by Adams, Max;
In the event, Eirík’s end came sooner than that of the erstwhile poetic troublemaker. In 954 the Northumbrians drove him from their kingdom; Northumbria submitted to Eadred and Archbishop Wulfstan was restored to episcopal dignity—this time of a less contentious, southern bishopric at Dorchester on Thames. Oswulf, the Lord of Bamburgh, was given the power of a subregulus over the lands north of the Humber. Only Roger of Wendover offers the detail of Eirík’s fate, telling of a Bernician coup sponsored by the king of the West Saxons:
King Eric was treacherously killed by Earl Maccus in a certain lonely place which is called Stainmore, with his son Haeric and his brother Ragnald, betrayed by Earl Oswulf; and then afterwards King Eadred ruled in these districts.28
Stainmore is the east–west pass on the old Roman route across the Pennines between Cumbria and Yorkshire, now the A66: a grim, bleak place to end a life. Eiríkr had no successor in York or the lands north of the Humber.
*
The end of the Scandinavian kingdom of York and the final unification of a kingdom that might be called England seems a reasonable place to draw a line under a narrative of the Viking Age. But the truth is, that narrative does not end in 954. On Eadred’s death a year later†† the kingdom was disputed between his sons Eadwig and Eadgar, with the Watling Street line once again conceived as a possible frontier. Only after 959 can Eadgar be said to have ruled over something resembling a kingdom of England. Twenty years later Scandinavian raids resumed. From 991 English kings once again paid tribute to Viking warlords; burhs were refortified or constructed de novo. Two kings of England in the early eleventh century were Danish. In 1066 further invasion attempts were launched. The first, led by the legendary Norwegian warrior King Haraldr harðráði, failed to overcome a desperate English defence in the North, at Stamford Bridge. The other, led by William of Normandy, descendant of the Viking chief Hrólfr, was conspicuously successful at Hastings.
*
In the 960s a trader crossing the Channel from Rouen to Britain in a smallish seagoing vessel, a faering, might carry a cargo of lava quern stones, as we know the Graveney boat did when it sank sometime in the tenth century.‡‡ The craft would accommodate one or two passengers, perhaps clerics bringing news of the monastic reform movement in Francia to sympathetic clerics like Dunstan, recently bishop of London and about to be elevated to the archiepiscopal see at Canterbury.
55. ‘OHTHERE TOLD HIS LORD, King Ælfred, that he lived the furthest north of all Norwegians...’ The contents of a reconstructed cargo vessel at Roskilde Ship Museum, Denmark.
The færing passing up the broad, silty estuary of the Thames would land not at the deserted strand of Lundenwic, the defunct and largely empty trading settlement of the eighth century, but at wharves a mile or so downstream at Lundenburg. There may by now have been a wooden bridge spanning the river here, joining the defended burhs on either side at Southwark and in the old Roman city. Boats might moor at one of the stathes constructed in the late ninth century—at Æðeredes hyd, perhaps, on what is now Thames Street, before their skippers presented themselves to the portgerefa to state their business and pay their tolls.
Ælfred’s refounding of the city after 886, with military, political and economic motives in mind, had borne fruit. Markets now existed along Cheapside§§ and, perhaps, at Aldgate. The church built long ago by the first Roman missionaries of the English church at Paulesbyrig was now sufficiently large and important that King Æðelred II would be buried there in 1016. As we know from Æðelstan’s London Ordinance, the reeves and bishop of the burh were sufficiently jealous of their rights and attuned to the benefits of peaceful trade that they had organized themselves into a guild to protect their interests.
More trading potential lay upriver. Exchanging quern stones and Rhineland silver for King Eadgar’s pennies whose portrait bore the imprimatur of the late Anglo-Saxon state, the merchant would now find himself within a single economic entity, with a single coinage and, in theory at least, a single set of rules governing his opportunities and responsibilities. He could not trade on a Sunday, for example—at least, not without a sweetener to the reeve.
A hundred and fifty years previously, at the beginning of the Viking Age, a færing continuing upriver would have passed minsters at Kingston, Chertsey and Dorchester. Kingston was now a favoured site for the inauguration of kings; Chertsey lay, if not abandoned and ruined, then dormant, awaiting its refounding in 964. The trader’s passengers might have taken more than passing interest in its potential.
The Viking stronghold at Reading, now four generations old, must have been no more than a grassy embankment by the river, a curiosity. Further along the Thames, past fish traps, flash weirs and increasing numbers of water mills, lay the indomitable and enduring strongholds of the Ælfredan project: Sashes Island (Sceaftessige: Sceaf’s Isle), Wallingford and Oxford, controlling passage along the great trading corridor and taking tolls off merchants. By the 960s these burhs were truly towns, their road frontages so desirable that cross streets were now filling the spaces inside the walls, giving them their characteristic gridiron plans. The trader must make himself known to the portgerefa and, probably, distribute a few choice gifts and the soft currency of news and downriver gossip, to oil the wheels of commerce.
At the farthest navigable reach of the river stood its last burh, Cricklade, one of those which never developed into a town despite its proximity to a network of roads leading in all directions. Now, the traveller wishing to head north and east into less familiar territory must journey overland: no navigable river crosses England’s timeless internal boundary. A day’s walk from Cricklade would bring the traveller to Cirencester, to where Guðrum’s defeated Viking army retreated in 878 after Edington; where the Roman amphitheatre must still have been visible and where royal councils (and the tax gatherers so hated by the poet of the Armes Prydein Fawr) met in the tenth century. From here roads led along the Fosse Way south-west to Exeter or north-east towards Leicester and Lincoln. Another ancient road led to the burh at Gloucester, where the Mercian royal mausoleum stood in its minster and whence vessels might ply up and down the River Severn, with ferrymen taking passengers over into the British kingdoms of Gwent and Morgannwg.
I will suppose that my hypothetical trader chooses a route just north of east, along Akemennestraete and at Bicester, where an ancient minster may have survived into the tenth century, then turns north to see what opportunities await in the so-called Danelaw. Towcester (Roman Lactodorum), like Tamworth, was a burh built directly on Watling Street: an offensive frontier garrison whose value, evident in the Roman period and, perhaps, long before, was its control of the river heads of the Great Ouse and the Nene, as well as the road route between London and Chester. Who can say if entry to the Danelaw at this point was controlled, or if the traveller experienced the feeling of coming into a different land: new dialects, new customs to learn; different dress and ways of counting; more risks and opportunities?
The dispersed Midland farms and hamlets of the tenth century had begun a slow, complex process of nucleation into what would become the open-field villages so recognizable in the medieval and later countryside. Fortified towns, orderly and regulated, were replacing minsters as central places, although often at the same sites. A warming climate, the king’s peace and raised productivity breathed new life into the rural economy; markets drew produce, crafts and trade, concentrating labour and profit. The entrepreneurial talents of Danish jarls, holds and traders, amplified by their material wealth and by the fragmentation of very large estates, energized a farming landscape now open to technical and social innovation.
Any traveller arriving at the Anglo-Danish town of Northampton, set in a typically-Scandinavian D-shaped earthwork enclosing a 60-acre site north of the Nene and east of its tributary, the Brampton Nene, must have been impressed by its busy-ness. Up until the reign of Æðelred and Æðelflæd Hamtun, as it was then, could boast of one of the largest and most impressive buildings in Britain, a uniq
ue stone hall, more than 100 feet (30 m) long and constructed using mortar from rotary mixers excavated close by during the 1970s.29 Whether it lay at the heart of a minster or palace complex, or both, is unclear. It was demolished at the end of the ninth century or the beginning of the tenth; by what agency we also cannot say, even if there is a temptation to blame the mycel here.
Like the thriving ecclesiastical production settlements at Portmahomack and Brandon, the site of the great hall was turned over to industrial use, from whose hearths and rubbish pits pennies of the East Anglian St Eadmund coinage have been retrieved. Now Northampton began to produce wheel-thrown pottery, unknown in contemporary Wessex. Iron, copper, silver and bone were worked here, providing any number of commercial opportunities for traders passing through or deliberately courting its craftsmen and markets. Norwegian hone-stones have been found here as well as the bones of saltwater fish. By the 960s Northampton supported a mint.
If, as seems likely, the Nene was navigable as far upstream as the town, it enjoyed excellent access to the Wash and the North Sea. Embarking there and coasting downriver on the streamway, the traveller would pass a magnificent new church at Earls Barton, under construction some time in the late tenth century, and an important estate centre and incipient manor, with its own church and cemetery, at Raunds, subject of extensive excavations in the 1970s and 1980s. Further downstream lay Oundle, a foundation (and the burial place) of St Wilfrid in the seventh century.
As the Nene valley opens out on to the Fens at Peterborough, the river passes beneath the magnificent walls of Peterborough Cathedral and its bishops’ palace. Medehamstede, as the seventh-century minster foundation was called, is supposed to have been destroyed by Ívarr’s mycel here in 869 and not refounded until the late 960s. The site might have been deserted in mid-century; but the survival of elements of its pre-Viking archives and of the remarkable Hedda stone bearing portraits of robed figures, which is displayed in the present cathedral, are hints that some form of community may have been sustained through the decades of uncertainty.
In the tenth century Wisbech must have lain on or close to the shores of the Wash; perhaps there was a beach market or harbour here. For those sailing north out of those shallow, sheltered but fickle waters, the east-facing North Sea coast, where so many of Britain’s celebrated early church foundations had flourished under royal patronage, was no longer a focus of ecclesiastical politics or trade. Humber, Trent and Ouse all gave access to inland towns and trade. Minster sites at Whitby, Jarrow, Lindisfarne and beyond retained some human presence, but none of the splendour with which they had been endowed in the seventh century; none of the power. Perhaps a week’s sail to the north, a royal cult centre survived and thrived at Rígmonaid, St Andrews in Fife, where King Constantín had retired in 943 and where he died in 952.
Whether the kings of Alba or the Norse lords of the Orkneys ruled Moray and Fortriu at this time is not clear; but their dominance of the Northern Isles was permanent, at least into the fifteenth century when Orkney and Shetland were finally ceded by the kings of Norway to Scotland. The intrepid traveller crossing the Pentland Firth (Petlandsfjörð: the fjord of Pictland) to Orkney and then Shetland would have encountered islands now thoroughly Norse in language and material culture. Early native settlements seem often to have been directly overlain by characteristically Norse houses. Whether that cultural colonization was aggressive and involved displacing or rendering the native population servile, or whether it was gradual, peaceful and co-operative, through marriage and purchase, is rarely evident from the archaeology. Current academic opinion inclines to the former. The Pictish variety of the British languages was not intelligible to the Norse speaker; nor was the Goidelic of the Irish. Bilingualism must have been common; but place names tell overwhelmingly a story of Norsification; and no Pictish settlement form overlies an obviously Norse structure.
The more intrepid sailors, pulling their boat up onto the sandy beaches of an inlet at the southern tip of Shetland close to Sumburgh Head, must have been impressed by the thriving farm complex whose early twentieth-century excavators knew it as Jarlshof. The quality of life, the domestic sophistication and solidity of the drystone and turf-built houses, byres, smithies and ancillary structures must have matched anything on the British mainland outside the royal palaces. The late ninth- or early tenth-century longhouse of the second building phase bears comparison in size with the great stone hall at Northampton. Kitchen blocks, paving, internal ovens and sweat-lodges would all, further south, be regarded as markers of high status, like the courtyard complex of the ‘private burh’ at Goltho. Each generation made its own improvements, and there is a strong sense that in Norse hands the settlement here, founded in the Bronze Age and occupied more or less continuously ever since, was the stable familial homestead of a wealthy, powerful clan, perhaps of a trader like the Norwegian Ohthere (who had given an account of his travels to King Ælfred) or a hold like Ingimundr.30
A ship’s crew landing at any one of dozens of sheltered harbours and beaches in the Orkney archipelago, a day’s sail to the south-west, must have been equally impressed, not just by the technical achievement of the settlements but by their numbers and by the wealth and fertility of the land, which supported large herds of cattle and prosperous arable farms. If we are to believe the evidence of Orkneyinga Saga the islands were subject to some form of devolved Norwegian royal authority. In its early Norse phase Orkney came under the direct rule of Norwegian kings, especially the famous Haraldr Hárfagri; and, subsequently, to those wishing to demonstrate their independence from him. By the middle of the tenth century Orkney may have come under the sway of Haraldr blátǫnn Gormsson, Haraldr ‘Bluetooth’ (ruled c. 958–986), often regarded as the founder of the Danish medieval state, whose conversion to Christianity is so convincingly monumentalized at Jelling.31
At the north-westernmost point of Orkney’s mainland the aspiring trader or warrior must surely have presented himself at the splendid court of the jarl who ruled from the massive natural fortress on Brough of Birsay and at nearby Buckquoy, later seat of the earls of Orkney.## But other impressive settlement complexes also existed by the tenth century to complement the wealth of Norse-style burials, hoards and place names that give the islands their uniquely Scandinavian flavour: at Pool, on Sanday, at Skaill near Deerness and at Saevar Howe.
56. VIEW ACROSS THE TIDAL CAUSEWAY from Brough of Birsay to Buckquoy, Mainland, Orkney.
Orkney was not peripheral to the Atlantic Norse world, but central: its colonizers did not just pillage and displace its indigenes; they exploited the archipelago’s riches as fully as its famous Neolithic and Bronze Age inhabitants, whose rich cultural and spiritual lives they matched fully. The great twelfth-century cathedral of St Magnus in Kirkwall is an enduring monument to Norse wealth, ambition and success, just as it is to the endurance, through these troubled times, of the institutional church. One could hardly blame our hypothetical trader if, on acquaintance with the opportunities presented by Orkney, he decided not to move on, but to stay.
* A Brittonic name, from Uisura, meaning ‘flowing water’. Watts 2004.
† See map, p. 322.
‡ See above, p. 185.
§ Dorestad, for example, suffered terminal decline in the late ninth century, only to be replaced in the tenth century by a site close by at Tiel at the confluence of the Rivers Waal and Linge.
# The mouldboard is a curved plate that turns the sod over after it has been cut and split by the share and coulter.
∫ VI Æðelstan: see above, Chapter 11.
Ω See above, Chapter 7, in relation to Ingimund’s invasion of Cheshire.
≈ III Æðelred. The text of the code is translated in EHD Charters and laws 43. Whitelock 1979, 439.
∂ Shire courts met twice a year under the auspices of, at first, the ealdorman and bishop and, later, the shire-reeve.
π The minster survived as an institution; so, miraculously, does the crypt built by another troublesome pries
t, St Wilfrid, in the late seventh century. ASC ‘D’ Worcester MS.
∆ The expulsion is recorded in the northern annal Historia Regum under 950.
** Scholars have long recognized that the prose narrative of the saga is largely a contrivance to link verses of skaldic poetry and create a coherent story of them. The historicity and plausibility of the saga is heavily compromised, but seems to retain substantial elements of folk-history which often form our only potential sources for these events. Readers must judge their value for themselves.
†† Among many generous bequests he left ‘his people 1600 pounds to the end that they may redeem themselves from a famine and from a heathen army if they need’. EHD 107. Whitelock 1979, 555.
‡‡ See Chapter 2, p. 74.
§§ The Old English word ceap, like the surname Chapman and the Norse variant Kaup, as in Kaupang and Kopeland, identifies the site or profession of trading, markets and purchase.
## See above, p. 258.
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Endpapers
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Picture Credits
Acknowledgements