by Adams, Max;
The histories of those minsters during the first Viking Age reflect regional fortunes. Some, especially vulnerable coastal communities like Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Iona, succumbed to the accumulated pressures of theft, violence and enslavement and declined terminally or were partially abandoned in the eighth and ninth centuries, only to be reborn in the later tenth or eleventh century.
Portmahomack, the most northerly of the coastal minsters, was put to sword and fire around the turn of the ninth century, its monks likely enslaved and taken off to markets in the Baltic for resale. Its skilled craftsmen and farmers were set to new endeavours, converting looted scrap metal into objects of more immediate secular value for international trade and producing grain and beef for its new lords, rather than calves for vellum. At various periods of the ninth century Fortriu was under the control of Picts, then Gaels, then the kings of Alba and perhaps, at times, under the direct control of the Norse earls of Orkney. One, and one only, of its bishops is known: Tuathal mac Artgusso, who died in 865, the year in which the mycel here arrived in East Anglia.2 If Portmahomack were no longer a suitable site for his see, then Rosemarkie, at the mouth of the Moray Firth, where ecclesiastical sculpture was still being produced, might have retained its institutional functions into the reign of Constantín after 900. The Tarbat peninsula was, much later, the scene of a great clash between Thorfinnr Sigurðsson ‘the Mighty’, the eleventh-century Earl of Orkney and a king of Scotland, Karl ‘Hundason’, better known as Macbeth.3
Far to the south-west on the tidal River Clyde and at the head of an important east–west route through the lowlands to the River Forth, the community at Govan on the River Clyde survived and thrived because of its status as a royal cult site that continued to be patronized and endowed by the native élite. Their trading connections, to judge by its collection of hogback tomb covers, also enabled them to acquire the products of Norse workshops. A royal estate lying on the opposite bank at Partick may also have been a centre for the consumption and display of sculpture during the tenth century.4
The survival into the tenth century of a working minster at the British royal cult site of St David’s, on the extreme western tip of Dyfed, is most convincingly demonstrated by the career of its one-time bishop, Asser, the scholar recruited by Ælfred to bolster his programme of literary and intellectual revival in the 880s. But his loyalties were divided as he was increasingly drawn into the West Saxon king’s orbit. Asser records that Ælfred presented him with two Somerset minsters, at Congresbury and Banwell, together with a lengthy list of all their possessions. Later, the king:
Unexpectedly granted me Exeter with all the jurisdiction pertaining to it in Saxon territory and in Cornwall... He then immediately gave me permission to ride out to those two minsters so well provided with goods of all sorts.5
Asser’s enjoyment of the fruits of those minsters may have ensured their wealth and future prospects, but evidence that secular lords in the West Saxon heartlands were trading minsters as gifts reflects an inexorable process of secularization that increasingly turned former monastic communities into clerical churches, the fruits of whose wealth might be consumed by visiting lords or disposed of like cash assets. In an extreme case like Cheddar, Ælfred and his descendants were able gradually to convert a minster and nearby hunting lodge into a royal palace and estate centre whose minster was subsumed into the royal portfolio.
A minster had stood in the ruins of the former Roman civitas capital of the Dumnonii at Exeter since at least the seventh century, when its thriving school produced the indefatigable missionary Boniface. After the Host’s withdrawal from Wareham in 876 and forced westward march they occupied the remains of the fortress at Exeter, defying Ælfred’s attempts to dislodge them. It must have suggested itself early on in his defensive plans as the perfect physical and strategic site for a burh (of relatively modest size, assessed at 734 hides) and in the epic campaigns of 893 its garrison was able to resist one of the Channel fleets of the combined Scandinavian forces until a relieving force arrived under Ælfred’s command.
It is not clear into whose hands the Exeter minster fell after Asser’s death in 908 or 909; twenty years later it became a favourite recipient of King Æðelstan’s favours during his period of alienation from the West Saxon royal minster at Winchester. He held councils here at Easter 928 (bringing his new Welsh subreguli with him) and again in 932; and William of Malmesbury offers a dubious story that in 927 he drove the Western Britons (i.e. the Cornish population) out of the city and refortified it with towers and stone walls, setting a new boundary on Wessex’s frontier with the British at the River Tamar.6 Æðelstan’s fifth law code was issued here in about 931 and he was a substantial donor of a collection of important relics to the minster.7 Exeter’s minster survived, but not as its founders knew it.
In two thirds of the forts listed in the Burghal Hidage minsters like Exeter lay inside the walls or were situated close by them. The defences offered physical protection from raiders; and it is possible that some of the earliest burhs where ancient minsters stood, like Wareham, had already been protected by earthen ramparts constructed at the behest and expense of the church. Wareham, after all, had been taken and defended against West Saxon assault in 875, before the burghal system was conceived. It may even have provided one of the models, alongside original Mercian exemplars. If the benefit to minsters of protection was one edge of the sword, the other was the inevitable militarization of their immediate environs and the diversion of ecclesiastical resources to fending off, or paying off, raiders.
Those minsters that lay in lands ruled and settled by Scandinavian pirate-farmers generally saw their estates broken up, the land redistributed among the Host in reward for loyalty and service. In East Anglia no bishops are known from the period between the 860s and the 940s and, along with its organizational framework, the church lost many communities and large swathes of land. Even here, though, minsters survived. The community at the seventh-century foundation of Ely, an island on the River Great Ouse deep in the Cambridgeshire fenlands, compiling their history half a millennium later, remembered how, in the aftermath of the Host’s arrival in the 860s, the monastery had been burned down, the precious sarcophagus of the founding saint Æðelðryth defiled, their monks and nuns massacred or enslaved:
And thus the place lay in a miserable state, totally deprived of the observance of the divine office... No one remained to carry out ministry. In the end, there returned after some years eight of the very clerics who were despoiled, and some of them remained, after the lapse of many years, in decrepit old age until the time of King Eadred. Patching up the aisles of the church as best they could at a time of such calamity, they carried out due observance of the divine office.8
We should swallow the detail of this story with a spoonful of scepticism, if for no other reason than that any monks surviving from the 860s would have been more than a hundred years old by the beginning of the reign of King Eadred, Eadmund’s brother and successor in 946. In reality it serves as mere prologue to the more historical record of the minster’s refounding in the time of Eadmund’s second son, King Eadgar (959–975). Nevertheless, the process of restoration of at least some of its former lands reflects, if nothing else, the tenacious memory and record-keeping of those who regarded themselves as its spiritual keepers, able to testify to what had formerly belonged to St Æðelðryth, like their counterparts in Chester le Street.
More convincing, and not much less dramatic, is evidence from the same source for a royal minster at Horningsea, a few miles upstream from Ely, close to the Danish stronghold at Cambridge. The record in the Liber Eliensis of a dispute over the minster’s legitimate holdings, a marvellous tale of stolen daggers, complicit priests and red-handed apprehension by lawmen, seems to refer to a genuine charter of King Eadweard (900–924) of a gift of five hides in Horningsea and two at Eye to the priest, one Cenwold, who ministered to the clerical community there.9 If nothing else it militates against the idea of the wholesale d
estruction of the East Anglian church at the hands of the Host. And it is salutary to remember that the cult of the Host’s most celebrated victim, the martyred King Eadmund, was fostered by and thrived under East Anglia’s Danish rulers.
If minsters looked increasingly like secular economic institutions, often incorporated into the military and institutional framework of the West Saxon state, from the early tenth century onwards they were also key components in urbanization and the rapid expansion of the Insular economies. The minsters had long enjoyed the fruits of trade; the archbishops of York and Canterbury minted their own coins and claimed rights similar to those of kings over tolls and the perquisites of élite international trade. The document confirming Worcester’s new status under Æðelred and Æðelflæd‡ shows how closely linked were the interests of church, market, ealdorman and king.
In Wessex the new burhs were slow to develop as towns and it was not until the middle of the tenth century that many of them emerged as fully urban markets. By then there is a compelling alignment of burhs and minsters with the mints that allow us to track the development of economic prosperity. David Hill, compiler of the indispensable Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, is at pains to show how, from the earliest inception of the burghal system, there was a distinction between fort and town.10 Smaller burhs enclosing less than 16 acres did not develop into urban centres, while the early southern burhs that became towns—London, Winchester, Canterbury, York, Rochester, Shaftesbury, Gloucester, Bath and Christchurch—all had existing minsters; and all but the last of these was also the site of a mint. The relationship between early church foundations and productive sites is evident, too. Minster communities concentrated large labour forces and enjoyed wide-ranging portfolios of agricultural and woodland resources. They innovated, specialized, invested, produced and traded at local, regional and international scales. They often occupied key locations on navigable rivers and Roman roads. Not for nothing were their patrons and lords interested (in both senses) in minsters’ economic potential. In the middle of the ninth century, after the demise of the coastal trading settlements, minsters were the largest and most developed of Insular settlements.
The relationship between the church and urban development has another intriguing strand. The centres of early saints’ cults attracted pilgrims in large numbers. Those churches that successfully nurtured their cults might expect to enjoy the donations of grateful, or hopeful, petitioners to their saint. And, where large numbers of people congregated, fairs and markets developed to relieve them of their surplus wealth. Churches with important cults often developed urban characteristics alongside productivity in agriculture and trade in goods. They ‘exported’ the fame and virtues of their saints. Markets and/or fairs and churches occur in very close proximity in a number of towns: at St Albans, Darlington, Southwark, Oundle, Beverley and elsewhere.11
Tenth-century Lincoln may have supported thirty churches.12 Up to a dozen of these seem to have stood close to market places associated with saints such as the ever-popular Cuthbert, Botolph and Martin of Tours, whose name appears on that intriguing series of Lincoln-minted coins. Whether any relics (bona fide or not) of the great saints were held by the churches bearing their names is a moot point. But there are established links between what one might call special interest groups and their holy patrons. Martin looked after beggars; Botolph after travellers.
In Ælfred’s Britain moneyers operated from London, Canterbury, Winchester, Exeter, Gloucester, Leicester, Lincoln and York, the latter three under the entrepreneurial influence of Danish kings or jarls. In the time of his grandson, Æðelstan, more than thirty mints existed, of which London and Chester were the most prolific by far.13 By the time of the Domesday survey of 1086 more than fifty towns had produced coins. London alone had more than ten moneyers at any one time. If one wants to rank the Insular towns by their coinage production (as good a measure as any), London is followed distantly by Lincoln, then York, Winchester, Chester, Thetford, Exeter, Stamford, Canterbury, Norwich, Southwark and Oxford, in that order. Four of these towns (Lincoln, Thetford, Norwich and Stamford) were substantially created under Danish lordship. The impressive self-confidence of Ælfred’s heirs in Wessex and the south was matched by that of the much more obscure but no less influential jarls and duces of East Anglia and East Mercia, whose promotion of production and trade, unfettered perhaps by the conservative institutions and entrenched interests of southern lordship, provided much of the inspiration for West Saxon success and fuelled a new age of economic expansion through its towns and trading links.
The burhs founded as towns in the late ninth and early tenth centuries by Ælfred and his children did not, at first, succeed as urban centres. International and internal trade was stagnant. The supply of bullion accumulated by invading and defending armies seems to have been hoarded: to avoid theft and taxes and because, perhaps, there was nothing material to spend it on. The evidence from wills suggests that only after the middle of the tenth century did those who had accumulated significant quantities of loot in the campaigns of the 910s and later begin to bequeath it to a generation willing to open their lead chests and spend.14
The release of large amounts of cash coincided with the discovery of significant new silver deposits in Germany, with a revival of cross-Channel trade§ and with the monastic reform movement under King Eadgar. Churches were newly built or rebuilt. In the burhs, tenements and cross streets began to fill in and new workshops for pottery, metal- and leather-working were established. The Danelaw territories of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were the most prosperous in lowland Britain, a function not just of entrepreneurial savvy and proximity to Continental markets but also, perhaps, because of the earlier fragmentation of great estates which allowed smaller, more enterprising landowners to exploit rural resources and adopt new technologies like the mouldboard plough.#
Once again lowland Britain’s accessibility, its abundant natural resources and excellent farmland fostered prosperity, and its kings sought with varying degrees of success to impose consistent rules for the conduct of trade, the resolution of disputes and the stability and quality of coinage. Their own wealth and power increased with the sophistication of state institutions and with the surplus of the land.
The concern of Æðelstan and his successors to legislate for the control of regional and local institutions is preserved in a document dating from the middle decades of the tenth century called the Hundred Ordinance. The need for such regulation arose from the process by which Mercian territories, both west and east, of Deniscan and Angelcynn alike, were divided into shires, each based on a burh. Wessex had long since been ‘shired’, but its old shire centres, the royal vills at Dorchester, Somerton, Wilton and Hamtun, largely lost their relevance in Ælfred’s defensive scheme, while the south-eastern counties retained older tribal and traditional centres. In the lands of the Danelaw fortified towns became the centres of fiscal administration and of the delivery of renders and justice.
With the exception of Stamford, which did not become a shire centre, the logic is impeccable: Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire were the lands controlled by such duces or jarls as Urm, the man who helped Óláfr on his Midland campaign of 941 and whose English-named daughter married the Norse king. The jarls were equated with ealdormen by Æðelstan, if we accept the persuasive testimony of his charter witness lists, and the size of their territories gave the new shires a natural congruence with those of Wessex and the south. Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire all, similarly, emerged as the territories at whose centres lay fortified towns. West Mercia is a more complex case and an argument has been made by David Hill and others that ancient polities, the folk territories of Hwicce, Magonsæte, Wrocansæte and Arosætna, were overridden by deliberate policy; and Eadweard is the favoured culprit.15 Thus, the ancient Mercian capital at Tamworth did not become a shire town but was left stranded on the margins of Staffordshire and Warwickshire.
; Æðelstan’s London Ordinance, the Friðgegyldum,∫ apparently set up for the benefit of its bishops and reeves, introduces hundred-men and the idea of collective responsibility for the execution of justice in London’s hinterland. The natural extension of this scheme to the hundredal divisions from which levies were raised to garrison the shire burhs and render burghal dues to them may have been conceived at the same time. There is no doubting its centralizing motivation, its design to overcome and overwhelm the inherent regionality of the lands south of the Humber.
The hundred itself was nominally an area assessed at 100 hides for rendering purposes, with a meeting place and vill at its centre, a minster, a market place and a cemetery for judicial executions.16 In practice, no such uniformity existed. At the time of the Domesday survey, Leicestershire comprised six hundreds, Devonshire thirty-two. Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were so large that they required an additional tier of administration, the third part, or Thrithing (Old Norse þriðjungr), which became the familiar Ridings. Neither they, nor the shires of the Danelaw, conformed to the hundredal ideal—instead, they were administered in equivalents called Wapentakes, from Old Norse vápnatak, a ‘taking of weapons’. The distinctness of the language is also reflected in separate legal customs in those areas long subject to Scandinavian influence, not least of which is the recognition by contemporaries and later Anglo-Norman legislators of ‘the Danelaw’ itself.17
In the Danelaw, compensation paid to a lord for the murder of one of his men varied with the dead man’s rank, not that of his lord. Another regional peculiarity was the fine called lahslit, a cover-all penalty applied to a variety of offences. I have already made mention of a Norse flavour to legal and fiscal provisions in Cheshire and Lancashire.Ω