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Religion and piety are foreign to many in the increasingly secular West. Speaking personally, I find the power exerted by religion over rational people quite inexplicable. But that simply reflects the fact that I do not believe in God. Today many people in Britain share my views, or rather lack of them, but my atheism does not make me somehow more modern than a person who has faith. Besides, faith and religion were never exclusively confined to the Middle Ages. The works of that great eighteenth-century genius J.S. Bach are suffused with faith. In Victorian times Charles Darwin encountered fierce public opposition, led by the Church of England, when he published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Even today, biblical creation and ‘directed evolution’ or ‘intelligent design’ are increasingly hot topics of debate. Many people in numerous countries across the modern world are perfectly content to live their lives within social and political contexts that are structured around faith. A strong belief in the power of God and the Church does not place the medieval world somehow outside our own times.
But to return to Ely, I find the achievements of those medieval master craftsmen still speak directly to me in a way that surpasses simple reason and logic. The construction of that soaring octagon high above the transept, apart from being one of the greatest achievements of medieval carpentry, required modern technical expertise, combined with modern thought and vision. I just cannot see the people with the minds to imagine, build, rebuild, maintain and support Ely as being significantly different from us today. I am aware, of course, that I am reading too much into one building, but it was the octagon at Ely that set me thinking. So I have reason to be thankful for that afternoon in the Fens. I looked upwards at the right time and in the right place. It was that single transporting moment that provided me with the motivation to write this book. Now it is time to start the story.
PART I On Britons, Saxons and Vikings (650–1066) (#ulink_952f52ed-2625-57a4-a098-feacfb00a224)
FIG 1 Principal places mentioned in Part I.
CHAPTER ONE The North/South Divide of the Middle Saxon Period (#ulink_21f43280-6aa4-5a46-9d3f-a912cd448261)
THIS CHAPTER will mainly be about the emergence of England. First, however, I must say a few words about the state of the countryside in general in the three centuries or so after the departure of the last Roman troops in AD 410, the generally accepted date for the end of the Roman presence in Britain. To summarise briefly, in the years prior to about 1960 it was believed that the British countryside reverted to a state of near wilderness when everything collapsed after the Roman withdrawal. The term often used to describe the situation was a ‘waste’ or ‘wasteland’, in which forests covered the land and the sun was excluded from the ground. Then waves of new settlers from across the North Sea arrived in Britain, felled the forests and pushed the few inadequate natives west towards Wales. The new people brought with them an entirely new way of life.
In Britain AD I discussed how archaeology and environmental science have shown that there was in fact very little forest regeneration, and that if anything the post-Roman landscape became more open, and the styles of farming more diverse. All the evidence points to continuity in the landscape: there was no wholesale disruption, such as one might expect if the entire population of what was shortly to become south and east England had in fact changed. Most towns and cities were indeed abandoned, but this was a process that had begun long before, in a remarkably sudden and coordinated fashion shortly after AD 300 – a full century prior to the Roman departure. The distinguished scholar of Roman Britain Richard Reece has suggested that this was because towns in Roman Britain were an idea ahead of their time, and that their grip on the population was at best tenuous – and soon slipped. Whatever the explanation, and I find Reece very convincing, Romano-British town life effectively ceased in the early fourth century and there was a (consequent?) rise in rural prosperity, which included the construction or enlargement of many elaborate country houses, known to everyone today as Roman villas.
To the north and far west the British population at large was less affected by the Roman presence, and many aspects of Iron Age life continued right through to post-Roman times. This is not to say that rural settlements here were grubby hovels, because the pre-Roman inhabitants of these areas had developed their own ways of living in what was sometimes quite a wet and windy environment. As we will see when we look at life in the Bernician royal centre at Yeavering in Northumberland, these people were perfectly capable of achieving a remarkably sophisticated style of life.
Plague may have played a role in keeping the population of Britain down in Early Saxon times. Bede mentions it on several occasions with reference to the seventh century.
(#litres_trial_promo) The problem I have with this is that the seventh century was a time when town life in Britain was pretty much non-existent, and it was in the crowded towns of the fourteenth century that the Black Death reaped its most devastating harvest. It affected rural areas too, but not as much. As we will see when we come to discuss that particular outbreak, plague tends to recur again and again, and it seems odd to me that it should die out at more or less the precise time that towns, in the form of the Middle Saxon wics, begin to come into their own.
It is also worth noting that the impact of the Black Death in 1348 was so devastating that the southern British population could not have retained any vestiges of immunity from earlier infections. In other words they must have been completely free from it – and for several generations. It seems to me that the plagues Bede writes about are unlikely to have wiped out whole swathes of the British population, thereby releasing land for huge numbers of people from across the North Sea to settle on. It is, however, entirely possible that plague in the seventh century could have played a role in freeing the survivors from restrictive ties and obligations.
(#litres_trial_promo) Just as we will see in the four-teenth century, the greater availability of land ultimately led to prosperity – which was such a feature of southern Britain in the Middle Saxon period.
For these and other reasons I suggested in Britain AD that the Anglo-Saxon invasion was more a spread of ideas than of actual people, as there is no convincing archaeological evidence for war cemeteries or for David Starkey’s ‘ethnic cleansing’. In a few decades I feel sure that genetics will be able to sort the problem out, one way or another. If it is indeed found that wholesale population replacement did take place, the challenge to archaeologists will be to work out how this could have happened. What was the social mechanism that enabled such a huge ethnic transformation to occur without, it would seem, major social disruption and conflict?
Maybe we can learn something here from the story of the Vikings, who were successful invaders, but who also seemed hell-bent not so much on rape and pillage (which certainly happened) but on settling down and becoming English peasant farmers. The Viking army, however, left clear and unambiguous documentary and archaeological evidence for warfare – something which is still lacking in the archaeological record of the Dark Ages. Perhaps some other, more subtle and archaeologically undetectable, process was at work in Early Saxon times. Maybe strict new codes of marriage introduced by the arriving Anglo-Saxons prevented native British women from having children; maybe too there was some other form of eugenic apartheid. As yet we simply don’t know, but one day we might find out. Either way, it will require some creative thought.
In Britain AD I also discussed the events that led up to the Synod of Whitby (AD 664), at which it was decided that the future of England lay with the Roman rather than the Celtic Church. From a very long-term perspective this was a most important decision, because it ensured that thenceforward British intellectual and spiritual attention would be directed towards Europe. The medieval period was also a time when the authority of the Church played a central role in most aspects of the life of the nation. Before Whitby the Church was altogether more fragmented, and its growth more organic. After Whitby it became both more centralising and more institutional, and soon became a significant power in the land. The increasing importance of the Church also promoted literacy and gave rise to a greater and more widespread use of written documents.
By the early seventh century the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of what was later to be England were beginning to emerge, and we know of a series of very rich or ‘royal’ burials at places such as Sutton Hoo, Taplow and Prittlewell. I described these graves in Britain AD, and I will not repeat myself here, other than to say that these lavish finds show that society was clearly becoming increasingly hierarchical, and that powerful ruling elites had begun to emerge.
(#litres_trial_promo) By the end of the Early Saxon period Christianity was of growing importance, as is well illustrated at Prittlewell (AD 650), where an otherwise pagan chamber burial, with roots that can be traced back to the pre-Roman Iron Age, had been ‘Christianised’ by the addition of two gold foil crosses.
The documentary evidence for Middle Saxon England is much better than that for Early Saxon times. Among the sources available to us, two stand out. The first has to be the work of that great genius of northern Britain, the Venerable Bede, who wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. But there is also a most remarkable eleventh-century source, a tax assessment known as the Tribal Hidage. This document gives us an important glimpse into the earliest geography of England, and I will consider it further in Chapter 3, when we come to discuss the development of administrative units such as the shires.
I mentioned Brian Hope-Taylor in my Introduction. His remarkable excavations at Yeavering in Northumberland transformed our knowledge of Earlier Saxon high-status architecture. His work has given us a vivid picture of life within a royal household in northern Britain prior to the onset of Viking raids. Strictly speaking, Yeavering was in use in the decades just before 650, the notional start of the Middle Saxon period, but dates such as these are for convenience only – and it is convenient for me to ignore them now. First I want briefly to discuss life in Britain north of, say, Yorkshire. Then we will turn our attention further south. The contrast between the two regions will help explain the phenomenon that has come to be known as the Vikings.
It is strange how certain bits and pieces of what you learned at school or university stay with you in later life. Sometimes these half-remembered fragments are of little consequence: does it really matter, for example, that one could have walked across the North Sea 12,000 years ago? Although I was quite interested in the archaeology of early medieval Britain, I never really got to grips with what was happening in the north of the island, except to marvel over the illuminated pages of that superb masterpiece in the British Museum, the Lindisfarne Gospels. This came to the museum in 1753 as part of its ‘Foundation collections’, which also included the only copy of that remarkable Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf..
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Before Brian Hope-Taylor’s excavations and the great growth in Scottish and northern archaeology that has happened since, the main sources of information on early medieval Britain were carved stone crosses, inscriptions, and of course those superb illuminated manuscripts. Their rich decoration owed much to various influences from within Britain, and the style has come to be known as the ‘insular tradition’. Here the term ‘insular’ is not meant to be pejorative; it simply signifies that the manuscripts produced on the island of Britain were quite distinct from those being produced elsewhere in Europe. They were also just as good as, or even better than, anything on the Continent. Besides the Lindisfarne Gospels there are two other famous examples, the Books of Durrow and of Kells (both in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin).
(#litres_trial_promo) All three are Gospels and are particularly renowned for their intricate ‘carpet pages’ of elaborate interlaced design whose vivid 3-D effects would actually make them lethal if woven into floor coverings. The spirit behind the restless movement of this work recalls, for me at least, the unquiet world of pre-Roman, so-called ‘Celtic’ Art. There is little here of the Roman Church, or indeed of Roman culture.
The suggestion of ‘Celtic’ influences summons up images of Ireland, but one should not be misled into thinking that the insular tradition was about Ireland, or those Irish settlers in Scotland, the Scotti, alone. English, or rather Anglo-Saxon, influences were also very important contributors to this rather heady graphic cocktail. We saw in Britain AD how there is growing evidence for mobility in Anglo-Saxon England, and the same can be said for the lands around the western seaways.
(#litres_trial_promo) The art of the insular tradition is clearly a fusion of both English (Anglo-Saxon) and British traditions, but its great flowering was sometime after the Synod of Whitby. The Book of Durrow and the Lindisfarne Gospels are probably mid-seventh century, and Kells is slightly later (late eighth). It may have been the stability provided by the new post-Whitby political and ecclesiastical regime that provided the environment for the new style to emerge and flower. One is tempted to reflect that it is far easier to alter the outward form of religious rituals than the feelings and emotions that lie behind them.
At college we learned in some detail about the glories of these three great works. I also remember seeing the Book of Kells as a small boy when I was taken by one of my Irish uncles, Esmonde, to the library of Trinity College, Dublin, where he himself had been a student. Esmonde was to become a historian of Hitler’s pre-war policy at London University, but at that stage his life in Dublin was rather wild and included some very colourful friends, like the playwright Brendan Behan. Esmonde taught me by example that the past was far too important to be taken too seriously. In the drab days of the 1950s those huge, colourful pages, glinting with gold, made a lasting impression on me. The Book of Kells features large animals, strange beasts and the huge-eyed faces of biblical characters such as the Gospel writers. It has always been among my favourite works of art.
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One might suppose that such great art was produced in a well-endowed culture where people had the time and resources to lavish upon such things. Indeed, that was how life in northern Britain was seen when I first learned about the Celtic Church. Brian Hope-Taylor’s excavations at Yeavering, if anything, reinforced this view of a heroic age that could still find the time to encourage the contemplative life of men such as Bede, or the masters who created the great illuminated manuscripts. That term ‘heroic age’ says it all. But what does it really mean?
The best answer I have come across has been provided by the greatest scholar of northern Britain in early medieval times, Professor Leslie Alcock, who has just published a magisterial review of his subject.
(#litres_trial_promo) Alcock makes it clear that this was indeed a heroic age in which great feats of valour on the battlefield were celebrated in verse and song; but there was more to it than just fighting. Many sources refer to scenes from the life of Christ, and it is apparent that the essentially pagan ideals of the heroic age were transferred to Christian beliefs. The ideals of a warrior elite were tempered by the humanity of those who, like Bede, opted for the quieter life of the soul.
The political situation in what is now northern England in the seventh – ninth centuries was extremely unstable. This is remarkable, because the eighth century saw what has been called a Northumbrian Renaissance, epitomised by scholars such as Bede and religious houses such as Lindisfarne. To the north and east, occupying the land in England and Scotland around the Cheviot Hills, was the kingdom of Bernicia, with Deira to the south, centred around the fertile Vale of York. Deira was taken over by Bernicia in the mid-seventh century, and both were then subsumed within the large kingdom of Northumbria, whose borders fluctuated quite widely, especially when campaigns against its northern neighbours took a turn for the worse. Southwestern Scotland was occupied by the Scots (or Scotti in Latin), who were in fact settlers from Ireland. North of the Firth of Tay were the Picts. During the heroic age much of the warfare took place between Angles from Bernicia and the Picts or the Scots further north.
Yeavering is about as far north in what is now England as it is possible to go. It is located in the Cheviot Hills, at the heart of Bernicia, just below a prehistoric hillfort known as Yeavering Bell. If you struggle over the ramparts of this hillfort in late winter, when the rough grass is low, you can clearly see the circular outline of collapsed Iron Age roundhouses. The settlement is on gently sloping ground at the foot of Yeavering Bell, whose commanding presence is everywhere, and which must have been the principal reason why the site was selected as a royal centre. The inhabitants of Yeavering could claim descent and protection from the ancestral figures who constructed the great hillfort.
This Bernician royal settlement – and I use that loaded word advisedly – went through a number of different phases. Great timber halls appear, are modified and replaced. Cemeteries even grow, come and go. But throughout its development the site shows the clearest signs of organisation and thought. Alignments matter, and symbolism is significant. Sometimes as I read Brian Hope-Taylor’s report – which I still consider the finest excavation report produced by a field archaeologist working in Britain – I feel I am in the Bronze Age, where sites like Stonehenge were about alignments almost more than anything else. Just as the presence of the nearby hillfort had a political message, alignment on celestial phenomena such as solsticial sunrise (or sunset) was a way of linking the world of the living to the power and authority of another world. These things mattered in the Bronze Age, as in Saxon times – as indeed they do today. Ceremony and ritual are methods that society uses to confer special authority on those selected (by whatever means) to rule.
FIG 2 The Bernician royal settlement at Yeavering, Northumberland, at its climax in Phase III, in the 620s. Six timber halls and a kitchen building lie to the east of the Great Enclosure, an elaborately defended meeting place, with two circular entranceworks, one of which contained a timber hall. At the centre of the settlement is a tiered timber grandstand or viewing platform where public ceremonies would have taken place. The large hall A4 and the smaller building A1 were joined together by a post-built yard or enclosure..
Hope-Taylor was able to distinguish five phases of post-Roman occupation at Yeavering, of which the most elaborate was Phase III. This phase ended with a catastrophic fire which the excavator attributed to hostile action. I’m not certain that the evidence he cites is absolutely convincing, because timber and thatched buildings can burn like tinder in exposed situations. All it takes is a spark on a dry roof on a breezy day – or night. But if the fire was indeed caused by hostile action, it is likely to have been a British rather than a Viking raiding party, as Viking raids had yet to get under way. Leslie Alcock has reassessed Hope-Taylor’s dating and is unable to link the great fire to any known historical event. Taking the evidence together, he suggests that the most elaborate and extensive phase (III) of occupation happened in the 620s. The later two phases (IV and V) may have continued into the 640s.
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Just to the east of the settlement was the Great Enclosure, with two circular entranceworks, one of which contained a hall. The enclosure is a massive affair, perhaps resembling a lowland hillfort, and was surrounded by two ditches and two sets of triple palisades of posts. This has to be seen as a fortification of some sort, but at the same time it does seem strange that the largest halls were positioned outside it. I think we are looking here at some form of gathering place that was meant to instil confidence in those who met there. Maybe it was a marketplace that was given royal protection – and the elaborate defences were also a way of reminding people that they were only able to trade there safely thanks to a powerful ruler.
In post-Roman Phase III the settlement consisted of at least six rectangular timber halls, one of which, Hall A4, was truly huge: 80 x 37 feet (24.4 x 11.3 metres); this gives a floor area of 3,000 square feet (275 square metres) – the largest known hall of the Saxon period. The settlement also included a cemetery and a unique timber grandstand or viewing platform. Hope-Taylor suggests that the shape of this structure would fit with the focus being on some sort of throne. The curved wall to the rear of the possible throne would have helped to project the voice of anyone addressing the audience from it. Perhaps a single post behind the throne carried some sort of royal standard or emblem.
The buildings at Yeavering were grand in the extreme, but the finds from the site were strangely unexciting, comprising perhaps two or three boxes of locally made pottery, a handful of coins, clay loom-weights, some metalwork and a quite a few iron nails. Compared to the ‘productive’ sites of Middle Saxon southern Britain, which I will discuss shortly, this is a less than lavish collection of material. The underlying concept of what constitutes royal pomp, or panoply, at Yeavering contrasts hugely with what we know about contemporary sites in the south, at places like Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, where the ship-grave of King Raedwald of Essex (who died in AD 625) contained treasures from all over Europe and the Mediterranean world. Yeavering seems to be more introspective, to be about impressing people with grand buildings and awe-inspiring structures rather than with wealth pure and simple. It also suggests that the royal house of Bernicia was probably more concerned with local relationships and hostilities than with long-distance trade. Again, this attitude to political life is markedly at variance with what was happening further south – and indeed with what was happening, and was about to happen, in monasteries in the north, at places like Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, where those masterpiece manuscripts of the ‘insular school’ were to be created.
Yeavering was not unique in its large timber halls. Other early examples have been found across Northumbria (there are a dozen at Thirlings) and in southern Britain, at sites like South Cadbury in Somerset and West Stow in Suffolk, which I will discuss further shortly.
(#litres_trial_promo) We know from sources such as Bede that these great halls were spaces where feasting and general carousing took place under the approving eye of the lord. But they were also about more than simple pleasure. They were places where justice was dispensed, and their arrangement was intended to show – display would perhaps be a better word – the lord and his family to good advantage. The guests were either the lord’s subjects or neighbouring nobility who attended his table as part of the continuing business of regional diplomatic relations. The great halls played an important part in the development of early medieval society in Britain.
The rarity of finds at Yeavering tends to be a feature of early medieval sites in northern and western Britain. Coins too tend to be rare, and it would seem that the economy was mainly based around barter. In situations such as this we should be careful of simply assuming that somehow coins = trade. In actual fact exotic coins can be collected as beautiful objects in their own right, they can be used as a way of storing wealth, and of course the royal name and portrait carried on many of them is a political statement in itself – and one which would only be seen by members of the upper echelons of society.
Throughout northern and western Britain there is evidence for trade with the Mediterranean region and Gaul. Usually this comes in the form of amphora fragments. Amphorae were large, robust vessels in which wine and oil were exported from the Mediterranean. Fine table wares were often made in north Africa. Coins do not appear to have been used in these transactions, and it is usually assumed that other items were exchanged, such as tin (in Cornwall) or copper, lead, silver or gold (elsewhere). Other items produced in north-western Britain probably included hides, fur and slaves. Wool and cloth do not seem to have been produced in exportable quantities.
Many sites, such as forts and rural settlements, echo Yeavering in revealing fine buildings but a rather small inventory of finds. One exception is the early Christian community at Whithorn Priory in south-west Scotland. This remarkable site has produced many fine buildings, which were accompanied by a large collection of pottery, glass and other objects.
(#litres_trial_promo) Many of these were imports. The site developed into a very significant settlement that has been described as proto-urban – not quite a town, but almost. The large numbers of finds might in part reflect the high quality of the excavation, but then Yeavering, to name just one example, was dug to equally high standards and produced little. One key to what might be special circumstances at Whithorn was provided by the distribution of the sixty-five coins, which mainly occurred around the church doorway. This could possibly suggest that there had been a church collection point of some sort here, and that the coins around it were mislaid offerings. However, it doesn’t explain how the people who made the offerings obtained their coins in the first place.
So if the coins at Whithorn cannot be linked directly to trade, what about the many imported Mediterranean, Gaulish and Continental objects? Surely these indicate extensive trade? In fact a close study of the various types of exotic pottery shows that they were actually imported rather sporadically and over quite a long period, from the late fifth to the eighth century. What was the nature of the trade between north-western Britain and elsewhere? Some would have taken place through Anglo-Saxon middlemen at places such as York, where we know that a coin mint had been established in the late seventh century. Some took place under the aegis and protection of the Church, as at Whithorn. But was there regular to-ing and fro-ing; was there continuous and active communication? On the whole I think not. Contacts had been established and could be called upon when needed, which is another way of saying that this was essentially a command economy.
Professor Charles Thomas has suggested that the trade between the Mediterranean region and his site at Tintagel Castle in north Cornwall would have involved ships which loaded up at various Mediterranean ports and then headed towards Britain, probably via the Spanish and Portuguese coast.
(#litres_trial_promo) Maybe this happened every few years, we cannot tell, but it was never the constant and increasingly active, coin-based trading network that we now realise existed around the southern North Sea basin from at least the later seventh century. That was something altogether different, and both north-western Britain and Ireland lay outside it.
In 1970 I briefly flirted with the idea of transferring my academic allegiance from prehistory to the Saxon period. There were several reasons for this. First and foremost, I suddenly felt daunted by the prospect of directing my first major excavation at Fengate, in Peterborough. This was already one of the best-known prehistoric sites in Britain, and its sheer complexity was very challenging. I also knew that the following spring I would have to turn talk into action, and like many young men I had been quite free in voicing my criticisms of the previous generation. Now I would have to prove whether or not I could dig as well as them – and secretly I knew that many of them had been very good indeed. Prehistory was also going through a rather complacent period; by contrast the archaeology of the Saxon period seemed very exciting. New discoveries were being made on an almost daily basis. It wasn’t just a matter of finding new sites and artefacts, but people were coming to grips with what seemed to be a wholly new world. In the 1950s the post-Roman centuries were seen as retrogressive, a return to barbarism and incompetence, but in the sixties and seventies this was reversed. It was realised that the Saxon landscape was not cloaked in forests of neglect. People did not live in muddy holes – so-called Grübenhaus ‘pit-dwellings’ – in the ground. Instead, new buildings, settlements and landscapes of great sophistication were being revealed. Vitally important excavations at places like York, Lincoln, London, Thetford and Southampton were radically transforming our knowledge of Saxon and Viking towns.
I watched all this and I freely admit I wavered, but I then decided to stay a prehistorian. Now I’m quite sure it was the right decision. But I recall one lunchtime on the first excavation at Fengate that I directed, back in 1971. In those less Health and Safety conscious days we would go to the pub for beer and sandwiches, and then – I’m now ashamed to admit this – sometimes I’d drive heavy machinery in the afternoon. Anyhow, I was standing at the bar listening to our Inspector from the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments at the Department of the Environment, Brian Davison. He was telling us how his dig a few years previously at Thetford had thrown light on the way Saxon townspeople organised their rubbish collection.
(#litres_trial_promo) I almost choked on my beer. That was precisely the sort of detail I wanted to reveal about the Bronze Age. But where was I to find the evidence? For that brief moment I bitterly regretted my earlier decision. Then, as happens, the feeling wore off when I returned to site.
Archaeology often seems to advance in fits and starts. First there will be a period of major reassessment brought about by new discoveries, then things will calm down while people consider the implications of what has just happened. Sometimes there is then a long period of stability – some would call it complacency – when every new discovery is seen to support the status quo. Finally the first hints begin to appear that all might not be as it seems – and the whole cycle starts again. These major changes in outlook and interpretation (theorists refer to them as ‘paradigm shifts’) tend to happen one by one in the different sub-disciplines of the subject. Thus prehistory today is just recovering from a major change of direction when straightforward functional interpretations, often based around economics, gave way to so-called ‘post-modern’ approaches, which placed symbolism and ceremony at the heart of ancient culture.
A big change in direction has just happened in the world of early medieval studies, and we now find ourselves at the second stage, when the implications of what has happened are being considered. As often occurs in archaeology, the shift in thought appears at first to have been triggered by new discoveries – in this instance thousands of metal finds, many of them coins – but the new information has come at the right time to support a radical new view of Europe in earliest medieval times.
The principal exponent of the new approach is Michael McCormick, Professor of History at Harvard University, whose huge new book will take most people some time to assimilate.
(#litres_trial_promo)I won’t attempt a summary of its 1,101 pages, but some of his conclusions are directly relevant to our story. We will shortly be discussing trade in greater detail, but to understand what was going on we have to look at the bigger picture, because trade cannot take place in a vacuum. People trade with each other not just because they need what others can supply, but because they have the means to do so and have established reliable lines of communication. Trade and communication are inextricably linked. Professor McCormick has shown that sometimes the communication can take place over very long distances indeed.
McCormick’s reconstruction of trade in the fourth to the ninth centuries is based on a number of sources, but especially on an exhaustive study of Mediterranean travellers’ records, findspots of Arab and Byzantine coins, and ship movements in the Mediterranean Sea, which in turn are based on contemporary records such as customs registers. These sources have provided a huge amount of information on the way that people and ships moved around Europe, and McCormick fully acknowledges that many Arabic records have yet to be tapped.
Europeans have a tendency to regard Europe as the wellhead from which all culture springs, following the flowering of Classical Greece in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. The modern concept of ‘the West’ is of a culture which is entirely European and essentially self-generated. The one or two acknowledged non-European influences, such as Christianity, are the exceptions that prove the rule. This Europe-centred world view is dangerously flawed, one-sided and misleading. Currently the Muslim world is seen by some as being in direct opposition to the West. It is viewed as having different attitudes to democracy, women’s rights and the relationship of Church and state. Laying aside the validity or otherwise of these modern perceptions, it might be helpful to show how the early flowering of culture and science in the rapidly expanding Muslim world played a significant role in fostering the development of early medieval Europe. The cultural traffic has by no means been in one direction only. But first, some essential dates and facts.
The Prophet Mohammed (the name means ‘praised’ in Arabic) was born sometime around 570 and died in 632. The Muslim or Arab Empire expanded rapidly between the year of the Prophet’s death and 650.
(#litres_trial_promo) From the mid-seventh to the mid-eighth century this vast empire was ruled by the Umayyad dynasty from their capital in Damascus, Syria. They were considered impious and tyrannical by many – especially in Iraq – and were replaced in 750 by the Abbasids, whose capital was in Baghdad. The Abbasids claimed direct descent from the Prophet, via his uncle Abbas. The Shi’ites disputed this claim, holding that true direct descent could only be via the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and her husband Ali.
FIG 4 Distribution of Arab and Byzantine coins in Carolingian (750–900) Europe. Some of the findspots contained more than one coin. The findspot in north-west England is the Viking hoard from Cuerdale, Lancashire, which included many Arab and Byzantine coins.
The sheer scale of the cities of the early Islamic Empire dwarfs anything in contemporary Europe. We still do not know the precise size of Baghdad under the Abbasids, because no accurate survey exists, but it was probably in the order of seventy square kilometres.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their royal city at Samarra, 125 kilometres north of Baghdad, has been described by Alastair Northedge as the largest archaeological site in the world. It was built and occupied for less than a century, yet its streets and houses covered a staggering fifty-eight square kilometres after only twenty years. Although now entirely deserted, it is still visible from the air, where mile after mile of carefully-laid-out gridiron streets can clearly be seen. Within the city were hunting reserves, racecourses and gardens. There were also numerous palaces, one of which was approached by a massive processional way, perhaps resembling The Mall in London.
The rulers of the Muslim world were known as caliphs (from the Arabic khalifa: ‘deputy of God’), and the caliphate of the great Abbasid, Harun al-Rashid, who ruled from 786 to 809, and who features in the Arabian Nights, was truly vast. It extended from modern Tunisia through Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran and what was once Soviet Central Asia. Oman, Yemen and much of Pakistan were also within his power. This great empire was no flash in the pan. Harun’s capital Baghdad was the largest city in the known world, and spread for miles on either bank of the Tigris. By this time the early internal conflicts within the Muslim Empire had been resolved. We know that Harun was in contact with Charlemagne, because he gave him, among other things, a superb and highly decorated enamel water jug on the latter’s coronation by the Pope in Rome in the year 800. During this time the Caliphate and Byzantium were in almost permanent conflict. Harun’s son, al-Ma’mun, who eventually succeeded him and ruled from 813 to 833, was an enlightened ruler, a great builder and supporter of science and the arts. But following Harun’s death, Baghdad and the Caliphate began to be plagued by civil war. Baghdad itself eventually fell to Shi’ite attacks in the mid-tenth century.
McCormick (following the work of earlier Belgian historians) has shown that trading contacts with the thriving economic, cultural and scientific world of the Caliphate played an important part in the development of Europe, most of which was under the control of Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire (about 750–900). It was contact with the Caliphate and Byzantium (once the eastern Roman Empire) that helped to kick-start early medieval Europe following the disruption caused by the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Westerners tend to think of the Carolingian Empire as huge and magnificent, but it would have appeared less significant and perhaps somewhat peripheral to someone like Caliph Harun. It was the Carolingian Empire which ultimately fuelled the growing trade around the southern North Sea.
Slaves, many of them from Britain and mostly captured on military campaigns, were the principal ‘commodity’ exported to the Arab Empire. The trade had been very brisk between 650 and 750, but received a boost when sometime around 750 the Caliphate suffered an attack of bubonic plague. European traders from Venice, Byzantium and the Carolingian Empire filled the gap in the Arab labour market. The scale of this trade was truly remarkable:
The last five decades of the eighth century were also the era when the Carolingian conquests could well have flooded the market … through the capture of large numbers of war slaves … As the slaves flowed out in these final decades of the eighth century, Arab coins, eastern silks, new Arab drugs, and old eastern spices surged into Italy. The slave market fuelled the expansion of commerce between Europe and the Muslim world.
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The new vision of early medieval Europe differs profoundly from the existing ‘conventional wisdom’. As McCormick puts it, this is a Europe
which is not the impoverished, inward-looking, and economically stagnant place many of us learned about in our student days. On the contrary, in its origins, Europe’s small worlds came to be linked to the greater world of Muslim economies … These links were perhaps more modest compared with what had once existed [in Roman times] and with what would develop … but they were real and, in economic terms, they counted, especially given Europe’s small scale.
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He goes on to point out that trade brings with it cultural contact, and that at the time Arab science was far ahead of anything happening in Europe. The trading contacts were also with Byzantium, which was not then the sealed-off world within the walls of Constantinople that it was later to become. McCormick sees early medieval Europe as more culturally open than at any other time in its history, before and in all probability since. We know that Charlemagne would have been acquainted with Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Lombards and Visigoths, but McCormick points out that he would also have had Venetians, Arabs, Jews, Byzantines and Slavs among his many contacts. It is thus surely not completely absurd to imagine an Arab or Venetian merchant walking through the streets of Lundenwic, as London was then known.
How did this flowering of early medieval trade affect life in Middle Saxon England? To find the answer we have to consider the origins of the first towns, because these were the safe places in which trade could take place. I will discuss the flourishing of Later Saxon towns in Chapter 4. Here I am concerned with the origins and roots of urbanism. Put simply: how and why did towns develop? What was the wider economic picture that encouraged their growth? Had I been asked those questions twenty years ago, I would probably have replied with a stock anthropological answer – as befits a prehistorian. I would have said that elites in various communities were competing with one another to control certain key natural resources such as salt, water, ores or productive land. But in the last two decades simple ideas such as this have been blown out of the water by a mass of new information. What sparked, and continues to fuel, controversy within the profession is that this new information was produced by hobby metal detectorists. These people are non-academics, and almost every archaeologist’s Aunt Sally. But are they wholly evil? I think not. Far from it, in fact.
Even so, I have to admit I am not happy about metal detecting. In archaeological terms it is fundamentally wrong to wrest objects out of their contexts for personal gain. Responsible metal detectorists might reply, with justification, that often they donate their best objects to museums, and that in any case the ‘context’ from which they removed their finds had usually been eradicated by intensive modern agriculture. That may be true, but for every responsible metal detectorist there are others who prefer to conduct their hobby less openly. I was president of a local detectorists’ club in the 1980s, and I well recall that our weekly meetings were attended by two or three dealers in antiquities who often had extended ‘conversations’ with club members in the car park.
In the 1980s metal detecting grew rapidly in popularity. Even if they had wanted to – and many did – archaeologists would never have been able to make the hobby vanish. It was clear that it could never be banned, because the law could not possibly be enforced: detectorists would be driven underground, and if that happened, any chances of monitoring what they were finding would disappear. As it is, it’s hard enough to prevent dedicated illegal ‘nighthawks’ from detecting over legally Scheduled Ancient Monuments (sites of national importance granted statutory protection).
While the attitude of most archaeologists in the early 1980s was hardening, one exceptional and farsighted individual, Tony Gregory, began to work with detectorist clubs in Norfolk. Pretty well single-handed he started to change archaeological attitudes. He was a close friend of mine (sadly he died in 1991 of cancer), and I spent several smoky evenings upstairs in Norfolk pubs while club members showed him their latest finds and he made notes of where they had been found. As he pointed out, it was bad enough that the finds were being removed in the first place, but it was an archaeological catastrophe that their findspots were being lost too. Those findspots are archaeologically every bit as important as the objects themselves.
Eventually the government bowed to archaeological pressure to regulate what was going on. In 1997 it sponsored the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which exists to ensure that findspots are recorded and major new finds are saved for the nation.
(#litres_trial_promo) This work is carried out by regional FLOs, or Finds Liaison Officers, who have the tricky task of retaining the trust of both archaeologists and detectorists. Even despite the Portable Antiquities Scheme, I still find the haphazard removal of finds from their contexts a very difficult moral dilemma, and one made no simpler to resolve by the outstandingly important new information that has recently begun to emerge.
This new information is transforming our understanding of trade and exchange in northern Europe between the seventh and tenth centuries, and it is doing this by means of so-called ‘productive’ sites. The term was coined (pun unintended) by numismatists, and would never have been chosen by archaeologists, who might have dubbed them ‘rich’ or ‘significant’ sites. To me, ‘productive’ is a word one might attach to an oil well. That quibble aside, ‘productive’ sites have turned the world of Middle Saxon archaeology upside down – with more than a little help from some distinguished specialists in ancient coinage.
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The four hundred years between 600 and 1000 (the seventh to eleventh centuries) are now seen to have been a period of economic renewal following two centuries when northern Europe was searching for new identities and direction, following the demise of the official Roman Empire in the west. I say ‘official’ because some form of Romanised authority did continue, but it had now been devolved to local and regional government. The Church, which had become the favoured religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine from AD 324, also played an important role in maintaining such government during a period which archaeologists and historians now refer to as Late Antiquity.
The new economic order seems to have been arranged around a series of major commercial centres, known as emporia in Latin and wics in Anglo-Saxon or Early English. Finds from the emporia in Britain and on the Continent are characterised by their richness and range. Most importantly they provide clear and unambiguous evidence for long-distance trade. These sites sprang up quite rapidly around the coasts of northern Europe, and their arrival coincided with the appearance of a widely adopted silver coinage which became the common currency for the emerging states around the shores of the North Sea. The importance of the emporia has been recognised for some time, and it was believed that they came into existence in the earlier seventh century as seasonally occupied trading centres, operated by independent merchants who worked outside aristocratic or elite control.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was believed that from about the 670s they began to come under such control. But following discoveries such as the magnificent burial at Prittlewell (AD 650) at the emporium or wic of Ipswich, we now realise that these places were probably under royal or elite control from the outset. That is not to say, however, that they were not also well integrated into the local economy, or that specialist traders were not also involved. They almost certainly were.
The emporium system was essentially elite-driven: it was all about power, prestige and display in the highest echelons of society. We now understand that while such motives were undoubtedly significant, many more people were involved, and it has become possible to see the whole process in far broader terms. It is becoming clear that the emporia formed the pinnacles of an integrated trading system that was united not just by ships and the sea, but by the network of good roads that had been established by the Romans, and had never been completely abandoned.
The true significance of ‘productive’ sites has only slowly filtered into the academic literature, largely because the realms of academia and metal detecting rarely come into contact. Archaeologists and numismatists are rather better at making such contacts, so the new discoveries have gradually been surfacing in journals and websites devoted to those particular interests. As the information is largely derived from metal detectors it is biased in favour of non-ferrous finds, because most of the machines used today have a discriminator function which allows iron to be screened out. The reason is that the modern ploughsoil is richly scattered with millions of old nails, many of them derived from the ash of scrap timbers burnt on farmyard muckheaps to add potash to the manure. Signals from these nails tended to drown out other signals in the metal detectorist’s headphones. Iron nails, it must also be said, are of no commercial value. So all iron finds, and usually non-metal finds too, such as pottery, tend to be ignored, thereby biasing the information enormously. Were archaeologists to excavate and metal detect ‘productive’ sites, they would plot and keep everything.
This mass of new information is appearing not just in England, but in Europe too. Places like Holland and Denmark have decided to cooperate with the detectorists, and as a result information is flooding in. Elsewhere, however, in Germany, France and Italy, for example, the hobby is still illegal, so new discoveries in these countries are happening very much more slowly, and through traditional means, such as official excavation. We know that illegal finds from these countries are entering the black market. We also know that some are being given false provenances in countries where detecting is less frowned upon.
It is becoming clear to numismatists working with this new material that there was something approaching an explosion of coin-making around AD 700. To give some idea of its scale, the volume of money then in circulation in southern England was not to be paralleled until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The situation in Britain was mirrored on the Continent, and it is now quite clear that the ‘explosion’ in currency production represents a sudden increase in trade across large parts of northern Europe.
There is good evidence to suggest that the coins from ‘productive’ sites were still more or less in situ when the detectorists found them. This would suggest that at such sites coin-loss equates with coin-use. In other words, we can safely assume that the coins were mislaid during trade, and were not placed in the ground as offerings, or concealed in hoards for safekeeping in times of strife. This assumption is based on the distribution of finds from ‘productive’ sites, which are spread across the landscape and do not occur in small, tight clusters. Numismatists have shown, moreover, that the coins found on one site reflect those from others. Changes in currency tended to happen across regions, which again suggests trade rather than hoarding and burial (often hoards contain antique or outdated coins kept purely for the value of the gold or silver they contain).
Analysis of the coin finds from ‘productive’ sites and other smaller ‘hot spots’ is still at an early stage, and so far no new mints have been identified, but we can be reasonably sure that the patterns revealed in these new and very early distributions are ‘real’ – in the sense that they reflect ancient trade. One example will suffice. Detectorists have discovered an isolated ‘hot spot’ of late-seventh-century Early Saxon coins, known as ‘primary porcupine sceattas’,* in the upper Thames Valley. We know from other evidence, including coinage, that this was to be an important area for the production of wool, starting in the mid-eighth century. The new ‘hot spot’ suggests not only that the wool trade in the chalklands of this region was under way much earlier, but that it began less gradually than was previously supposed.
It would be a mistake to view trade in early medieval Europe as being part of a free market economy, any more than it was in the Bronze Age. In the past, just as in certain parts of the world today, trade was controlled or encouraged by influences other than purely market forces. Usually these non-market forces represented figures or centres of power within the structure of the state, such as kings, landowning nobles, military leaders and, increasingly, the Church. Protectionism – in the sense of the protection of vested interests – is not just a modern phenomenon. Having said that, the evidence provided by emporia and ‘productive’ sites does strongly indicate that genuine trade did take place within the contexts of a rapidly developing political structure. The question that has to be asked is, to what extent did these power politics affect the growth and development of early medieval commerce?
Two recent studies have suggested that royal power was used both in the Baltic area and in Rouen to influence the arrangement and location of the trading quarters in major emporia.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the Baltic example the Danish King Godfred relocated all the merchants from the original settlement to one over 130 kilometres distant in the early ninth century. In the French example an essentially organic trading landscape of ports and trading posts, many of them owned and run by monasteries, was centralised by royal authority, reacting to increasing Viking raids, around Rouen, which then became an important urban centre, but one very much under royal control. In neither instance was trade discouraged by these changes.
Studies of eighth-century coin distributions suggest that trade within the various regions of northern Europe was tightly-knit and integrated. There were consistent patterns that developed over time and space. There does not seem to be evidence (yet) for currency stopping short at national boundaries. Although we know that the process of state formation was under way at this time, there is as yet no evidence that this was impeding or adversely affecting the development of wider patterns of trade.
The relatively recent recognition of ‘productive’ sites, ‘hot spots’ and other smaller centres within the hinterland of the major emporia does raise the question of the extent to which non-royal patronage and influence could affect the day-to-day business of trade in such places. It seems inherently unlikely that the hand of royalty extended to these more remote and distant places. So did these places develop as a result of simple private enterprise? The general consensus, while acknowledging that individuals and individual motives undoubtedly played a significant role, prefers to see the Church as the engine or inspiration for these smaller centres of trade. Some of the English ‘productive’ sites in Suffolk, Norfolk and the Isle of Wight were located at or near former ecclesiastical sites, and for others in, for example, East Anglia, the change was the other way around, with seventh- and eighth-century ‘productive’ sites acquiring a religious dimension by the eleventh century. There is other evidence too that the Church played an important part in the growing economies of southern Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries.
What were these ‘productive’ sites like? Were they towns, administrative centres, trading posts, religious houses, settlements – or what? Here we are confronted with the biggest problem of all: none in Britain has yet been thoroughly or totally excavated. So the short answer is that we don’t know. But some work on the setting of these sites has been done, and of course we do have the non-ferrous metal finds themselves to guide us. As we will see shortly, most are located on rivers or at spots where roads are readily accessible. It’s possible that some ‘productive’ sites were temporary fairs, but so far this has not been demonstrated for certain. Many of the finds – which we must remember are a highly biased selection – compare well with what one might expect to find at a settlement. So it does seem likely that people were actually living at these places.
It is possible to view the growth and development of individual British ‘productive’ sites in two ways. They might have sprung up as trading centres because of their location close to rivers and roads. Prehistorians have found that a safe or ‘neutral’ position at some distance from a large centre of population might help in the establishment of such a place, where trade and exchange could happen with some assurance of security. After a while the trading post would grow as a settlement and soon it would acquire other facilities, such as the provision of justice, administration and financial services – a mint, for example.
But there is another way of looking at the situation. J.D. Richards, basing his remarks on fieldwork he carried out at Cottam, a ‘productive’ site in East Yorkshire, wonders whether we are placing the cart before the horse by putting so much stress on the productiveness of ‘productive’ sites.
(#litres_trial_promo) He asks whether, if they had been found by more conventional archaeological techniques, they would simply have been seen as important regional communal centres – rich settlements, in other words. Although he seems at first glance to be taking a less dramatic, and rather more conventional, view of the period, I find his ideas ring archaeologically true. His suggestion is persuasive because it helps to demystify the concept of ‘productive’ sites, which otherwise seem to lack a rationale.
It is not often that I come across an academic paper that excites me so much that its implications keep me awake at night, but it happened recently when I read Ben Palmer’s thoughts on emporia and ‘productive’ sites in southern England.
(#litres_trial_promo) It happened to be the first chapter I read in Tim Pestell and Katharina Ulmschneider’s Markets in Early Medieval Europe: Trading and ‘Productive’ Sites, 650–850, a collection of essays that I have already drawn upon quite heavily and that will undoubtedly have a profound effect on the way we think about the archaeology of early medieval Europe for years to come. Palmer’s paper is original because it focuses on what used to be called inter-site (as opposed to intra-site) archaeology. Most archaeologists spend their time wondering how people led their lives or conducted ceremonies on one specific site. This inevitably follows the process of excavation, which is intensely focused and usually has the archaeologist ‘by the throat’ – I speak from personal experience. Plainly one looks at other sites for comparisons and parallels, but that tends to happen very late in the post-excavation period.
Such short-sighted introspection is discouraged if the information is coming from a number of separate places, and when detailed excavation and survey are usually not involved. The result is what the prehistorian Robert Foley termed ‘off-site archaeology’, where one studies what was happening between rather than on sites. This approach helps one to understand both what it was that held the network of sites together, and why the system appeared on the landscape in the first place.
