by Adams, Max;
One of the hoariest questions of Early Medieval studies is the extent to which the population of these islands fell during the centuries after the fall of the Western Empire. It would help if we knew how many people lived here during the Roman period; opinions differ widely, although there has been a general trend in recent decades, prompted partly by ever-increasing evidence for rural settlements of this period, to allow a figure of perhaps two or three million. Many experts agree that whatever the figure was in, say 350, it was not reached again until perhaps a thousand years later, just before the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century. So we suspect that the population in Bede’s day was lower, perhaps very much lower. How can we find out? If we could map all the settlements and cemeteries of the Romano-British period and those of the eighth century, for example, we might come to a reasonable estimate. We can’t, because most of those settlements are invisible beneath later farms, villages and towns. Valiant efforts have been made to estimate national populations from the archaeology that we can look at: especially those cemeteries which come up for excavation or detailed survey. The idea is to estimate, using what dating evidence we find, the number of people who died in a community over a period of, say, two hundred years and then project those numbers into calculations based on minimum and maximum ranges for numbers and densities of settlements. The method is fraught with difficulties, because small changes in estimates or starting points produce wildly different outcomes.
Place-name scholars have looked at the chronology of name formations and mapped the settlement or reoccupation of places whose names are a clue to their age, but the names which survive are not necessarily a good guide to when they were first settled. More smoke on the glass; but there has been some successful research conducted on names associated with the clearance of woodland, which shows a patchy record of areas where land cultivated during the Roman period reverted to forest; and there is room for more work here. We do, at least, have a pretty good idea of what woodland existed where in the eleventh century, thanks to the Domesday Survey. For those of us living in the north-east, one frustration is that Domesday did not cover Northumbria (William the Conqueror having wasted it in his ‘Harrying of the North’, there wasn’t much left to record).
A more scientific approach has been to use the evidence of pollen diagrams retrieved from sediments with long records of formation: lakes and bogs, primarily. Palynology is also not without its problems, but if we could map the relative decline or spread of those pollen grains associated with farming, woodland, wasteland or abandonment, we might be getting somewhere. Again, the resulting evidence for population decline or even growth is patchy; that, at least, means that the Gildas/Bede invasion-apocalypse scenario of fire, sword and famine on which all narratives of the British Dark Ages are hung must be challenged at the most basic environmental level. People survived; some thrived; some left in the hope of a better life in Brittany. Others, like Patrick, were captured and enslaved. Some (though not many) died in battle. Some must have starved (but probably fewer than we think). Archaeology will, in the end, narrow the parameters of the discussion. One thing we can say, backed by evidence from tree rings, ice cores and annals, is that from the middle of the sixth century the climate cooled markedly, before recovering about fifty years later. Coinciding with the arrival in Britain of a serious plague, these may be the decades when we should look for a dramatic population decline; and it may or may not be a coincidence that many of the surviving genealogies of Early Medieval kings have their origins at this time.
The two hundred years between the end of Roman rule in Britain and the revival of written history may be obscure, but they cannot have been centuries of unvarying chaos, starvation and anarchy. Society survived and evolved; kings ruled, warriors fought, monks prayed and peasants farmed.
For a while after Gilsland the Wall has been systematically robbed; only the massive ditch which fronted it follows the inexorable line eastwards, through a farmyard where I exchanged a wave with a sturdy borderer up a ladder, mending a roof next to an old, immaculately maintained barn. For a long stretch the ditch was full of water and bog grass; far off I could hear the winter wail of a curlew, and a flock of lapwings cavorted in its fruitless search for good grazing. I asked myself if I could live off the land at this time of year and thought that, on the whole, I would struggle. In all probability I would become a thief, stealing eggs and hens. The odd pheasant and rabbit caught in my field of vision were no consolation—neither of these was present during the Dark Ages.13 A story told by Bede in his life of St Cuthbert, when the saint happened upon a barn from whose thatched roof a loaf and a lump of meat fell providentially into his hands, comes to mind. At six feet four and in the exotic dress of the twenty-first-century rambler, I would, in any case, make a lousy thief for those times. Strangers would have stood out like sore thumbs in a countryside that was much more crowded than our own because everybody worked on the land: even if Britain’s Dark Age population was no more than a million or so, its fields and woods were full of endeavour and of the sounds of ploughman and woodcutter. I recalled one of the Laws of King Wihtred of Kent, dating to the early eighth century, which says that:
If a man from a distance or a foreigner goes off the track, and he neither shouts nor blows a horn, he is to be assumed to be a thief, to be either killed or redeemed.14
At Thirlwall the line of the Wall descends into the narrow valley of the Tipal Burn; on the other side the remains of a twelfth-century castle sit squatly and the path rises steeply past and around them. These borderlands were never more dangerous or unwelcoming for the traveller (horn or no horn) than during the Anglo-Scottish wars of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries—in these years a state of perpetual war existed among the so-called ‘surnames’, old-time ranching clans forever poaching on each others’ turf, stealing cattle, slitting throats on dark nights and wreaking blood-feud revenge on their enemies over the generations. Northumberland is still full of those names: Nixons and Grahams, Fenwicks, Campbells and Armstrongs.
From now on Wall and Stanegate went their separate ways, the road running parallel to the south. The wall climbed onto the crest of the Whin Sill, a north-facing cliff of intrusive igneous rock which hardly needs any artificial enhancement. For the walker it is an aerobic challenge, as Wall and Sill rise and fall, switch-back and swerve to conform with millions of years of origami strata and erosion. The rewards are heart-raising views from the scarp, a sense of awe at natural and human engineering and the indomitable character of this almost untameable landscape, the Wall and its hinterland etching a narrative of endurance and determination from sea to sea. Past the fort of Magnis at Carvoran and over Greenhead Crags; the great green fog-bank of Wark Forest away to the north and the Tyne valley folded into invisibility to the south. At Great Chesters, the Roman fort of Aesica, I came off the Wall and followed Haltwhistle Burn down to the small town that bears its name and which makes the proud boast that it lies at the exact axial centre of Britain.
Haltwhistle’s survival is as improbable as that of the Wall, its industry gone and the town bypassed by the modern A69. Survive it does, though, and after a day braced against the elements and two thousand years of hard tales it was a welcome sight.
§ CHAPTER TWO
Marches : Telford to Wrexham
Ironbridge—giants—River Severn—Wrekin and Cornovii—Wroxeter Roman town—an odd dedication—Shrewsbury—place names and settlements—Welsh and English—St Winifred’s Well—Wat’s Dyke—Oswestry and King Oswald—an engagement—Offa’s Dyke—boundaries—Llangollen—Pillar of Eliseg—Pont Cysllte aqueduct—the River Dee—Bangor-is-y-coed—a long day—serendipity
IRONBRIDGE
ON A MONDAY LUNCHTIME in the middle of March 2014 I stepped off a train at Telford, a West Midlands new town of the 1960s whose bland shopping centre and suburban box-like housing could not have been less evocative of the Age of Arthur. Five miles later I walked across one of the most iconic monuments in the world, defini
ng its own special moment in a dark, satanic epoch. The wrought-iron span at Ironbridge, built in 1779 by Abraham Darby III, marks for me the transition from an empirical, wooden world to one driven by science and metal. The Ironbridge Gorge, and Coalbrookdale, so vividly animated in the poetry and art of the Age of Enlightenment, are the lands of our ancestral spirits, the giants of the Industrial Revolution. Even at the dawn of a century of super-fast travel and communication, I am awed by the monumental honesty and grandeur of this henge erected as much to honour the Promethean masters of the forge as it was to bridge the River Severn.
Ironbridge, and the Severn, seemed a good place to start a journey through the Welsh Marches. My first destination was Shrewsbury, and there are two obvious ways for the wannabe Dark Age traveller to reach it: along the A5, Roman Watling Street, from Telford; or by following the river. In many ways the A5 makes sense. The Romans were nothing if not logical, and in aiming to open up (or suppress, depending on your point of view) the mountainous lands of central and northern Wales and join both sides of Britain, the legionary road gangs were linking key strategic points in the landscape. Look at a map of the Marches and you’ll see that, east of the mountains, it is delineated by the courses of the Severn running east, then south, and the Dee running north to Merseyside. At Shrewsbury the Severn emerges from the heart of the Welsh valleys. North of Shrewsbury is a gap running towards the Dee in the Vale of Llangollen; and through that gap runs the modern A5 towards Anglesey, the fastness of druids and rebels. Watling Street heads north to Chester; and so would I. But modern A-roads are no fun for the walker, so on a dank and drizzly morning I set off to walk along the Severn. Two months after devastating floods the debris of destruction and inundation lay strewn everywhere. Unlike much of the upland Tyne, there is no realistic crossing of the Severn for many miles without the aid of a bridge: it is deep, swift and powerful. It is its own borderland.
The floodplain west of Telford is narrow, enfolded on either side by gentle Shropshire hills dotted with small, red-brick mixed farms, woody copses and the odd village with a half-timbered cottage. Few, if any, houses are built from stone here. The river meanders, and so did I, keeping to the north-east bank beneath the mouth of Coalbrookdale where small industries still find a niche; past the massive orange cooling towers of the Ironbridge power station. At the small village of Buildwas I turned north, rising up from the plain and following a more direct path than the river: through farmyards and small coverts, across fields dotted with dairy cows and early lambs where I made the acquaintance of an enthusiastic border collie (what else?). Coming out onto a narrow deep-cut lane, an ancient cattle-worn thoroughfare that might have taken me east to Little Wenlock and a tempting pub, I saw ahead beneath clouds gravid with rain the long, sloping humpback spine of the Wrekin, a thirteen hundred-foot monster of a hill that promises, in better weather, stupendous views of the north Shropshire plain. It was a long climb; the pack seemed heavy after a winter’s slothful, self-imposed confinement. It began to rain: a squally, penetrating, sideways kind of rain, and cold with it. The Wrekin’s slopes have been planted with conifers these many years, but the native oak and beech which must once have covered it are still to be seen here and there among the pines. There was not a spring leaf in sight yet, although I had already seen violets, primroses and celandine in the hedgerows. I could hear tits and chiff-chaffs even if I couldn’t see them; and a woodpecker’s randy, manic drum roll echoed from the hollow acoustic of the woods.
Before the long, long backbone of the Wrekin flattens out at over a thousand feet, a rocky crag, known as the Needle’s Eye, makes a natural entrance through the ramparts of a great Iron Age hill fort that watches over, and is seen from, a grand swathe of country. This natural fortress, called by the Romans Uriconio (and hence Wrekin), was the headquarters of the tribe known to the second-century AD geographer Ptolemy as the Cornovii.
Here their chiefs accepted tribute in the form of cattle and perhaps slaves, dispensed justice, received petitions; judged the actions of their people and planned campaigns of war (rather like the commander at Birdoswald but on a vastly grander scale). It is some HQ: twenty acres in extent, a military and chiefly base sufficiently threatening to first-century imperial armies that they constructed Watling Street just a mile to the north of it. For the first Roman legion exploring these parts, the XIVth, Gemina, it was a strategic key to western Britain. They disestablished the hill fort in about AD 58 and built a city in its shadow to pacify, subdue and civilise the natives after a campaign of resistance under Caratacus was overcome by their military might. A. E. Housman caught the spirit of the place in his poem ‘On Wenlock Edge’, with sentiments that the Anglo-Saxon author of ‘The Ruin’ might have appreciated.
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
I did not stay long enough to explore the former British tribal capital. Brief gaps in the relentless clouds that skimmed the hilltop were enough to show how physically dominating this place was. A glimmer of sun reflected off the spires and houses of Shrewsbury, eight miles or so to the west; beyond that loomed the Border hills. Laid out beneath me were the north Shropshire and South Cheshire plains and, looking back whence I had come, the mouth of Ironbridge Gorge and its own weather-producing cooling towers periodically appeared between sweeping showers. Enough, though; I headed back down the steep slope, stopping under the shelter of a Scots pine to munch on trail food and peer through steamy spectacles at a soggy map.
The Roman fortress and subsequent civitas15 capital of the Cornovii, established just four miles west of the Wrekin in the first century at Wroxeter (Viriconium Cornoviorum), became the fourth largest city in Roman Britain. The walls of the second-century bath house and public exercise buildings still stand to a height of fifteen feet, surrounded by the exposed foundations of a typical imperial Roman town centre. From the road, and with the Wrekin framing it against the horizon, it is still an imposing ruin nestling on the right, east bank of the Severn. That was as close as I got: it was too early in the year for the Visitors’ Centre to be open, even though the men from the Ministry of Tidy Monuments were hard at it mowing the grass, the rain having given way to cool spring sunshine and fluffy, busy clouds. I took my lunch to the nearby church of St Andrews, where Roman ashlar masonry was reused for the walls and where the churchyard gates are held up by Roman lathe-turned stone columns. Inside was a magnificent old red sandstone font, perfectly circular and pre-Conquest in date. Had that, too, been rescued from the Roman city?
The prelates and potentates of the Dark Ages were great imperial recyclers: they scavenged pottery and coins, gold and silver, stone and ideas, and if they did not often understand the symbolism or currency of the works of the giants, they were not averse to incorporating them into their own world of empirical magic, rough justice and dynastic patronage. But Wroxeter gives the lie to any idea that Early Medieval life was one of noble savagery, of skin-clad natives huddling among ruins praying for intervention from their thunderous gods. A brilliant campaign of excavation here by Philip Barker,
whom I remember as a beady-eyed, white-haired magus looking like William Hartnell’s original Doctor Who, showed that scientific excavation could unpick the ruins of Roman towns to reveal the subtle traces of occupation that lasted into the fifth, sixth and even seventh century, when English history begins. For archaeologists of my generation, Barker almost defined a new level of technical expertise: he was perhaps the first truly forensic excavator in Britain and a pioneer of digging large open areas, giving archaeology the confidence to believe that it could not just supplement the meagre history of the Dark Ages (‘paper-cup’ culture, as Roman archaeologists used to call it), but rewrite it. Just as at Birdoswald, the beginning of this enigmatic period is marked by the erection of timber halls among the footings of urban contraction and abandonment. Wroxeter had its own barn conversion. Twenty years before Barker began to excavate here in the late 1960s, such traces would barely have been sought, let alone found and made meaningful. It is technically exacting, expensive and time-consuming sculptural science.