INGIMUNDR—ÆÐELRED AND ÆÐELFLÆD—ANGLESEY AND MAN—ORKNEYINGA SAGA—CONSTANTÍN —MAC ÁEDA—ÆÐELWOLD AND EADWEARD—UNDERCURRENTS
The 893 entry in the ‘A’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an almost continuous and breathless narrative of field campaigns, sieges, fleet movements and forced marches over twelve months, runs to more than 1,000 words. From 897, the year after the Host dispersed, until 909 the accumulated entries of more than a decade recorded in the same Chronicle run to just over half that. If the first twelve years of the tenth century appear from a superficial, West Saxon point of view, to have been predominantly uneventful, the focus of historical attention is now drawn inexorably to the west and north. Even here, that long decade can only tentatively be sketched in outline, from annals thin on detail and obscure in their genesis.
Nevertheless, the rebounding impact of great events across the sea at the turn of the century was to have a profound effect on the British political landscape for a century and more. A terse but telling entry in the Annals of Ulster for 902 fires the starting gun:
The heathens were driven from Ireland... from the fortress of Áth Cliath, by Mael Finnia son of Flannacán with the men of Brega and by Cerball son of Muiricán, with the Laigin; and they abandoned a good number of their ships, and escaped half dead after they had been wounded and broken.1
31. NORSE RUNES ON A CROSS SHAFT from St Andrew’s church, Andreas, Isle of Man. Settlement and conquest was swiftly followed by assimilation.
Áth Cliath is Dublin, the Norse longphort on the River Liffey. Here the Norse Vikings made their principal stronghold in 841 and by the end of the century it supported close-packed housing, perhaps on more than one site, indicating its expansion from a mere pirate base (part dockyard, part defensive redoubt, part slave market and production centre) into something resembling its Scandinavian prototypes at Kaupang and elsewhere. The immediate, material fallout from this sudden, overwhelming attack by a combined force of Irish included a large stash of silver, buried at Drogheda in Brega shortly afterwards.* The loss of men and ships was probably of small concern compared with the loss of the Norse Irish capital, their long-held centre of power. Refugees, not just pirate captains and their crews but families, dependents and artisans, fled across the sea in panic. It is impossible to know how many drowned in the dangerous waters of the Irish Sea.
Very shortly afterwards, notices appearing in Insular sources testify to ominous repercussions in the east. The Annales Cambriae entry for the year 902 records that ‘Ingimund came to Mona, and took Maes Osfeilion’. Another contemporary entry, in the Brut y Tywysogion under 903, records that ‘Igmund’ was defeated in a battle for Ros Meilion. The two places are likely to be the same: Llanfaes, a small settlement north of Beaumaris overlooking the Menai Straits on Anglesey.2
A third source, if it can be trusted, provides compelling supporting detail of a series of events played out over the following half dozen years. The same warlord, Ingimund, Old Norse Ingimundr, appears in a set of Three Fragmentary Irish Annals which exist only in third- or fourth-hand form, having been transcribed from lost copies of unidentifiable annals in the seventeenth century; that is to say, we are picking up a pretty cool trail. Even so, historians from F. W. Wainright onwards have seen in Ingimund’s adventures the forging of a new career by the leader of one of the war bands expelled from Dublin.3
The annal describes eloquently, if all too briefly, the departure from Ireland, a defeat in battle against Cadell ap Rhodri† and an appeal to Mercia for sanctuary:
Afterwards Hingamund with his forces came to Edlefrida, queen of the Saxons, for her husband, that is Edelfrid, was at that time in a disease... Now Hingamund was asking lands of the queen in which he would settle, and on which he would build huts and dwellings, for he was at this time weary of war. Then Edelfrida gave him lands near Castra, and he stayed there for a time.4
And so Ælfred’s celebrated daughter Æðelflæd (Edelfrida) makes her belated entry on to the stage in the first years of the tenth century. She was the Wessex king’s oldest child, born perhaps about 870 and married to her father’s godson and ally, Ealdorman Æðelred, in the mid-880s—perhaps to seal the transfer of London to Mercian control after 886. The couple had one surviving child, a daughter called Ælfwynn. Æðelred had proven himself a stalwart ally through the travails of the 890s. Ælfred’s grandson Æðelstan seems to have been fostered at his court, and Mercian and West Saxon policy against the Danish threat had been solidly aligned since the 860s.
Mercian relations with its traditional antagonists in Powys and Gwynedd were conducted independently of Wessex. Under Anarawd, son of Rhodri the Great, Gwynedd had initially been antipathetic to both Wessex and its old enemy Mercia, throwing in its lot with Guðroð’s kingdom in York. But by the 890s Anarawd had abandoned his Northumbrian allies (Guðroðr died in 895, according to Æðelweard) and submitted to Ælfred’s overlordship. Now, with Ælfred dead and a new dynamic force in play from across the Irish Sea, Venedotian‡/Mercian relations were once more subject to ancient tensions.
It is widely accepted that after about 902 Æðelred was in some way incapacitated, as suggested by the Fragmentary Annals, and that his queen effectively took the reins of power in Mercia, mirroring her brother Eadweard’s overlordship of Wessex and the South. That she acquiesced in Ingimund’s request for land on which to settle his exhausted veterans demonstrates her independence of thought: the policy was as much anti-Venedotian as it was a defensive acceptance of the peaceful alternative to invasion. It echoes the expedient strategies of the Frankish kings, settling one band of raiders in the hope of fending off other enemies; buying them into a less aggressive means of supporting themselves. Ingimund’s people are unlikely to have been the only Irish Norse war band kicking about the Irish Sea looking for fresh opportunities in the aftermath of the Dublin expulsion.
Guðroð’s granting of the lands between Tyne and Wear to Cuthbert’s spiritual host had been intended to serve the same purpose: to create a buffer against Bernician antagonists. The land that Æðelflæd now chose to give Ingimundr was territory lying between her heartlands and those of Anarawd: that is, the area around Castra, Chester on the River Dee, which had in the previous decade been the object of Hæsten’s attentions. It is possible that this part of north-west Mercia, now Cheshire, had been depopulated in the past; that a settlement of veterans might in time bring economic advantages by carving productive farms out of unproductive waste and by submission to Mercian overlordship. It is hard to imagine that Æðelflæd passively acquiesced in the displacement of a large indigenous population. Chester itself, with riverine access to the Irish Sea, was evidently a prize worth having.
Had the so-called Lady of the Mercians (Myrcna hlæfdige in the Mercian Register incorporated in several versions of the Chronicle) been a student of more ancient British historical tradition, she might have recalled the cautionary tale of Vortigern, the legendary fifth-century British overlord who received a similar request from Hengest and Horsa, arriving on the coast of Kent in three ships exiled from their homelands. Vortigern gave them Thanet, and they settled their Saxon comrades there before seizing the whole kingdom from its hapless incumbent. Four centuries later, Ingimundr saw the same opportunity.
When he [Ingimundr] saw the city full of wealth and the choice land around it, he desired to possess them. Afterwards [he] came to the leaders of the Norsemen and the Danes; he made a great complaint in their presence, and he said that they were not well off without good lands, and that it was right for them all to come to seize Castra and to possess it with its wealth and its lands.5
Who were these other Norsemen and Danes? The fissile expulsion of the Norse from Dublin had scattered individual war bands and their dependents across the Irish Sea and beyond. Some of these, we know, went north to try their fortunes in Alba; perhaps also in Suðreyar, the Hebrides. Ingimundr may be only one of several Norse warlords who attempted small-scale invasion or settlement of the British mainland. That others attempted to make common cause with the Vikings of York is suggested by both place names and by the sensational discovery of an enormous silver hoard (63 lbs or 29 kg in weight) at Cuerdale on the banks of the River Ribble in 1840. The nearly 9,000 items comprised not just large quantities of hacksilver and other bullion but also coin, much of it minted at York. Encased in a lead box, it looks as though it had been a war chest, assembled either to support the retaking of Dublin or to found a new colony, perhaps on the western fringes of Northumbria. The Norse place name Copeland—‘kaupa land’, meaning ‘bought land’—on the west coast of Cumbria may reflect the acquisition of estates by wealthy veterans of campaigns in the Irish Sea. The route through the Ribble Valley and up over the Pennines connected the Irish Sea directly with sympathetic allies in York.
32. THE CUERDALE HOARD, deposited in about 905 on the banks of the River Ribble, Lancashire. Comprising an immense quantity of silver items, it is perhaps the war chest of a Dublin Norse army.
Did Ingimundr hold his conference with former comrades and prospective York allies somewhere on the Ribble, perhaps near modern Preston? Circumstantial evidence of a displacement of indigenous landowners from Cumbria comes from an entry in St Cuthbert’s Historia:
In these days Elfred son of Brihtwulf, fleeing pirates, came over the mountains in the West and sought the mercy of St Cuthbert and Bishop Cuthheard so that they might present him with some lands.6
This Elfred does not appear in any other contemporary source; but ‘mountains in the West’ suggests that he had fled Cumbria or western Northumbria; and the size of the lands given or sold to him by the Cuthbert community, no less than the twelve vills of a complete Early Medieval shire around Easington in modern County Durham,§ indicates that he had been a high-ranking noble, probably an ealdorman.
Whatever the context of Ingimund’s confidential plan to seize Chester, its details leaked: ‘the queen came to know of it [and] collected large forces around her in every direction’.7 Confrontation was inevitable. A clue to the timing of these events is provided by a brief entry in the ‘C’ or Mercian Register version of the Chronicle, which records that in 907 Chester ‘was rebuilt’.# Its impressive surviving walls show that in the tenth century it must still have enjoyed substantial defences standing from its days as the headquarters of Rome’s famous Legio XX Valeria Victrix. In 894 the Host had camped there and had to be removed by a policy of starvation.
The 907 entry suggests that Æðelflæd had been monitoring increasing tensions among Ingimund’s Norse settlers over several years. Whether she actually got wind of a rebellion, as the Fragmentary Annals suggest, we might doubt. Intuition and experience inclined her to fortify and garrison Chester: to make of it a burh like that at Worcester, from which she could mount both defensive and offensive operations and develop the stagnant economy of north-west Mercia. Mention in the Fragmentary Annals’ account of numbers of ‘freemen’ within the city supports the idea of a properly constituted burghal foundation. In earlier times Chester’s refortification and garrisoning would have been seen by the kings of Gwynedd as a provocative, offensive gesture; now, perhaps, it was accepted as a military expedient against a common enemy. Æðelflæd had fine examples of recent burh foundations at Worcester and, perhaps, Tamworth on which to base her design; even so, neither the garrison nor the new defences∫ could prevent an assault by Ingimund’s combined Norse and Danish forces.
The historian must, regrettably, discount the gory siege narrative contained in the Fragmentary Annals, despite such evocative imagery as cauldrons of boiling ale being poured onto the Norse attackers and the release of all the garrison’s bees as an offensive weapon against them. We must put such colour down to over-exuberance on the part of later scribes, imagining and embellishing. The simple truth is that the Mercian fortress was more than a match for its attackers. That the siege is not even mentioned in the Mercian Register, let alone the main Chronicle, suggests that fame’s trumpet did not sound very far.
Æðelflæd kept her fortress on the Dee. Even so, Ingimund’s veterans had come to stay in Cheshire; and they were not alone. Among the fanciful detail of the Fragmentary Annals is mention of those Irish, the Gall-Ghaedhil of other sources, who had intermarried with or become acculturated by the Dublin Norse. Their impact on the human geography and linguistic history of the Irish Sea ‘province’, as it is often called, was as profound in its way as that of the Norse.
The long-term impact of the Irish Norse arrival on the west coast cannot be in doubt: archaeology, legal and administrative terms, personal and place names supply ample evidence that after the expulsion from Dublin they settled here. It has long been recognized that there is an abundance of Norse-derived names on the Wirral peninsula between the estuaries of the Mersey and Dee and in coastal Lancashire; not just in settlements that survive to the present day: Irby, Kirby, Meols,Ω Thingwall, Croxteth, Aigburth, Tranmere and so on; but also in personal names and the names of landholdings recorded at the time of the Domesday survey. In the same document are distinct patterns of manorial valuations and fines whose numbers indicate an origin with the Scandinavian Ora, equivalent to sixteen English pennies. We find among the lawmen of Cheshire a ‘sacraber’, from the Norse sakaráberi, a prosecutor, and a concept of denial termed thwertnic: ‘absolutely no’.8
Anglesey, or Môn, where Ingimundr had suffered a hot reception in 902, displays few Norse names, but there is a concentration of evidence for Scandinavian activity on its east coast, particularly around the fringes of Red Wharf Bay. Ingimund’s battle with the forces of Gwynedd at Maes Osfeilion, Llanfaes, may well have been precipitated by a landing at this broad, sandy inlet, north-east facing and sheltered from the prevailing winds. At Benllech, close by, there is a record of a ‘Scandinavian’ burial, and a sustained campaign of metal detection has produced concentrations of finds in the area around Llanbedrgoch, two thirds of a mile inland. A hoard of silver arm rings, whose remarkably consistent weight shows them to have been a form of ‘ring-money’, a cross between bullion, ornament and exchangeable cash, also comes from Red Wharf Bay.≈
33. RED WHARF BAY, Anglesey, a day’s sail east of the longphort of Dublin: an attractive and obvious target for Norse raiders and settlers.
While the focus of Early Medieval Venedotian royal power lay at Aberffraw in the south-west of the island, the contemporary archaeology of the eastern tip of Anglesey is rich in ecclesiastical settlement and sculpture, indicative of productive farmland and powerful territorial control. In the ninth century this was no empty land waiting for pioneer farmers; it was wealthy, an attractive target for the Dublin Norse whose longphort lay a day’s sail due west. That the majority of Norse names in East Anglesey are prominent coastal navigation marks is ominous proof of mariners’ interest in its coastline. The modern English ‘Anglesey’ (Önguls-ey, Öngull’s island) for the Welsh ‘Môn’ is itself Norse in origin.
Recent excavations at Llanbedrgoch9 have produced striking evidence for the fortunes of its native community at the turn of the tenth century, as a secular counterpart to the monastery at Portmahomack and the possible minsters at Flixborough and Brandon. Like an earlier site some miles to the north at Din Llugwy, the inhabitants of Llanbedrgoch combined a conservative, native round house tradition with rectangular halls typical of Germanic or Scandinavian architecture. A kidney-shaped ditch and bank enclosure, which had been constructed perhaps during the fifth or sixth century, contained houses and a hall, a smithy and a stone-lined spring cistern (the upper fills of the latter included a penny of King Eadmund [939–946]). To the north of the pool lay a paved and kerbed road surface. During the ninth century the enclosure was rebuilt with a defensible stone wall and re-cut ditch. The buildings were also refurbished during the ninth or tenth century with either sill beam or stone wall foundations, sunken floors and sufficient constructional detail to demonstrate that they were substantial and well-engineered structures, with affinities to Scandinavian-style buildings elsewhere in the Atlantic west.
Llanbedrgoch seems to have enjoyed a long life, continuing into the late tenth century or later: its character fits within a context of wealthy rural agricultural élites, what in Anglo-Saxon England would be the thegnage caste and in Wales was the maenol. Mark Redknap, its excavator, suggests that it would have lain at the heart of an agricultural estate with outlying dependent farms and farmers; that, perhaps, it was sufficiently prestigious to have earned the title llys, a ‘court’.∂ He further suggests that it was ideally placed for the collection of tolls on traffic entering or exiting the Rivers Dee and Mersey on their way to and from Dublin and Man. The inhabitants of Llanbedrgoch survived by adapting to circumstances.
Archaeologists investigating such sites spanning dynamic historical periods are sensitive to possible evidence for cultural disruption, of violence, even. At Portmahomack the presence of shattered sculpture and deposits of catastrophic burning rather speak for themselves. Equally redolent of violence is the discovery, at Llanbedrgoch, of five skeletons ‘casually’ interred in shallow graves in the upper fills of its enclosure ditch.10 Burial disposition suggested to the excavators that at least two of the bodies had had their hands tied, and there was sufficiently clear pathology on one of these to suggest sharp-object trauma: evidence of murder. Naturally, the excavator has been cautiously drawn to the inference that Norse raiding may have precipitated a sudden, forced change in ownership; but one must allow other, less dramatic scenarios. Execution with prejudice is not an irrefutable marker of invaders; Early Medieval justice could be brutal, and violence was not the exclusive preserve of ethnic incomers.
Like Flixborough, Brandon and Portmahomack, Llanbedrgoch seems to have become a ‘productive’ settlement with wide trade links. Antler, non-ferrous metals and leather-working tools came from active workshops. Glass beads, a fragment of a Kufic dirham, hacksilver, lead trial-pieces and weights tell of a site and an island fully integrated into the maritime Atlantic world, ensuring its place on the mental Tube map of Viking Age Britain. More locally, it lay at the heart of a nexus connecting Chester and the Mercian hinterland with Dublin, Man, Whithorn on the Wigtownshire coast and York via the Ribble Valley. A number of clench nails and other ship-fittings from the site suggest the recycling of materials from time-expired (or wrecked or captured) marine craft. To add to the site’s period cachet, a Scandinavian-style ring-chain motif on a belt buckle, from a deposit above the floor of one of the buildings, replicates a motif on a cross at nearby Penmon Abbey.11
The extent to which Llanbedrgoch’s enhanced economic activity was a function of Norse takeover, or merely of Norse patronage, cannot be determined. The upturn in its fortunes may, equally, have been an indirect product of the revival of Chester as a centre of trade and production under Æðelflæd. Wherever Irish, Norse, British, Pictish and Anglo-Saxon met, whatever their conflicts, their cultures hybridized; so, probably, did their people.
*
At the heart of the Irish Sea basin, Man (Ellan Vannin in Manx) was the hub around which a dynamic Atlantic Age spun. With its central peak, Snaefell, at 2,037 feet (621 m), Man is visible from Wales, Ireland, north-west England and south-west Scotland. Mariners of all ages have traded with, sheltered in and taken pilotage from good but infrequent harbours on both east and west coasts. Important Early Christian sites at Maughold, at St Patrick’s Isle and elsewhere, and annal entries recording its involvement in the dynastic rivalries of the Insular kingdoms, ensure the island’s continuing interest for historians and archaeologists.π At various times it was subject to Northumbrian, Irish and British overlordship. There has often been speculation that Merfyn Frych, founder of the great Venedotian dynasty that produced Rhodri Mawr and, later, Hywel Dda, came from Man—perhaps displaced by new Norse overlords like Ingimundr.12
It is surprising, perhaps, that the island was not settled by an overtly Scandinavian population any earlier than the very end of the ninth century. David Wilson, the former director of the British Museum who has made a special study of the island’s Viking archaeology, believes that a lack of existing commercial markets there, the fierce tides and currents of its coastal waters and ample opportunities for settlement elsewhere delayed what seems its inevitable subjugation.13 Gradual encroachment on the Irish Sea from settlements on surrounding coasts and the expulsion from Dublin in 902 seem finally to have propelled one or more warlords to displace its indigenous kings; but it is possible that Norse were already settling there independently. The physical evidence for a Norse presence is striking; so much so that Insular scholars look to Man for archetypes in farmsteads, building styles, burials and, later, the conversion to Christianity.
Man’s long north-east to south-west lozenge shape has three distinct zones. In the centre the Snaefell massif provides an internal barrier to settlement and landward communication. To the north the mountains are bounded by the Sulby River running east into the sea at Ramsey (Old Norse: hrams á, ‘wild garlic river’). The low-lying green coastal plains that look north towards Galloway are rich in Norse settlement and burial sites, Scandinavian place names like Jurby and Phurt jostling with Gaelic Ballaugh and Carrick. Jurby parish, on the north-west coast, boasts three ‘pagan’ graves of the Viking period. Gerhard Bersu’s pioneering excavation of the mound at Ballateare in the 1940s revealed the complex, structured burial of a warrior male interred with the trappings of his profession. The excellence of the excavation and a burial environment favourable to preservation afford us perhaps the most detailed and intimate portrait of a Norse Viking from the British Isles, paralleled most vividly in the poetry of Beowulf and the accounts of Norse burials among the Rus encountered by the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlán.14
The man interred at Ballateare was between eighteen and thirty years old. On his death a grave was dug into which his wooden coffin was placed. He was dressed in a cloak held fast at the throat by a ring pin absolutely diagnostic of Irish manufacture. With him inside the coffin were a knife, lying on his chest; a sword of Norwegian manufacture, its hilt inlaid with copper wire and silver, still sheathed in a scabbard of probable Anglo-Saxon design; and a spear. The sword and scabbard had been ritually ‘killed’ by breaking them into several pieces. Outside the coffin, perhaps laid on top in military fashion, were his shield and two more spears. The shield boss, like the sword, had been deliberately hacked; even so, some of the shield wood survived, with its colours remarkably intact: black and white striped bands with red dots—the insignia of his war band or family. Over the grave a mound of turfs, the earth of his new land, was constructed, still standing to more than 9 feet (3 m) high and nearly 40 feet (12 m) across when it was excavated. On top of the mound was placed the body of a female, executed by means of a single, devastating sword-blow to the back of the head, and above her lay the cremated remains of animals: ox, horse, sheep and dog. On top of the completed mound a wooden post had been erected.15
Scandinavian pagan burial was a highly engineered affair. The social and material effort invested in securing passage to the warrior’s hall at Valhalla was considerable, its symbolism profound. The ritual ‘killing’ of personal possessions ensured that there was no coming back—fear of revenants was widespread and deeply felt. The ceremonial and ritual elements and the time devoted to the burial of a powerful warrior and landowner, in so many ways reminiscent of the investment afforded to the holy men and women of the Age of Saints, reinforced ties to the land: of family, honour and reverence. Conspicuous consumption of labour, material possessions and the likely sacrifice of the man’s personal slave-girl reflected his wealth and prestige, and the honour due to him in death.
The apparent conservatism of this ancient suite of customs (even without the cremation rite of the legendary Beowulf) must be set against a backdrop of strong Christian affiliation on the island represented by stone sculpture and a landscape littered with churches; and, indeed, against the Insular context of prominently visible Bronze Age monumental burials that proclaimed ownership of and ties to land time out of mind. Tensions between old and new, Christian and pagan, native and incomer would be played out in the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) imagery of a new hybrid form of memorial art across the tenth and eleventh centuries, as Norse and Manx negotiated novel cultural expressions of their increasingly shared experience.
The southern third of Man, hillier and with a more rugged coastline than the north, shows an even greater density of Scandinavian burials and settlements, from the natural stronghold and sheltered harbour of St Patrick’s Isle at Peel in the west to the probable beach market site at Ronaldsway in the south-east. Hoards, graves and the likely Viking Age re-use of some of its many prehistoric promontory forts paint a picture of active settlement and a vigorous, outward-looking seagoing culture. At the Braaid, in Marown parish a little west of Douglas, the most impressive surviving remains of Scandinavian settlement south of Orkney give a strong impression of the ways in which Norse incomers carved out (or bought into) active agricultural landholdings.
Here, set among improved upland sheep pasture, the stone footings of a large native circular house, similar to those at the village of Din Llugwy on Anglesey, lie next to their replacements: a straight-sided stone byre with internal stalls and a bow-sided house, more than 60 feet (18 m) long and nearly 30 feet (9 m) wide, whose internal walls showed traces of the lateral stone benches so characteristic of Scandinavian houses further north. Timber-porched entrances at both ends must have created an impressive sense of space and grandeur for the home-cum-feasting barn of a substantial landowner: the mead hall of thegn or jarl, with an effect on the locals every bit as intimidating as the Roman legionary boot on the British mainland in previous centuries.
Whether the inhabitants of the grand circular house next door were displaced, murdered, betrothed to or sold out to the new lords can only be a matter of speculation: the Norse Sagas provide plenty of more or less likely stories to choose from. Most of what must have been hundreds of distinctive native or Scandinavian buildings on Man eventually suffered the common fate of houses that outlive their design or use: they were rebuilt, dismantled, burned down or relocated elsewhere. Only very rarely do they survive, as here, for archaeologists to investigate.
34. THE BRAAID: Norse houses on the Isle of Man, replacing native dwellings (foreground) and perhaps displacing the natives.
The Braaid lies 1.5 miles (2.5 km) south of, and overlooks from a height of nearly 500 feet (150 m) above sea level, a natural pass through the hills formed by the valleys of the Rivers Neb and Dhoo, linking the ports of Peel in the west with Douglas in the east; and it is no coincidence that on this route lies the most famous of Manx institutions, the Tynwald (Manx Tinvaal, derived from Old Norse Þingvollr, an assembly place) whose origins must lie in the Norse period when Man and the Scottish islands formed the heart of a piratical thalassocracy: an empire of the Western seaways.
Appropriately, the expressive stamp of Norse warrior identity is also displayed in Manx boat burials. At the north end of the island, at Knock-e-Dooney, a burial mound excavated in 1927 revealed the remains of a vessel about 30 feet (9 m) in length dating from between 900 and 950, represented by some 300 iron rivets. The body, wrapped in a cloak, was accompanied by sword, shield and spear, and the more prosaic tools of fishing gear, hammer and tongs. At Balladoole, in Arbory parish on the south coast, the unmistakeable outline of a boat, its mound flanked with a kerb of boulders like those at Lindholm Høje on Limfjord in Jutland, was erected inside an existing Christian cemetery, itself occupying the site of a prehistoric enclosure. The burial beneath lay inside the remains of a real boat, some 36 feet (11 m) long.16
*
The exposed western shores of the Outer Hebrides, Suðreyar to the Norse, are slowly yielding their Viking Age settlements, on the fertile machair plains of South Uist at Bornais and Cille Pheadair, on North Uist at the fort of Udal, and elsewhere;17 but the core of that empire lay far to the north. Orkney was, perhaps, the earliest of the Atlantic Norse settlements, an increasingly influential focus of power during a period when Norway’s kings were consolidating theirs and when Iceland was first being settled. Here the archaeological evidence for Norse cultural intervention is incomparably rich: campaigns of excavation at Brough of Birsay and Skaill, among other sites, have revealed the complex detail of daily life and domestic ritual over several centuries; hoards from Skaill and Stenness indicate how some of Orkney’s Viking wealth was accumulated, while Scandinavian-style interments, including a spectacular boat burial at Scar on Sanday, combine with abundant material culture to paint a picture of Norse conquest and integration much more nuanced than the sagas and annals allow.
35. THE OUTLINE OF A NORSE SHIP BURIAL at Balladoole, Isle of Man, looking out to sea. It overlies an earlier, Christian cemetery.
Brough of Birsay presents the visitor with one of those dramatic arrival scenes reminiscent of Iona and Lindisfarne, as if one has come to the world’s edge; more so, perhaps. It sits on a rocky island cut off from Orkney’s Mainland west coast at high tide: a great smooth slab of rock tilted slightly away from the land, its bluff bows pointing directly at the surf as if to ride out the relentless Atlantic storms of autumn and winter; absolutely treeless, but capped with green bent grass. The only conceivable harbour is a modified natural rock ramp butting the narrow neck at Point of Buckquoy and hard by the causeway, up which boats might be drawn. An indigenous Pictish settlement was established here long before any Scandinavian interest in the islands. Its elaborate symbol stone and evidence for metal and glass working suggest that a monastery was established close by, well before 800, alongside more secular habitation; perhaps St Findan knew it as a haven after his adventures at the hands of pirates. Orkney’s wealth of marine resources is, perhaps improbably, matched by the fertile, cultivable soils of its low plains; wind aside, very cold winters are rare, and from the Neolithic period onwards it supported a substantial population with an abundance of convenient, sheltered harbours. Orkney was anything but peripheral.
Birsay’s very evident stone foundations attracted early and continuing archaeological interest; but the most substantial and important excavations (and re-excavations) took place from 1974 under the direction of Chris Morris and John Hunter, following a campaign by Anna Ritchie close by on the Mainland at Bukquoy. Among Orkney’s key natural resources is easily quarried and split sandstone: tightly constructed drystone walls are the norm for domestic, agricultural, religious and memorial structures, from the stupendous chambered tombs of the Neolithic period onwards, allowing for marvellous sophistication in the architecture of every age.
The distinctive Pictish form is the figure of eight, a double circular cell arrangement looking, in plan, like a pair of handcuffs. Norse buildings, which replaced the indigenous form from the first half of the ninth century, are of familiar longhouse design in the ratio 3:1: often about 45 feet long by 15 feet wide (14 × 5 m), with various entrances designed to accommodate changing wind patterns. Stone flagged drains and side benches with carefully designed internal partitions (distinctively Orcadian ergonomics, matched only in Shetland, and at Mawgan Porth) are common.
Even without excavation reports to hand, the imagination can easily populate these substantial dwellings with the domestic fug of kitchen and hearth, straw-lined bed cubicle and wall cupboards: dwellings absolutely crammed with space-saving devices.∆ Timber and turf roofs insulated; peat provided the fuel. Spinning and weaving, metalworking, fishing and animal husbandry are all evidenced by the artefacts of industry: Birsay was a wealthy and busy place. This was a major power base of Pictish monastic and secular power and, later, of the Norse earls of Orkney.18
Those earls first come into focus in one of the most enduringly readable of Norse literary achievements: Orkneyinga Saga. None of the surviving written sagas are remotely contemporary with the events they describe and, in spinning the thin strands of Orkney’s history, its twelfth- to thirteenth-century compiler presents the sort of creation myth of Atlantic settlement that defies historical analysis. Even so, there are shards of reality here. Haraldr Hárfagri, Harald ‘Finehair’, whose successful rule over Norway can be placed across a swathe of decades either side of 900, and whose intemperate relations with his own people propelled many a longship across the seas, dominates the early part of a grand narrative. Much of the story is based on surviving fragments of Skaldic verse; some comes from sources now lost, or is sparsely supplemented by references in other sagas.
According to the Saga, Harald’s councillor and military ally, the celebrated Earl Rögnvaldr Eysteinsson, had five sons, among them that Hrólfr who became Rollo of Normandy** and founded his own successful expatriate dynasty, from whom William I and subsequent English kings are descended. After a long campaign during which Haraldr raided Norse pirate bases as far as the Hebrides and Man, he gave Orkney and Shetland to his faithful commander Rögnvaldr, both as reward and to hold them against potential competitors. Rögnvaldr in turn gave these lands to his brother Sigurðr. Sigurðr, so the saga says, became so powerful that he was able in his day to subdue much of Caithness, Moray, Argyll and Ross. His campaign against Maelbrigte, ‘Earl of the Scots’, ended in the latter’s defeat and death; but, according to the compiler, after Sigurðr strapped Maelbrigte’s severed head to the saddle of his horse in victory, his calf was pierced by the dead man’s tooth and the wound became infected: he died pathetically of sepsis.
One of Rögnvald’s sons, Hallad, was subsequently given control of Orkney and confirmed by Haraldr in the title of earl. But he found the onerous task of defending the islands’ farmers from Viking raids too much and returned to Norway in ignominy. The islands were subsequently seized, we are told, by two Danish chiefs, Thorir ‘Treebeard’ and Kalf ‘Scurvy’, whose nicknames rather speak for themselves. Rögnvaldr now sent his youngest, ‘natural’ son, slave-born on his mother’s side, to see what he could make of Orkney, although with little hope, it seems, of success. Torf Einar set out with Harald’s blessing, the earldom and a twenty-bench ship provided by his father.19 Tall, ugly and one-eyed, as the saga tells us, Torf Einar was nevertheless far-sighted: he killed his Danish antagonists, took control of Orkney and, in an odd aside that might account for his nickname, we are told that he was the first to dig peat, or turf, for fuel.†† The very real fortunes of the communities at Portmahomack and the lands of Fortriu around the Moray Firth fit somehow into this semi-historical context. Einar’s turf-cutting took place, appropriately, on ‘Torfness’: the Tarbat peninsula.20
Einar seems to have spent periods in exile in Caithness after the death of his father and a fallout with King Haraldr, which might have been precipitated by his increasingly successful rule of Orkney. In the end the two were reconciled and a deal was thrashed out, whose detail seems at least historically plausible and admirably pragmatic:
Haraldr imposed a tax on the islands amounting to sixty gold marks. Einar offered to pay the whole sum out of his own pocket on condition that he should hold all the estates in fee [freehold], and to these terms the farmers agreed since the wealthier ones hoped to redeem their estates later, while the poorer ones were unable to pay the tribute anyway... Earl Einar ruled over Orkney for many years and died in his bed.21
These semi-mythical events are only dimly perceived in the Insular sources. Sigurð’s ravages on the Scottish mainland might just be identified with an attack on Dunottar, the great rocky promontory fort just south of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, noted in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba under the year 900.22 In this battle Domnall son of Constantín,‡‡ king of Alba, was killed, an event of sufficient importance for it to be recorded by the Annals of Ulster. The Alban Chronicle also relates that Pictavia was wasted; and it is conceivable that Scotland might have fallen permanently under Norse rule in the aftermath, with powerful earls controlling the islands to north and west while land-hungry Irish exiles, thwarted in their attempts to wrest the southern kingdoms from the Anglo-Saxons, looked for easier conquests in northern Britain.
That Alba did not fall can be attributed in large part to the long and politically astute rule of Constantín mac Áeda, Domnall’s cousin, who held the kingdom for forty years and who can properly be regarded as the founder of the medieval Scottish state. He was the first Scottish king to interact with a recognizably coherent kingdom of the Angelcynn; capable, too, of mounting a serious military campaign against Northumbria and the southern kingdoms. He was to abdicate in 943 and retire to a life of monastic contemplation as abbot at St Andrews, where he died nine years later.
Under Constantín, in the early years of the tenth century, a distinctive Alban state emerged in the east. If Ælfred had professionalized kingship and royal administration in the south, Constantín seems to have been able to enact parallel reforms in the north, although there is insufficient detail to be certain: no coins were minted in Alba during his reign; no chronicle survives in which a thousand words might be lavished on the events of a single year. All that remain are hints, mere fragments.
36. DUNOTTAR CASTLE, on its rocky promontory in Aberdeenshire—a target for both Norse raiders and Anglo-Saxon kings.
The first significant events in Constantín’s reign seem to reflect a series of campaigns against invading Norse from Ireland in the aftermath of their expulsion from Dublin. In 903 ‘Northmen plundered Dunkeld and all Albania’. But a year later the same Chronicle of the Kings of Alba announces that ‘Northmen were slain in Strath Erenn’§§ and a parallel record in the Annals of Ulster gives the crucial detail: ‘Ímar grandson of Ímar was slain by the men of Fortriu, and there was a great slaughter about him.’23 Ímar is the Goidelic form of the Old Norse Ívarr, the outstanding Viking dynast and scourge of the Insular kingdoms in the 860s.
Constantín was able to draw almost immediate political capital from this victory:
In the vi year## king Constantín and Bishop Cellach pledged to keep the laws and disciplines of the faith and the rights of the church and the gospels, pariter cum Scottis on the Hill of Belief next to the royal civitas of Scone.24
The wording is reminiscent, as Alex Woolf points out, of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle account of the meeting between King Ecgberht and Archbishop Ceolnoth at Kingston in 838; so too is the location, on a royal estate at the tidal head of the River Tay. This was a state occasion, the promulgation of formal relations between church and king, mutually reinforcing legitimacy, rights of patronage and law-making. Each party had aligned its immense powers of patronage with the other. It must be seen, too, as an act of Christian solidarity in the face of overtly pagan military threats, backed by the authority of Colm Cille, St Columba, whose precious relics lay higher up Strathtay at Dunkeld. The future of the Scottish state lay in the south-east, not in exposed Argyll or Fortriu. The tricky phrase pariter cum Scottis has caused much debate among historians. Alex Woolf concludes that it should best be translated ‘in the fashion of the Gaels’: that is, following precedents set anciently in Argyll between the kings of Dál Riata and the abbot-bishops of Iona.25 Alba was a Gaelic rather than a Pictish kingdom.
Even more obscure undercurrents swirling beneath the still waters of its opening decade warn us that the apparently inexorable emergence of three long-lasting polities in England, Scotland and Wales during the tenth century is a simplistic retro-fit. There is nothing inevitable about unification; Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries was intensely regional, not much less so in the tenth. Elements of the old Heptarchy,∫∫ even of smaller regional polities and territorial rivalries, continued to surface during the period when the great dynasts of Wessex, Gwynedd and Alba were rewriting, or suppressing, alternative histories. Under scrutiny the apparently neat façade of national identity shows structural cracks.
To begin with, Constantín could not lay claim to overlordship of the whole of what we call Scotland. Cait (Caithness) seems to have lain entirely outside his control. The Northern and Western Isles belonged to a Norse thalassocracy. The ancient British kingdom of Strathclyde, which temporarily disappears from annalistic records after the sack of Dumbarton in 870, reappears as Cumbria in later centuries. In the time of Constantín its capital lay at Govan, judging by the extraordinary wealth of Brittonic–Norse sculpture at Govan Old Church on the south bank of the Clyde, and the Thing-mound that seems to have stood nearby.ΩΩ Strathclyde was capable of extending its cultural and political reach as far south as the Lake District, formerly subject to Northumbrian overlordship; its armies formed an important element of the confederacy that would face Æðelstan at Brunanburh in 937 and it seems not to have been conquered by Scottish kings until the eleventh century.
*
To the south, Northumbria’s always uncomfortable projection of unity, if it was ever more than a pipe dream of Bede’s and the dynasty of the Idings, did not survive: the kingdom split into its ancient constituent parts. The later pre-Conquest earls of Bamburgh were the descendants of the sixth- and seventh-century kings of Bernicia. When the community of St Cuthbert threw in its lot with the Scandinavian kingdom of York in the late ninth century they were transferring their allegiance away from Bernicia, where their core territorial holdings had lain, to Deira: the kingdom of York.
Even the long-held idea of a wholly Scandinavian kingdom based on York looks a little flimsy under the microscope, at least before the third decade of the tenth century. Several of its kings might have acted as proxies for Danish war bands but the Cuthbert community’s dealings with them show how much power was retained by ancient institutions; and the archbishops of York might even be said to have enhanced their position as territorial and economic power brokers under nominal Scandinavian rule. That southern Northumbria’s political agenda was anti-Bernician and anti-Wessex, rather than pro-Viking, seems a reasonable conclusion to draw from both its dealings with the Host and its apparently enthusiastic adoption of Æðelwold, the ætheling of Wessex.
Æðelwold had emerged after Ælfred’s death in 899 as an alternative candidate for the throne of Wessex. He attempted to attract disaffected elements among the Wessex élite to his banner just as, in 877–878, rival claimants had acquiesced in or sided with the Host’s attempts to decapitate the regime. Failing to gain traction in the south he had escaped, made his way to York and there been either received as king (during what seems to have been a brief interregnum), or at least recognized as a legitimate claimant to the throne of Wessex. A number of coins bearing the name ALVALDUS have been found over the years and are generally believed to have been minted in York for the pretender.26 In 903, according to the Chronicle, he sailed with his fleet to the land of the East Saxons. This ancient kingdom, once inclusive of the modern counties of Middlesex and Hertfordshire, had been claimed by Mercia and Wessex alternately in the eighth and early ninth centuries; its last native king, Sigered, had died in 825.
Ancient antagonisms between Essex, its former overlords and the kingdom of Kent across the Thames estuary seem to have rendered it fertile ground for Scandinavian armies seeking a secure base and sympathetic friends. Its muddy estuaries, numberless creeks and tidal islands were perfect hunting grounds and sanctuaries for longships ghosting in and out under sail or oar. Since the treaty between Ælfred and Guðrum it had belonged to the sphere of Danish rule, or at least lay outwith the control of Wessex or Mercia. Now, the West Saxon ætheling took advantage of its strategic position on the Thames estuary to launch a fresh attack on his cousin Eadweard.
He did not strike immediately. Instead he seized the opportunity to exploit more regional antipathy towards Wessex by moving, the following year, into East Anglia where he was able to assemble a much more serious force, capable of invasion. We know, from lists of subsequent casualties recorded in the Chronicle, that his army included, perhaps was jointly led by, one King Eohric (properly Old Norse Eiríkr). Eiríkr, otherwise invisible to us, seems to have been the successor to Guðrum, possibly one of the younger commanders in the wars against Wessex in the 870s or 890s or a son thereof, who had proved himself worthy of leading the East Anglian Host.
East Anglia, probably at this time comprising what is now Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, maintained a strong regional identity, demonstrated not just by its acceptance of Æðelwold’s claims but also by the remarkable emergence of a cult of the martyred, indigenous King Eadmund. In time this cult would be recognized by Eadweard’s successor, Æðelstan, as part of his unification strategy. That the Scandinavian kings of East Anglia took it seriously as an expression of regional solidarity cannot be doubted: from 895 onwards a series of coins, some of whose obverse inscriptions read SCE EADMUND REX (O St Eadmund the King) is widely evidenced. These were no mere memorial tokens: more than 1,800 of them, from more than seventy moneyers, come from the Cuerdale hoard alone.27 They were minted up until about 915 and show the strength of a thriving coin-based market economy in the kingdom: Scandinavian settlement had been swiftly followed by booming trade. Norwich, the old trading settlement at Ipswich and the newer town at Thetford were productive and successful. King Eadmund’s body was transferred from its original burial place to a new church at Beadoriceworth, later Bury St Edmunds, enthusiastically patronized by successive English kings. Towards the end of the tenth century a Life of the martyred king was commissioned.
Æðelwold’s allies in his prospective campaign against Wessex included not only disaffected branches of the West Saxon ruling dynasty, Northumbrian freebooters, glory-seeking members of Essex’s and East Anglia’s senior families and Danish war bands; he was also able to attract to his banner Beorhtsige, son of the ‘ætheling’ Beornnoth. It has been suggested that the name offers an alliterative clue to identifying members of the old Mercian ‘B’ dynasty of kings whose heartlands lay around Breedon on the Hill in Leicestershire.28 This, it seems, was truly an anti-Wessex alliance, which shows how simmering regional tensions might be brought to the boil by the appearance of a candidate capable of uniting them into a credible force.
Credible that army might have been; but the defences of Wessex, Mercia and Kent, thanks to the reforms undertaken by Ælfred and Æðelred and proven in the campaign of 893–896, were deep and solid; so too was the alliance that bound the southern kingdoms by mutual interest. Decades of Scandinavian predations had strengthened them against both external invasion and internal dissension. Land, its power and wealth woven tightly into the political fabric, lay in the control of the king and church, whose lines of patronage ensured its advantageous distribution.
In 904 Æðelwold led his coalition west into Mercia, raiding and testing support for his venture. Very little detail of the campaign is recorded, except that at Cricklade, the highest navigable point on the River Thames, now defended by a burh, the army crossed into Wessex and ‘seized all they could’ before returning home.29 It hardly seems like a sustained attempt to engage Eadweard or his sister Æðelflæd in a do-or-die battle. Eadweard nevertheless pursued the army eastwards, ravaging the country south of the Fens in Cambridgeshire. Intending, then, to retire, Eadweard issued a general order for disengagement which seems to have been ignored by the Men of Kent.
Either caught unawares or pursuing their own ancient rivalries, they engaged Æðelwold’s army in a serious and bloody battle that left many of their senior commanders dead but also accounted for King Eiríkr, the ætheling Æðelwold and countless others of his army. The remainder may have kept the field of slaughter; but the anti-Wessex coalition was finished. Looking back from the end of that century, the chronicler Æðelweard completely ignored Æðelwold’s part in the campaign which he had inspired, recording only a battle at Holme≈≈ under the year 902, against ‘the Eastern enemy’; the same battle is recorded in the Mercian Register as a conflict between Kentishmen and Danes.
*
The sparseness of the Chronicle’s entries for the opening decade of the tenth century acts as a fog blanketing other political undercurrents. Internal and external tensions and noises heard offstage from the Irish Sea, the Continent and the far north, are as the distant thrum of a bombardment beyond the horizon. The almost universal experience of Early Medieval kings was that, after their succession, they must spend several years constructing, or reconstructing, elaborate webs of lordship and patronage fractured or dissolved by the death of their predecessor. Eadweard’s political capital in the aftermath of his defeat of the West Saxon pretender, and with his redoubtable sister and brother-in-law in firm alliance, ought to have been high. He had been groomed for the kingship; his father had constructed a powerful state apparatus, revolutionizing defence and military service; West Saxon and Mercian interests were secure; the enemy was weak. And yet...
The evidence of coinage, so independent and neutral a witness in these centuries, suggests that, unlike the economies of the Danelaw, East Anglia and York, those of Wessex and Mercia were weak in the early part of Eadweard’s reign.30 Silver seems to have been in short supply, either because of the immense cost of Ælfredan military defences and tributary payments, because of economic neglect in Ælfred’s last years, or perhaps as a result of three years of ‘murrain and plague’ in the late 890s. A lack of silver with which to secure loyalties, pay off enemies and purchase landed estates and prestige goods is a strong indicator of relative political poverty, the detail of which is now impenetrable.
London and Canterbury hardly seem to have been operative as mints in this period. Winchester, Eadweard’s heartland, was his only seriously productive mint and, given that no independent Mercian coinage was produced under Æðelred or his wife, we suspect that the West Mercian economy, whose only markets before the revival of Chester were isolated inland, was suffering equal stagnation. A more concrete hint of economic woe in the first decade after Ælfred’s death is contained in a charter account in which land was leased to Eadweard by Denewulf, his bishop at Winchester. The bishop recalls that when Eadweard first gave him the land ‘it was quite without stock, and stripped bare by heathen men’. Now (in perhaps 907 or 908) the bishop was pleased to say that there were 9 full-grown oxen, 114 pigs and 50 wethers [castrated rams] and a surplus of corn, with 90 acres under crops.31 It seems as if the post-war Insular southern kingdoms had been economically exhausted by thirty years of war.
We are presented with an abrupt, acontextual message from the laconic chronicler of Wessex for the year 905:
Her on þys geare gefor Ælfred, wæs æt Baðum gerefa. 7 on þæm ilcan gere mon fæstnode þone frið æt Yttingaforda, swa swa Eadweard cyng gerædde, ægðer wið Eastengle ge wið Norðhymbre.
In this year died Ælfred, who was reeve at Bath; and in the same year peace was ratified at Tiddingford,∂∂ as king Eadweard ordained, both with the Host from East Anglia and with the Northumbrians.32
The Chronicle’s ‘E’ version, from Peterborough, with its more distinctly northern outlook, reinforces the suspicion that Eadweard was weaker than the official account suggests: it records that Eadweard was ‘compelled to make peace’.33 One wonders, on what terms and with what money?
* The hoard, containing about 5,000 coins, was found in 1846 but has since been lost. Edwards 1996, 177.
† Cadell was king of Seisyllwg; his brother, Anarawd, was king of Gwynedd, of which Anglesey was a core territory, and is regarded as the more likely antagonist.
‡ The adjectival form of Gwynedd.
§ See map on p. 322.
# There seems to have been more activity in Chester than the written sources suggest. Coins were minted here, perhaps in a trading settlement by the Dee, as early as the last years of Ælfred. Lyon 2001, 75.
∫ There is continuing debate about the location of the new defences, which seem to have abandoned or replaced the west and south walls of the Roman fortress and projected the north wall west to the river, and the east wall, likewise, to the south. This would have formed a protected riverfront and considerably enlarged the area of the future town; but excavations have not so far proved conclusive. Ward 2001.
Ω A particularly significant site: the location of a beach market on the north-west sands of Wirral, it has yielded an extraordinarily rich inventory of exotic artefacts from the Early Medieval and medieval periods. The names derive, respectively, as follows: Irby (‘settlement of the Irish’), Kirby (‘church settlement’), Meols (‘sandbank’), Thingwall (‘assembly field’), Croxteth (‘landing place on a bend’), Aigburth (‘Oakwood hill’), and Tranmere (‘crane sandbank’).
≈ Many of the hundreds of arm rings recovered from Viking period hoards conform to a weight standard, known as the Dublin ounce, of about 26.6g.
∂ Citing also the presence among the finds of a silver pendant whetstone, an almost universal symbol of warrior power and prestige in the period.
π Man’s Viking archaeology was first systematically explored not by a native archaeologist but by an interned German during the 1940s. Gerhard Bersu, a gifted and innovative excavator, was allowed more or less free run of the enigmatic mounds and half-buried enclosures that dot the Manx landscape.
∆ To use the ironic phrasing of songwriter John Richards.
** Rollo was cited by the Frankish chronicler Richer de Rheims, as the leader of the Viking raiders who besieged Paris in 885–886. The tenth-century writer Dudo of St Quentin wrote an account of his acquisition of Normandy. Somerville and McDonald 2014, 252ff. By similarity of name he is associated with the Göngu-Hrólfr of Orkneyinga Saga: Ganger-Rolf or Rolf ‘the Walker’, a man so big that a horse could not carry him.
†† An alternative story to that told in Orkneyinga Saga, and preserved in the Three Fragmentary Annals, says that Rögnvaldr and his sons were all exiled in Orkney. FA 330.
‡‡ Constantín mac Cináeda or Constantín I; Domnall was, therefore, a grandson of Cináed mac Ailpín. Constantín mac Áed is commonly referred to as Constantin II. It is possible that both Domnall and his cousin spent some years exiled in Ireland with their aunt, which might explain the more than ordinary interest in their careers recorded in the Irish annals. Woolf 2007, 122–6.
§§ Probably Strathearn, but possibly Strath Dearn on the south side of the Moray Firth.
## The sixth year of his rule, i.e. 906.
∫∫ Kent, Wessex, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia, Essex and Sussex. It is not a contemporary term. In the twelfth century Henry of Huntingdon introduced the idea of the division of seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in his Historia Anglorum. We might further identify sub-kingdoms in Lindsey, West Wealas, Hwicce, Deira and Bernicia.
ΩΩ See below, Chapters 9 and 12. Ritchie 2011.
≈≈ The site has never been conclusively identified; Holme in Cambridgeshire seems a plausible location.
∂∂ Tiddingford, no longer in existence, is identified with Linslade just west of Leighton Buzzard next to the River Ouzel on the Bedfordshire–Buckinghamshire border. It lies a few miles south-west of the boundary described in the Treaty of Ælfred and Guðrum (pp. 173–6).