The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  At Tadcaster the road to York veers north-eastwards to take advantage of the higher ground provided by glacial moraines. Something of that city’s Roman grandeur survived into the seventh century, but it was not recognisable as a functioning urban political unit like the great cities of Frankia. There was no judicial function, no military command, no authority to organise maintenance of its dilapidated defences. Under Æthelfrith’s rule, indeed, it may have been to all intents and purposes ignored as a centre of royal power; effectively abandoned. Its status as an emporium serving the court and its establishment as a new seat of ecclesiastical power—not by any means unconnected developments—probably date from Edwin’s reign alone, as does the attempt to restore sections of its Roman walls. The high ground of the legionary fortress and principia on which York Minster stands today were in Edwin’s day surrounded by the periodically flooded plains of the rivers Ouse and Foss. Edwin’s ambitions for its revival may have had much to do with its history as the city where Constantine the Great was created Emperor of Rome in 306; they may also have had something to do with the motivations of his erstwhile nocturnal visitor Paulinus, who had seen Rome and knew what an imperial city ought to look like.

  Deira, the land of the peoples of the Derwent: one of a number of rivers bearing the same British name derived from the Brythonic word for oak, it seems to flow the wrong way, from the sea inland. Its headwaters are indeed close to the sea near Filey but the clue to its course is its origin as a glacial melt-water lake draining the North York Moors and the chalk Wolds. In the Mesolithic period, some several thousand years bc, it was an area rich in natural resources, exploited by hunter-gatherers. The lake drained, as the river does, westwards into the Vale of York, via the Roman cavalry fort at Malton and the village of Stamford Bridge, possibly the Roman Derventio and site of the dramatic pre-Hastings battle of 1066 in which Norwegian King Harald Hardrada was cut down by his ill-fated Saxon namesake.

  To the east and south of the River Derwent the rolling chalk uplands of the Yorkshire Wolds were densely occupied during the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age. By the fifth and sixth centuries ad some of the earliest concentrations of Germanic pagan cremation cemeteries were to be found here: at Sancton (the largest in England), Garton Slack and elsewhere.65 Many Wolds burials of the Early Medieval period have been recovered from prehistoric burial mounds. Somewhere along the west edge of the Wolds was a splendid Early Medieval palace: near Goodmanham or perhaps at Place Newton near Wintringham. North of the Wolds the edge of the Vale of Pickering has revealed an extraordinary landscape of settlements of which the Anglian village at West Heslerton on the southern edge has become celebrated in archaeology for the heroic scale and excellence of its excavation and for the enormous wealth of information it has revealed about the prosaic lives of its inhabitants.

  For one thing, West Heslerton gives the lie to the idea that there was any great physical invasion of Germanic peoples. Recent genetic studies have shown that, contrary to what Bede and generations of historians and archaeologists believed, most of the modern British population have been here since the dimmest days of prehistory.66 At Heslerton this has been confirmed despite the apparently contradictory evidence of ‘new’ building types, foreign artefacts and a general reshuffling of landscape elements. It used to be thought that the grubenhäuser or sunken-floored buildings, big timber halls and village layouts typical of Early Medieval settlements must have belonged to a wave of Germanic farmer-settlers; that the exotic artefacts found in cemeteries belonged to those invaders and that their settlements gave us our English place-names. Now it seems that most of the ‘new’ settlements had been there all along; that the indigenous British were adopting the language and fashions of a small number of immigrants. To offer a recent example, the adoption of and enthusiasm for cricket, Western dress and the English law code ought not to be taken as evidence for a mass invasion of India by the British in the nineteenth century. Settlements like West Heslerton, especially those near the south and east coasts, were susceptible to external cultural influences; they were not over-run. And there is very little evidence, if any, that these rural settlements were destroyed by violence or even that they were routinely made defensible by ramparts or stockades.

  Whatever opaque forces transformed Roman Britain into Anglo-Saxon England, it was not mass immigration or invasion. It seems more likely that the general economic and political tensions of the fourth and fifth centuries prompted a reversion to regionalism, that of the native British tribes, and even to localism. The world shrank a little. The British, having been used to more or less peace and quiet, took to hiring foreign mercenaries for their protection and it was natural that, even in relatively small numbers, those with the arms, ability and experience of authority began to assume local, then regional control. Whether or not such developments looked or felt like revolution, or anarchy, may largely depend on how long they took to come about; and that question is an enduring if potentially solvable one for archaeologists.

  The Vale of Pickering and indeed a large part of the lands of Deira were agriculturally productive even if much low-lying land had become waterlogged in the fifth and sixth centuries. It was a land, as Bede himself said, rich in grain, cattle and draught animals.67 There were no great swathes of abandoned farmland for immigrants to exploit. The rural population of the north was as it had been: static, tied to the land by bonds of service and render, and subject not to displacement but to the introduction of new ideas, styles of clothing, buildings and gods under the influence of its peripatetic lords. Some of these lords probably did come, as Hengest and Horsa had, from across the sea with their warbands: their influence seems to have been entirely disproportionate to their numbers.

  Heslerton’s excavator Dominic Powlesland believes that the classic diagnostic feature of early English settlements, the so-called sunken-floored building or grubenhaus, was not the grub-hut of early twentieth-century imagination but a grain store with a raised timber floor to protect its contents from flood and rodents.68 His evidence of animal bones—several tens of thousands of them from this one site—is that sheep, goats and cattle were kept not so much for eating as for wool, milk, hides and traction. He thinks the inhabitants mostly ate porridge. Their settlements, which one might justifiably call proto-villages, were well laid out with clusters of buildings devoted to crafts, cereal processing and so on, and a hierarchy of housing styles. They forged their own iron and probably had a corn mill, controlled by some sort of ‘manorial’ centre. They were buried in a cemetery in graves that suggest family groupings, exactly as one would expect in any English churchyard. The settlement was undefended. That it represents continuity in the landscape is shown by its location at the site of a Romano-British shrine and spring. These springs are keys to the location of Early Medieval settlement in the area. On the Wolds massif itself there is only one permanent stream, the Gypsy Race; where the chalk overlies a clay band, along the north scarp of the Wolds, there is a line of springs that attracted settlement from well before the arrival of the Roman legions.

  The ordinary inhabitants of Deira had access to exotica: the querns made from Niedermendig lava (imported from the Rhineland), the ivory and cowrie shells, are just the materially robust remnant of goods which might also have included imported dyestuffs and leather goods. These might have been obtained from beach markets along the Yorkshire coast: at Filey, perhaps, but also from further afield. There is a cluster of wic-names along the Yorkshire coast between Hornsea and Filey which seems to indicate the sites of various periodic beach-markets and which is paralleled by a cluster near Lindisfarne in Bernicia. The essential sense of continuity of the territories and settlements in this area is shown by the remarkable coincidence of Bronze or Iron Age boundaries and medieval parishes along the north edge of the Wolds, each with its manor and village, prehistoric burial mounds and palisaded knoll site, such as that at Staple Howe.69 Today the parish boundaries run across the grain of the land from high on the Wolds, where they l
ink late Bronze Age burial mounds, right down to the River Derwent. This reflects an ancient division of the landscape in which each community had access to the full range of resources from hill pasture to spring, arable fields, water meadows and river.

  Whatever upheavals were visited on the people of East Yorkshire by the deeds of kings, the human landscape of its indigenous people had not much changed between the rules of Constantine and Edwin. There is evidence for a decline in climate to cooler, wetter conditions; there are signs that some cultivated land was abandoned to secondary woodland; the population dropped from its late Roman peak of perhaps five million in Britain, but there is no evidence of catastrophe, no wholesale exodus of British peasants fleeing Germanic conquerors. Field, pasture, fence and hedge would be recognisable to any small-scale twentieth-century farmer from the east of Europe, as would the cycles of the year dominated by plough, sickle, grain store and sheepfold.

  The scores or hundreds of West Heslertons which must have existed across Deira, evidenced by the density of early English place-names and increasing numbers of archaeologically identified settlements and cemeteries, demonstrates the competence and viability of Early Medieval life. It also highlights a negative: there is very little else in the early seventh-century landscape. There were no functioning towns, perhaps anywhere in Britain, in which civic activities we would recognise as urban—planned streets, public buildings, permanent markets and industrial zones—might have carried on between the fifth and eighth centuries. Markets were temporary, perhaps even opportunistic. Gatherings were seasonal, tribal, customary. Armies were maintained not by conscription but by personal loyalties that collapsed on the death of their lords. Bridges might be maintained in certain critical locations, but most Roman examples fell into disuse to be replaced by fords and ferry crossings. Dykes were occasionally built by collective enterprise in Yorkshire, in East Anglia and Wessex; but not many, and we cannot be sure of their function or longevity. Roman roads were, in the main, maintained by use rather than repair. Justice and the rendering of food rents and services were controlled by customary law. The only features of the human landscape that reflected the social complexity of society were the estate centres on which these functions converged. For Deira, so far, few of these have been identified, but there is no reason to suppose that they did not exist as they demonstrably did in Bernicia. They may well lie, as yet undetected, beneath the fields and farmyards of later manor houses.

  Where were the borders of Deira, if indeed such a term as border is relevant in this period? It used to be thought, and quite reasonably, that the rivers Humber and Tyne, or possibly Tees, marked the Deiran marches to south and north; to the east was the sea and to the west lay the Pennine British territory of Elmet, its heartlands in the region around Leeds (Loidis) and perhaps defined on the east by the rivers Wharfe and Don. The extent of this enigmatic kingdom is to this day indicated by place-names like Sherburn-in-Elmet and Barwick-in-Elmet, which imply that Edwin was skirting it on his route north from the Idle. One credible suggestion is that the Roman road running north to south through Yorkshire may have been identified as a boundary, but at what period is not clear.70 The northern edge of Deira is more problematic. This is partly because of a lack of historical references to a boundary, but also because there appears to have been a fundamental shift in the dynamics of borders between the fifth and seventh centuries. Many of the territories to emerge from the mists of the fifth century seem to have been defined by watersheds, so that major river systems were at the core of their lands. Examples that survived into the historic period include Hwicce, at the head of the Severn Estuary, and Arosæte, around the River Arrow in Wiltshire.71 Some time between the beginning of the sixth century and the end of the seventh, rivers became boundaries, not cores; and this process is likely to have coincided with many small kingdoms being subsumed into larger territories to form the so-called Heptarchy of the middle Saxon period: Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, Kent, East Anglia, Essex and Sussex.

  In Edwin’s and Oswald’s day there were many more. A number of these survived to be recorded in the so-called Tribal Hidage, a list of tributary states dating to the seventh or eighth century; many others are unrecorded but can be partially reconstructed from place-name and other evidence. Between Lindsey (roughly modern Lincolnshire) and Elmet, for example, there seems to have been a small polity or petty kingdom called Hæthfelth or Hatfield consisting of the lower Trent and Ouse fenlands at the head of the Wash.72 Further north, the lands to the north-east of, and including, Catræth may have formed a small kingdom based on the Roman fortress there (or perhaps an older fortress on the castle mound at Richmond) and the fertile lowlands of the Tees Valley.73 A pagan Anglo-Saxon cemetery of more than a hundred and twenty individuals excavated at Norton, near Stockton-on-Tees, offers an intriguing look at a sixth-century population belonging to this putative petty kingdom, a mixture of British and ‘Germanic’ styles of burial and grave goods with links across and outside the region and artefacts from as far away as Frankia.74 If nothing else, it warns us of the dangers of making any sharp ethnic or cultural divisions between native and foreigner: drinking Coke and eating McDonald’s burgers does not turn a Japanese youth into an American any more than a British household furnished in a popular Swedish style makes its inhabitants ethnically or culturally Ikean.

  Deira itself might have originated as the lands belonging to the River Derwent: the southern Vale of York and the Vale of Pickering along with the Wolds. The work of the historical geographer Brian Roberts suggests that what he calls cultural corelands, a similar concept to the Irish tribal tuath based on the magh, or fertile plain, help to explain the existence of these polities. Their expansion in the sixth century to the point where conflict with neighbours was inevitable can now only be speculatively reconstructed. But if that is the case, then the idea of the River Tyne as a boundary between Deira and Bernicia is a false concept, even if it might apply in a limited sense to the later Anglo-Saxon period. More likely, the Tyne Basin and Valley were the core of the British kingdom of Bryneich which later became Anglian Bernicia. That being the case, Roberts argues, the converging edges of Deira and Bernicia in Oswald’s day lay somewhere in the less fertile parts of north Durham.

  It is unlikely that Æthelfrith, even in his exceptionally long rule, exercised what we would recognise as administrative control over a united kingdom. These were separate states forced into a mutually reluctant marriage in which tribute flowed from Deira to Bernicia. The fact that Edwin was able to exercise a similar control, but with the tribute flowing the other way, argues against, rather than for, their interdependency as a viable single kingdom. The Deiran nobility, having no acceptable candidate of their own and having been politically allied to Bernicia by the marriage of Æthelfrith to Acha, had no choice but to accept the rule of the lord of Bamburgh. Edwin, in turn, was able to exercise tributary control over Bernicia because its nobility had no other credible candidates (they had fled to Dál Riata). Æthelfrith’s sons did, at least, have a claim on Deira: their mother was a Deiran princess. Edwin did not attempt to ally himself with the Bernician nobility by marriage. For one thing, he already had sons by a Mercian princess (no doubt a matter of distress to Bernicians); for another, when he did remarry in the tenth year of his reign—and we do not know the fate of Coenburh—he chose to marry a Kentish Christian princess. But that is another story.

  *1These are tributary kingdoms named in the seventh- or eighth-century Tribal Hidage. See Yorke 1990.

  *2Twelve hundred years later, in similar circumstances, William Blake would warn Tom Paine of his impending arrest by Government spies just in time for him to make the same dash across the Channel to France.

  VI

  King’s gambit

  Leax sceal on wæle mid

  sceote scriðan

  Salmon must glide with

  trout in the pool

  Edwin’s first task on gaining the kingship of Deira was to secure his kingdom against its enemies
, internal and external. Politics could come later; the first decade of his rule was spent establishing his borders, subjecting states to his tributary control and demonstrating to the world that he was the supreme military power in the land. The swiftness with which Edwin was apparently able to assert control over the North reflects both his own strategic abilities and Rædwald’s new-found authority as overking. Edwin might count on his diplomatic and military support, and his reassuring presence on the east flank of Mercia, although he would also have been obliged to fight on Rædwald’s behalf in the event of war with his western neighbour; he probably rendered tribute in the portable forms of cattle and booty to the East Anglian treasury. It is an intriguing possibility that one of the most magnificent items in the Sutton Hoo treasure, the great bronze hanging bowl, might have been a gift from Edwin to his saviour and lord: its exquisite La Tène enamelled hook-mounts are of northern British provenance (it was recovered inside a bowl which had come from Coptic Egypt), although in its last owner’s hands it was repaired by a distinctively Anglian craftsman.75 Ironically, the beautiful little rotating pedestal-mounted bronze trout which adorns the inside of the bowl has Christian connotations which may or may not have been lost on its ultimate recipient.

  On Æthelfrith’s death Oswald, at just thirteen years old, was too young to challenge for his father’s kingdom and as yet unproven in battle—hence Acha’s apparent determination to spirit her sons away to safety. Eanfrith, his older half-brother, was for whatever reason disinclined to try his hand. Edwin’s decisive military victory on the River Idle, backed by Rædwald, ensured that Bernicia submitted to him in 617. Having received oaths from the political elite of Northumbria, Edwin’s immediate priority was to secure the kingdom from pretenders. There may have been Bernician candidates, other descendants of Ida hanging around; but we hear nothing of them until a later generation, in Bede’s day, brought civil strife to Northumbria.