In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  Hardrada had invaded in early September with a large force, perhaps as many as fifteen thousand men in hundreds of longships. He had for an ally Earl Tostig, exiled brother of Harold and former Lord of Northumberland. At Fulford, just south-east of York, they defeated an English force under two earls, Edwin and Morcar. York surrendered. Harald’s army marched from their base camp at Ricall, close to the Ouse, where they had left the bulk of their fleet, towards the strategic crossing of the Derwent at Stamford Bridge, to receive hostages and prepare an administration to rule the North. King Harold arrived with his army the same day, 20 September 1066, marching through an undefended York and determined to meet Harald for a decisive encounter.

  The Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson has left us with a dramatic account of the first sighting between the two armies:

  …as they approached the town they saw a large force riding to meet them. They could see the cloud of dust raised by the horses’ hooves, and below it the gleam of handsome shields and white coats of mail. King Harald halted his troops and summoned Earl Tostig, and asked him what this army could be… the closer the army came, the greater it grew, and their glittering weapons sparkled like a field of broken ice.90

  When it came to preliminary parleys, the English king is said to have offered his Norwegian counterpart seven feet of English soil—or as much more as he was taller than other men. Despite a heroic defence of the bridge by a single berserker warrior, and tremendous aggression on both sides, the English held the field; Hardrada was cut down and the last Scandinavian invasion of England ended in victory for Harold. If it had not been for the little matter of his defeat by Duke William of Normandy three weeks later, the action at Stamford Bridge might still be hailed among the English the way that Bannockburn resonates north of the border.

  The wooden bridge is long gone; its stone replacement is a busy choke-point for trucks and cars. Today’s Stamford Bridge is not somewhere—just a small place on the way to somewhere. I took a back road heading south-east, rising gradually out of the Vale, and then cut east through the small village of Full Sutton, whose maximum-security prison houses an A-list of celebrity nasties. The filthy day suited its grim outlines. It was not a place to dwell for long and, besides, I only had about three hours of daylight left. I quickened my pace, tracing a muddy path out of the back of the village, crossed the Roman road again and headed up the less confrontational valley of the Skirpen Beck, a tributary of the Derwent whose otherworldly gentility was a world away from razor wire, floodlights and slamming cell doors. Skirpen and Beck are both Old Norse names; in this case they indicate a seasonal stream; not surprising, since the Wolds are chalk uplands whose valleys, with few exceptions, are dry during the summer. East Yorkshire abounds in Scandinavian place names whose northern limit, more or less, is the valley of the River Tees; there are virtually none in modern Northumberland; few in Durham. No one is sure whether the Vikings thought conquest of the lands to the north a game not worth the candle or whether there were only enough of them to fill Yorkshire.

  The next village on my route towards the Wolds, now just a shade north of east, was the equally Norse-sounding Bugthorpe. It was an easy climb—in fact, barely perceptible; gradually the land falls away to the north and to the beck, while to the south narrow wooded denes cut into the soft edge of the Wold plateau and a much steeper route up Garrowby Hill is taken by the uncompromising Roman road (I had a sudden memory of my awful old motorbike stalling halfway up it on a winter’s day much like this). I stopped at Bugthorpe, contemplating its empty rectangular green where a man sat in his car making a phone call and two women passed by on horses; otherwise it might as well have been deserted. I had a bite of lunch on a churchyard bench, checked the map and then moved on, keeping to the south side of the valley. The stream changed its name to Bugthorpe Beck and then to Salamanca Beck (it sounds as though it has been renamed after a Peninsular War battle; there is also a Waterloo Beck near by: perhaps the local squire came back with trophies of fallen Frenchmen and tales to tell of daring deeds on the Continent: a latter-day warrior thegn?). Where it emerges from the head of the valley the spring is called Chalybeate, a name indicating the presence of iron-rich minerals.

  At Kirby (Old Norse: ‘village with a church’) Underdale, tucked into the side of the valley and nestling on the edge of its own beck, I stopped for a look inside the church, which boasts a decorated Romanesque doorway at the west end. This is matched by a taller, simpler and more imposing round arched doorway to the bell tower, and by a solemn chancel arch. Inserted into an interior wall was a much-weathered relief carving of a naked warrior, horned and wielding a spear. The plaque hanging next to it suggests that it is the Roman god Mercury; but the same figure adorns Anglo-Saxon brooches (this time playing the part of Woden) and earlier carvings of native British gods such as Mars Belatucadros: the symbol of vital, virile warrior manhood has a common root in the European pantheons. This version was found in the Rectory garden in 1916, evidence perhaps of a local temple. It’s not exactly a comfortable orthodox Catholic image; but it is surprising just how many of our medieval churches contain distinctly pagan motifs.

  I made a steep ascent from Kirby Underdale up along a ridge that led to the Wold top at about seven hundred feet. Here I crossed another Roman road that once patrolled the west edge of this unique upland landscape harbouring its own distinct accent, attitudes and sense of identity. If I was oppressed by York and the flat, wet Vale, my spirits were lifted now, just as they were the first time I ever came up here, by a feeling that I was floating on a magnificent vessel in the clouds, riding a green, undulating swell of grasslands which, even in their state of winter undress, seduce the eye. I was happy to be back; even so, the light was failing and a dark cloud that had trailed me up the valley was just about to unleash its meteorological dogs of war. Looking back across the grainy sweep of the Vale, I fancied I could see the faint silhouette of the Minster’s twin towers, seventeen or so miles away, burned against the retina of the sun’s weak, solstice eye as it snuck offstage having cast no warmth on winter’s bleak fields. I did not hang around, but took a small road north-east towards Thixendale, dipping down out of the wind and knowing that the Cross Keys pub, my refuge for the night, lay just over the hill.

  Even a cursory glance at the Ordnance Survey map shows that the Wolds are crowded with the remains of ancient cultures. Thousands of tumuli lie apparently scattered like broadcast seed, just as they do on the downs of Wessex. Chalk and limestone uplands were cleared of their trees very early by Neolithic and Bronze Age livestock farmers exploiting the bounties of transhumant summer pastures: this has been an open landscape for five thousand years. The seeming randomness of the burials does not stand up to scrutiny. The natives interred their dead under mounds of soil and stone, often on the skyline from where the ancestors could look down on them and intercede with the fates, reinforce their ties to a mythological dreamscape past and remind others whose land it was. Joining the dots of these blips on the map reveals that they also functioned as markers, for they often lie on the edges of territories that later became our parishes. They took the natural lie of the land, its watersheds and ridges, and drew onto it an idea of belonging and owning: they are proprietorial. Many parts of the Wolds are also delineated by linear earthworks which seem to indicate the boundaries of what archaeologists have sometimes called ranches (evoking cowboys). Sometimes these earthworks enclose ridges and headlands, sometimes they run right across valleys and often along the contours of valley sides. Some are very substantial; others may have been little more than hedge banks, keeping cattle on or off seasonal pastures. Beneath them all are the invisible remains of many more complex land divisions, burials, the traces of forgotten settlements and enclosures and the routes taken by ancient peoples onto and through this naturally bounteous geological citadel.

  Very early on the second morning, before light, I hit the trail again after a stout breakfast. I had not been to the Cross Keys at Thixendale for many an
d many a year; but the landlord had been here since my undergraduate days and knew some of the colleagues and friends with whom I had dug near by. I was interested to know how the village and its few businesses were surviving an age of austerity. Just, was the answer. One of the locals sitting at the bar the previous night was about to leave: forced to give up his driving licence because of failing eyesight, he was having to leave the community that had been his home for more than half a century. Most of those who came to live in the village these days worked in Malton, Driffield or York; almost none of them ever came to the pub; and the Post Office was now closed, replaced by a mobile service whose social functions could not possibly match those of the local store. The village seemed no longer to function as a community. Families with children lived here; but not grandparents, the guardians of continuity and identity. The ancestors are nowhere to be seen; their voices silent.

  It was cold; I was the only soul about, just me, the sheep and the crows. As I climbed out of the dale and back onto the Wold top I was bathed in the heatless glow of an orange sunrise. The land glistened and shivered with me; a maize crop, unharvested and brittle, rattled in the breeze and from it came a squawk as pheasants broke cover. Bare hawthorn hedges and gorse bushes in improbable yellow bloom might have offered a little shelter had I been in their lee. Seasoned walkers, once they have gained height, try to keep it; but I had a rendezvous with the past.

  Over the next ridge from Thixendale lies the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy, whose name alone is enough to suggest that it once formed part of the lands of the Dukes of Northumberland. Britain’s longest-running excavations took place here, from 1950 until 1990. It was first identified by Maurice Beresford, a pioneer in the study of deserted villages, and excavated under his and John Hurst’s direction. When Philip Rahtz arrived in York to become its first Professor of Archaeology, Wharram seemed a natural place to take his students for their excavation training; so we spent two summers here, tackling what became known as the North Manor. There was nothing quite like Wharram: more than a hundred and thirty people lived here during those summers, camping in the empty fields of the old village with the Victorian cottages down in the hollow acting as site offices and canteen. It was the sort of transient community, annually reassembled, that must have been familiar to the ancient pastoralists, bringing tribute to their lords at Beltane or Midsummer, reviving and forging relationships, feasting and coupling.

  Oddly, I had never seen the place deserted: it now seemed creepy, with the roofless skeleton of the church poking up from the hollow of Deep Dale, the empty cottages beyond and bare flanks of the valley sides giving on to tidy grass humps and bumps that tell a story of double desertion: once by its medieval farmers and lords; and then, half a millennium later, by its archaeologists. My head buzzed with a score of half-remembered conversations and incidents (feasting; coupling). More nostalgia; more ancestors; more giants. Beresford, Hurst and Rahtz have all passed away. There is no dinner bell to sound, or scrape of trowel, only wind and birdcall. Villages need people, not ghosts. I hoped I was not looking at Thixendale’s future. I had to orient myself for a few minutes before I was able to identify the site of ‘our trench’. I could not stop here, but walked along the lane that is Wharram’s only access to the outside world, and climbed back up onto the Wold top.

  At North Grimston I went into the church to have a look at the font. Grimston is a place name for academics: formed by a Scandinavian personal name and an Anglo-Saxon suffix, it is the type-name for a large group of settlements called the Grimston hybrids (it sounds like an alien plant dreamed up by John Wyndham), which seem to tell of a Norse warrior elite buying or marrying or arrogating their way into the English squirearchy of the ninth century, perhaps by means of marriage to the lord’s daughter (or widow). When people think of immigration they often think in genetic terms: a functioning, breeding family moving into new territory and producing offspring representing 100 per cent immigrant genes, perhaps diluted in the next generation. But a man or woman arriving and breeding with a native produces offspring carrying only 50 per cent immigrant genes to the next generation, genes likely to be diluted again and again. Our Grims will be represented by only half of their children’s DNA and since we expect that warrior elite to be, by its very nature, small in numbers, the Norse genes would get swallowed up after only a few generations (although Grim might, admittedly, be sowing his oats more widely). (And see Postscript: Who are the British?—pages 423–6) More important for archaeologists and societies is whether the incomer assimilates or imposes their culture. One man’s invasion and rapine is another’s commercial and domestic opportunity in a new setting. But the Norse seem to have embraced the culture, including Christianity, of their adopted lands. The names that survive in the English landscape which seem to echo successive waves of immigration may exaggerate their genetic and cultural impact.

  The font at North Grimston is a marvel of Early Medieval sculpture. Its date is not agreed by scholars; it could have been carved just after, or before, the Norman Conquest. It depicts Christ and his disciples at the Last Supper; a continuous frieze is completed by a crucifixion scene and a portrayal of an indulgent bishop. It is wonderfully affecting and a reminder, perhaps, of vernacular sensibilities underlying and reinforcing the Gospel message. The top of the font is a ropework cable twist; beneath that, the Mona Lisa smiling heads of the disciples line up in military rank, seated at the eponymous meal, behind a table which bears bowls, fish and round loaves with crosses incised into them. Most disciples hold a knife; several hands clasp what look like books to their breasts; their tiny feet poke out from beneath skirts like chair legs, seeming to prop up the massive stone cylinder. Seated slightly apart, Christ, a blazing solar halo behind him, holds his hands in an offertory gesture; his skirts look like the plumage of a giant raptor; his feet rest on the stretcher of a stool. Next to him is carved in a separate panel the figure of a bishop; perhaps St Nicholas, to whom the church is dedicated. In the crucifixion scene he is held up, like some tragic skeletal Punch, by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, head hanging lifeless on shoulder; again, the blaze of heavenly glory behind him. The apparent crudeness of the carving reinforces the starkness of the message and the boldness of the execution. I wanted to take it away with me. Pevsner called it ‘mighty and barbaric’. Its rustic sensibility is enhanced by the presence of a Victorian single-furrow plough which sits behind it against the wall. Outside, the walls bear carvings—a pair of beasts cavorting; and a Sheela na gig, one of those crude, vulva-displaying depictions of female fertility and lust that adorn Norman churches in various parts of Britain but which do not seem to have iconographic roots any further back.

  NORTH GRIMSTON FONT

  Tempting as it was to traverse the ocean of the high Wolds which lay to the east, my route could do no more than skirt them. Two miles north of Grimston I passed through Settrington, which marks more or less the north-west corner of the massif, and came down off the chalk. From here the view opens out onto Malton and the Vale of Pickering, with Ryedale beyond and the Howardian Hills encroaching from the west. Somewhere near here, I believe, is the site of the Deiran kings’ summer palace, their equivalent of Yeavering in Bernicia. Bede sites Edwin’s hall, the location of the attempted assassination of Easter 626, standing by the River Derwent, whose line I could trace below me. The Derwent ought to flow towards the coast; but it actually rises at the far east end of the Vale of Pickering, close to the sea, and flows inland, fed by springs from the North York Moors and the Wolds, until it joins the Ouse south-east of Selby and flows thence into the Humber, Deira’s and Northumbria’s southern border. Deira is named from the Derwent: perhaps the ‘land of the river of oak trees’, or the ‘land of the waters’; there is no agreement among experts. Either way, the Derwent, its vale and the Wolds form the core of the southern Northumbrian kingdom, the Deirans’ ancestral homelands. Very early in the post-Roman period, the Wolds hosted a distinct culture reflected in large cremation c
emeteries whose bespoke black decorated urns bear overtly Germanic cultural affiliations. The Anglians of Deira are also known to have reused ancient barrows to inter some of their elite, tapping into an idea of belonging and memorial that seems to appropriate, or reinvent, ties to the prehistoric ancestors, the Giants of the Early Medieval imagination.

  Malton is a curiosity: to the south and east of the river it is called Norton; across the river it has two parts: Malton and Old Malton. Old-fashioned butchers and ironmongers, market pubs and rundown townhouses give it a sense of having been somehow left behind, although its position at the junction of Ryedale and the Vale of Pickering astride the A64, its status as a livestock market and its quaintness ought to ensure that it thrives. England has lost many villages over the centuries; it has lost few settlements as large as this. Malton will endure. I took my lunch sitting on the damp ramparts of Derventio, the Roman fort planted here in the late AD 60s to control this vital landscape pivot, to subdue the Parisi of the Wolds and the Brigantes of the Pennines. There is a strong temptation to suggest that, just as I had seen at Wroxeter and the Wrekin, there may be more than coincidental association between Roman fort and later ancestral seat. Was Edwin’s palace, wherever it lay, a successor to the Roman fort as a seat of military power and patronage? Was the fort itself sited near some earlier, as yet undiscovered stronghold of the Iron Age tribes? There are no hill forts, as we traditionally recognise them, near by; but then, Yeavering only revealed itself by chance and aerial photography.

  Edwin’s Christian kingdom did not long survive his conversion and the grudging assent of Deiran and Bernician gesiths.91 He was defeated and killed in battle in 632 or 633 by a combined army under Kings Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon of Gwynedd, whom Edwin had unwisely allowed to survive exile on the island of Priestholm off Anglesey (see page 249). Edwin’s legacy was not, in the end, to bequeath a Christian state in the north: such were the Dark Age fates. But he had consolidated and reinforced Æthelfrith’s power and maintained Northumbrian dominance as the most powerful warrior kingdom in the island; his ambition had briefly led to the revival of an idea of Roman imperium; and Bede cites as perhaps his greatest achievement the striking image that ‘there was so great a peace in Britain, wherever the dominion of King Edwin reached, that, as the proverb still runs, a woman with a newborn child could walk throughout the island from sea to sea and take no harm’.92 The king, we are told, even set up posts with bronze drinking vessels at springs along his highways (the Roman roads?) so that travellers might be refreshed; and no one had ever stolen one of these vessels. This was not just imperial hubris; it was an idea, apparently novel, of the king’s peace. The modern traveller could do with some such conveniences: public drinking fountains, or at least a safe means of negotiating busy A-roads.