by Adams, Max;
How far can we believe Bede’s portrayal of Edwin as a force so powerful that he could impose domestic peace while at the same time conjuring an image of the horned, spear-wielding embodiment of tribal virility and martial brilliance? Eight miles east of Malton lies the tiny village of West Heslerton, where a paradoxically huge campaign of excavation has revealed the most complete example yet found of a settlement contemporary with the Golden Age of Northumbrian kings. Dominic Powlesland has been excavating and surveying this part of the Vale of Pickering since my time as an undergraduate. In those days Dominic was living an attractive, chaotic hippyish lifestyle in a house in the middle of the vale whose origins lay in a medieval abbey (there was a gothic arch in one of the bedrooms). His idea was that landscapes must be understood on the grand scale; when he excavated he had machines strip topsoil by the hectare; his geophysics team maps by the square mile. He was a pioneer of computerised on-site recording (I remember the night when he inherited his first computer from his father: an ancient Wang that he learned to programme from scratch). It was a colourful, exciting time; Dominic hardly ever seemed to sleep.
The Anglian village at West Heslerton is the most fully understood settlement of the period. Others of the same era—Mucking in Essex, West Stow in Suffolk, Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire—have only been partially recovered. Most Early Medieval settlements are inaccessible to archaeologists: they lie beneath contemporary towns and villages, a sign of the continuity our landscape has enjoyed for the last fifteen hundred years. Philip Rahtz used to say that nothing much has changed; the peasants pay their taxes and it doesn’t much matter to whom they pay them.
If the traditional Bedan story of the coming of the English is to be believed, then West Heslerton ought to be a new settlement of the fifth century, contemporary with the pagan burials of incomers on the high Wolds. But that is not the case. The site was occupied in the late Roman period when a shrine was constructed around a spring that emerges from the north scarp of the Wolds along a stratum of clay. Earlier Roman and Iron Age habitation has been found by geophysicists in a strip of so-called ladder settlements that runs parallel with the north edge of the Wolds, but lower down in the Vale, closer to the rising water table. It was a densely settled landscape. The axes of many of the territorial boundaries here show that each community benefited from a strip of land extending from the river up through water meadows to arable fields to pasture, to the transhumant summer grasslands of the Wold top. As the water-table rose, settlements withdrew to slightly higher, drier ground. A string of villages like West Heslerton grew up on this line; the shrine perhaps reflects the preoccupations of a people whose water meadows had become too watery. The idea that the water of life flowed from the hills where the ancestors lived and died must have given many springs a sense of the sacred. From the Roman shrine, where there were bread ovens and scatters of food rubbish, including oysters—where there are pilgrims there is always trade—the settlement expanded into what we would recognise as a true village: houses, craft and industrial areas, pens for livestock; butcheries; perhaps even orchards, features that would be familiar if not to today’s commuter villagers then to Thomas Hardy’s Woodlanders.
Focus was maintained on the shrine; but despite the advent of Christianity West Heslerton survived until the ninth century—a half millennium of continuity. And it was never defended; there was no rampart or wall, no sign that the village was ever attacked or destroyed by fire. Micro-analysis of a staggering quantity of material retrieved from the excavations—still to be seen in final published form—has allowed specialists to look at very detailed levels of domestic life in an age which could not, here at any rate, be called dark. The complexities of animal husbandry are revealed in the species raised (sheep, pigs, cattle, goats) and in their management; wild food is found: fish and birds; there are beaver, deer and whale bones. It is tempting to match these finds with the evidence of contemporary food renders, of which the best source is the Laws of King Ine, which required a ten-hide estate to provide annually 10 cow hides, 10 vats of honey, 300 loaves, 12 ambers of ale and 30 of clear ale; 2 cows, 10 geese, 20 hens, 10 cheeses, an amber of butter, 5 salmon, 20 pounds of fodder and 100 eels.93 Weaving was a principal activity; there were workshops where tools and devices were forged and maintained. Barley was malted for beer and, perhaps, winter fodder. A mill probably stood on the banks of the stream channel fed by the spring: a case of baking one’s cake and eating it. Glass, pottery and lava querns from Europe are among the imported material found here. Most striking is the evidence of organisation, collective action and the hand of a planner—a lord who, living away from the village in a grand hall, exercised management of his dependent farmers and craftspeople. Here is a stable, organised social and economic landscape, successful by any standards, which shows that through political turmoil, famine and plague, ordinary indigenous people survived the Early Medieval period doing what people do: getting on with life.
Heslerton is the ‘place of the hazel’; a reference, perhaps, to hurdle fences in the village which may have been its distinguishing characteristic for neighbours and visitors. A little to the east, the village of Sherburn has revealed evidence that suggests it was a major estate centre on this side of the Vale. The cemetery which belongs to West Heslerton has also been excavated—another unique feature of the project. Some at least of the individuals interred here seem to have come from outside the immediate locality—possibly Germanic or Scandinavian Europe, but not inconceivably western Britain—but if real cultural identity is defined by behaviour, they seem to have merged seamlessly into the native population. The proliferation of sunken-floored buildings—known as grubenhäuser or grub huts, they were once seen as a marker for Germanic peasant immigrants—is now thought to be an adaptation to a new sort of estate management. During the Roman period taxation seems to have been direct; but in the centuries of the Early Medieval period, of barn-conversions like those at Birdoswald and Wroxeter, renders such as ale, grain, dried meat and so on might have had to be stored on site before being taken to the vill or estate-centre at specified seasons. The so-called grub huts are larders or miniature barns; and so mature and effective was the economic and social model of the settlement that it was not forced to reinvent itself periodically. It worked and continued to work. That is a remarkable record of social and economic success and archaeologists are being forced to recognise that West Heslerton may be the norm for the Dark Ages, not the exception.
Old Heslerton is buried beneath hillwash and drifting wind-blown sand; today the village is a more modest affair. A church and pub, a small school and the grand house of the inheritors of its lordship survive. The former railway station house survives too; but trains pass it by at speed. The boundaries of the parish, formed as a territorial unit in the late Bronze Age and still partially traceable on the ground, are a legacy of the Giants and a continuous line of ancestors stretching back across the millennia.
My route lay to the west. From Malton I struck out through the Vale’s bleak carrs,94 crossing the River Rye before cutting across country along trackways that followed a co-axial mesh of drainage ditches and long lines of poplars. At Kirby Misperton (‘church village by the medlar tree’), more or less at the dead centre of the Vale, I paused to check my map. The village is on a slight rise, a glacial moraine that protects it from inundation, and it may have been an Early Medieval estate centre or the site of a monastery, protected on all sides by marshes. The sense, in the fading afternoon light of a milky, flat day, that giants had been here before me was heightened when I looked south-west towards a dying sun and saw the outline of the Flamingoland theme park rides silhouetted against the purpling sky, skeletal and otherworldly. A last few kilometres of trudging along flat, straight, empty tarmac roads brought me to the edge of Pickering where I saw a second reverential depiction of St Nicholas in one day: a semi-detached house ablaze with Christmas lights, Santas, snowmen and reindeer.
An idea that the Vale of Pickering was the core
of the Deiran homelands seems at first to be reinforced by its resemblance to the Magh Tóchuir of North Inishowen (see page 304). The remains of prehistoric land management look down on three sides. At its northern and western edges, just above the water margins, lay early Christian centres whose siting and deployment reveal the economic and social organisation of the landscape just as surely as West Heslerton does. Two years after Edwin was slain at Hatfield in what is now South Yorkshire, the Bernician exile Oswald reclaimed the Northumbrian kingdom in his father Æthelfrith’s stead. Baptised and perhaps educated on Iona, he founded the monastery on Lindisfarne, completed Paulinus’s church at York, and instituted an English Christian state which has survived ever since. His reign was short; his legacy lasting. After his death in 642 at Oswestry (see page 75) his brother Oswiu took up the reins of Christian kingship in imitation of the Irish church; but his politics were blended with those of his wife, Edwin’s prodigal daughter Eanflæd, who had been brought up in exile at the Frankish court. A remarkable woman, her fingerprints are all over Oswiu’s domestic policies, ensuring that they were informed by a more than parochial interest in missionary priests. Their combined strategy had a distinctly European flavour.
Oswiu maintained his family’s patronage of the Lindisfarne community but, having married a Deiran, he recognised the need for a hearts-and-minds diplomatic initiative. Besides, his queen had her own lines of patronage. When a collateral member of her family, Oswine, sub-king of Deira, rebelled against the king and was then betrayed and murdered by one of Oswiu’s thegns, Eanflæd persuaded her husband to found a monastery close to the site of the murder in expiation, and to appoint as its first abbot her kinsman Trumhere. Reading between the lines, we can see this as an attempt to avoid an otherwise inevitable blood-feud. There are two candidates for the site of the monastery, which Bede names as Gilling: Gilling West, near Scotch Corner, is a plausible option; but it might alternatively have lain on the very western edge of the Vale of Pickering at East Gilling, which lies on the line of a Roman road called the Street that runs up Ryedale from Old Malton.
In later years, when Oswiu was severely pressed by the predations of Penda of Mercia and was forced to give up an incalculable treasure to the Mercian king to ward off further invasions (the episode is a historical possibility for the origin of the Staffordshire hoard),95 Oswiu promised his God that should he be victorious in battle he would give his daughter Ælfflæd and twelve estates to the church, six of which would be donated from lands in Bernicia, six in Deira; they were to be of ten hides (or family farms) each: modest in size, if one remembers the ten-hide render cited in Ine’s Laws. After Oswiu’s dramatic and decisive victory over Penda and his allies at the Battle of the Winwæd in 655, he duly delivered. The archaeologist Ian Wood has suggested that several of the Deiran monasteries can be identified around the Vale of Pickering: at Hovingham (which also lies along the Street) and Stonegrave, perhaps at Kirkdale, Coxwold and Crayke. In all of these places there is evidence for an early foundation.
The politics are suggestive: a Bernician king alienating core Deiran lands from potential rivals to his overlordship; the planting of a monastic colony to match those north of the Tyne and to give opportunities for non-martial careers among the Deiran royal family; the beginnings of a capital landholding system and an idea of a literate elite. This is not mere largesse: it is the politics of a rational attempt to construct a state. It must be read alongside the evidence from West Heslerton of a thriving rural population whose graft and economic success were capable of supporting the elite (warrior or monk) from their surplus. Above all, and taken with the Early Medieval penchant for interring aristocratic bodies in prehistoric burial mounds (and some of these overlook Ryedale and its Roman road), it suggests a collective sensibility to the ancestors and their landscape, an acknowledgement that they still felt the Giants watching them from the heights of the Moors and Wolds: sitting in judgement.
If the Dark Ages began at Birdoswald, their mutation into a new era can be traced here. But the Magh Tóchuir analogy cannot be taken too far. Oswiu was no fool: there is no evidence that he gave away, or allowed to be given away, any royal estates in the Wolds or along the southern edge of the Vale, the older territories of the Deiran homeland. That seems to have remained a secular, ancestrally potent landscape.
In any case, Oswiu’s six new monastic estates were not the first footprints of this new venture. His nephew, Oswald’s son Œthelwald, whom he had favoured with an appointment as Deiran sub-king and who repaid him with rebellion during the Penda campaigns, founded a monastery at Lastingham under the rule of Cedd, former bishop of East Anglia and one of four priestly brothers of Northumbrian stock. Lastingham lay:
amid some steep and remote hills which seemed better suited for the haunts of robbers and the dens of wild beasts than for human habitation.96
When I walked into Lastingham village, on the southern edge of the North York Moors, during the morning of my third day, I had already passed a party of tweed-clad hunters, with their Labradors, out pheasant shooting. These are no longer the haunts of robbers or very wild beasts: this is rich farming country. The splendid, basilica-like church at Lastingham sits on a knoll overlooking a huddle of elegant houses at the centre of the village. The springs that rise here, now regarded as holy wells, might have been a focus for animist veneration and divination long before Cedd, who is said to have had to cleanse the place from the ‘stain of former crimes’. Cedd spent his last years there, dying in an outbreak of the plague against whose virulence even Lastingham’s celebrated remoteness was not proof. The first church built here was wooden, in the Irish tradition. It was later replaced by a stone church which may not have survived the depredations of the ninth-century Viking invasions. It was not refounded until the eleventh century, when the crypt that survives was constructed as a shrine to venerate its first abbot. I stood before the altar and was tempted to ask the verger about the symbolic irony of having a decorated Christmas tree in there (all very pagan), but bit my lip and instead descended to the crypt. It is every bit as evocative of the seventh century as if it had been built in the years after Wilfrid, Cedd’s successor, constructed his stone crypts at Hexham and Ripon. It is part mausoleum, part chapel with a foot in the pagan underworld and another in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Rome. The low lighting and ceiling, the Romanesque sweep of the vaults and round-arched windows are a world and more away from the Gothic elaborations upstairs.
In Œthelwald’s donation one can trace the origins of a competitive element in monastic foundations, the starting gun for several generations of entrepreneurial patrons. Monasteries attracted wealth, particularly if they possessed saintly or royal relics. Senior appointments tended to be kept within discrete family lines. The community, in recognising the founding gift, supported and legitimised that patron and his or her descendants (if they continued to favour that church with gifts of land, relics and other treasure). Oswiu’s founding of no fewer than six monasteries in one fell swoop might be seen as a competitive Bernician response to the patronage of sub-kings and other great lords of Deira.
The transition from a psychological landscape of animism, wooden idols, auguries, fragile temporal kingdoms and customary laws into the rational, state-based, stone-built book-keeping world of Bede’s day could not be recorded more emphatically than here. A hundred years after Edwin’s conversion, King Wihtred of Kent made it explicit, enshrining the basic guiding principles of medieval Europe in his first two decrees:
1. The church [is to be] free from taxation
1.1 And the king is to be prayed for97
From Lastingham a path led directly up onto the moors, a horizon-stretching, heather-bound, treeless plateau deeply incised by valleys. Its southern edge lies on limestone, but from here upwards the massif is sandstone. There is no shelter: cold as it was, I was lucky to be crossing on such a pure sparkling day of blue sky, green and purple moor and dry, sandy path. I was alone, an icy wind pressing me on. Cedd’
s monks must have grazed their sheep up here and taken their hives out into the flowering purple of its summer blossom. In winter they might have made this same crossing, on the way to Whitby, very much the senior house of the Deiran kingdom. With wolves, lynx and bears still roaming the wastes, it must have been a hazardous undertaking. Here and there lie the remains of more ancient burials and standing stones, reminders of earlier generations of pastoralists, and markers for travellers in an otherwise featureless upland plain.
At Rosedale Abbey (a Cistercian priory once stood here; virtually nothing remains of it) I came off the moor, hoping that the village store might sell me a pasty, or one of its cafés provide a life-giving cup of tea. But all was shut, even on a Saturday. I perched on a bench munching oatcakes and cheese and then, too cold to sit still, was on my way again, up the other side of the dale and onto Rosedale Moor at nearly fifteen hundred feet. Here, old iron workings, standing stones and weather-worn crosses jostle for attention at crossroads or the heads of valleys. As the sun crept towards the horizon I came down into Danby Dale and out of the wind.