by Adams, Max;
Danby Dale is a curiosity. Bronze Age cairns look down on it like a frown. Not much more than three miles long, it runs directly north from the moors and opens onto the west–east-running Eskdale at Castleton. The village which gives the dale its name lies a couple of miles east of that. At the head of the dale a hamlet called Botton thrives improbably, cut off from the outside world. There is a sawmill here, an active school and a strong sense of communal pride in the place. It boasts a self-supporting community of vulnerable adults and their carers, a fragmentary survival of what seems like a lost sense of belonging.
What strikes the archaeologist, looking at a map, is the number of farms strung out on both sides, at identical heights, two thirds of the way up from the beck and lying just below a fringe of stone-walled meadows that have been carved out of the rough hillside where the valley sides become too steep to cultivate. The farms are linked, like a festoon of lights, by a single continuous track and they are spaced as regularly as if they had been planned. Each farm seems to own a strip of fields either side of the house, running up from the beck to the scarp so that each has a section of beck-side meadow, gently sloping arable fields and then pastures (a Vale of Pickering in miniature). Given the name of the place, which means ‘valley of the village of the Danes’, I am tempted to suggest that here is evidence of the landnam parcelling out of defeated territories by the Viking warrior King Halfdan among the veterans of his invasion army of the 860s. In 875, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Halfdan ‘shared out the lands of the Northumbrians and they were engaged in ploughing and making a living for themselves’. As if to add circumstance to my nice theory, at the back of the otherwise unprepossessing church that stands at the centre of the dale are two Anglo-Saxon stone columns, half-hidden behind later walls. It was now too dark for me to nose around the churchyard for Scandinavian surnames like Anderson or Larson; I must come back again, perhaps to get a closer look at the farmhouses and ask the locals if they know anything of its early history. For now I had my mind set on a hot shower and food in Castleton.
On midwinter’s day I set off long before dawn on the last leg of my journey to Whitby. In a swallowing, hungry darkness I followed the edge of the high ground along the north side of Eskdale, looking across at the gaping mouths of valleys which bite, one after the other, deep into the high moors: Danby Dale; Fryup Dale; Glaisdale. Some time after nine it looked as though the sun might rise over the distant coast: the sky was a rippled purple, iridescent and supernatural. But that was the most I saw of it. The day never got much lighter.
Once I dipped down to cross a small beck by a footbridge, and the path led up through hazel coppice and oakwood before dodging around a farm. At Egton I hoped I would find somewhere open for breakfast; or at least a shop. But there was only a pub, and no signs of life. I took a small lane that climbed back to the edge of the moor, whose sheep must by now have been brought down onto lower, more sheltered ground for the winter. The odd burial mound caught my eye, a pimple against the purple-grey skyline. Far to the south-east, monstrously disproportioned, an immense concrete monument to Cold War paranoia, a scaled-up tumulus from the nuclear era, beat the landscape into submission on Fylingdales Moor. At Aislaby I came down to the banks of the River Esk, and followed the main road that I knew must lead to Whitby, and the sea.
Whitby (Old Norse: ‘White settlement’), Bede’s Sinus fari (‘Bay of the Lighthouse’) and, most historians agree, the Streanæshalch of the famous synod of 664.98 After his defeat of Penda, his only serious external rival, in 655, King Oswiu increasingly spent his political capital on extending the influence of the church and exploring its potential as an instrument of state. He sponsored alliances with Mercian royalty (a wedding and conversion ceremony at Newburn). He maintained Ionan influence at the community of Lindisfarne. At times he found himself outflanked by Deiran subkings, his cousin Oswine and his nephew Œthelwald both attempting rebellion. His son Alhfrith (by his first queen, Rheged-born Rieinmelth) set up a rival seat of ecclesiastical power at Ripon under the arch-entrepreneur Wilfrid. Wilfrid had been to Rome, was a zealous proselytiser on behalf of the orthodox and an enemy of both the British church and of Iona and its schismatic practices. It does not take the refined sensibilities of a political historian to appreciate that not only were these Deiran princes potential threats to Oswiu’s idea of a unified Northumbria; they were threats to the future prospects of his son by Eanflæd: Ecgfrith. If Oswiu thought he could keep all the interested parties happy by allowing collateral members of the family to experience vice-regal power in Deira, he was being naïve; his queen was under no such illusion. Alhfrith was a problem requiring a solution.
The crisis came in 664 when the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Deusdedit (the first native-born holder of that office) forced Oswiu’s hand. Bede tells us that the royal household had fallen out over their alternative celebrations of Easter. More prosaically, in order to have influence, as overlord of the English kingdoms, on the Pope’s next metropolitan appointee, Oswiu must consider accepting papal and Roman authority. Wilfrid had succeeded in nurturing Romanist ideas in Alhfrith and might have played on the queen’s orthodox upbringing to further pressurise the king. If Alhfrith were to make a military move, Deira and Bernicia must split, forcing a rift at the heart of Oswiu’s new state project, not to mention in the royal bedchamber.
WHITBY ABBEY
Oswiu called a synod to Whitby, whose abbess, Hild, is an outstanding figure of the age. This was a matter of state; and the state would decide in conference. A great-niece of Edwin and kinswoman of the queen, Hild hosted the synod. Her sympathies were Irish, like the king’s and those of the abbot-bishops of Lindisfarne. On the Roman side, Wilfrid acted as spokesman (and agent provocateur) for the senior orthodox bishop, the Frankish Agilbert—and for his royal sponsor, Alhfrith. One of the most impressive aspects of the synod is its administration: if one thinks of the complexities of organising, hosting and feeding conference delegates today one’s head spins. Whitby must have been planned ahead; extraordinary renders must have been forced on surrounding estates; envoys must have been sent by land and sea; temporary accommodation must have been constructed.
Oswiu’s consummate outflanking of his opponents by agreeing that the English church must accept orthodoxy was a masterstroke of political subtlety that, perhaps more than any other contemporary development, shows the maturity and breadth of vision that the Oswiu/Eanflæd marriage had produced just a generation after the apostasies of the first quarter of the seventh century. Alhfrith was never heard of again (there is said to have been a fatal battle near Pickering, but Bede is silent). Eanflæd’s son, the ill-fated Ecgfrith, who would come to grief in Pictland, eventually succeeded to the kingship. Wilfrid continued to be a thorn in the royal side for another forty years. But the English kingdoms were united in their orthodoxy and the Pope’s eventual appointee to Canterbury, Theodore, proved to be a gifted reformer, administrator and educator who succeeded in resolving dangerous conflicts between the Christian English kingdoms. Only the Irish party lost out: many disillusioned monks returned to their native land. Even so the influence of Irish and Columban Christian culture did not end: it pervaded Northumbria’s Golden Age and invigorated the conversion of northern Europe during the eighth century. In 670/1 King Oswiu was the first of his line to die in his own bed.
I had booked a room in a noisy town-centre pub, where Sarah was to join me for the evening. As the shortest day of the year merged imperceptibly with the longest night, I sat in the bar and witnessed a fight between two football fans infuriated by a goal they had just seen on the big screen TV from a local derby fifty miles away. That evening Sarah and I walked up through Whitby’s narrow, Christmassy streets to the abbey on the headland, the sea a dark stain in the east and the lights of the town playing on the sheltered waters of its harbour; behind us the jagged ruinous outline of the successor to Hild’s abbey, now a moody gothic ruin and mecca for Dracula fans mostly unaware of an earlier, dram
atic catharsis between opposing moral forces played for the highest stakes.
Christmas 2014. Seamus O’Kane’s bodhrán arrives and gets its first run-out at a gig. It is sensational. In the news is the most exotic delivery in history: a ratchet spanner is emailed from Earth to the International Space Station where it materialises in a 3D printer. Another import: the first Ebola case arrives in Britain from Sierra Leone. Some clever engineers are about to start work on a tidal barrage in Swansea Bay, reinventing seventhcentury technology. Elsewhere, the winter mood is reflected in strife and disaster: tensions in eastern Ukraine and a plummeting oil price bring the prospect of civil war in that country and instability in Russia; millions of Syrian refugees face a winter in temporary camps; migrants trying to cross from Africa to Europe are abandoned at sea by their ship’s crew; an Indonesian AirAsia flight from Surabaya crashes off Borneo, killing everyone on board; a ferry sinks—more deaths in the Adriatic Sea; soup kitchens and food banks ply their trade on the streets of Britain and hospitals overflow.
Ann. MMXIV Dies tenebrosa sicut nox.
Days as dark as night.
Postscript Who are the British ?
AS I WAS WRITING the last few pages of this story, my email inbox lit up with half a dozen messages: had I seen a new study, published in the science journal Nature, giving the results of the most comprehensive study yet of Britain’s genetic geography? I hadn’t, but I got hold of it the same day. And in an election year when immigration is a hot topic and there is much talk of ‘native’ and ‘foreigner’, it makes salutary reading.99
First, the method. More than two thousand people across Britain, all of whose grandparents were born within fifty miles of each other, contributed DNA to the study. The idea was to ensure that a genetic snapshot of the most stable elements of the population, taking us back to the late nineteenth century, was obtained. Two thousand samples make for a substantial genetic crosssection. They enabled the researchers to create a detailed map of genetic inheritance which could be compared with groups from similar studies across Europe. If Romans (that is to say natives of ancient Italy), Anglo-Saxons, Vikings or Normans invaded or immigrated in significant numbers, they would be spotted.
It has been known for some time that the vast bulk of the British population is ultimately descended from a relatively tiny number of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who arrived some few thousand years after the end of the last Ice Age while Britain was still umbilically attached to Continental Europe. Migrations, particularly from north-west Europe, have periodically supplemented that genetic base. For the purposes of those interested in the first millennium, the new evidence complements rather than contradicts the view that a ‘native’ population of Celtic language-speaking Britons underwent significant but not wholesale change in the middle of the millennium. What is wholly new is an appreciation of just how stable and regionally discrete our genetic make-up is.
Let’s take the potential genetic infiltrators one by one. Romans: none to speak of; they came, they saw, they made their money and went home, by and large. Not many soldiers spread their seed sufficiently broadly to affect the genes of the Britons. Not, that is, unless those soldiers came from the northern part of Germany which, as I have suggested, some may have done. Next: Angles and Saxons. The bulk of central and southern England is (or was in the late nineteenth century) made up of a single, homogenous, group. Somewhere between 10 and 40 per cent of their genes were contributed by natives of those areas traditionally associated with Anglo-Saxons: the base of the Jutland peninsula and northern Saxony; perhaps Frisia too. Now, somewhere between 10 and 40 per cent is a big difference, so it’s worth thinking about those numbers. If the fifth-century population of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was in the region of a million, then a, say, 25 per cent genetic footprint from Anglo-Saxon immigrants or invaders would require there to have been something in the region of three hundred thousand of them. Wow! For the period that is a staggering number. The place-name specialists will nod their heads at that: look at England’s names and her language—we talk English, not Welsh or Gaelic; but many archaeologists will find it hard to reconcile with the evidence they excavate.
There are ways through this scenario: a much smaller preexisting population in central and southern England; a smaller number of exceedingly randy and procreative males arriving; a much longer period of migration on a smaller scale; or an existing native population that already had lots of Germanic genes. Well, if we take the migration period to last a hundred years (most archaeologists would accept that as a likelihood), we are talking a thousand immigrants a year for a century. That still seems a lot. In context, it means that by about AD 600 every person in central and southern England had, on average, one grandparent of Germanic origin. There are are other possibilities, including the potential, reflected in some Continental accounts, of many ‘Anglo-Saxons’ migrating back to their supposed homelands: it’s a complicated business, a genetic cat’s cradle.
Leaving the problematic Anglo-Saxons for the moment, let’s look at the pesky Vikings. Not guilty: there is very little Danish or Swedish influx at the right period for the Viking armies to have contributed much to our genes. Maybe Viking veterans were only into mature Anglo-Saxon women? In Orkney it was rather different: in the northern isles there is a very strong Norwegian component. Then there are the Normans. But no, we do not get any significant genetic influx from them either; they disdained large-scale coupling with the Anglo-Saxons whose aristocratic families had, in any case, largely been destroyed by civil war and conquest; that confirms what we already thought.
Perhaps the real highlight of this new study is the very striking regionality of the genetic groupings. The native British of Cornwall and Devon, for example, are distinct not just from the rest of Britain, but from each other. North and South Wales are also distinct from each other and from other Britons, as are the people of the Welsh Marches. The same goes for parts of Scotland; for Cumbria and Northumbria (where there are several distinct tightly clustered groups). There was no great Celtic tribe of Britain. The distinct regions that one experiences travelling through these landscapes are not just cultural; they go back to very ancient and very stable bloodlines.
So, what to make of those Germanic immigrants? Even if 25 per cent of English genes are Germanic, we would still like to know the historical detail. Are we talking two hundred families (two adults, three children) arriving every year for ten decades? That seems reasonable. Perhaps small tribal groups, like the Hrothingas of Essex, arrived in the three keels of Hengest and Horsa cited the Kentish Chronicle, only a hundred at a time. Or are we talking a thousand single male warriors a year, each of whom mated with three native women? Did these Saxon gene-bearers all arrive at the coast, working their way inland (via rivers like the Roding or the Ouse)? Did their genes then diffuse evenly or were there pockets, like East Yorkshire, Essex, Suffolk, where they turned up in much greater numbers and then slowly spread so that the whole of England is an eventual admixture? Does the archaeology of burials and buildings, language and art have anything more to say on the matter? Genetic identity is not the same thing as cultural affiliation or identity: these, as my travels through the past and present have shown, are much more subtly negotiated. Geneticists, archaeologists and historians will continue their arguments; we work our way slowly towards a truth that we can all live with. The past gets more interesting; never less complex.
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Acknowledgements
Plate section
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Appendix One: Journey distances
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Notes
Recommended Reading
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About Max Adams
Also by Max Adams
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A charismatic leader, a warrior whose prowess in battle earned him the epithet Whiteblade, an exiled prince who returned to claim his birthright, the inspiration for Tolkein’s Aragorn.
Oswald of Northumbria was the first great English monarch, yet today this legendary figure is all but forgotten. In this panoramic protrait of Dark Age Britain, archaeologist and biographer Max Adams returns the king in the North to his rightful place in history.
I
Queen’s move
Soð bið swiðlost...
and gomol snoterost
Truth is the clearest thing...
and the old man
is the wisest*1
The dark ages are obscure but they were not weird. Magicians there were, to be sure, and miracles. In the flickering firelight of the winter’s hearth, mead songs were sung of dragons and ring-givers, of fell deeds and famine, of portents and vengeful gods. Strange omens in the sky were thought to foretell evil times. But in a world where the fates seemed to govern by whimsy and caprice, belief in sympathetic magic, superstition and making offerings to spirits was not much more irrational than believing in paper money: trust is an expedient currency. There were charms to ward off dwarfs, water-elf disease and swarms of bees; farmers recited spells against cattle thieves and women knew of potions to make men more—or less—virile. Soothsayers, poets, and those who remembered the genealogies of kings were held in high regard. The past was an immense source of wonder and inspiration, of fear and foretelling.