lindsey respectively. There is no single suite of characteristics that allows us to either create a hierarchy of Anglo-Scandinavian towns, or differentiate them by earlier or later status.

  The Five Boroughs were all, to be sure, geographically well connected. Leicester was the focus of a major Roman road network and lay on the River Soar, a possibly navigable tributary of the Trent. Lincoln was perhaps even better positioned: astride the Roman Ermine Street, one of the key north–south roads in eastern Britain with riverine links to the Humber via the Fossdyke and Trent, and to the Wash via the River Witham. Nottingham sat on the navigable Trent, Derby on a tributary of it. Stamford lies on both Ermine Street and the River Welland, which empties into the Wash. Northampton, Ipswich, Thetford and Norwich also enjoy the advantages of navigable rivers well connected to the existing Roman road system. The Danes, as I have suggested befo
re, knew their geography and chose their sites well; and in various of these places existing defences or enclosures may have been adapted or enlarged by their armies. Not one of the putative towns or burhs of Danish East Mercia or East Anglia lay on a river that drained southwards into West Saxon or Mercian territory: they looked north and east for markets, for retreat and for alliances.

  Places that worked as strongholds, with excellent communications by road and water, naturally enough made good trading sites; and if we look at the growth of manufacturing, a key feature of the late pre-Conquest town, their character comes into sharper focus. By the middle of the tenth century wheel-thrown pottery was being produced on an industrial scale at most of the sites I have mentioned, and there is a very clear distinction between these industries, with their restricted but consistent range of bowls and jars, their sophisticated kilns and their zones of regional distribution, and the relatively shabby products of the contemporary West Saxon burhs.16 The pottery offers us both a discrete set of Anglo-Scandinavian traits and a sense of distinct regional identity. Not only did West Saxons and Danish Mercians employ their own pottery styles; they also rejected the use of pottery made by their counterparts. Late ‘Saxon’ pottery was a two-fingered gesture, as well as a functional domestic artefact. On display at the heart of the domestic milieu, it transmitted social and ideological messages on a quite different, perhaps equally significant scale to the coins that carried, or did not carry, the king’s head.

  Even the pottery picture suffers from fuzzy edges and a partially torn canvas. For one thing, excavated evidence shows that in Ipswich, Stamford, Thetford, Lincoln and Leicester kilns were already productive when the Host decided to set up camp and overwinter as the first stage of its grand conquests. And the ceramicist Paul Blinkhorn has shown that at least four of the pottery traditions present at other urban sites by the end of the tenth century were probably only founded around the middle of that century—that is to say, after those regions had been subsumed by the West Saxon and Mercian campaign of expansion that began in the late 910s with the conquest of Derby and Leicester.

  There is more than one way of looking at the evidence. One is to argue that central places with important minsters, increasingly secularized and specializing in a variety of products for regional markets, were attractive targets for the jarls of the Host; that they were hijacked, their mercantile development accelerated by a sudden influx of entrepreneurial foreigners, slaves and shed-loads of hard cash. One might picture, as a comparison, the arrival of thousands of American GIs in Britain in the mid-1940s, and its effect on the economy (and birth rate).

  We might offer a little more nuance than that, however. It is well understood that the potteries of Danish Mercia and East Anglia owe much of their character to those of Francia. A post-865 model of urban expansion and production would comfortably see Frankish potters being brought over by persuasion or coercion and set to work to produce kitchenware for Vikings who couldn’t get it locally. That argument fails to convince those who point out that there was no great pottery tradition in Scandinavia—the Vikings were not simply missing their homely porridge bowls.

  One model, which would allow for Frankish potters to arrive in Mercia and East Anglia before the Host, would take its example from waves of exiled artisans in a more recent period: the Huguenot weavers and metalworkers who fled France and the Low Countries after the revocation in 1685 of the tolerant Edict of Nantes. Might our Frankish potters have crossed the Channel in the 840s and 850s as refugees from Continental Viking raids, with skilled labour on offer, to be enthusiastically patronized by the local élite just in time for them to be dispossessed by new landlords with bulging pockets and a taste for Continental goods? We cannot say; at least, not yet.

  Nor can we say much about what daily life was like in those towns, so familiar in their busy modern high streets and dense housing, their industrial quarters and their fine medieval churches, where excavation has yet to produce the workshops and house plots of their Viking Age inhabitants. For that sort of detail we have to look elsewhere, in some respects uncomfortably far to make credible parallels. Outside of the Scandinavian homelands the largest number, by far, of Viking period urban houses to have been uncovered is in Ireland, where they are counted comfortably in the hundreds.17 The domestic form there is distinct and homogenous, conservative even. Houses were rectangular with straight walls and sometimes rounded corners, constructed of upright posts infilled with wattle panelling, later upgraded to plank walls. Two lines of internal posts supported a pitched roof of thatch, giving an internal space divided longitudinally into thirds. Raised bedding platforms were set against the side walls. There was a hearth at the centre and doors stood at both ends; smoke and the fug of cooking escaped through turfed or thatched eaves where, one suspects, meat and fish hung for curing.

  These houses were built on long narrow plots fronting on to streets, much like their earlier prototypes in the wics or riverside trading settlements. The overriding impression is of a hugger-mugger existence, of constant tension between the values of space and privacy, industry and domesticity. Although rebuilt, sometimes several times over the generations, the form and size, at their largest 7 yards by 5 yards but often as little as 4 yards by 3 yards, was replicated again and again; these are family houses the size of modern living rooms. Some of the plots boasted ancillary buildings, with or without hearths, along with cesspits, wells, pathways and kitchen gardens.

  These are such distinctly urban dwellings and so striking in their uniformity that it is hard to shake off the impression of planning, of organization and a shared sense of identity, even of urbanity. We might well expect to see such structures emerging from future excavations in cities like Nottingham or Derby, especially given the apparent constraints of crowded urban space and competition for street and river frontage, apparently immutable urban truths. Winchester’s Ælfredan re-planning has shown something of the same street-frontage arrangement in several excavations.

  Whether all town-dwellers were occupied in trade, craft and industry is more difficult to assess. Perhaps the greatest distinction between urban and rural populations was in food production and consumption. Town-dwellers did, and do, keep chickens and other poultry; perhaps also pigs to recycle food waste and as a winter protein source; but there is no grazing land in their plots. Sheep seem mostly to have been consumed at estate centres in the countryside; they hardly figure on the urban menu. Cattle, the most important source of animal protein, seem, by dint of the skeletal information gained from rubbish deposits, to have been brought from countryside to town on the hoof, as they were right up until the railway age; and here they were slaughtered and sold on streets that would, in later centuries, be called Shambles. Fish and shellfish were a popular and valuable source of protein; grain, butter and cheese, it almost goes without saying, must have come from towns’ hinterlands: from farms specializing in dairy, cereals or livestock whence they were transported by boat, cart or packhorse to central markets in a more or less formal series of arrangements whose detail is opaque.

  The urban diet, when it can be reconstructed from food remains preserved in rubbish and cesspits,§§ relied for its staples on bread and cereals, honey, lentils, leeks, peas and beans, fruits, nuts and fungi, washed down with weak beer whose alcohol effectively purified dodgy water.18 Food seems to have been stored and processed domestically in small quantities. The evident widespread consumption of sloes, hawthorn and rowan berries reflects the need for antiscorbutics## during late winter when fresh fruit and vegetables were in short supply.

  If every urban home wove its own cloth from wool and flax, other buildings show that craft specialization was an increasingly important function of towns as productive and trading sites. At York, the famous Viking dig at Coppergate, and excavations in many other sites across the city, produced very substantial evidence for trade and industrial production from the end of the ninth century onwards. The trading settlement of pre-Viking York, evidenced by artisan p
roduction and finds of exotic imports, was dispersed along its riversides and around the fringes of the Roman citadel; but it was hardly a populous place.19 The interior of the former Roman fortress was dominated by ecclesiastical precincts and, perhaps, a royal estate, probably appropriated by its new Scandinavian leaders after 875.

  Coppergate’s four excavated tenements belong to the first decades of the tenth century and indicate a new, dynamic phase in that city’s history, when the population grew to perhaps 10,000. The long, narrow plots seen in other Viking Age towns are present here for the first time. Coppergate was the street of the wood-turners (coopers) and archaeology shows that specialized crafts occupied distinct urban niches—the origins, perhaps, of the medieval guild system. But it is not clear whether the people of Coppergate were full-time, seasonal or merely domestic producers of bowls, tools, handles and so on; even, in fact, whether they were dwellers, rather than commuters. Coppergate also housed metal, leather and textile craftsmen and women—dyers, weavers, spinners and finishers.

  Elsewhere, on other streets so far only partially excavated or inferred from stray finds, comb-makers, potters, jewellers and glass-makers plied their trades, satisfying local, regional, élite and foreign markets. Coppergate was well placed: it lay 100 yards (90 m) south of the corner of the old fortress and the same distance from a new crossing of the River Ouse, whose approach road, Micklegate (the ‘Great Street’), turns away from the site of the former Roman bridge towards the new bridge and skews the neat grid street pattern around it.