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Historical Note
Glossary
About Victoria Whitworth
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Historical Note
Donmouth is a real place, yet no one knows where it was. Inevitably, therefore, the maps in this book are almost as fictional as the narrative. In 757/8, a century before this story begins, the Pope wrote to the King of Northumbria, demanding that the king return to their rightful abbot three monasteries which he had confiscated. Two of these are the well-known North Yorkshire sites of Stonegrave and Coxwold; the third is Donaemuthe. No site of this name is known, and yet the name itself tells us that it must be where a river known as the Don flows into the sea. Of the various candidates, I have chosen the Humber estuary, and the borderland of moor and marsh between the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia. However, you will not find my landscape on any map, and the modern, drained and reclaimed landscape of the region is very different from how it lay twelve centuries ago. Much has also been lost to coastal erosion. The shifting landscape and the ambiguous evidentiary status of Donmouth are like folds in the space–time continuum, allowing me to slip my river, estuary, hill and salt marsh seamlessly into the real geography of the Humber hinterland.
Further gaps and ambiguities govern other aspects of my story. In 866 York fell to the viking ‘Great Army’. The way in which that army’s leaders exploited the politics of Northumbria’s Church and State to establish themselves in the landscape between the Humber and the Tees suggests that they were very well informed; yet there is little in the historical record to tell us how they gained that information. The kings and archbishops of ninth-century Northumbria are hardly more than names: we cannot be clear about their family relationships, their alliances, or how they died. One of the few facts that we do know is that Northumbria was embroiled in civil war when the vikings invaded. Please note that this is the first paragraph in this book in which the word viking appears, and that it is lower case on purpose. The word means pirate, and it is a job description, not an ethnicity. Nor is it a word which we find in contemporary English sources, applied to the bands of first raiders, then invaders, who are recorded from 793 onwards. The ideas exploited in this story – that there were Baltic and Scandinavian traders and wandering entertainers travelling the coasts of Eastern England who were in the pay of viking warlords, and that those warlords were themselves ready to take up the role of mercenaries on the different sides of the Northumbrian factions – are plausible hypotheses, but the evidence does not survive. I am indebted here to the work of Shane McLeod; and very grateful to Clare Downham for discussions about the nature of the viking trade diaspora, and the way in which such mercantile networks are based fundamentally on trust and shared interests. Her argument that the vikings and the churchmen formed mutually beneficial alliances from very early on in their encounters is powerful and persuasive. There is no viking attack on Northumbria recorded in the 850s: of course this need not mean that there were no attacks, but for the purposes of my story I have chosen to read the record in this way. The evidence provided by coins suggests that there was disruption in Northumbrian politics in the mid-ninth century, but this could equally well have been caused by the civil strife attested in the chronicles.
One fascinating type of coin evidence illustrates both the complexity and the ambiguity of the data. In the eighth and ninth centuries the various English kingdoms had established a consensus on currency, the widely accepted and standardized silver penny, weighing 1/240 of a pound, often beautifully designed, and minted under licence from the kings and occasionally the archbishops. A single silver penny represented a sizable amount of wealth, and cannot have been used for the smaller, everyday transactions. Northumbria, uniquely, moved away from the silver-penny model in the ninth century, and introduced a small debased silver/bronze coin known as the styca, with comparatively crude imagery, and worth much less than the silver penny. A previous generation of historians and numismatists interpreted this as indicating the isolated and backward nature of Northumbria; but these coins are now being seen by some revisionist scholars as evidence of a sophisticated economy, focused on external trade.
These coins are perhaps the best contemporary source for the politics as well as the economics of mid-ninth-century Northumbria, which are painfully obscure. We have a list of names of kings, found both on coins and in annals, but almost no recorded events, and the dates of those kings are very hard to pin down. The evidence of the coins does not match easily with that from the annals (which are themselves contradictory). Although I have placed Osberht on the throne in this story, as he is generally thought to have succeeded in around 850, other scholars have wanted to put the start of his reign a decade or more later. Almost the only thing we know about Osberht is that his civil war with the non-royal claimant Ælle (whose name I have expanded to Alred) was entrenched enough to continue even after the viking assault on York on 1 November 866. Nor do we know much about Archbishop Wulfhere, other than his dates (to which the same caveat applies).
Historians and archaeologists of Anglo-Saxon England may recognize aspects of the two excavated sites which underpin my vision of Donmouth: Brandon in Suffolk and Flixborough in north Lincolnshire, just south of the Humber. Both of these are complex sites, unrecorded in the written record, with many buildings and rich finds, including convincing evidence of literacy and Christian practice. They have been published to a very high standard. The debate rages as to whether they should be read as monasteries, as secular aristocratic residences, or some sort of hybrid. They also contribute to a wider academic debate about the extent to which the complex, wealthy and largely sheep-based economy of the High Middle Ages can be traced back into the Anglo-Saxon period. I have used elements of this, combined with those little bronze stycas, to paint a portrait of a rural centre combining ecclesiastical and secular elite foci with links to local, national and international markets, and royal and episcopal elites, specializing in high-quality wool and treated skins.
Despite these and other excavations, the built environment of the middle Anglo-Saxon elite remains frustratingly elusive. Here I am profoundly indebted to John Blair for stimulating conversations, and in particular for his allowing me access to his then-unpublished research. The conclusion may be drawn that regional power at this period was not yet entrenched in particular dynasties; that prosperous households were all on much of a level; that any one of these might do well in one generation, but the next might not be so favoured – especially as partible inheritance is likely to have been practised, making it hard to retain wealth in a small number of hands across the generations. Posts in the royal household were awarded on merit rather than only on family connections. A good analogy is probably with the society depicted in the Icelandic sagas of prosperous peasants, some of whom, by wit, canniness, charm, brute force and/or a willingness to take risks, did much better than their neighbours. The absence of archaeological evidence for notably grander residences in the eighth and ninth centuries means that the houses inhabited by people like Radmer and Tilmon may have been sumptuously decorated, but the glamour and luxury with which they surrounded themselves was portable, more like the trappings of a stage-set than the kind of long-term investment in statement buildings which becomes visible from the tenth century onwards. It is worth remembering that these people would have spent a significant part of their lives in tents, at royal and local assemblies and church synods as well as on military campaign, and that temporary dwellings and portable display would have been an integral part of the way they presented themselves to the world.
Perhaps the hardest kind of story to write set in this period is a love story. The vast majority of Anglo-Saxon writing, in Latin or Old English, is mediated through the Church, and one looks almost in vain for the kind
of love lyric common from Classical Antiquity, or the later Middle Ages. Explorations of sexual passion are rare, and often presented negatively. When we do read about a woman torn between loyalty to two different men, they are likely to be her brother and her son, fighting on different sides of a family feud. Loving women in Anglo-Saxon literature are typically shown alone, anxious, bereft and either grieving or anticipating grief, not romantically happy or erotically fulfilled. I have tried to rectify this, within the bounds of social and cultural plausibility.
I owe a great debt to Alex Woolf for exploring with me questions of age at marriage in early medieval Britain. The evidence is neither comprehensive nor consistent, and when we have details they are usually concerned with the very highest levels of society. However, we would be justified in imagining a world in which most girls would be married by fifteen or sixteen, often to men significantly older than themselves. It goes without saying that pregnancy and birth were often death sentences for mother, child, or both. Nonetheless, a girl probably had the right to refuse a suitor; she retained some economic independence in marriage; as a married woman she had considerable status within the household; and she could choose to end a marriage if she wanted to. Marriage was a social contract; it was not to become a religious ceremony for centuries.
I am sure that this story is riddled with anachronisms, although I have tried to keep them at bay. However, the gaps in our knowledge are huge, and range from the minutiae of everyday life to some very large questions of how society was structured and culture was practised. We know little about how the Anglo-Saxons stabled their horses, for example, and yet I have to put my horses somewhere: the needs of horses have not changed much over 1,200 years; and the word ‘horse-stall’ is found in Old English. Another example: I have given my travelling entertainers a drum, based on the Irish bodhrán, but this is simply wishful thinking. We have no evidence that drums were in use in this part of the world in the middle of the ninth century – but then again it’s hard to imagine that they were unknown. Dress is another problem. While the differences in dress between mid-ninth-century Scandinavian, eastern Baltic and Anglo-Saxon women would have been readily apparent to the casual observer, it is much less clear whether men’s dress would also have served as an ethnic identifier at a distance. Estate management is another problematic issue. Carolingian estate stewards kept written records (or some of them did), but we do not know much about how an Anglo-Saxon estate was administered. Similarly, we have very little idea of whether there were itinerant pedlars at this period. There were certainly merchants who sold exotic goods, but who they were, how they got their stock, how they sold it, and in what currency (barter, bullion or coin) it was paid for, are all grey areas. In the end, and inevitably, I have made a lot of this story up (it is a novel, after all), and if anyone better informed than me reads this book, please contact me through my website, vmwhitworth.co.uk, as I’d love to know more.
I have invented the Keg game, but it is based on a number of local sports, ancestral to games like rugby. The one I know best is the Orkney Ba’, fought out between Uppies and Doonies every Christmas and New Year through the narrow streets of Kirkwall. The Haxey Hood Game is another example, played every January in north Lincolnshire, very close geographically to my imaginary landscape.
One conscious anachronism, for using which I make no apology, is the adjective ‘trowie’. This is an Orkney dialect word, referring to the supernatural people, the trows, a name derived ultimately from Old Norse troll. The Anglo-Saxons would probably have referred to these humanoid, mound-dwelling, musical, often malevolent and always uncanny creatures as ‘elves’. But ‘elf’ is a word which has been commandeered by modern writers of fantasy and has gone in very different directions, whether twee or Tolkienesque, from how it would have been understood in the ninth century. A later medieval word is ‘fairy’, which is just as misleading. ‘Troll’ is equally inappropriate. ‘Trowie’ is still in use in Orcadian – an unwell or recalcitrant sheep, for example, is referred to as a ‘trowie yow’, although modern farmers no longer use the phrase literally to mean that she is from an otherworldly flock, or has been overlooked by some ill-wishing power. Other Orcadian and/or Scots words have slipped into my narrative, as well, such as ‘smirr’ for a drift of rain, and ‘sharn’ for excrement. I make no apology for this either: Northumbrian Old English is ancestral to Scots, a much closer relationship than the better-recorded Old English of the southern kingdoms.
The modern convention of dating the New Year from 1 January was known in Anglo-Saxon England, but not universally practised by any means, and there is little consistency. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, uses a variety of dates to start the year, including Christmas Day, the Feast of the Annunciation on 25 March (which Ingeld uses in his own chronicle), and 1 September. Much more important was the cycle of saints’ days, solar and lunar milestones such as the solstices and equinoxes, and agricultural celebrations, the dates of which would vary from year to year depending on the weather.
According to strict definitions, there were no horses in Anglo-Saxon England, only ponies. The nature of Anglo-Saxon horsemanship has been much debated. In the mid-ninth century the metal stirrup had not yet been introduced, although the word stirrup comes from steer-rope, suggesting that there were antecedents in materials which have not survived. Tenth-and eleventh-century evidence such as the poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’ and the Bayeux Tapestry suggest that the English did not fight on horseback, at least not in the south-east. In contrast, the eighth-and ninth-century carved stones of Pictland (modern eastern Scotland) bristle with mounted warriors, and the care given to the depiction of the horses’ gaits suggests that the breeding and training of horses was a subject of great interest, investment and skill. The English poem Beowulf also gives us a picture of flamboyant aristocrats who care deeply about their horses, racing them and composing poetry while riding. This is the culture I have evoked here.
Languages: Abarhild and Fredegar’s native language is Gallic, a descendant of Latin which was to become French. They also speak Frankish, a Germanic language related to Old English (and Old Norse). For the purposes of the story Frankish and English are mutually comprehensible with a bit of effort, as is Old Norse (compare modern Swedish and Norwegian). Finn and his shipmates use Old Norse as their lingua franca, but Auli and Tuuri are Finnish-speakers from the eastern Baltic, and they also use that language (the one that Tilmon finds so objectionable).
Ingeld’s reading: the great library of York has vanished almost without trace. We know it existed, and to some extent it can be reconstructed from the works of Alcuin, its most influential graduate. The de luxe manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History now in Leiden has been ascribed to the York scriptorium by Mary Garrison, and Alcuin’s poem on York suggests that the natural world and classical poetry figured largely in the curriculum of the minster school. There is no evidence that Ovid’s love poetry was popular among the ninth-century Northumbrian clerics, but a contemporary Welsh manuscript of Book One of the Ars Amatoria (‘How to Pick up Girls’) came into the hands of a tenth-century monk, Dunstan, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. The scholarly consensus is that Dunstan read and annotated the Ars Amatoria out of interest in Ovid’s grammar, vocabulary and style, rather than its erotic content. But life is seldom so simple.
Many kind and wise people have helped in the writing of this book. I have mentioned some of them above, and I must also thank my wonderful agent, Laura Longrigg and publisher, Rosie de Courcy. Carolyne Larrington, Christina Lee, Alex Sanmark, Ragnhild Ljosland, Donna Heddle, Paul Macdonald, Kristin Lindfield-Ott, and Kiersty Tams-Grey, Jim MacPherson, Susan Oosthuizen, Donncha MacGabhann are some of the friends who have significantly boosted morale and/or made helpful contributions; and Julia and her staff at Julia’s Café in Stromness, Orkney, have provided a lovely warm corner in which to scribble away. Special thanks must go to the Dark Lord of manuscript criticism, Martin Rundkvist, for helping me through several sticky
patches.
Glossary
Airt – quarter from which the wind comes (Scots).
Aula – a Latin word with a range of meanings such as court, and hall. Here referring to the abbot’s private quarters.
Ave – the greeting of the angel to Mary, Ave Maria, before telling her that she had conceived a son. The riddle-loving medieval imagination delighted in this being a reversal of Eva: i.e. through Eve’s weakness we fell; by Mary’s strength we are redeemed.
Bernicia – northern Northumbria, usually thought to be from the River Tees to the Firth of Forth, including the modern Scottish Borders, the Lothians, Dumfries and Galloway, etc.
Bower – from Old English bur, a private chamber. In later usage it is a specifically feminine space but in Anglo-Saxon England it is largely gender-neutral.
Creepie-stool – a small, portable stool (Scots).
Danemarch/the Danish marches – Denmark, but more specifically the border between modern Denmark and Germany.
Deira – southern Northumbria, usually defined as the River Humber north to the Tees in the east. For both Bernicia and Deira the western territories and their borders are less clear than the eastern ones.
Dore – now a village on the edge of Sheffield, the name Dore (same word as ‘door’) refers to the confluence of three waterways which formed the borderzone between Northumbria and Mercia.
Ean – a newborn lamb.
Elmet – a British kingdom in the Leeds area that hung on until the seventh century, and still survives as a regional identifier for villages such as Sherburn-in-Elmet and Barwick-in-Elmet.
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