CHESTER LE STREET — FALLEN MINSTERS — NEW TOWNS — SHIRES AND HUNDREDS — EADRED, EIRÍKR, WULFSTAN — EGIL SKALLAGRÍMSSON AGAIN — BRITAIN IN THE 96OS
ON THE WHOLE, THE COMMUNITY OF St Cuthbert survived the first Viking Age in good shape. Fleeing its original island home of Lindisfarne in the ninth century with the relics of its precious saint, its leaders supped with the devil in the shape of the Scandinavian Host and forged a new geography and identity south of the River Tyne.
Its bishops played a clever hand as brokers between the native Christian élite and the kings of York and were rewarded with royal protection and valuable estates which secured its economic future. In time, they won the favour of a great southern king, Æðelstan, who lavished gifts on them and promised the loyalty of his successors. The survival of the community’s unique relics and of the famous Lindisfarne Gospels is surpassed in historical value only by the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, a key text in tracing the fortunes of the Insular church from its seventh-century beginnings up until the Norman Conquest.
The small town of Chester le Street, where the community made its home for more than a century after 883 and where, some time in the middle of the tenth century, the Historia was first compiled, might seem an unlikely setting for such a momentous narrative to be written. A Roman fort, Concernais, was constructed here in the first century AD on a rise above the confluence of the navigable River Wear* and the Cong burn which rises in the Pennines some miles to the west. Once a staging post on the Great North Road and a busy coal transhipment port, its industries have moved elsewhere.
52. SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL: mounted warrior on a cross fragment from St Cuthbert’s church, Chester le Street.
Chester le Street, Kuncacester, obeys the fundamental rules of Early Medieval connectivity, forming a node, or interchange on the Insular travel network: a day’s journey upstream from the sea at Wearmouth, the centre of an important early monastic estate. The road that crossed the burn, now buried beneath the town’s Front Street, directly linked the River Tyne and its Hadrianic bridge, the Pons Aelius, to York, Lincoln and London. A few miles to the north another Roman road, known as the Wrekendike, branched off to the north-east towards the old Roman fort at Arbeia, Bede’s monastery at Jarrow and a seventh-century royal harbour close to the mouth of the River Tyne. Not far to the west, running parallel with the Great North Road, is the line of Dere Street which, at Corbridge, meets the Tyne and its own metalled trans-Pennine route, Stanegate, thus linking the Cuthbert community with its important holdings in Cumbria.†
By the time that the Historia was written the Cuthbert community had lost or shed many of their lands in north Northumbria but sat at the centre of a large territorium in what is now County Durham. The Kuncacester establishment was more than just a squatter’s camp: an impressive array of carved crosses (including one depicting a mounted warrior à la mode) survives in fragments to show that the community supported a sculpture workshop; and competent scribes (whatever King Ælfred might have believed about the decline of Latinity) plied their trade here.
At about the time when the Historic was being compiled from records assiduously curated and embellished by St Cuthbert’s clerics, one of them, Aldred, embarked on a project to translate the Lindisfarne Gospels into Old English and, since he did so by interpolating between the elegant lines of the original, the physical record of that achievement endures, as do his invaluable notes on the history of Anglo-Saxon England’s most famous book and the first lengthy samples of written Northumbrian dialect.
Symeon, writing his Libellus de Exordio much later, after the community had moved to its permanent Durham home on a dramatic riverine peninsula five miles upstream, records that in the eleventh century the original ‘wooden church’ at Kuncacester was taken down and replaced in stone.1 Within the walls of the old Roman fort, then, lay an establishment capable of hosting the visits of kings and other dignitaries, of producing sculpture, with its own library and scriptorium. The mother church of north Northumbria lay at the heart of its estates, its bishops acting like secular lords receiving and consuming the renders of its tenants, tenaciously defending its ancient rights against all comers. Despite the neglect of its former patron kings at Bamburgh, the theft of its lands by native and foreign warlords and the loss of core territories, the institution founded by King Oswald and Bishop Aidan in 635 rode the tides of fate, adapting to reality and opportunity and expertly navigating the labyrinth of Early Medieval politics.
53. ST CUTHBERT’S CHURCH, Chester le Street, County Durham. The Lindisfarne community made its home here for a century after about 883.
Since their heyday in the early eighth century hundreds of Insular minsters, originally élite communities of high-born monks and nuns following the rule of St Benedict and often playing a pastoral role among the believers on their estates, had exploited their status as central places dominating equally pivotal landscapes: on estuaries; where important roads crossed rivers; at natural harbours; not always on the most fertile land but with access to a range of resources on which their wealth and influence depended. Their entrepreneurial talents led to concentrations of labour and skills: to the founding and maintenance of scriptoria and vellum workshops, schools of sculpture and glazing, specialization in arable and stock-rearing; to mill engineering; to intellectual endeavour and the production, consumption and trading of marketable surplus. When they are excavated, some of these minster establishments look for all the world like small towns.
The histories of those minsters during the first Viking Age reflect regional fortunes. Some, especially vulnerable coastal communities like Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Iona, succumbed to the accumulated pressures of theft, violence and enslavement and declined terminally or were partially abandoned in the eighth and ninth centuries, only to be reborn in the later tenth or eleventh century.
Portmahomack, the most northerly of the coastal minsters, was put to sword and fire around the turn of the ninth century, its monks likely enslaved and taken off to markets in the Baltic for resale. Its skilled craftsmen and farmers were set to new endeavours, converting looted scrap metal into objects of more immediate secular value for international trade and producing grain and beef for its new lords, rather than calves for vellum. At various periods of the ninth century Fortriu was under the control of Picts, then Gaels, then the kings of Alba and perhaps, at times, under the direct control of the Norse earls of Orkney. One, and one only, of its bishops is known: Tuathal mac Artgusso, who died in 865, the year in which the mycel here arrived in East Anglia.2 If Portmahomack were no longer a suitable site for his see, then Rosemarkie, at the mouth of the Moray Firth, where ecclesiastical sculpture was still being produced, might have retained its institutional functions into the reign of Constantín after 900. The Tarbat peninsula was, much later, the scene of a great clash between Thorfinnr Sigurðsson ‘the Mighty’, the eleventh-century Earl of Orkney and a king of Scotland, Karl ‘Hundason’, better known as Macbeth.3
Far to the south-west on the tidal River Clyde and at the head of an important east-west route through the lowlands to the River Forth, the community at Govan on the River Clyde survived and thrived because of its status as a royal cult site that continued to be patronized and endowed by the native élite. Their trading connections, to judge by its collection of hogback tomb covers, also enabled them to acquire the products of Norse workshops. A royal estate lying on the opposite bank at Partick may also have been a centre for the consumption and display of sculpture during the tenth century.4
The survival into the tenth century of a working minster at the British royal cult site of St David’s, on the extreme western tip of Dyfed, is most convincingly demonstrated by the career of its one-time bishop, Asser, the scholar recruited by Ælfred to bolster his programme of literary and intellectual revival in the 88os. But his loyalties were divided as he was increasingly drawn into the West Saxon king’s orbit. Asser records that Ælfred presented him with two Somerset minsters, at Congresbury and Banwell, together with a lengthy list of all their possessions. Later, the king:
Unexpectedly granted me Exeter with all the jurisdiction pertaining to it in Saxon territory and in Cornwall... He then immediately gave me permission to ride out to those two minsters so well provided with goods of all sorts.5
Asser’s enjoyment of the fruits of those minsters may have ensured their wealth and future prospects, but evidence that secular lords in the West Saxon heartlands were trading minsters as gifts reflects an inexorable process of secularization that increasingly turned former monastic communities into clerical churches, the fruits of whose wealth might be consumed by visiting lords or disposed of like cash assets. In an extreme case like Cheddar, Ælfred and his descendants were able gradually to convert a minster and nearby hunting lodge into a royal palace and estate centre whose minster was subsumed into the royal portfolio.
A minster had stood in the ruins of the former Roman civitas capital of the Dumnonii at Exeter since at least the seventh century, when its thriving school produced the indefatigable missionary Boniface. After the Host’s withdrawal from Wareham in 876 and forced westward march they occupied the remains of the fortress at Exeter, defying Ælfred’s attempts to dislodge them. It must have suggested itself early on in his defensive plans as the perfect physical and strategic site for a burh (of relatively modest size, assessed at 734 hides) and in the epic campaigns of 893 its garrison was able to resist one of the Channel fleets of the combined Scandinavian forces until a relieving force arrived under Ælfred’s command.
It is not clear into whose hands the Exeter minster fell after Asser’s death in 908 or 909; twenty years later it became a favourite recipient of King Æðelstan’s favours during his period of alienation from the West Saxon royal minster at Winchester. He held councils here at Easter 928 (bringing his new Welsh sub-reguli with him) and again in 932; and William of Malmesbury offers a dubious story that in 927 he drove the Western Britons (i.e. the Cornish population) out of the city and refortified it with towers and stone walls, setting a new boundary on Wessex’s frontier with the British at the River Tamar.6 Æðelstan’s fifth law code was issued here in about 931 and he was a substantial donor of a collection of important relics to the minster.7 Exeter’s minster survived, but not as its founders knew it.
In two thirds of the forts listed in the Burghal Hidage minsters like Exeter lay inside the walls or were situated close by them. The defences offered physical protection from raiders; and it is possible that some of the earliest burhs where ancient minsters stood, like Wareham, had already been protected by earthen ramparts constructed at the behest and expense of the church. Wareham, after all, had been taken and defended against West Saxon assault in 875, before the burghal system was conceived. It may even have provided one of the models, alongside original Mercian exemplars. If the benefit to minsters of protection was one edge of the sword, the other was the inevitable militarization of their immediate environs and the diversion of ecclesiastical resources to fending off, or paying off, raiders.
Those minsters that lay in lands ruled and settled by Scandinavian pirate-farmers generally saw their estates broken up, the land redistributed among the Host in reward for loyalty and service. In East Anglia no bishops are known from the period between the 860s and the 940s and, along with its organizational framework, the church lost many communities and large swathes of land. Even here, though, minsters survived. The community at the seventh-century foundation of Ely, an island on the River Great Ouse deep in the Cambridgeshire fenlands, compiling their history half a millennium later, remembered how, in the aftermath of the Host’s arrival in the 86os, the monastery had been burned down, the precious sarcophagus of the founding saint Æðelðryth defiled, their monks and nuns massacred or enslaved:
And thus the place lay in a miserable state, totally deprived of the observance of the divine office... No one remained to carry out ministry. In the end, there returned after some years eight of the very clerics who were despoiled, and some of them remained, after the lapse of many years, in decrepit old age until the time of King Eadred. Patching up the aisles of the church as best they could at a time of such calamity, they carried out due observance of the divine office.8
We should swallow the detail of this story with a spoonful of scepticism, if for no other reason than that any monks surviving from the 86os would have been more than a hundred years old by the beginning of the reign of King Eadred, Eadmund’s brother and successor in 946. In reality it serves as mere prologue to the more historical record of the minster’s refounding in the time of Eadmund’s second son, King Eadgar (959-975). Nevertheless, the process of restoration of at least some of its former lands reflects, if nothing else, the tenacious memory and record-keeping of those who regarded themselves as its spiritual keepers, able to testify to what had formerly belonged to St Æðelðryth, like their counterparts in Chester le Street.
More convincing, and not much less dramatic, is evidence from the same source for a royal minster at Horningsea, a few miles upstream from Ely, close to the Danish stronghold at Cambridge. The record in the Liber Eliensis of a dispute over the minster’s legitimate holdings, a marvellous tale of stolen daggers, complicit priests and red-handed apprehension by lawmen, seems to refer to a genuine charter of King Eadweard (900-924) of a gift of five hides in Horningsea and two at Eye to the priest, one Cenwold, who ministered to the clerical community there.9 If nothing else it militates against the idea of the wholesale destruction of the East Anglian church at the hands of the Host. And it is salutary to remember that the cult of the Host’s most celebrated victim, the martyred King Eadmund, was fostered by and thrived under East Anglia’s Danish rulers.
If minsters looked increasingly like secular economic institutions, often incorporated into the military and institutional framework of the West Saxon state, from the early tenth century onwards they were also key components in urbanization and the rapid expansion of the Insular economies. The minsters had long enjoyed the fruits of trade; the archbishops of York and Canterbury minted their own coins and claimed rights similar to those of kings over tolls and the perquisites of élite international trade. The document confirming Worcester’s new status under Æðelred and Æðelflæd‡ shows how closely linked were the interests of church, market, ealdorman and king.
In Wessex the new burhs were slow to develop as towns and it was not until the middle of the tenth century that many of them emerged as fully urban markets. By then there is a compelling alignment of burhs and minsters with the mints that allow us to track the development of economic prosperity. David Hill, compiler of the indispensable Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, is at pains to show how, from the earliest inception of the burghal system, there was a distinction between fort and town.10 Smaller burhs enclosing less than 16 acres did not develop into urban centres, while the early southern burhs that became towns— London, Winchester, Canterbury, York, Rochester, Shaftesbury, Gloucester, Bath and Christchurch—all had existing minsters; and all but the last of these was also the site of a mint. The relationship between early church foundations and productive sites is evident, too. Minster communities concentrated large labour forces and enjoyed wide-ranging portfolios of agricultural and woodland resources. They innovated, specialized, invested, produced and traded at local, regional and international scales. They often occupied key locations on navigable rivers and Roman roads. Not for nothing were their patrons and lords interested (in both senses) in minsters’ economic potential. In the middle of the ninth century, after the demise of the coastal trading settlements, minsters were the largest and most developed of Insular settlements.
The relationship between the church and urban development has another intriguing strand. The centres of early saints’ cults attracted pilgrims in large numbers. Those churches that successfully nurtured their cults might expect to enjoy the donations of grateful, or hopeful, petitioners to their saint. And, where large numbers of people congregated, fairs and markets developed to relieve them of their surplus wealth. Churches with important cults often developed urban characteristics alongside productivity in agriculture and trade in goods. They ‘exported’ the fame and virtues of their saints. Markets and/or fairs and churches occur in very close proximity in a number of towns: at St Albans, Darlington, Southwark, Oundle, Beverley and elsewhere.11
Tenth-century Lincoln may have supported thirty churches.12 Up to a dozen of these seem to have stood close to market places associated with saints such as the ever-popular Cuthbert, Botolph and Martin of Tours, whose name appears on that intriguing series of Lincoln-minted coins. Whether any relics (bona fide or not) of the great saints were held by the churches bearing their names is a moot point. But there are established links between what one might call special interest groups and their holy patrons. Martin looked after beggars; Botolph after travellers.
In Ælfred’s Britain moneyers operated from London, Canterbury, Winchester, Exeter, Gloucester, Leicester, Lincoln and York, the latter three under the entrepreneurial influence of Danish kings or jarls. In the time of his grandson, Æðelstan, more than thirty mints existed, of which London and Chester were the most prolific by far.13 By the time of the Domesday survey of 1086 more than fifty towns had produced coins. London alone had more than ten moneyers at any one time. If one wants to rank the Insular towns by their coinage production (as good a measure as any), London is followed distantly by Lincoln, then York, Winchester, Chester, Thetford, Exeter, Stamford, Canterbury, Norwich, Southwark and Oxford, in that order. Four of these towns (Lincoln, Thetford, Norwich and Stamford) were substantially created under Danish lordship. The impressive self-confidence of Ælfred’s heirs in Wessex and the south was matched by that of the much more obscure but no less influential jarls and duces of East Anglia and East Mercia, whose promotion of production and trade, unfettered perhaps by the conservative institutions and entrenched interests of southern lordship, provided much of the inspiration for West Saxon success and fuelled a new age of economic expansion through its towns and trading links.
The burhs founded as towns in the late ninth and early tenth centuries by Ælfred and his children did not, at first, succeed as urban centres. International and internal trade was stagnant. The supply of bullion accumulated by invading and defending armies seems to have been hoarded: to avoid theft and taxes and because, perhaps, there was nothing material to spend it on. The evidence from wills suggests that only after the middle of the tenth century did those who had accumulated significant quantities of loot in the campaigns of the 910s and later begin to bequeath it to a generation willing to open their lead chests and spend.14
The release of large amounts of cash coincided with the discovery of significant new silver deposits in Germany, with a revival of cross-Channel trade§ and with the monastic reform movement under King Eadgar. Churches were newly built or rebuilt. In the burhs, tenements and cross streets began to fill in and new workshops for pottery, metal- and leather-working were established. The Danelaw territories of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were the most prosperous in lowland Britain, a function not just of entrepreneurial savvy and proximity to Continental markets but also, perhaps, because of the earlier fragmentation of great estates which allowed smaller, more enterprising landowners to exploit rural resources and adopt new technologies like the mouldboard plough.¶
Once again lowland Britain’s accessibility, its abundant natural resources and excellent farmland fostered prosperity, and its kings sought with varying degrees of success to impose consistent rules for the conduct of trade, the resolution of disputes and the stability and quality of coinage. Their own wealth and power increased with the sophistication of state institutions and with the surplus of the land.
The concern of Æðelstan and his successors to legislate for the control of regional and local institutions is preserved in a document dating from the middle decades of the tenth century called the Hundred Ordinance. The need for such regulation arose from the process by which Mercian territories, both west and east, of Deniscan and Angelcynn alike, were divided into shires, each based on a burh. Wessex had long since been ‘shired’, but its old shire centres, the royal vills at Dorchester, Somerton, Wilton and Hamtun, largely lost their relevance in Ælfred’s defensive scheme, while the south-eastern counties retained older tribal and traditional centres. In the lands of the Danelaw fortified towns became the centres of fiscal administration and of the delivery of renders and justice.
With the exception of Stamford, which did not become a shire centre, the logic is impeccable: Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire were the lands controlled by such duces or jarls as Urm, the man who helped Óláfr on his Midland campaign of 941 and whose English-named daughter married the Norse king. The jarls were equated with ealdormen by Æðelstan, if we accept the persuasive testimony of his charter witness lists, and the size of their territories gave the new shires a natural congruence with those of Wessex and the south. Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire all, similarly, emerged as the territories at whose centres lay fortified towns. West Mercia is a more complex case and an argument has been made by David Hill and others that ancient polities, the folk territories of Hwicce, Magonsæte, Wrocansæte and Arosætna, were overridden by deliberate policy; and Eadweard is the favoured culprit.15 Thus, the ancient Mercian capital at Tamworth did not become a shire town but was left stranded on the margins of Staffordshire and Warwickshire.
Æðelstan’s London Ordinance, the Friðgegyldum# apparently set up for the benefit of its bishops and reeves, introduces hundred-men and the idea of collective responsibility for the execution of justice in London’s hinterland. The natural extension of this scheme to the hundredal divisions from which levies were raised to garrison the shire burhs and render burghal dues to them may have been conceived at the same time. There is no doubting its centralizing motivation, its design to overcome and overwhelm the inherent regionality of the lands south of the Humber.
The hundred itself was nominally an area assessed at 100 hides for rendering purposes, with a meeting place and vill at its centre, a minster, a market place and a cemetery for judicial executions.16 In practice, no such uniformity existed. At the time of the Domesday survey, Leicestershire comprised six hundreds, Devonshire thirty-two. Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were so large that they required an additional tier of administration, the third part, or Thrithing (Old Norse þriðjungr), which became the familiar Ridings. Neither they, nor the shires of the Danelaw, conformed to the hundredal ideal—instead, they were administered in equivalents called Wapentakes, from Old Norse vápnatak, a taking of weapons’. The distinctness of the language is also reflected in separate legal customs in those areas long subject to Scandinavian influence, not least of which is the recognition by contemporaries and later Anglo-Norman legislators of The Danelaw’ itself.17
In the Danelaw, compensation paid to a lord for the murder of one of his men varied with the dead man’s rank, not that of his lord. Another regional peculiarity was the fine called lahslit, a cover-all penalty applied to a variety of offences. I have already made mention of a Norse flavour to legal and fiscal provisions in Cheshire and Lancashire.**
Between Northumbria, the lands of the Five Boroughs and East Anglia considerable internal variation reflected the historical evolutions of those regions and their fortunes under Danish and Norse rule. Since their legislators did not leave written coda, much of the evidence for direct Scandinavian influence comes from Southern kings’ attempts to rationalize and streamline law across the geographical divide. King Æðelred II acknowledged the problem in his so-called Wantage Code of about 997, written when England was under sustained attack from a new wave of Scandinavian armies.†† That rationalization did not preclude borrowing from Scandinavian prototypes. In among the punitive fines for various crimes is a bold precedent:
A meeting is to be held in each wapentake, and the twelve leading thegns, and with them the reeve, are to come forward and swear on the relics that are put into their hands that they will accuse no innocent man nor conceal any guilty one.
This is generally held to enshrine the concept of a jury system, unknown in English law before this date but secure in its Scandinavian origins.18 A subsequent clause outlines, also for the first time, the principle that when the twelve thegns of the jury cannot agree, a majority verdict of eight to four is sufficient to secure a conviction. More than a century of Danish and Norse rule and settlement had left an indelible stamp on Insular law and customs.
Regional variations in customary law and administration were not confined to areas of mixed population. In Kent and Sussex much more ancient territorial units survived, of lathes and rapes, six in each county. And across the territories of the Angelcynn the concentration of hundredal courts at meeting places of evident antiquity, such as the Ecgberht’s Stone and Iley Oak mentioned in the account of Ælfred’s Edington campaign of 878, suggests that such institutions emerged from an earlier customary system of local and regional meeting places and folk-courts, perhaps convened on the quarter days to signal an inalienable bond between the invariable turn of the season’s wheel and the lives of thegn, ceorl and slave.
In the British kingdoms of the west, cantrefi (literally ‘a hundred townships’), rough equivalents of the shires, with commotes (‘neighbourhoods’) beneath them, are suggestive of similarities in administration; but exact equivalence is not possible or appropriate. In Scotland, the administrative system is frustratingly obscure, although the davach, perhaps Pictish in origin, seems to have been a measure of land that could support so many oxen. In what became Northumberland a different sort of shire administration persisted, uniquely tied to the rule of its lords at Bamburgh. South of the Tyne, the County Palatine of Durham was formed out of the buffer state created by the community of St Cuthbert.
In the Hundred Ordinance Eadmund, or one of his close successors, legislated for the meeting of a hundred court (hundred-gemot) every four weeks at which ‘each man is to do justice to the other’‡‡. Its clauses, like those of the Dunsate ordinance and the Friðgegyldum, are concerned with the apprehension of thieves, especially of cattle, with compensation for victims and fines for contempt of the court. In all aspects of Early Medieval law-giving there is a strong sense of ideology expressed: kings envisaged a model state, with themselves at the law-giving apex of a social pyramid. The ideal may have differed greatly from reality. Rarely, if ever, were kings’ laws and ordinances cited in the judicial cases for which we have evidence.
The kings of the tenth century conceived of a set of unifying, centralizing ideals, if not a single indivisible kingdom, expressed in the confident imagery and inscriptions on their coins, and in their law codes and land grants. But it was an illusory prize, offered anciently by the Venerable Bede to the virtuous, martial king who could map the universality of the Christian kingdom onto the terra firma of political reality. At each throw of the dice the southern overlords of the tenth century believed themselves to have imperium over the Angelcynn in their grasp, only to suffer the frustrations of their forbears. Britain remained resolutely regional in identity and affinities.
In the aftermath of King Eadmund’s murder in 946, his brother Eadred succeeded to the throne. His first grant, a so-called ‘coronation-gift’ of land in Northamptonshire, made at Kingston upon Thames to a thegn called Wulfric, describes him as ‘king and ruler to the sovereignty of the quadripartite rule’. As the rest of the text makes clear, the four kingdoms and peoples in question were the Anglo-Saxons, the Northumbrians, the pagans (meaning the Norse of Cheshire and Lancashire rather than the Christian Danes of East Mercia and East Anglia) and the Britons of Wales and Cornwall.19 The list of witnesses at this inaugural council shows a continuity of policy: the two archbishops, Oda (the naturalized Dane) and Wulfstan; Deodred, the bishop of London; various other bishops and abbots; then Hywel Dda and Morgan, son of King Owain of Gwent (the latter a royal hostage, perhaps), four ealdormen and four Danish jarls, including Urm.
The new king’s attentions were immediately drawn to events in the North. Later in the same year, 946, he was able, in the words of the Chronicle, to ‘reduce all Northumbria to subjection’, after which the Scots ‘gave him oaths and promised to do his will in all things’.20 His imperium was sealed by treaty the following year at Tanshelf, near Castleford (Ceoster fordo), an old crossing point of the River Aire some 15 miles (24 km) north of the Don on the traditional border line between Mercia and southern Northumbria. Here Archbishop Wulfstan and all the councillors of the Northumbrians submitted to him. That, at least, is the official version contained in the Chronicle, whose editorial aim was to establish that Northumbria naturally belonged under West Saxon rule and that deviation from that narrative constituted either rebellion or base ingratitude. The truth may be a little more obscure; the politics are not.
Kváran’s expulsion from York in 944 had left southern Northumbria without a ruler. Eiríkr, son of Haraldr, is first mentioned in two versions of the Chronicle four years later; the Worcester manuscript says that by this year the Men of York had accepted him as their king and that Eadred mounted a punitive campaign against the Northumbrians in response. Eiríkr also appears, more allusively, in the life of a Scottish saint, Cathróe (of Metz) who, in the middle years of that decade, happened to be making his way south with the intention of embarking on a pilgrimage to Rome. The account of that journey places the saint at the court of both Constantín (who had abdicated in 943) and Eadmund; so his supposed visit to York, at which he was introduced to Eiríkr by virtue of Eirík’s marriage to one of Cathróe’s kinswomen, must have taken place before 943.21
Placing Eiríkr in York as early as 943 is not in itself problematic—he may have been a protégé of Kváran’s. Archbishop Wulfstan then plays the part of his ambassador at Tanshelf, continuing his own career of professionally ambiguous affinities. Fusing the account in the saint’s Vita with the Chronicle does, however, create two problems for historians. Firstly, there is the identity of Eiríkr, often and conveniently associated with the Eiríkr blóðøx familiar from the sagas, whose running feud with Egil makes for such good reading. York’s Eiríkr is the son of a Haraldr, just as Eiríkr blóðøx was the son of Haraldr Hárfagri. But that anti-hero’s wife was called Gunnhildr, and she is not likely to have been a Gaelic kinswoman of Cathróe. Historians Clare Downham and Alex Woolf suspect a conflation of two historical figures, of whom the York variant was another grandson of Ívarr and, therefore, Irish Norse rather than Norwegian.22 The confusion is not helped by the fact that the Egil of the eponymous Saga turns up at York and reignites the feud with his nemesis.
Whatever complexities underlie the events of 946-947, we know that Eadred took an army north in the year after the convention at Tanshelf and destroyed one of Archbishop Wulfstan’s prize assets, the ancient and wealthy minster complex at Ripon, by fire in a punitive raid§§. He did not get away scot-free; the Men of York caught up with his returning army as it recrossed the Aire at Castleford, and destroyed its rear. Even so, Eadred was able to force submission and reparations from the Northumbrians and a promise that they would expel Eiríkr.¶¶
That departure did not signal the end of Northumbria’s long-standing relationship with Irish Norse kings, the dynasty of the great Ívarr. The Chronicle entry for 949 blandly records the return of Óláfr Kváran from Dublin, where he had spent the previous few years in competition for the kingship with his cousin, Blákári Guðrøðsson. With the latter’s death in 948 and the convenient expulsion of Eiríkr the same year, Kváran was received in York once more. The arch-operator, Wulfstan, transferred his allegiance accordingly; but he was still attending Eadred’s councils in 949, possibly by this time acting formally as ambassador on Kváran’s behalf.
There is little doubt that kingship in York, or Lincoln, or the Five Boroughs, meant something rather different from its Mercian or West Saxon counterpart. Germanic kingship had emerged from the custom of appointing a leader ‘in time of war’. The development of state institutions giving the king law-making, fiscal and administrative rights was a seventh-century phenomenon that went hand in hand with the emergence of the church as a legitimizing, powerful institution in its own right. The eternal triangle of bookland, church and kingship through which the Insular states functioned depended on that enduring relationship, steeped in rationality and mutual dependence.
In York, it seems, the church survived in robust good health; but its relationship with Norse warlords was ambivalent. The Cuthbert community had persuaded successive kings of York (if that is what they were) of the value of mutual support. The archbishops seem to have been able to effect a similar arrangement for themselves; but it is hard to accept the idea that Rögnvaldr, Óláfr and their like ruled over the lands north of the Humber in the way that their southern counterparts did. They do not appear to have been enthusiastic legislators. They must have overseen or allowed the fragmentation of many very large ecclesiastical estates and, although they often issued coinage from their mints, one doubts whether they possessed the administrative equivalent of the civil service professionalized by the West Saxon kings, with hierarchies of portgerefa, shire reeve, ealdorman and, particularly, of bishop. There is no northern equivalent of a royal secretary like Æðelstan ‘A’. That is not to say that their rule was ineffective, or that they did not see the virtues of the model Christian state. But they left no enduring ruling dynasty; no stable succession holding office by divine right; no written record of their functions or achievements.
In East Mercia and East Anglia it seems as though the hierarchy of lordship followed a model comprising the dependent unfree, free farmers or sokemen, thegns, holds and jarls. The latter, of whom we know more than half a dozen names, appear to have controlled the territoria based on their towns (including the Five Boroughs) as more or less independent fiefdoms, each capable of autonomous military action and economic policy but evidently very often working co-operatively and in mutual support. The distinctiveness of legal and administrative institutions in the Midlands shows not that the jarls sought cultural conquest but that they were capable, effective rulers, economically successful and able to impose a king’s peace on those regions that would become the shires of Midland England. They adapted to and modified indigenous customs and became, in time, patrons of a revived church as well as promulgators of innovative law. We have no record at all of civil war or rebellion during the nearly hundred years of their effective rule. The lords of Goltho and Flixborough were left alone, for the most part, to get on with it.
The greatest of the early Welsh kings, Hywel Dda, died in 950. He was succeeded in Deheubarth, the south and west of Wales, by his son Owain, who was able to retain control of Powys on the Mercian border; but Gwynedd was won back by the sons of Idwal Foel who, two years later, ravaged Gwent: Welsh unification was just as illusory for the dynasty of Rhodri Mawr as a kingdom of England was for that of Ælfred.
In the north, Mael Coluim mac Domnall felt sufficiendy confident of his military power to raid as far south as the River Tees, according to a not altogether straightforward entry in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba for 950.23 The raid, in which the Men of Alba ‘carried off many people and many droves of catde’, does not feature in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, whose annalist recorded no entries between the reign of Eadmund and his grandson Æðelred II. The raid was, perhaps, designed to test the military strength of Northumbria. The brevity of the contemporary record may well mask complex internal politics. Two years later the Annals of Ulster record a battle between ‘the Men of Alba and the Britons [of Strathclyde] and the English [the lords of Bamburgh, perhaps]’ against the foreigners (that is, the Irish Norse). If dependable, this is the faint echo of a layer of alliances that historians might otherwise not suspect. If the Irish Norse of this conflict were, in fact, the forces of Kváran and the Men of York, the fallout seems to have been his repudiation by the Northumbrians. Kváran returned once more to Dublin and, after a long martial career, retired improbably to Iona, where he died in 980.
Kváran’s second expulsion from York was followed by Eirík’s return. Whatever complex politics lie behind these events, Archbishop Wulfstan now found himself, for once, the victim. According to the Worcester version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle he was imprisoned by King Eadred in an unidentified stronghold called ludanburh ‘because he had been frequently accused to the long.’24 Eadred’s impatience at his double-dealing, or the factional gossip of his court, had rendered to Wulfstan the same fate as Ripon’s founder, St Wilfrid, under an equally exasperated king in the seventh century. Unlike St Dunstan, he was not able to produce a timely miracle to win back the king’s favour at the last minute.
Eirík’s return to York brought about his re-acquaintance with the colourful career of the warrior-poet and troublemaker Egil Skallagrímsson. In Egil's Saga, Eiríkr ( blóðøx) is exiled from Norway by his brother Hákon, Æðelstan’s foster-son, and makes his way south through Scotland, arriving in York while Æðelstan is still king. Egil, meanwhile, is conveniently placed by the composer of the saga on a ship, also heading for England and intent on renewing his relationship with his former patron Æðelstan##. Instead, his ship founders at the mouth of the River Humber where the crew, alive but battered, manage to get ashore. Now Egil finds that he has landed not in the kingdom of his former patron, who is in any case long dead, but in that of his enemy, for Eiríkr rules in York with his wife Gunnhildr. But he also hears that his brother-in-law Arinbjorn, an intimate of Eirík’s, is with the Norse king in York.
54. IN YORK, the warrior-poet Egil Skallagrímsson and his antagonist Eiríkr were re-acquainted. Mounted warrior from St Andrew’s church, Andreas, Isle of Man.
Without the means to sail home Egil determines to go there and have it out with Eiríkr. He makes his way to Arinbjorn's house and pleads his case to be reconciled with the king. Arinbjorn agrees to petition on his behalf and, together with ten armed men, they go to the king’s hall. Egil humbles himself before the great warrior, taking Eirík’s foot in his hand and offering up an impromptu verse:
I have travelled on the sea-god’s steed
A long and turbulent wave-path
To visit the one who sits
In command of the English land.
In great boldness the shaker
Of the wound-flaming sword
Has met the mainstay of King Harald’s line.25
Eiríkr is unimpressed; and, moreover, his implacable wife Gunnhildr demands that Egil be executed immediately. Arinbjorn pleads Egil’s case to be heard again the following morning, and Eiríkr acquiesces. Arinbjorn's advice to Egil is to compose a great verse of praise to the king before morning: it is his only chance for mercy. In the night Egil's poetic musings are interrupted by a shape-shifter in the form of a swallow, chirping at his window; but at length he composes and then memorizes the praise poem, which he duly delivers the following morning. One imagines a hall bristling with tension and anticipation, crowded and hushed as the two antagonists settle their famous and long-standing feud not with swords and axes but with fine words and reasoning.
Nothing more perfectly captures the essence of the Scandinavian world, poised between violent destruction and the creative arts, between blood-rush, love of poetry and cool judgement:
West over water I fared
Bearing poetry’s praise to the shore
Of the war-god’s heart.26
Egil employs the full palette of poetic battle-metaphor and simile in praising the king’s great and bloody deeds. Eirík’s sword is the ‘battle-sun’ or ‘wound-digger’; dead men are Odin’s forest of oaks, felled by warrior’s axe; corpses are eagles’ food:
Like bees, arrows flew
From his drawn bow of yew.
Eric fed flesh
To the wolf afresh.
Like all great kings in Germanic and Atlantic cultures, Eirík’s bellicosity is matched by magnanimity and the generosity of the ring-giver. He hands out gold by the fistful, like sand; distributes shields and brooches far and wide.
The praise of great poets was prized by warlords across the ethnic and linguistic spectra of the Atlantic west: a universal language of approbation, respect and loyalty. Likewise, the generosity of the poet must be rewarded, if not in treasure then in the gift of clemency. Eiríkr grudgingly accepts Egil’s skilled verses: he may leave with his head still attached. The gift of life, in return, requires more praise from the reprieved warrior-poet:
Ugly as my head may be
The cliff my helmet rests upon,
I am not loath
To accept it from the king.
Where is the man who ever
Received a finer gift
From a noble-minded
Son of a great ruler?27
The aftermath of this legendary encounter speaks, if possible, even more eloquent testimony to the social mechanisms by which native and incomer were able to co-exist and integrate. Egil, leaving Eirík’s kingdom under his grudging protection, exchanges gifts with his saviour, Arinbjorn, whose own reputation must have been enhanced by such skilful diplomacy. They part as good friends. The Saga tells us, then, that Egil’s crew stayed behind, to trade the goods that they had brought with them in Jorvik’s markets under Arinbjorn’s watchful eye. No doubt the artisans and traders of that city were eager to see what exotic goods they had to offer.
In the event, Eirík’s end came sooner than that of the erstwhile poetic troublemaker. In 954 the Northumbrians drove him from their kingdom; Northumbria submitted to Eadred and Archbishop Wulfstan was restored to episcopal dignity—this time of a less contentious, southern bishopric at Dorchester on Thames. Oswulf, the Lord of Bamburgh, was given the power of a Subregulus over the lands north of the Humber. Only Roger of Wendover offers the detail of Eirík’s fate, telling of a Bernician coup sponsored by the king of the West Saxons:
King Eric was treacherously killed by Earl Maccus in a certain lonely place which is called Stainmore, with his son Haeric and his brother Ragnald, betrayed by Earl Oswulf; and then afterwards King Eadred ruled in these districts.28
Stainmore is the east-west pass on the old Roman route across the Pennines between Cumbria and Yorkshire, now the A66: a grim, bleak place to end a life. Eiríkr had no successor in York or the lands north of the Humber.
The end of the Scandinavian kingdom of York and the final unification of a kingdom that might be called England seems a reasonable place to draw a line under a narrative of the Viking Age. But the truth is, that narrative does not end in 954. On Eadred’s death a year later*** the kingdom was disputed between his sons Eadwig and Eadgar, with the Wading Street line once again conceived as a possible frontier. Only after 959 can Eadgar be said to have ruled over something resembling a kingdom of England. Twenty years later Scandinavian raids resumed. From 991 English kings once again paid tribute to Viking warlords; burhs were refortified or constructed de novo. Two kings of England in the early eleventh century were Danish. In 1066 further invasion attempts were launched. The first, led by the legendary Norwegian warrior King Haraldr harðráði, failed to overcome a desperate English defence in the North, at Stamford Bridge. The other, led by William of Normandy, descendant of the Viking chief Hrólfr, was conspicuously successful at Hastings.
In the 960s a trader crossing the Channel from Rouen to Britain in a smallish seagoing vessel, a faering, might carry a cargo of lava quern stones, as we know the Graveney boat did when it sank sometime in the tenth century.††† The craft would accommodate one or two passengers, perhaps clerics bringing news of the monastic reform movement in Francia to sympathetic clerics like Dunstan, recently bishop of London and about to be elevated to the archiepiscopal see at Canterbury.
55. ‘OHTHERE TOLD HIS LORD, King Ælfred, that he lived the furthest north of all Norwegians..The contents of a reconstructed cargo vessel at Roskilde Ship Museum, Denmark.
The færing passing up the broad, silty estuary of the Thames would land not at the deserted strand of, the defunct and largely empty trading settlement of the eighth century, but at wharves a mile or so downstream at There may by now have been a wooden bridge spanning the river here, joining the defended burhs on either side at Southwark and in the old Roman city. Boats might moor at one of the stathes constructed in the late ninth century—at Æðeredes hyd, perhaps, on what is now Thames Street, before their skippers presented themselves to the portgerefa to state their business and pay their tolls.
Ælfred’s refounding of the city after 886, with military, political and economic motives in mind, had borne fruit. Markets now existed along Cheapside‡‡‡ and, perhaps, at Aldgate. The church built long ago by the first Roman missionaries of the English church at Paulesbyrig was now sufficiently large and important that King Æðelred II would be buried there in 1016. As we know from Æðelstan’s London Ordinance, the reeves and bishop of the burh were sufficiently jealous of their rights and attuned to the benefits of peaceful trade that they had organized themselves into a guild to protect their interests.
More trading potential lay upriver. Exchanging quern stones and Rhineland silver for King Eadgar’s pennies whose portrait bore the imprimatur of the late Anglo-Saxon state, the merchant would now find himself within a single economic entity, with a single coinage and, in theory at least, a single set of rules governing his opportunities and responsibilities. He could not trade on a Sunday, for example—at least, not without a sweetener to the reeve.
A hundred and fifty years previously, at the beginning of the Viking Age, a færing continuing upriver would have passed minsters at Kingston, Chertsey and Dorchester. Kingston was now a favoured site for the inauguration of kings; Chertsey lay, if not abandoned and ruined, then dormant, awaiting its refounding in 964. The trader’s passengers might have taken more than passing interest in its potential.
The Viking stronghold at Reading, now four generations old, must have been no more than a grassy embankment by the river, a curiosity. Further along the Thames, past fish traps, flash weirs and increasing numbers of water mills, lay the indomitable and enduring strongholds of the Ælfredan project: Sashes Island ( Sceaftessige: Sceaf’s Isle), Wallingford and Oxford, controlling passage along the great trading corridor and taking tolls off merchants. By the 960s these burhs were truly towns, their road frontages so desirable that cross streets were now filling the spaces inside the walls, giving them their characteristic gridiron plans. The trader must make himself known to the portgerefa and, probably, distribute a few choice gifts and the soft currency of news and downriver gossip, to oil the wheels of commerce.
At the farthest navigable reach of the river stood its last burh, Cricklade, one of those which never developed into a town despite its proximity to a network of roads leading in all directions. Now, the traveller wishing to head north and east into less familiar territory must journey overland: no navigable river crosses England’s timeless internal boundary. A day’s walk from Cricklade would bring the traveller to Cirencester, to where Guðrum’s defeated Viking army retreated in 878 after Edington; where the Roman amphitheatre must still have been visible and where royal councils (and the tax gatherers so hated by the poet of the Armes Prydein Fawr) met in the tenth century. From here roads led along the Fosse Way south-west to Exeter or north-east towards Leicester and Lincoln. Another ancient road led to the burh at Gloucester, where the Mercian royal mausoleum stood in its minster and whence vessels might ply up and down the River Severn, with ferrymen taking passengers over into the British kingdoms of Gwent and Morgannwg.
I will suppose that my hypothetical trader chooses a route just north of east, along Akemennestraete and at Bicester, where an ancient minster may have survived into the tenth century, then turns north to see what opportunities await in the so-called Danelaw. Towcester (Roman Lactodorum), like Tamworth, was a burh built directly on Watling Street: an offensive frontier garrison whose value, evident in the Roman period and, perhaps, long before, was its control of the river heads of the Great Ouse and the Nene, as well as the road route between London and Chester. Who can say if entry to the Danelaw at this point was controlled, or if the traveller experienced the feeling of coming into a different land: new dialects, new customs to learn; different dress and ways of counting; more risks and opportunities?
The dispersed Midland farms and hamlets of the tenth century had begun a slow, complex process of nucléation into what would become the open-field villages so recognizable in the medieval and later countryside. Fortified towns, orderly and regulated, were replacing minsters as central places, although often at the same sites. A warming climate, the king’s peace and raised productivity breathed new life into the rural economy; markets drew produce, crafts and trade, concentrating labour and profit. The entrepreneurial talents of Danish jarls, holds and traders, amplified by their material wealth and by the fragmentation of very large estates, energized a farming landscape now open to technical and social innovation.
Any traveller arriving at the Anglo-Danish town of Northampton, set in a typically-Scandinavian D-shaped earthwork enclosing a 6o-acre site north of the Nene and east of its tributary, the Brampton Nene, must have been impressed by its busy-ness. Up until the reign of Æðelred and Æðelflæd Hamtun, as it was then, could boast of one of the largest and most impressive buildings in Britain, a unique stone hall, more than 100 feet (30 m) long and constructed using mortar from rotary mixers excavated close by during the 1970s.29 Whether it lay at the heart of a minster or palace complex, or both, is unclear. It was demolished at the end of the ninth century or the beginning of the tenth; by what agency we also cannot say, even if there is a temptation to blame the mycel here.
Like the thriving ecclesiastical production settlements at Portmahomack and Brandon, the site of the great hall was turned over to industrial use, from whose hearths and rubbish pits pennies of the East Anglian St Eadmund coinage have been retrieved. Now Northampton began to produce wheel-thrown pottery, unknown in contemporary Wessex. Iron, copper, silver and bone were worked here, providing any number of commercial opportunities for traders passing through or deliberately courting its craftsmen and markets. Norwegian hone-stones have been found here as well as the bones of saltwater fish. By the 960s Northampton supported a mint.
If, as seems likely, the Nene was navigable as far upstream as the town, it enjoyed excellent access to the Wash and the North Sea. Embarking there and coasting downriver on the streamway, the traveller would pass a magnificent new church at Earls Barton, under construction some time in the late tenth century, and an important estate centre and incipient manor, with its own church and cemetery, at Raunds, subject of extensive excavations in the 197OS and 1980s. Further downstream lay Oundle, a foundation (and the burial place) of St Wilfrid in the seventh century.
As the Nene valley opens out on to the Fens at Peterborough, the river passes beneath the magnificent walls of Peterborough Cathedral and its bishops’ palace. Medehamstede, as the seventh-century minster foundation was called, is supposed to have been destroyed by Ívarr’s mycel here in 869 and not refounded until the late 960s. The site might have been deserted in mid-century; but the survival of elements of its pre-Viking archives and of the remarkable Hedda stone bearing portraits of robed figures, which is displayed in the present cathedral, are hints that some form of community may have been sustained through the decades of uncertainty.
In the tenth century Wisbech must have lain on or close to the shores of the Wash; perhaps there was a beach market or harbour here. For those sailing north out of those shallow, sheltered but fickle waters, the east-facing North Sea coast, where so many of Britain’s celebrated early church foundations had flourished under royal patronage, was no longer a focus of ecclesiastical politics or trade. Humber, Trent and Ouse all gave access to inland towns and trade. Minster sites at Whitby, Jarrow, Lindisfarne and beyond retained some human presence, but none of the splendour with which they had been endowed in the seventh century; none of the power. Perhaps a week’s sail to the north, a royal cult centre survived and thrived at Rígmonaid, St Andrews in Fife, where King Constantín had retired in 943 and where he died in 952.
Whether the kings of Alba or the Norse lords of the Orkneys ruled Moray and Fortriu at this time is not clear; but their dominance of the Northern Isles was permanent, at least into the fifteenth century when Orkney and Shedand were finally ceded by the kings of Norway to Scotland. The intrepid traveller crossing the Pendand Firth ( Petlandsfjörð: the fjord of Pictland) to Orkney and then Shetland would have encountered islands now thoroughly Norse in language and material culture. Early native settlements seem often to have been directly overlain by characteristically Norse houses. Whether that cultural colonization was aggressive and involved displacing or rendering the native population servile, or whether it was gradual, peaceful and co-operative, through marriage and purchase, is rarely evident from the archaeology. Current academic opinion inclines to the former. The Pictish variety of the British languages was not intelligible to the Norse speaker; nor was the Goidelic of the Irish. Bilingualism must have been common; but place names tell overwhelmingly a story of Notification; and no Pictish settlement form overlies an obviously Norse structure.
The more intrepid sailors, pulling their boat up onto the sandy beaches of an inlet at the southern tip of Shetland close to Sumburgh Head, must have been impressed by the thriving farm complex whose early twentieth-century excavators knew it as Jarlshof. The quality of life, the domestic sophistication and solidity of the drystone and turf-built houses, byres, smithies and ancillary structures must have matched anything on the British mainland outside the royal palaces. The late ninth- or early tenth-century longhouse of the second building phase bears comparison in size with the great stone hall at Northampton. Kitchen blocks, paving, internal ovens and sweat-lodges would all, further south, be regarded as markers of high status, like the courtyard complex of the ‘private burh’ at Goltho. Each generation made its own improvements, and there is a strong sense that in Norse hands the settlement here, founded in the Bronze Age and occupied more or less continuously ever since, was the stable familial homestead of a wealthy, powerful clan, perhaps of a trader like the Norwegian Ohthere (who had given an account of his travels to King Ælfred) or a hold like Ingimundr.30
A ship’s crew landing at any one of dozens of sheltered harbours and beaches in the Orkney archipelago, a day’s sail to the south-west, must have been equally impressed, not just by the technical achievement of the settlements but by their numbers and by the wealth and fertility of the land, which supported large herds of cattle and prosperous arable farms. If we are to believe the evidence of Orkneyinga Saga the islands were subject to some form of devolved Norwegian royal authority. In its early Norse phase Orkney came under the direct rule of Norwegian kings, especially the famous Haraldr Hárfagri and, subsequently, to those wishing to demonstrate their independence from him. By the middle of the tenth century Orkney may have come under the sway of Haraldr blátǫnn Gormsson, Haraldr ‘Bluetooth’ (ruled c.958-986), often regarded as the founder of the Danish medieval state, whose conversion to Christianity is so convincingly monumentalized at Jelling.31
At the north-westernmost point of Orkney’s mainland the aspiring trader or warrior must surely have presented himself at the splendid court of the jarl who ruled from the massive natural fortress on Brough of Birsay and at nearby Buckquoy, later seat of the earls of Orkney.§§§ But other impressive settlement complexes also existed by the tenth century to complement the wealth of Norse-style burials, hoards and place names that give the islands their uniquely Scandinavian flavour: at Pool, on Sanday, at Skaill near Deerness and at Saevar Howe.
56. VIEW ACROSS THE TIDAL CAUSEWAY from Brough of Birsay to Buckquoy, Mainland, Orkney.
Orkney was not peripheral to the Atlantic Norse world, but central: its colonizers did not just pillage and displace its indigenes; they exploited the archipelago’s riches as fully as its famous Neolithic and Bronze Age inhabitants, whose rich cultural and spiritual lives they matched fully. The great twelfth-century cathedral of St Magnus in Kirkwall is an enduring monument to Norse wealth, ambition and success, just as it is to the endurance, through these troubled times, of the institutional church. One could hardly blame our hypothetical trader if, on acquaintance with the opportunities presented by Orkney, he decided not to move on, but to stay.
* A Brittonic name, from Uisum, meaning ‘flowing water’ Watts 2004.
† See map, p. 322.
‡ See above, p. 185.
§ Dorestad, for example, suffered terminal decline in the late ninth century, only to be replaced in the tenth century by a site close by at Tiel at the confluence of the Rivers Waal and Linge.
¶ The mouldboard is a curved plate that turns the sod over after it has been cut and split by the share and coulter.
# VI Æðelstan: see above, Chapter 11.
** See above, Chapter 7, in relation to Ingimund’s invasion of Cheshire.
†† III Æðelred. The text of the code is translated in EHD Charters and laws 439. Whitelock 1979, 439.
‡‡ Shire courts met twice a year under the auspices of, at first, the ealdorman and bishop and, later, the shire-reeve.
§§ The minster survived as an institution; so, miraculously, does the crypt built by another troublesome priest, St Wilfrid, in the late seventh century. ASC ‘D’ Worcester MS.
¶¶ The expulsion is recorded in the northern annal Historia Return under 950.
## Scholars have long recognized that the prose narrative of the saga is largely a contrivance to link verses of skaldic poetry and create a coherent story of them. The historicity and plausibility of the saga is heavily compromised, but seems to retain substantial elements of folk-history which often form our only potential sources for these events. Readers must judge their value for themselves.
*** Among many generous bequests he left ‘his people 1600 pounds to the end that they may redeem themselves from a famine and from a heathen army if they need’. EHD10 7. Whitelock 1979, 555.
††† See Chapter 2, p. 74.
‡‡‡ The Old English word ceap, like the surname Chapman and the Norse variant Kaup, as in Kaupang and Kopeland, identifies the site or profession of trading, markets and purchase.
§§§ See above, p. 258.