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(#litres_trial_promo) Ben Palmer’s paper is an excellent example of the genre. He confines his attention to south-eastern England, the main region of rapid economic growth in the Middle Saxon period.
The first impression I had when I read Ben Palmer’s paper was of geographical ‘connectedness’. This paper could never have been written about prehistoric Britain, and it certainly did not resemble anything I knew on the archaeology of the post-Roman ‘Dark Ages’. These periods were simply too remote, and lacked the necessary information. It took just two centuries for that to change. The world he was discussing was a working, functioning trading system. We don’t know whether they had such things, but it would have been possible to compile road maps showing places where one could stay the night, get a meal and find fresh horses. It seems to me that the false emphasis on loot – on coins and ‘productive’ sites – tends to obscure the fact that Middle Saxon southern England was about more than just trade in objects from foreign parts: these networks were also about people living their daily lives – selling their wool, making their clothes and growing their food. We can now discern coherent trading landscapes where we can observe the relationship of the town to the countryside – and how each supported the other. To my eyes this paper showed the first signs of a geography that was recognisably modern.
There has been some debate as to whether the three major centres (emporia or wics) at Ipswich, Lundenwic (London) and Hamwic (Southampton) were ‘true’ towns, in the sense that they supported a large population and were self-governed. Pre-Viking York (Eoforwic) is another likely contender for wic status. Personally I’m in little doubt that these settlements were fully urban, as we would understand the term today, because I cannot see how places with such a density of settlement could survive and prosper in any other way. Further, a significant proportion of the population must have spent all their time being merchants or artisans. They would have had little or nothing to do with the production of food from the land.
But I will leave that particular discussion aside, because I’m not sure it’s either relevant or interesting. What matters is that these places are something altogether different from anything that had gone before: not only are they larger and richer, but they are positioned at key points in a much larger network of settlement, trade and communication. It cannot be a coincidence that they are all more or less the same distance apart, and straddle the south-eastern approaches, like the open mouth of a vast trawler net being slowly towed towards the North Sea. The traditional view of wics and emporia is that they were one-offs, isolated and before their time. Ben Palmer describes the old view of them as a failed experiment in kingdom-building. They owed their existence to the fact that they were ‘gateway communities’ that stood on the periphery of the developed core of western Europe, represented by Francia, the Empire of the Franks.
FIG 5 South-eastern England in the Middle Saxon period, showing the location of the three major centres (emporia or wics) at Ipswich, Lundenwic (London) and Hamwic (Southampton). ‘Productive’ sites and other significant settlements or trading centres are shown by dots.
Here I must briefly break off to say a few words about Charlemagne and the Franks. Charlemagne is often seen as the father of modern Europe, and his empire the true ancestor of the European Community. Jacques Le Goff takes a more sceptical view. For him, Charlemagne produced an abortive Europe that nevertheless left behind a legacy.
(#litres_trial_promo) This is a view with which most archaeologists would probably agree.
The Franks were a Germanic people who expanded west across the Rhine in the late fifth and sixth centuries, under the command of their remarkable king Clovis (died c.511), to occupy most of central and eastern Gaul (France). This expansion was continued by their greatest emperor, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne (771–814). Under his leadership the Carolingian Empire was to occupy most of western Europe, excepting Spain and southern Italy. Charlemagne, who was barely literate himself, reformed and expanded the power of the Church and encouraged the development of art and letters. While he was in sole charge his empire was stable and very prosperous. The tradition of scholarship was continued by his successors Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald, but the old flair had gone, and Europe now entered a less stable period when political allegiances were shifting. By the mid-tenth century the driving force of the Carolingian Empire shifted towards Germany, with the accession of Otto I in 936.
The traditional view is that the wics and emporia stood at the boundary of the developed core (Francia) and the underdeveloped periphery, represented by Britain and Scandinavia. In today’s politically correct world we would doubtless refer to the latter as ‘developing’ – which the new archaeological evidence would suggest was factually correct too. As in subsequent core/periphery relations between an imperial centre and outlying regions, it was held that the wics and emporia were the places where raw materials were exchanged for luxury goods from Europe. Put cynically, the periphery produced the things that mattered, and received showy trinkets in exchange.
This view of the setting up and operation of wics and emporia was given added weight by scholars such as Richard Hodges, who analysed these processes in the contexts of European macro-economics. He reasoned that trade and exchange only make sense if you look at the whole picture. His approach was anthropological, and rings sort-of true to a prehistorian like myself. I say ‘sort-of’ because there are no such things as permanent, static laws in anthropology, and Hodges’s seminal study of the subject, which appeared in 1989, now seems to me at least somewhat dated and mechanistic, although at the time it deservedly had a huge impact.
(#litres_trial_promo) His views on the social and economic forces behind the growth of wics and emporia in the seventh and eighth centuries are still very influential, and are essentially based on the competitive relationship between the governing elites in the various emerging states and kingdoms.
Anthropologists love relationships. They believe that the way humans react to each other is governed by forces other than instinctive or emotional likes or dislikes. So anthropologists hold that a married man will tend to have strained relations with his mother-in-law because she resents the loss of her daughter, and he feels that his wife is reluctant to leave her original family because her mother wants her back. Such competitive relationships have also been found in the world of tribal politics, where family considerations also complicate matters. The competitive nature of the relations between ruling elites was first discussed in detail by the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). He studied the exchange of gifts between the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, and realised that the exchange formed part of a complex system of social obligation known as the Kula cycle. This cycle was based on what anthropologists refer to as ‘Malinowski’s principle of reciprocity’ – a sonorous phrase which suggests that no gift-giving is without some form of motive. As the words imply, each ‘gift’ was actually nothing of the sort, because it carried with it the prospect of something in return: either another gift later, or some form of social obligation. Malinowski also realised that these exchanges encouraged competition between the elites on different islands. So a particularly lavish gift was less a generous donation than an expression of power on the donor’s part.
Malinowski was an extraordinary man who also established the ground rules of anthropological fieldwork. Among other achievements he pioneered the process of structured interviews, which allowed him to compare the responses he received from different people right across the huge island archipelago he studied. Today his approach is seen as ‘functionalist’. In other words he based much of what he observed on common-sense observation and a rather masculine (dare I say it, simplistic) view of human relationships, perhaps summed up by: ‘one good turn deserves another’. Subsequent workers, most famously Margaret Mead in her wonderful book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), showed that there was a great deal more to human relationships in the Pacific – and of course elsewhere – than could readily be defined by laws of reciprocity alone. Returning to ancient trade and exchange, more recent studies such as The Gift by Marcel Mauss (1950) and Stone Age Economics (1974) by Marshall Sahlins have been far less functionalist than Malinowski; but even so, his fundamental principle still seems to apply.
(#litres_trial_promo) Reciprocity and exchange are now seen as organising structures that are about more than the giving of gifts: they underlie most social, economic and administrative processes in both ancient and modern societies.
Archaeologically speaking it is very hard to distinguish between the exchange of gifts and trade, pure and simple, because each involves reciprocity of one form or another. Moreover, where exchange at an elite level happens, it is not unusual to find other, smaller transactions also taking place further down the social ladder. Transactions of this sort do resemble trade, when seen in the archaeological record, because a large variety of objects – even coinage – may be involved.
One useful rule of thumb that can help us define what was going on concerns the nature of the places where transactions took place. Traditionally the emporia and wics have been seen as rather isolated phenomena that contrasted markedly with the not-so-very-prosperous rural settlements that surrounded them. There are signs too that they were laid out by a central authority: for example, streets were arranged on a grid pattern, and many buildings seem to have been erected simultaneously. The finds include exotic items such as wine containers and pottery imported from the area around the Rhine. Taken together, these clues suggest that the wics and emporia were set up by powerful elites to control trade to and from the territories they ruled. The reason they wanted to control the trade was simply to establish a royal monopoly on prestige goods, which they could then use to grease the wheels of power both externally, as regards foreign policy, and internally, by rewarding the loyalty of key families and individuals. In a command economy which was based on the exchange of prestige goods, the control of commerce led naturally to the control of people.
It was believed that the establishment of the wics and emporia by royal patronage did not protect them forever, which is why they began to decline. They lost their central role by, and just after, the end of the eighth century. There was then a gap of about a century, during which time there was effectively no substantial urban presence in Britain. This apparent hiatus coincided with the first period of Viking raids and settlement (we will see that their first raid, on the monastery at Lindisfarne, took place in 793). The next set of major urban foundations were the fortified burhs, which we know for a fact were established by royal command, first as a defensive measure against raids and then as protection from Viking forces present in Britain. I will return to the burhs in the next two chapters, but the important point to make here is that the bulk of them were established in the late eighth and early ninth centuries.
The conventional wisdom on early towns and the separation of the earlier wics and emporia from the later burhs only really makes sense if we can detect good evidence for discontinuity – which in archaeology must always be proved, and never assumed. The idea of discontinuity also subsumes that of abandonment. In other words, one system replaces another after a period when people either moved elsewhere or the system itself collapsed in some way. Notions of discontinuity were more fashionable in the past, when there was far less data to play with. Archaeology was constructed with a textbook or a historical account in one hand – to provide some form of context – and site notebooks and photographs in the other. You concentrated on the details of the site you had just excavated, and only towards the end of the operation did you attempt to place it all in context. Nowadays all of that has changed, because context is being provided by new archaeological finds, as well as by documents.
I have touched on metal detecting, but a far more significant factor in shaping the way we view the past has been the explosion of new information from commercial archaeology, which I discussed in the Introduction. Thanks to computers and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) this store of new information is now available to archaeologists and others. To be more specific, this means that we now have the information to re-examine the way that wics and emporia have traditionally been interpreted.
Two questions spring immediately to mind. The first is perhaps the most obvious: were they isolated, one-off royal foundations that existed to promote and exploit a royal monopoly of imported prestige goods? The answer to that is relatively simple: yes they were, and no they were not. They were, inasmuch as they show all the signs of royal involvement, but they were not isolated, nor did they monopolise all trade – or even most of the trade that was taking place in and around them. There was simply too much going on to attribute everything to some form of royal prerogative. One glance at the map of southern England see (page 47 (#ulink_9b49f6dc-28da-5379-adf0-6f7d522defb8)) showing the three wics at Ipswich, London and Southampton reveals that the hinterland of these three places was liberally peppered with subsidiary, but still very significant, settlements and ‘productive’ sites which are positioned close to either Roman roads, ancient routes or navigable rivers. It is most noticeable that none is positioned on the more remote hills of the southern Midlands, in East Anglia or the South Downs. Good access and easy communication were clearly essential. These must be seen as trading places, but that of course does not mean they could not have been settlements or small towns in their own right. It does suggest, however, that royal power was not employed to confine all trade and exchange to the major wics and emporia. The evidence suggests that Middle Saxon trade was indeed organised around the wics and emporia, but that these formed just one part of an integrated system in which many people played an active part.
The second question that we can re-examine with the benefit of so much new information concerns the demise of the wics and emporia. Can we still confidently assert that the best part of a century of abandonment separated the appearance of the first burhs from the last feeble gasps of the declining wics? This suggestion becomes increasingly hard to support if the wics were indeed part of an integrated system, because if they declined and vanished, then surely the system as a whole must also have collapsed. But there is no evidence to suggest that anything of the sort happened. Yes, the wics and emporia declined in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, but certainly Lundenwic never disappears off the map. Nor do ‘productive’ sites simply vanish. Trade within Britain has slowed down by, say, 850, and the Late Saxon successors to the widely traded pottery known as Ipswich Ware (Thetford Ware, Stamford Ware, etc.) were never as widely distributed as their Middle Saxon precursor. This winding down can be attributed in part to political turmoil within the Carolingian Empire across the Channel, and to increasing Viking raids and conflict within Britain. But trade within Britain certainly didn’t cease. There was no hiatus; the Late Saxon economy never hit the buffers.
The emphasis on coins and metalwork from both the wics and the smaller ‘productive’ sites has tended to obscure the true nature of much of the trading that was taking place. I’ve already mentioned that Richard Hodges considers that something of an ‘industrial revolution’ was happening in the eighth century, and the best evidence for this comes in the form of Ipswich Ware.
I remember when I first came across this starkly functional, unglazed, dark grey pottery. I was with my friend and colleague Keith Wade, who had been the deputy director of the Saxon and medieval dig, which I had co-supervised in 1970, at North Elmham Park in central north Norfolk. In the late summer, when digging ended, I went with Keith in search of Ipswich Ware, which he rightly felt was very important because it represented the beginnings of a major Saxon industry. I don’t think either of us realised back then just how important Ipswich Ware was to become. I recall looking at my first sherds and noticing that they were lightly dimpled on the outside, and Keith explaining that this was an example of the slow-wheel technique of manufacture, where the vessel being formed was on an unpowered turntable that was revolved by a sideways flick of the thumb on the vessel itself, which left the distinctive ‘girth grooves’. Thanks to the Ipswich Ware Project we now realise that this pottery was produced in very large quantities and was distributed widely across southern England, presumably along the same roads and rivers that linked the various wics and ‘productive’ sites. If we are not looking at actual batch-based mass production, then we must be getting very close to it. Whatever the true situation, we have now moved well beyond a simple craft-based rural manufacturing tradition to something more standardised and, indeed, industrial.
I have to admit that I was only slightly aware of its importance at the time, but when I was working at North Elmham one of us found a sherd – actually it was a handle – of fine dark pottery which somehow seemed to have acquired a diamond-shaped piece of tinfoil which had stuck to its outside – as if it had accidentally stuck there when the Christmas turkey was being cooked.
(#litres_trial_promo) The digger who found it had the good sense not to scrape the foil off with his finger – as I fear I might have done in my naïveté – and he showed it to Keith, who stared at it with eyes like saucers. ‘Good grief,’ he said (actually he used a stronger term), ‘it’s Tating Ware!’ And off he hurried to the director, Peter Wade-Martins, in the site hut. Peter was absolutely delighted, because Tating (pronounced ‘Tarting’) Ware mostly came from the Rhineland, and was the finest and most skilfully produced pottery in late-eighth- or ninth-century Europe.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was very high-status stuff indeed, and the best evidence possible for trade.
As I have already mentioned, Keith and I went in search of pottery and pottery kilns when we had finished at North Elmham. In the autumn I visited him on a dig behind a farmyard at the beautiful Essex village of Wicken Bonhunt. The first find he showed me when I got there was another sherd of Tating Ware.
In the early 1970s the gradually increasing quantities of exotic early imported pottery were causing something of a stir. What did it all mean? Today, because we have the coins and metalwork provided by the detectorists, we can see that it was part of a larger pattern of trade. At the time we put the presence of this exotic material down to the Church. There was good evidence that the ruined church at North Elmham, known locally as the Old Minster, which stood just outside the excavations, might in its early stages have been the minster church* (#litres_trial_promo) of the Saxon see (or seat of the bishop) of the diocese of Elmham, which incorporated most of the northern part of the kingdom of East Anglia (i.e. most of Norfolk). When the dig had finished and all the finds were assessed, it became clear that North Elmham had produced about 30 per cent of all the imported sherds of pottery known from Norfolk. I had chosen the right dig to take part in.
It would now appear that we may not have been wrong in assuming a link with the Church. Other important places and ‘productive’ sites, such as Barking Abbey (Essex), Burgh Castle and Caister-on-Sea (Norfolk), have produced exotic imports and are known to have had links to the Church. So, rather like the links to the ruling elites, it would appear that the Church also wanted its slice of the action, and probably took an active part in encouraging trade: God and Mammon shared the same interests.
So far, evidence for the vigorous trade in Middle Saxon southern Britain comes from coins and other metal objects, from Ipswich Ware and from imported pottery such as Tating Ware; but what were the other products being traded? I have already mentioned wool in the Thames Valley, and there are good indications that wool and indeed finished cloth were important commodities produced and manufactured in rural British sites. In modern terms the farmers of Middle Saxon England were ‘adding value’ in a significant fashion to their basic product, wool. The evidence for this comes from several sites, including Shakenoak in the Upper Thames, where sceattas (those early silver Saxon coins) were found associated with loomweights. Clear evidence that the trade was not always just for money, and involved the exchange of imported goods as well, comes from the Anglo-Saxon village at West Stow in the sandy Breckland of north Suffolk.
(#litres_trial_promo) What makes West Stow so interesting is its early date. Middle Saxon Ipswich Ware only makes its appearance in the village’s final phase, and it declines in importance during the seventh century. During this time families moved off the sandy knoll where the original settlement was positioned, probably towards the church of the existing village of West Stow nearby.
West Stow was a pioneering excavation by Stanley West, who successfully achieved what we are trying to do at Flag Fen in Peterborough. He excavated the village in 1965–72 and then set about reconstructing it, using authentic techniques. It became a major visitor attraction, and is growing in popularity year on year. Somehow he managed to obtain support from the local authorities, and this has made all the difference to the operation. I go there regularly in the springtime, and having lived with sticky, wet Fenland clay all winter, it makes a wonderful change to stand on warm, dry sand and listen to the wind in the Scots pines, or watch siskins feed on alder cones in the damp valley at the bottom of the knoll. It can be a magical spot.
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The excavations at West Stow produced a large number of finds, many of which were metal, and although this is a site where coins are rare because of its early date, it is hard not to imagine that had it been systematically worked over by competent detectorists, it would have proved very ‘productive’ – to reuse that slightly distasteful term. So was it a trading centre of some sort? A quick glance through the list of finds might suggest that it was. No fewer than thirteen buildings produced fragments of querns made from a volcanic lava which occurs in central Europe. There was abundant evidence for weaving, not just the familiar fired-clay loomweights, but an iron ‘weaving batten’ – a tool used to beat down and compact the threads. Trade was well under way by the late sixth century, when pottery made by an important group of regional workshops based around Lackford appears at West Stow. Other objects, such as the fine bronze brooches, together with glass and amber beads, found on bodies in the cemetery, suggest that many of the inhabitants could afford exotic finery. In the late phases trade with the outside world was expanding. We see this not just in the quantities of Ipswich Ware being brought to the site, but in very upmarket and unusual things, such as a cowrie shell and two silver miniature shields, probably worn around the neck as pendants.
There is nothing at West Stow to suggest that the inhabitants had access to, or controlled, any unusual resource such as salt or ore. Stanley West is convinced that this prosperous community earned its wealth by farming and by selling the surpluses it produced, such as wool (cloth), hides, meat and so forth. It’s quite possible that they sold slaves as well – an unpleasant trade for which there is good archaeological and documentary evidence in Saxon times. It’s hard not to conclude that it was this pattern of trading essentially rural products that was taken forward into the eighth and ninth centuries. In other words, by the mid-seventh century exchange and commerce were an integral part of rural life, and provided the goods that were traded from the emporia and ‘productive’ sites – many of which would have housed people who were also making and producing things.
If the economy at West Stow seems to have been mainly centred around wool, cloth and hides, other later sites show signs of greater specialisation. Sometimes the specialised production was encouraged by a local church; in other instances it seems to have been private enterprise by landowners and farmers. I’ve already mentioned Keith Wade’s site at Wicken Bonhunt in Essex, which produced many pig bones, suggesting that it specialised in the production of pork. Very close to where I am currently writing, a group of Fenland sites on the silty banks of tidal creeks surrounding the Wash were most probably cattle farms specialising in beef.
These cattle stations, as they might be called in Australia, were first revealed by Bob Sylvester and his colleagues of the Fenland Survey around 1984 when they spotted scatters of Ipswich Ware lying on the surface (being dark, it shows up quite well in dry weather, when the silty soil turns pale).
(#litres_trial_promo) Contrary to popular opinion, the Fens are not all boggy areas, and the so-called ‘Marshland’ soils around the Wash are naturally well-drained; they mainly consist of Iron Age tidal silts, which are actually quite porous because the individual particles of silt are halfway in size between sand and clay, so there are spaces for the water to pass through. This silty soil is very fertile – my vegetable garden grows sprouting broccoli the size of small trees – and it also makes excellent cattle pasture, being sufficiently dry on the surface to prevent foot problems in most animals.
Bob’s work was particularly important because it shows how archaeology can be used to extend and amplify the historical record. It has long been known from documentary sources that the silty marshland west of King’s Lynn was a very wealthy area. This wealth derived mainly from livestock, especially sheep, but salt was also extracted from the creeks around the Wash, and the proximity of the prosperous and growing port of King’s Lynn certainly aided this process. If we rely on documentary sources alone, it would seem that the wealth of the region began to increase from the time of Domesday (1086) until the thirteenth century, by when it was a very prosperous area indeed. There were, however, no reasons to suppose that Marshland was particularly important in Saxon times until Bob Sylvester and Andrew Rogerson started methodically to survey the Norfolk parish of Terrington St Clement.
I first met Andrew when I was working at North Elmham in 1970, and I knew him to be an imaginative but essentially hard-nosed specialist in early medieval archaeology. He was never one to jump onto bandwagons, and he scrupulously avoided exaggerated claims, which is why I well remember his huge enthusiasm about discoveries at a site named Hay Green, just outside the village. It was the scale that was so extraordinary. Andrew and Bob revealed a vast scatter of about a thousand Ipswich Ware sherds along the banks of an extinct tidal creek, or roddon. From the air you can see a network of pale, silt-filled roddons snaking their way across the landscape. At ground level they show up as low silty mounds which would have been where Middle Saxon communities placed their homes, their farms and their stockyards. This was the land that rarely flooded, even after the heaviest rains.
Bob and Andrew found Ipswich Ware across thirteen fields, covering about seven hectares (over seventeen acres) and extending along the roddon for a distance of 1.5 kilometres. This was a truly massive spread, but what was even more interesting was that Hay Green was almost entirely Middle Saxon – there was only very little later material, probably because by then Late Saxon and Norman settlement had moved to Terrington, just north of the fine medieval church. On the face of it, this might suggest that the life of the Middle Saxon farming settlement was short and sharp. The scatter was large, but it was difficult to say any more about it without digging some selective holes. This happened a few years later, when some of the most important sites revealed in the Fenland Survey were given a closer look.
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It would now seem that Hay Green was not alone. The Fenland Survey revealed six other comparable sites that were evenly spaced out across the Marshland silts. This arrangement strongly suggested that these farms or settlements were part of a Middle Saxon planned development. It was also suggested, in line with what we know happened somewhat later, that the individual farms or settlements could have been linked to upland estates on the higher ground of ‘mainland’ Norfolk, to the east.
Like all good surveys, the ‘field-walking’ was more than just a pot-pick-up.* (#litres_trial_promo) Metal detectors were also used, but to everyone’s surprise they failed to find significant quantities of coins (sceattas) or any other metalwork. This was most peculiar, given the huge quantities of quite high-quality pottery. The surface survey also revealed a number of animal bones, many of which had been burnt. It was all rather mysterious. Everyone was agreed: trenches must be dug.
They decided to excavate at Hay Green and two other sites of the remaining six. All three sites produced a number of archaeological features, which was a relief to the excavators, who had feared that most would have been destroyed by modern farming. Big ditches had been dug along the roddon, and at Hay Green these ended in a series of large pits which were filled with quantities of animal bone and debris. Much of the animal bone showed obvious signs of butchery (butchery marks are now well-studied in archaeology), and it was clear that this had happened in situ. It therefore appears that meat was being exported from the site as joints or sides, rather than ‘on the hoof’.
So far no clear evidence for settlement has been found, but this probably reflects the fact that larger, ‘open area’ excavation was not possible. The excavators believe it is likely that the six sites were only occupied in the summer months, when the grazing was at its best and the risk of flooding was minimal. So this livestock enterprise represents the planned exploitation of an underused natural resource at a time when conventional history might have us believe that the economy was still largely underdeveloped. It shows not only that these farmers had the wealth to buy in quantities of pottery, but that their products could be distributed efficiently to markets that were sufficiently rich to justify such a large-scale enterprise. The more we look at the Middle Saxon period in southern Britain, the more we realise that it was about far, far more than mere subsistence farming.
Ben Palmer is of the opinion that some rural sites may have had access to traded goods because of their location close to one or more roads or rivers. Laying aside the fact that the same can be said for most settlements, he points to rural sites such as Lake End Road near Maidenhead which do not seem to have anything special to offer, but which contain traded goods. This site lies close to the Thames, and has produced imported pottery, lava quernstones and Ipswich Ware from filled-in pits. So far, and despite extensive excavation, there is no clear evidence for metalwork or for permanent settlement. Whoever frequented this rather enigmatic site could also ‘tap in’ to passing trade. That is the theory. Palmer also suggests a nearby Thames-side site at Yarnton in Oxfordshire as a place that benefited from the passing trade along the river. But in this particular case I think it was rather more than that.
I first came across Gill Hey’s complex multi-period project at Yarnton when I found my wife Maisie, a specialist in ancient woodworking, standing at the kitchen sink examining a waterlogged Bronze Age notched-log ladder. She had collected it the week before from the store at the Oxford Archaeological Unit, and was working indoors because it was bitterly cold in our barn, where she normally did such things. The ladder had been excavated by Gill Hey at Yarnton, which had also revealed a large Iron Age community, Roman settlement, Early Saxon and now Middle and Late Saxon occupation. Most of these important sites were later destroyed, either by gravel quarries or road schemes.
Maisie had known Gill as a student when Gill was doing research into Peruvian pottery, of all things. Subsequently she quit South America for the Thames Valley and began her remarkable project at Yarnton, which I first mentioned in Seahenge, my autobiographical book on Bronze Age religion.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yarnton is that rare thing, a large-scale excavation which also happens to be a thoroughgoing landscape project.
Gill recently published her report on the Saxon period at Yarnton.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yarnton lies on the very edge of the gravel terrace, on land that would have been just outside the limit of the river’s winter floodplain. This location ‘at the edge’, as it were, was deliberately chosen both in the Bronze and Iron Ages, as in Saxon and medieval times. The Thames floodplain is dressed with a thin layer of flood clay, known as alluvium, every time the river is in spate. This material is very fine, and is rich in natural fertilisers. As a result the grass gets away to a very good start in the spring, and gives young lambs and calves what farmers refer to as ‘a good bite’. In the past, before we learned how to ignore traditional ways of doing things, this land was never ploughed. Today it is, and surprise, surprise, the soil washes away and clogs up streams and drainage dykes.
Good arable land was to be found on the light, well-drained gravel soils around the villages that clustered at the edge of the floodplain, and up the gentle slopes of the valley sides to the north of them. Beyond this arable belt was another landscape of rough pasture, woodland and scrub. This was where most of the building material for houses and fences was grown. It was also a good ‘emergency reserve’ of fodder in wintertime and in very dry summers. Most grazing animals are quite happy to browse (in other words to eat the leaves of trees and shrubs) if grazing is running short – in fact my sheep prefer browsing the young shoots of hawthorn hedges around the fields to the rich Fenland grass at their feet. So Yarnton and the villages around were carefully positioned not just to be safe from flooding, but to exploit their natural surroundings as efficiently as possible.
Yarnton has produced huge quantities of Iron Age and Roman pottery. I can remember being in the finds shed surrounded by trays and trays of pottery stacked up to dry. This is what one would expect of an Iron Age site in the Thames Valley. But archaeology isn’t always predictable. As a general rule of thumb, in areas where pottery is common in the Iron Age, it remains popular in post-Roman times. The converse also applies, so in places like the west Midlands around Cirencester, the Iron Age is almost aceramic – presumably people used basketry and wooden bowls instead – then the usual types of semi-mass-produced Romano-British pottery appear in the Roman period. At the close of the Roman period people revert to their old ways and pottery vanishes from the scene. But at Yarnton, despite the richness of its Iron Age pottery, post-Roman sherds are rare. This is particularly odd given the size and seeming prosperity of the Saxon settlements. These were not pokey, subsistence-style farmsteads clinging onto a blasted hillside somewhere in the mountains, but a thriving and vigorous set of expanding communities in the heart of the pastoral lushness that is the Thames Valley. So what was going on?
Yarnton and other sites around it revealed Early Middle and Late Saxon settlements, yet the total number of pottery fragments found there was just 117, weighing a fraction more than two packets of sugar (actually 2.192 kg). I would have expected something more like a quarter of a tonne, comprising anything from 10–50,000 sherds. We must assume that there isn’t a simple physical reason for the rarity of potsherds, like very acid ground water, which can dissolve shell and other calcareous components of the pottery. So the answer has to be cultural. For some reason the people living in Saxon Yarnton didn’t make or use much pottery. To an archaeologist, and probably only to an archaeologist, that might seem odd. But it isn’t. In fact the decision not to use pottery is perfectly rational, if unusual, because good containers can be made from wood or basketry, and of course birch bark, which we happen to know was used in the Thames Valley in prehistoric times. These organic containers will only survive in waterlogged conditions, where the air needed for fungi and bacteria to break down organic materials is absent. Such containers are durable, they don’t shatter when dropped, and they don’t require complicated technology to make. In fact it’s interesting to note that two probable Iron Age pottery kilns are known from Yarnton. But in Saxon times they wanted none of it, and preferred instead to use local materials such as willow and birch bark that would have grown plentifully nearby. To me, this seems a perfectly reasonable choice.
The pottery that did manage to survive was very interesting, and Gill’s pottery specialist, Paul Blinkhorn, made the most of what little he had to work on.
(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps the most remarkable result actually took very little analysis: the features of the Saxon settlement contained more Iron Age and Roman pottery (3.5 kg) than Saxon. This was material that was lying around on the surface when the Saxon houses were built, ditches were dug and so forth, a strange inversion of what one might normally expect. During the life of the settlement this earlier debris slipped into the various ditches, pits, wells and post-holes, along with fragments of the few contemporary Saxon pots.
The Saxon pottery included nine sherds of Ipswich Ware, and Yarnton is so far the most westerly site to have revealed this early form of mass-produced pottery. Paul Blinkhorn has pioneered a sophisticated form of chemical analysis, known as ICP-AES (or Inductively-Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectroscopy), which has shown that all the Ipswich Ware we currently know about was made from clays occurring in Ipswich. It can therefore be considered a very reliable indicator of Middle Saxon trade. Ipswich Ware was made between about 720 and 850, but was not traded outside East Anglia until about 730. At the height of its popularity it was traded as far north as York and as far south as Kent. Huge quantities have been found in the emporium at London, and it is assumed that Yarnton would have been within its trading area. Recently other sites in the Thames Valley have revealed Ipswich Ware, so it would seem reasonable to suggest that Yarnton was part of this trading network. As at other non-East Anglian sites, the Ipswich Ware from Yarnton included just a few vessels (around seven), the majority of which were large jars that probably originally contained some traded commodity such as salt or oil. It is always a problem, when it comes to pottery, to determine whether the vessels were bought for themselves, or for what they may once have contained.
FIG 6 The Middle Saxon settlement in the Thames Valley at Yarnton, Oxfordshire (AD 700–900).
There have been relatively few recent excavations of Middle Saxon settlements, so Gill Hey’s work at Yarnton is most important. A series of radiocarbon dates has indicated that occupation began in the late seventh century and lasted through the ninth (say 700–900). There was occupation in and around Yarnton in the Early Saxon period, but Gill is keen to emphasise the contrast between that and what followed: ‘The contrast between the Early and Middle Saxon settlements at Yarnton is strong. There are radical differences in the size of the settlement area, in the degree of organisation within it, in building type and in the variety of structural remains and other features … but the coherence of the [Middle Saxon] settlement plan suggests that it was organised on this large scale from the beginning.’
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The settlement involved, for the first time, substantial timber buildings in addition to the more traditional building form of the Early Saxon period, the SFB or sunken feature building, which essentially consisted of a single-storey structure with a wooden floor over a cellar-like space beneath.
(#litres_trial_promo) This space probably served to keep the floor dry and would have helped the floor joists resist wet-rot.
The large buildings were a series of post-built rectangular halls and their outbuildings, including an impressive circular poultry house. These buildings were set within enclosures that were defined by ditches, and perhaps by hedges too. Gill notes that from the eighth to the tenth centuries the use of space within the settlement became increasingly formalised. She suggests that this may have been a reflection of two things: greater social control and authority, coupled with a growing shortage of land.
The changes visible in the layout of the settlement are mirrored in the surrounding countryside, where analysis of botanical samples suggests that farming was changing quite rapidly. Hay meadows were being laid out, major boundaries between larger holdings were being constructed, and manuring (using manure from farms and settlement) was introduced as a regular part of the farming cycle. Farming, in other words, was becoming more organised and intensive, yet at the same time it was also more diverse, with a greater variety of crops being grown. Technological improvements included the probable introduction of the mouldboard or heavy plough, which allowed soil to be cast to one side to form a true furrow.
The new form of plough was invented sometime in the mid-first millennium AD, and was one of the great unsung technological developments of the early medieval world. Suddenly proper ploughing became possible: the soil was cut, lifted and folded back on itself. This had all sorts of beneficial effects. The top growth of weeds was denied light beneath the surface, and died. Any manure spread on the surface was taken down into the ground, where the earthworms could give it their undivided attention. Earlier, non-mouldboard ploughs were known as ‘ards’ or scratch-ploughs. They were invented in the Near East in the fifth millennium BC, and were most effective if used in two directions, a pattern known as ‘cross-ploughing’. The best British example of the marks left by cross-ploughing with an ard was found below the mound of the South Street long barrow, just outside Avebury in Wiltshire, and dating to the fourth millennium BC.
(#litres_trial_promo) I once had the doubtful pleasure of actually using an ard. It was pulled by two oxen, took all my strength and weight to keep it in the ground, and I only managed to make it penetrate about four inches deep. It really was a struggle, despite the fact that the two oxen were remarkably tame and behaved themselves excellently. I concede that ancient farmers would have had generations of skill and practice to guide them, but even so, I found it extraordinarily difficult. These earlier ploughs acted more like a huge hoe or a modern tractor-towed sub-soiler, which simply breaks up and lifts the soil as it passes through. All the effort goes into encountering the soil’s initial friction and resistance; less attention is paid to what happens as the ploughshare passes through. It’s a subtly different way of looking at the problem and the process of ploughing.
This pattern of intensification coupled with new technology is also seen at other Middle Saxon sites in the Thames Valley. It echoes, too, what we saw in the Fens of the Norfolk Marshland – and there are many other examples that show how the Middle Saxon period was one of stability, increasing social control and rapid economic development, at home and abroad. These changes in the countryside were combined with the growth of the first towns and the spread of international trade. It must have been a remarkably dynamic time in which to have lived.
Michael McCormick’s view of early medieval Europe accords well with what we now know about the Middle and Late Saxon period in southern Britain. Increasingly archaeological evidence is revealing this as a time of vigorous change, trade and development, with regular communication over long distances. It seems no exaggeration to say that in the four centuries before the Norman Conquest, Later Saxon southern Britain was very much a part of Europe, and not just as a matter of economic convenience. The ties were also cultural, scholarly and ecclesiastical. Perhaps rather surprisingly, given the fact that William the Conqueror was a Norman with Viking family ties, the close relationship between Saxon England and its Continental neighbours failed to develop much further under him or his offspring. If anything, the Plantagenets and other high medieval monarchs took England in a more insular direction – whatever they might have claimed by way of territory across the Channel.
There is now no doubt that close links existed between Later Saxon southern Britain and its neighbours around the southern North Sea basin. Further north and west the situation was rather different. As we have seen, development here was slower and less affected by outside influences, a situation which was soon to be exploited by those remarkable entrepreneurs the Vikings. Our understanding of the period has changed in two important respects. First, we now see the Middle Saxon period in southern Britain as altogether more dynamic and cosmopolitan than hitherto. Second, we no longer see the Vikings as just being a force for evil – a view, as we will see, that was fostered by King Alfred, who is increasingly being acknowledged as a master of political propaganda. So what were the Vikings really like?
CHAPTER TWO Enter the Vikings (#ulink_b3b0e144-f02b-5c3b-a7f7-f82f2f45ea23)
THE LATE SAXON PERIOD (850–1066) has been poorly taught at schools, and I cannot blame the teachers altogether for this. There are too many kings with strange names beginning with Æ. Viking armies seem to whizz about the place generally wreaking havoc, and worst of all, it seems somehow rather uncivilised. In actual fact, and largely thanks to archaeology, we now realise that many of the advances made in Middle Saxon times were consolidated and built upon in the Late Saxon period. Indeed, it must now be seen as one of the most creative periods in English history. Certainly there was strife and conflict, but at the same time the administrative framework of the country was being established. The Church was gaining a firm foothold, patterns of land ownership and tenure were being established, and urban life was to be transformed by the setting up of the first burhs.
Maybe the neglect of archaeology is a reason why so many popular history books relegate the entire Saxon period to a single introductory chapter which usually reads as a prologue to the main business, which happened after 1066. Having considered the Middle Saxon period in the barest outline in Chapter 1, I plan to devote this and the next two chapters to the Late Saxon period. Although it will be impossible to avoid some degree of overlap, the present chapter will mainly be about the Vikings and the historical events surrounding their conflict with the Saxons. Chapters 3 and 4 will consider more general themes, such as the changes that took place in the administration of town and country.
The Late Saxon period is very much better documented than the Middle Saxon period, largely thanks to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which as we will see shortly were set up in the late ninth century. But in both the Middle and Late Saxon periods evidence from field archaeology is having a most dramatic effect on the way we now view the first four centuries of medieval Britain. If one takes the historical record at face value, it would appear that people thought about Dane and Viking raids almost obsessively. Little else, it would seem, occupied their thoughts. But it now appears that the reality was rather different. Yes, raiding did affect people, especially in eastern and northern Britain, but as we have seen, farming, trade and communication were very much more important. But now we must come to grips with the bare bones of the political history – which is another way of saying that it is time to introduce the Vikings.
At first glance there is something wonderfully romantic, even ‘prehistoric’, about those wild Scandinavian warriors. They are strangely attractive, in a horribly bloodthirsty way. I remember on my first visit to Denmark meeting a university colleague who specialised in the archaeology of the Earlier Neolithic. Like me he was fair-haired, with an orange beard. As he shook my hand he said with a broad smile, ‘So you are Viking, I think?’ Suddenly – and quite irrationally – I felt I was part of a Band of Brothers. Had he offered me a horned helmet I would have grabbed it with both hands.
In fact horned helmets are part of the romanticising of the Vikings which began in the nineteenth century. Sadly, despite their evocative profile and terrifying appearance, they were never worn by Nordic warriors. I do, however, know of a very fine Late Iron Age example (probably first century BC), complete with rather fat, straight horns, which was dredged from the River Thames at Waterloo Bridge in 1868.
(#litres_trial_promo) Its Celtic-style decoration firmly marks it as being some eight centuries earlier than the first Viking raids.
The word ‘Viking’ does not appear in any contemporary accounts of the period. Instead we read of raids by Danes or Norsemen. Sometimes they simply referred to their attackers as ‘heathen’. The word (which is Old Norse in origin) gained public acceptance in the nineteenth century with the publication of the Icelandic Sagas, and the heroic deeds of the semi-mythical Viking sailors and warriors that appear in them. The Sagas were enormously popular and influential in Victorian Britain, and indeed across much of northern Europe. Today archaeologists tend to use ‘Viking’ as shorthand for ‘Anglo-Scandinavian’, which is the correct way of describing the Norse-influenced way of life to be found at places such as Jorvík (York). In general terms, what one might term the ‘Viking Age’ ends in England in the mid-eleventh century with the Norman Conquest, but we should not forget that places like the Western Isles of Scotland and the Isle of Man remained under Viking rule until 1266. Orkney and Shetland were Norwegian until as late as 1469.
The warlike reputation of the Vikings was justified, because we do know that they raided extensively in northern Europe, and even crossed the Atlantic to Greenland and Newfoundland in Canada. But there was a great deal more to them than that. Raiding was part of what they did, but it was probably a relatively minor part. In fact they were very much more constructive and, dare I say it, useful. Today many archaeologists question whether there was ever a group of people who saw themselves as distinctively Viking, as opposed to something less immediately identifiable, such as Nordic or Norse. It is also questionable to what extent the term Viking can actually be attached to a defined ethnic group. This is perhaps understandable: viewed from the perspective of a Saxon peasant in eastern England, it wouldn’t matter a jot whether the raiders were members of the same tribe, nation or kingdom, because they were all equally unwelcome.
The Vikings are as popular in print as they have ever been, and some of the more recent accounts are also very well illustrated.
(#litres_trial_promo)The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles contain the earliest account of a Viking raid on a British monastery, which took place on 8 January 793 on the island of Lindisfarne, just off the Northumberland coast. The ‘heathen’ raiders sacked the buildings, killed several monks and took others captive. They also desecrated altars and helped themselves to valuables which may have included the richly decorated original covers of the world-famous Lindisfarne Gospels, now in the British Museum.
The picture of heathens from abroad mercilessly raiding Christian shrines is a vivid one, but raiding was characteristic of the times. We know of many raids, especially around the Irish Sea, by British on Irish and vice versa. The Vikings were not the only people doing it. We also tend to think of northern and eastern England – what was soon to be called the Danelaw – as the main object of Viking depredations. But in fact other parts of the British Isles also received many and repeated visits from Viking raiders and settlers. It was a complex picture, not least because the Vikings were coming from many parts of Scandinavia. As a rule of thumb, people from Norway colonised the north and west of Britain, and Ireland. Danes came to eastern England and north-west France (Normandy).
FIG 7 The general pattern of Viking raids and migrations in north-western Europe from just before AD 800 until the eleventh century.
Their non-existent horned helmets aside, the Vikings are justly celebrated for their superbly graceful, clinker-built sea-going vessels, known as longships. The tradition of clinker building in northern Europe predates the Vikings, and was to persist until the fifteenth century for large sea-going vessels, when it was replaced by carvel or frame construction.* (#litres_trial_promo) The Viking longship was a superb vessel. I remember coming across one in a rather run-down state, very dusty and liberally spattered with pigeon droppings, in a shelter on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. A faded plaque declared that she was a full-scale replica that had been sailed across the Atlantic for the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Viking, as she was named, was a copy of the Gokstad ship which was discovered in Norway in 1880.
(#litres_trial_promo)Nobody was around, so I had a Viking longship that had crossed the Atlantic all to myself for an hour or so, until it started to get dark. It was an experience I will never forget.
The first thing that struck me about the Viking was her size. She seemed tiny for a vessel that could take the worst that the North Atlantic had to offer. I was reminded of this ten years later when I visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, in 1987. I was on a circuit of Continental tourist attractions as part of the feasibility study I undertook before we opened Flag Fen to the public. I had spent the morning sampling the delights of Legoland, and was eager to escape clever things made from plastic bricks, so I headed out to Roskilde. I was looking across the harbour when I noticed that in amongst the yachts and pleasure craft was a replica Viking ship (a large one, but not one of the ocean-going warships), with another, much smaller boat moored at the shore. By modern standards they were tiny.
Maritime archaeologists have realised that many of the handling characteristics of full-sized vessels can be replicated in half-scale models, with the help of some simple mathematics.
(#litres_trial_promo) These smaller vessels also present the shipwrights involved in their construction with most of the technical challenges faced by their ancient counterparts, but at considerably reduced expense. So far half-scale models have been constructed of a smaller Viking-age vessel, the fourteen-metre clinker-built Graveney boat, which it is estimated could have carried a cargo of six to seven tonnes. This vessel, which was abandoned in the mid-tenth century, was carrying a cargo that included (presumably Kentish) hops – comprehensively destroying the myth that all medieval ale was unhopped. The half-scale model of the Sutton Hoo ship, a twenty-eight-metre vessel, has been named the Sae Wylfing. I have seen her in action, and I was particularly impressed by her lightness – she could easily be dragged up onto a sloping beach by her crew, and would not require a quay unless heavily laden. The constructors of the Sae Wylfing were so impressed with her handling in rough water that they were inclined to attribute much of the political success of the builders of her original to such vessels.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is thought that the Sutton Hoo vessel was buried within a barrow mound to commemorate or conceal the last remains of King Raedwald of Essex, one of the Wuffingas, the early kings of Saxon East Anglia.
Boat or maritime archaeology has become a sub-discipline in its own right, and landlubbers are advised to walk its companionways with extreme caution. Its practitioners can be as ferocious as Captain Bligh. So the point I want to make has to be simple: yes, ocean-going Viking longships were quite probably the finest open clinker-built vessels ever built, but they were not the only ships afloat at the time – we know of many humbler boats from Viking Britain – and they were not ‘the reason’, as I was taught at school, that the Vikings voyaged abroad. The Vikings came first, the ships second. In other words, the longships were built because the men who sailed them wanted to travel and had the necessary skills to build them.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was not the other way around.
It should also be stressed that Viking longships did not appear, as it were, out of the blue. They can be seen to form part of an evolutionary tree whose roots probably extended back to the Early Bronze Age, around 1900 BC, when the first plank-built boats (found at Ferriby on the Humber) made their appearance. These boats could have crossed the Channel, and were probably used for trade along the coast. By the Late Bronze Age (say 1000 BC) trade and exchange around the North Sea was taking place on a regular basis. During Roman times Britain exported huge amounts of grain across the Channel to feed the later Roman field armies. We know that the Anglo-Saxons were excellent sailors, and we have evidence for this in the clinker-built ship from Sutton Hoo, dating to around AD 625. This vessel superficially resembles a Viking longship, and would have been perfectly capable of crossing the North Sea. And of course in the previous chapter we saw the extent of trade throughout northern Europe in the Middle Saxon period and afterwards. So Viking ships, like the Viking phenomenon in general, were part of a process that had roots many centuries old.
Viking warships, and some Viking art, were intended to strike terror into their enemies, and in this they undoubtedly succeeded, because images of Viking ships, such as that in wrought iron on the door of Stillingfleet Church, North Yorkshire, continued to appear even after the immediate threat had passed.
If we are to appreciate the impact of the Vikings on southern Britain, we must briefly go back to the Middle Saxon period and say a few words about the relationship of the Vikings, in what would later be known as the Danelaw, to the two major Saxon territories west of them, the Mercians in the Midlands and the West Saxons in Wessex. Many will know of Wessex and King Alfred the Great in the ninth century, but Mercia, under great rulers such as Offa, was of comparable power in the previous century.
Those of us who have the good fortune to live in the middle of England have always believed that we live in the belly of the place. What the Midlands digests, England consumes; this is the part of the country where we are proud to make and grow things, and where you find the best beer and the warmest people. In the Saxon period the Midlands was synonymous with the kingdom of Mercia. It was the most powerful kingdom of Anglo-Saxon England in the first part of the Middle Saxon period (late seventh and eighth centuries). The heart of Mercia was the middle Trent Valley. This is where its episcopal centre, Lichfield (founded 669), and two royal sites, at Tamworth and Repton, were located. As we will see, Repton is currently being excavated, and is producing very exciting results. Mercia’s early kings Penda and his son Wulfhere were aggressive soldiers, and managed to exact tribute payments from all around: from southern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, from British kingdoms to the west, and from Northumbria.
Mercian power peaked in the eighth century with two kings, Æthalbald* (#litres_trial_promo) and Offa (757–96); the latter is mainly remembered today for the construction of Offa’s Dyke, a massive earthwork which runs north – south for 192 kilometres between England and Wales. It consists of a bank to the east and a ditch to the west, so defenders could stand atop the bank and shower attackers with rocks, spears, arrows and anything else that came to hand while they struggled across the ditch and up the steep slope. The positioning of the bank behind the ditch clearly suggests that the earthwork was built to defend the territory of Mercia from attacks from Wales and the west. At first glance Offa’s Dyke seems like a single massive construction, but research by Sir Cyril Fox in the 1950s showed it to have been built in a series of sections, some of which don’t marry up too well.
(#litres_trial_promo) Fox suggested that it was essentially a symbolic ‘line in the sand’ created by the might of Mercia against the altogether more puny Welsh. More recently, detailed survey and excavation by Dr David Hill of Manchester University has shown that it was constructed in earnest as a defensive work against concerted attacks from the powerful Welsh kingdom of Powys.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a serious piece of military engineering, probably regularly patrolled by Mercian troops and linked to a system of warning beacons. Anglo-Saxon beacons were an important military tool and consisted of large thatched bonfires which were always at the ready.
FIG 8 The principal kingdoms of Britain in the late eighth century (Middle Saxon period).
Contrary to popular belief, Offa’s Dyke does not extend from sea to sea across the entire eastern approaches to Wales. In fact the original Mercian earthwork is only found across the central part of Wales – a stretch of just over a hundred kilometres. The rest is unprotected, and David Hill believes that this stretch represents the boundary between Mercia and Powys, the source of the principal recurrent threat. Mercia was not at war with the kingdoms of Gwynedd to the north, or with Ercing or Gwent to the south. So that was the boundary Offa defended – there was no point in doing any more. This tells us that boundaries and political treaties were generally honoured. It also tells us that Offa was a pragmatist, and was not about to do anything that was not strictly necessary. It is known that Offa lost Mercian land to the kingdom of Powys in the mid-eighth century, and David Hill regards the Dyke as a fallback position to ensure that there were no further incursions into his territory.
