ROYAL CULTS—A BATTLE—AN ALLIANCE OF SIBLINGS—WAR OF THE NEW BURHS—FIVE BOROUGHS—EVERYDAY LIFE IN LINDSEY—SUBMISSION—COUP D’ÉTAT—RÖGNVALDR AND CUTHBERT
Acuriously anachronistic event stands out among the Chronicle entries for the first decade of the tenth century. In 906 or 909* the bones of a long-dead saint were ‘translated’ from Bardney in Lindsey to Gloucester. On the face of it this seems improbable, for a number of reasons. Oswald was the Northumbrian king celebrated by Bede, who, in the year 635, brought an Irish Christian mission from Iona to mainland Britain: the mission by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was founded. Oswald was killed in the year 642, by the pagan Mercian warlord Penda, and dismembered, his head impaled on a stake at a place that came to be called, in grisly irony, Oswald’s Tree, or Oswestry, on the Mercian–Welsh border. Oswald’s head and right arm were later retrieved by his brother and taken back to Bernicia. The head found its way into the coffin of St Cuthbert (both now lie in Durham Cathedral); the uncorrupted right arm was enshrined at Bamburgh. Many miracles and healing episodes were said to have occurred at the place of Oswald’s martyrdom.
37. ÆÐELFLÆD, LADY OF THE MERCIANS, with her nephew, Æðelstan: the statue at Tamworth, dedicated in 1913, was sculpted by Edward Bramwell.
The fate of the torso did not become apparent for some thirty-seven years until, oddly, it was presented by a Mercian king, Æðelwulf, and his Northumbrian queen, Osðryð, to their royal monastic foundation at Bardney, an event accompanied by a suitably miraculous celestial revelation and much curing of ills. In the eighth century King Offa endowed the shrine with precious gifts.1
Bardney lies on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, overlooking the peaty flatlands of the River Witham, some 9 miles (14 km) south-east of Lincoln. In the early tenth century Lincoln was a Scandinavian fortress town, one of the so-called Five Boroughs established after the invasion of 865. Two questions immediately present themselves: why did Æðelred and Æðelflæd so desire the relics of a Northumbrian king and saint; and how did they acquire them from within such apparently hostile territory?
Several historians have speculated that a large-scale raid in 909 might have presented an opportunity to steal the relics from under the noses of Lincoln’s Danish garrison:
7 þy ilcan gere sende Eadweard cyng firde ægðer ge of Westseaxum ge of Mercum, 7 heo gehergade swiðe micel on þæm norðhere...
And in this year King Eadweard sent levies from both Wessex and Mercia, and severely harried the Host in the north, destroying both people and every kind of cattle: they slew many Danes and were five weeks in their territory.2
Well, perhaps. In that scenario the acquisition of Oswald’s relics was an opportunistic find of the returning army, or a specifically targeted prize. There are other possibilities: one is that, like Ealdorman Ælfred’s acquisition of the Codex Aureus, the relics were ransomed from the Host by the Mercian royal couple, and for similar reasons, as a devotional offering to a great ecclesiastical foundation. Another, if we accept the ‘D’ manuscript’s date of 906, is that the return of the relics was negotiated as part of the peace treaty brokered at Tiddingford that year; and that perhaps they were re-interred at Gloucester three years later. Either way, we must explain their value to the Mercian royal house and the timing of their acquisition.
Gloucester, Roman Glevum, was the ruined fortress and colonia which controlled an important crossing of the River Severn at the core of the old kingdom of Hwicce. In its northern angle stood a minster founded in the seventh century. Half a mile further north, at Kingsholm, lay a royal vill complex. Æðelred and Æðelflæd are thought to have begun refortification, perhaps after the campaign of 893, as a pivotal extension of the burghal network. Like Chester, its riverside walls were either abandoned or used as quarries for stone to extend its other walls so that they enclosed a length of riverbank, within which lay the new burh.
38. A FIERCE BEAST bound by intricate interlace from St Oswald’s Priory, Gloucester. King Oswald’s great reputation was a source of inspiration to the Mercian royal house.
At the same time, it seems, the couple conceived of a new royal minster, constructed close to the river but just outside the walls. It was a remarkable church, built in dressed stone: small by comparison to Eadweard’s New Minster at Winchester and some other contemporary grandiose designs, but still magnificent. An apse was constructed, most unusually, at its western end and at its east end stood a crypt or mausoleum, apparently very like that at Repton with its candy twist columns and intimate, almost claustrophobic atmosphere.3 The ealdorman and his spouse would be buried here in time. The relics of King Oswald were also interred at the new church, a reflection of its royal credentials and the sainted king’s unearthly powers at a time of considerable political uncertainty. Part of one of its walls still stands, much altered by later works.
A similar scheme seems to have been carried out at Chester, reconstructed and fortified as a burh by Æðelflæd in 907 to counter the threat of Ingimund’s settlement in north-west Cheshire. Here, too, she seems to have re-interred the translated relics of a celebrated royal saint—in this case Wærburg, a granddaughter, ironically, of Oswald’s slayer, King Penda.† In later years the church was rededicated jointly to her and Oswald. The Oswald cult was in time patronized by Eadweard’s son and successor King Æðelstan (924–939), who was probably fostered at the Mercian court. It seems he believed himself, mistakenly, to be descended from Oswald, who featured prominently in Bede’s list of those who had held imperium over all Britain (one of the Bretwaldas listed by the Chronicle under the year 828).4
From West Saxon royal investment in the cult of another Northumbrian hero, St Cuthbert,‡ and Eadweard’s re-interment of King Ælfred as effectively a secular saint at his New Minster in Winchester, a picture emerges of political and physical capital being invested by the children of Ælfred in appropriating charismatic cult figures of a heroic, golden past to new political ends. It is almost like a Democratic presidential candidate claiming that his or her father had known Kennedy: the magic is supposed to rub off, as political endorsement. The Mercians were buying into Oswald’s and the more credibly indigenous Wærburg’s immense prestige.
39. CHESTER: the Roman fort was rebuilt as a burh by Æðelflæd in the aftermath of Ingimund’s invasion of 902.
This investment in cult figures of the past is paralleled in Alba by the Ailpín dynasty’s acquisition of Columban relics and by the royal cult of St Andrew, and in Wales by long-lasting royal patronage of St David, the least disturbed of all the Insular patron saints (until the eleventh century, at least, when a series of devastating attacks wrought destruction on cathedral, shrine and relics alike). In the British kingdom of Strathclyde or Cumbria investment in more obscure and ancient, semi-mythical saints (Constantine at Govan, Kentigern at Glasgow and Ninian at Whithorn) reinforced claims of legitimacy, sanctity and deep ancestral roots for their emerging dynasts. From a long historical perspective, this renewed interest in royal-sponsored cults can be seen as part of a confident, offensive political strategy countering arriviste Danish rule in East Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia. In the latter kingdom, the Scandinavian rulers appropriated one of their own victims, St Eadmund, as a royal cult: a case of having one’s homicidal cake and eating it. It may be significant that both Oswald and Eadmund seem to have been the focus of head cults, a deeply ancient, pre-Christian Insular phenomenon.
There is a curious footnote to Gloucester’s acquisition of Oswald’s relics. In 910 the Chronicle reported that a fleet of Continental Vikings based in Brittany sailed up the Severn estuary. Eadweard seems to have received intelligence of their imminent departure from Brittany, for he had mustered his fleet in the harbours of Kent. Perhaps informed of his absence in the far south, the Northumbrian Host ‘broke the truce’ and harried Mercia, seemingly taking the opportunity to retaliate for the aggression perpetrated by the armies of the Angelcynn the previous year.
There was evident danger in the two Scandinavian forces combining somewhere in the lands of the Hwicce; but Mercian and West Saxon levies, co-ordinated through the burhs, intercepted the Northumbrian force and, at Tettenhall, on the north-west outskirts of what is now Wolverhampton,§ put it to flight. Two Danish kings,# Eowils (Old Norse Auðgísl) and Hálfdan, were slain along with several of their senior commanders. The Severn fleet seems also to have been put to flight.
Æðelweard, writing as a court insider a hundred years later, indicates that the battle was fought on 5 August; the ‘D’ version of the Chronicle sets it a day later. None of the Mercian or West Saxon participants would have been unaware of the significance of 5 August, especially given the recent translation of remains to Gloucester: this was the day on which, in 642, King Oswald was slain by Penda’s forces at Maserfeld near Oswestry, with the famous proverb on his dying lips, ‘May God have mercy on their souls.’5 The Mercian royal project to bring Bede’s great English martyr into Mercia had, it must have seemed, been given divine approval: absolute proof of the power of the dead saint’s virtue.
Eadweard and his sister moved swiftly to take advantage of Northumbrian losses at Tettenhall. The Mercian Register noted that in the same year, 910, Æðelflæd built a new fortress at an unidentified site called Bremesburh.∫ The year after Tettenhall, Ealdorman Æðelred, reviver of Mercian fortunes and staunch ally of Ælfred and his children, died after his long illness and was buried, most likely, in his new minster at Gloucester alongside Oswald’s relics. In the immediate aftermath, according to the Chronicle, Eadweard occupied London and Oxford ‘and all the lands which belonged thereto’.6 Historians have variously seen this move as opportunism by Eadweard or as part of a long-term strategy to weaken his sister. At this remove it is hard to decide; but family sentiment is not a conspicuous feature of Early Medieval politics.
Notwithstanding Eadweard’s annexation of two Mercian towns, what looks like a co-ordinated project to drive a military wedge into the heart of Danish-held territory now began. Before the second decade of the tenth century was out, new fortresses or burhs were constructed at nineteen sites strung out on a broad line between Thames and Mersey, unmistakeable in their offensive purpose. That line roughly follows Watling Street, north-east of which Scandinavian place names are common and south-west of which they are virtually unknown. It has an ancient and continuing geographic distinction, barely noticed by today’s Midlanders. Broadly speaking,Ω to the north-east all the rivers flow into the Wash or North Sea on the east side, or the Irish Sea on the west. To the south and west every river drains into either Severn or Thames. This is England’s natural fault line, its continental divide: the watershed that divided and divides north from south (epitomized by the famous Watford Gap, on the A5/M1 north-east of Daventry); and I have no doubt that Scandinavian armies and settlers knew its imperatives. Now, its status as the front line between the Anglo-Saxon and Danish kingdoms was to be marked and enhanced by military infrastructure: the new burhs were border garrisons, first for a defensive barrier protecting the headwaters of its own rivers and their road connections, then for an offensive frontier, crossing the watershed from south to north.
That military confidence was backed by a strengthening economy. The number of moneyers, mints and coins dating from the years after about 910 increased dramatically. A series of coins of distinct ornament and carrying Eadweard’s name has been shown to originate in West Mercia, most significantly at Chester but also from moneyers in Shrewsbury, Hereford and Gloucester. These coins were not minted by or for him: they are Mercian, an indication that co-operation between Æðelflæd and her brother allowed for considerable independence of action on her part, but also of a revival in trade and a reinvigorated supply of silver. In the south-east, Archbishop Plegmund was responsible for a substantial new coinage minted at Canterbury, while Eadweard’s Winchester mint was now supplemented by production in Oxford, London, Chichester, Wareham and Exeter. By the end of his reign the number of moneyers has been estimated at more than sixty in the south and over twenty in West Mercia.7
In 912 Æðelflæd had forts constructed at the lost Scergeat, perhaps Shrewsbury, and at Bridgnorth, to prevent further incursions across the Severn there and to provide a base for raiding into Danish territory. In the same year Eadweard raised defences at Hertford, on the traditional boundary of Danish East Anglia, and at Maldon in Essex. The latter, at the head of the broad Blackwater estuary and close to the line of the old road from London to Colchester, must have seemed particularly threatening to Danish commanders; later in the tenth century a celebrated battle would be fought close by.
In 913 Æðelflæd, with the assurance of new burhs protecting the Severn and, perhaps, the Roman road towards the valuable salt springs of Droitwich, made her aggressive intentions clear with the construction of burhs at Tamworth≈ and Stafford, close to the thin blue line of the River Trent and within a day’s forced march of Danish defences at Derby and Leicester. Eadweard, having secured his bridgehead at Maldon the previous year, now built another fortress right on the line of the London to Colchester road at Witham, and a second across the River Lea at Hertford to create a double barrier across the river there, no doubt remembering his father’s inspired coup de main against a Viking fleet on that very river in 894.
It is inconceivable that these projects were not co-ordinated in advance by the two siblings. Burh construction required a large commitment of labour from the levies, co-operation of ealdormen and fine-tuned planning with military support; not to mention large quantities of cash. The boldness of the programme paid almost immediate dividends. While Eadweard was stationed at Maldon, protecting the builders at Witham, ‘a good number of people who had earlier been under Danish domination submitted to him’.8 Parts, if not all, of Essex now came under his control.
The pace and scope of Eadweard’s and Æðelflæd’s offensive showed dazzling ambition; and it could not be allowed to continue unopposed. In 914, as Æðelflæd implemented the next phase of the scheme with new forts at Eddisbury∂ and Warwick, Danish forces came out from Northampton and Leicester and raided southwards. They advanced as far as Hook Norton, south-west of Banbury, and Luton. Both were repulsed by ‘the people of the country’, who ‘fought against them and routed them completely, recovering all that they had taken and also a great part of their horses and their weapons’.9
In 915, pressing the advantage, Æðelflæd’s levies constructed three new fortresses: at Runcorn, on the peninsula between the Rivers Mersey and Weaver; at Chirbury, close to the Severn and the line of Offa’s Dyke at Montgomery (which shows that her offensive ambitions extended to the Welsh kingdoms); and at the unidentified Weardburh.π
The Severn estuary had always been vulnerable to seaborne attack: the same year saw another marine assault, again from Brittany, under two jarls, Ohtor and Harold.∆ They harried inland and seized Cyfeiliog, the Bishop of Archenfield.** Levies from the burhs at Hereford and Gloucester were mobilized and routed them, besieging them in ‘an enclosure’ until they could extract from them hostages and promises to leave. Retreating to their boats, the Vikings raided coastal sites in Cornwall, at Porlock and at a site east of Watchet in Somerset; again they were driven off, forced to shelter on one of the small islands in the Bristol Channel, before departing.
Late in the same year Eadweard supervised the construction of two fortresses at Buckingham, one on each side of the River Great Ouse. Danish Jarls from Bedford and Northampton and many of the chiefs who owed allegiance to those two towns submitted to him, according to the Chronicle. Eadweard then took the fortress at Bedford and built another on the opposite bank of the Great Ouse. In the aftermath, according to a laconic note in the ‘A’ version of the Chronicle, Jarl Ðurcytel ‘went oversea to Froncland with men who wished to follow him, under the protection of King Eadweard and with his assistance’: paid off, one supposes; or given ships.10
In 916, taking advantage of a distracted Wessex–Mercian leadership to pursue more local interests, the king of Brycheiniog in southern Wales killed an abbot, called Ecgberht, with his companions, provoking the vengeful wrath of the Myrcna hlæfdige. She sent a force to his llys at Brecenanmere, the crannog on Llangorse lake, stormed it and captured his queen with more than thirty others.†† Æðelflæd at this time appears to be all-seeing, in absolute command of political developments in her increasing orbit and capable of immediate, effective military response.
Frustratingly, there are dislocations between the several versions of the Chronicle in the middle years of the decade which are hard to reconcile. The result is an unsatisfactory scrapbook of events that makes a straightforward linear narrative almost impossible to construct. One is in danger of reversing the order of raid and counter-raid, fort construction and submission; the rhythmic click-clack of Newton’s cradle becomes a chaotic racket. With that proviso, one can pick out a new pattern from the year 917: the tattoo of invasion.
Before Easter, Eadweard refortified the old Roman fort at Towcester, not far from Northampton, right on the line of Watling Street and lying close to the head of the north-east flowing Great Ouse. He constructed another at the unidentified Wigingamere.‡‡ A co-ordinated Danish leadership sent forces from Leicester and Northampton and ‘north from there’ to lay siege to Towcester. Its defences were too strong, however, and a relief force arrived to disperse the Danish army. In response they took to raiding at night, ‘taking considerable spoil both in captives and cattle between Aylesbury and Bernwood’.11 Another Host now came into the field from Huntingdon, joining forces with an army from East Anglia and constructing a fortress of their own at Tempsford, a few miles north-east of Bedford at the confluence of the Rivers Great Ouse and Izel. The Chronicle tells us that the fort at Huntingdon was now abandoned and that the Host came to focus its forces on this crucial front line close to Bedford and Watling Street. Their first new venture was to attack Bedford itself; but the garrison there sallied and put them to flight.
Now, at the height of summer of 917, a second Host came out of East Anglia and East Mercia. They laid siege to the new fort at Wigingamere, attempting to storm it; again they were repelled. Eadweard’s response was to gather a strong army from the surrounding garrisons. He:
7 foron to Tæmeseforda 7 besæton ða burg 7 fuhton ðæron oð hi hie abræcon 7 ofslogon þone cyning, 7 Toglos eorl, 7 Mannan eorl his sunu...
Marched to Tempsford and besieged the burh and attacked it until they took it by storm, and slew the king, and Jarl Toglos and his son Jarl Manna and his brother and all the garrison who put up a resistance, making prisoners of the rest and seizing everything inside the fortress.12
Seizing the initiative, Eadweard now assembled a force from Kent, Surrey and Essex and sent them to attack Colchester, ransacking it and killing all its inhabitants ‘except those who escaped over the wall’. Again the Host fought back, bringing their forces, and those of ‘pirates whom they had enticed to their aid’ against Eadweard’s new burh at Maldon. Once more a relieving army saw them off.
As autumn wore on the pace of events did not slacken. Eadweard brought the levies of Wessex to protect the garrison at Towcester while they reinforced its walls with stone (the first mention of such construction at a new burh). The Scandinavian commanders in the area around Northampton submitted to him. Part of the Wessex levy was now relieved and a new force came into the field to take and repair the abandoned fort at Huntingdon, deep inside Danish territory. They moved on to Colchester and occupied it too; and as autumn turned to winter the Host at Cambridge and the people of East Anglia came to Eadweard and submitted to him.
The king could not have left his Mercian flanks unprotected during this furiously hectic campaigning year; but nor did his sister sit idly by in support. Before Lammas 917 (i.e. between 1 August and 1 September, the month of harvest) the Mercian Register records that Æðelflæd:
Won the borough called Derby with God’s help, together with all the region which it controlled: four of her thegns, who were dear to her, were slain there within the gates.
And in 918:
In the early part of this year, with God’s help, she secured the possession of the borough of Leicester by peaceful means; and the majority of the Mercian forces that owed allegiance to it became subject to her.13
The first two towns of the Five Boroughs of Danish Mercia had fallen, not to Eadweard but to the forces of the Myrcna hlæfdige, Ælfred’s daughter. The fighting at Derby was bloody even if, as some historians have suggested, the town’s main force was absent, occupied in fighting against Eadweard’s levies;14 Leicester was won by negotiation, either through the acclamation of its inhabitants or by bare-faced bribery.
*
Since the burhs of East Mercia were invisible to the chroniclers during a period of more than forty years, their history under Danish rule is obscure: it is not at all clear from the historical sources what had been going on beyond the frontiers of West Mercia and Wessex. We can, I think, say that any idea of a model Anglo-Scandinavian burh is a non-starter. The excavated evidence is patchy or non-existent in many towns; and those where archaeology has produced detailed evidence of ninth- and tenth-century life through its version of keyhole surgery may well be atypical of the wider settlement, let alone other towns. Even attempts at basic classification will defeat the unwary. To take the so-called Five Boroughs as a starting point, we might read too much into their debut in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 942, in a poetic list of territories conquered by King Eadmund (939–946) which included:
Burga fife, Ligoraceaster 7 Lindcylene 7 Snotingaham, swylce Stanford eac Deoraby.15
The names are immediately recognizable as Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Derby. Four of these would become the shire towns of counties; and historians naturally see these as the five principal strongholds and trading centres of the Danish-controlled Midlands. But what of those other places that seem to have enjoyed similar status under Danish rule? Northampton was fortified and became a shire town; the same goes for Bedford. Torksey, the Viking camp and production site on the Trent, appears to have manifested some urban characteristics; Repton, too, boasted defences. In Essex, Benfleet might qualify. In East Anglia, Norwich, Thetford, Ipswich, Huntingdon and Cambridge were all towns before the Norman Conquest; and of these Ipswich, at least, shows continuity of urban function, including pottery production, from the early eighth century onwards. Coins were minted in this period in at least four of the Anglo-Scandinavian towns: York, Norwich, Lincoln and Stamford.
Can we characterize these places by the nature of their supposed pre-Scandinavian status? Yes... and no. Leicester had been a Roman town; Lincoln no less than a colonia, a regional provincial centre supporting a settlement of retired legionary veterans. A Roman fort stood close to Derby; but not at Nottingham, Bedford, Northampton or Cambridge. Leicester, Lincoln, probably Northampton and Derby and possibly Stamford were the sites of important minsters before the middle of the ninth century. Leicester was, and Lincoln may have been, the seats of the bishops of Mercia and Lindsey respectively. There is no single suite of characteristics that allows us to either create a hierarchy of Anglo-Scandinavian towns, or differentiate them by earlier or later status.
The Five Boroughs were all, to be sure, geographically well connected. Leicester was the focus of a major Roman road network and lay on the River Soar, a possibly navigable tributary of the Trent. Lincoln was perhaps even better positioned: astride the Roman Ermine Street, one of the key north–south roads in eastern Britain with riverine links to the Humber via the Fossdyke and Trent, and to the Wash via the River Witham. Nottingham sat on the navigable Trent, Derby on a tributary of it. Stamford lies on both Ermine Street and the River Welland, which empties into the Wash. Northampton, Ipswich, Thetford and Norwich also enjoy the advantages of navigable rivers well connected to the existing Roman road system. The Danes, as I have suggested before, knew their geography and chose their sites well; and in various of these places existing defences or enclosures may have been adapted or enlarged by their armies. Not one of the putative towns or burhs of Danish East Mercia or East Anglia lay on a river that drained southwards into West Saxon or Mercian territory: they looked north and east for markets, for retreat and for alliances.
Places that worked as strongholds, with excellent communications by road and water, naturally enough made good trading sites; and if we look at the growth of manufacturing, a key feature of the late pre-Conquest town, their character comes into sharper focus. By the middle of the tenth century wheel-thrown pottery was being produced on an industrial scale at most of the sites I have mentioned, and there is a very clear distinction between these industries, with their restricted but consistent range of bowls and jars, their sophisticated kilns and their zones of regional distribution, and the relatively shabby products of the contemporary West Saxon burhs.16 The pottery offers us both a discrete set of Anglo-Scandinavian traits and a sense of distinct regional identity. Not only did West Saxons and Danish Mercians employ their own pottery styles; they also rejected the use of pottery made by their counterparts. Late ‘Saxon’ pottery was a two-fingered gesture, as well as a functional domestic artefact. On display at the heart of the domestic milieu, it transmitted social and ideological messages on a quite different, perhaps equally significant scale to the coins that carried, or did not carry, the king’s head.
Even the pottery picture suffers from fuzzy edges and a partially torn canvas. For one thing, excavated evidence shows that in Ipswich, Stamford, Thetford, Lincoln and Leicester kilns were already productive when the Host decided to set up camp and overwinter as the first stage of its grand conquests. And the ceramicist Paul Blinkhorn has shown that at least four of the pottery traditions present at other urban sites by the end of the tenth century were probably only founded around the middle of that century—that is to say, after those regions had been subsumed by the West Saxon and Mercian campaign of expansion that began in the late 910s with the conquest of Derby and Leicester.
There is more than one way of looking at the evidence. One is to argue that central places with important minsters, increasingly secularized and specializing in a variety of products for regional markets, were attractive targets for the jarls of the Host; that they were hijacked, their mercantile development accelerated by a sudden influx of entrepreneurial foreigners, slaves and shed-loads of hard cash. One might picture, as a comparison, the arrival of thousands of American GIs in Britain in the mid-1940s, and its effect on the economy (and birth rate).
We might offer a little more nuance than that, however. It is well understood that the potteries of Danish Mercia and East Anglia owe much of their character to those of Francia. A post-865 model of urban expansion and production would comfortably see Frankish potters being brought over by persuasion or coercion and set to work to produce kitchenware for Vikings who couldn’t get it locally. That argument fails to convince those who point out that there was no great pottery tradition in Scandinavia—the Vikings were not simply missing their homely porridge bowls.
One model, which would allow for Frankish potters to arrive in Mercia and East Anglia before the Host, would take its example from waves of exiled artisans in a more recent period: the Huguenot weavers and metalworkers who fled France and the Low Countries after the revocation in 1685 of the tolerant Edict of Nantes. Might our Frankish potters have crossed the Channel in the 840s and 850s as refugees from Continental Viking raids, with skilled labour on offer, to be enthusiastically patronized by the local élite just in time for them to be dispossessed by new landlords with bulging pockets and a taste for Continental goods? We cannot say; at least, not yet.
Nor can we say much about what daily life was like in those towns, so familiar in their busy modern high streets and dense housing, their industrial quarters and their fine medieval churches, where excavation has yet to produce the workshops and house plots of their Viking Age inhabitants. For that sort of detail we have to look elsewhere, in some respects uncomfortably far to make credible parallels. Outside of the Scandinavian homelands the largest number, by far, of Viking period urban houses to have been uncovered is in Ireland, where they are counted comfortably in the hundreds.17 The domestic form there is distinct and homogenous, conservative even. Houses were rectangular with straight walls and sometimes rounded corners, constructed of upright posts infilled with wattle panelling, later upgraded to plank walls. Two lines of internal posts supported a pitched roof of thatch, giving an internal space divided longitudinally into thirds. Raised bedding platforms were set against the side walls. There was a hearth at the centre and doors stood at both ends; smoke and the fug of cooking escaped through turfed or thatched eaves where, one suspects, meat and fish hung for curing.
These houses were built on long narrow plots fronting on to streets, much like their earlier prototypes in the wics or riverside trading settlements. The overriding impression is of a hugger-mugger existence, of constant tension between the values of space and privacy, industry and domesticity. Although rebuilt, sometimes several times over the generations, the form and size, at their largest 7 yards by 5 yards but often as little as 4 yards by 3 yards, was replicated again and again; these are family houses the size of modern living rooms. Some of the plots boasted ancillary buildings, with or without hearths, along with cesspits, wells, pathways and kitchen gardens.
These are such distinctly urban dwellings and so striking in their uniformity that it is hard to shake off the impression of planning, of organization and a shared sense of identity, even of urbanity. We might well expect to see such structures emerging from future excavations in cities like Nottingham or Derby, especially given the apparent constraints of crowded urban space and competition for street and river frontage, apparently immutable urban truths. Winchester’s Ælfredan re-planning has shown something of the same street-frontage arrangement in several excavations.
Whether all town-dwellers were occupied in trade, craft and industry is more difficult to assess. Perhaps the greatest distinction between urban and rural populations was in food production and consumption. Town-dwellers did, and do, keep chickens and other poultry; perhaps also pigs to recycle food waste and as a winter protein source; but there is no grazing land in their plots. Sheep seem mostly to have been consumed at estate centres in the countryside; they hardly figure on the urban menu. Cattle, the most important source of animal protein, seem, by dint of the skeletal information gained from rubbish deposits, to have been brought from countryside to town on the hoof, as they were right up until the railway age; and here they were slaughtered and sold on streets that would, in later centuries, be called Shambles. Fish and shellfish were a popular and valuable source of protein; grain, butter and cheese, it almost goes without saying, must have come from towns’ hinterlands: from farms specializing in dairy, cereals or livestock whence they were transported by boat, cart or packhorse to central markets in a more or less formal series of arrangements whose detail is opaque.
The urban diet, when it can be reconstructed from food remains preserved in rubbish and cesspits,§§ relied for its staples on bread and cereals, honey, lentils, leeks, peas and beans, fruits, nuts and fungi, washed down with weak beer whose alcohol effectively purified dodgy water.18 Food seems to have been stored and processed domestically in small quantities. The evident widespread consumption of sloes, hawthorn and rowan berries reflects the need for antiscorbutics## during late winter when fresh fruit and vegetables were in short supply.
If every urban home wove its own cloth from wool and flax, other buildings show that craft specialization was an increasingly important function of towns as productive and trading sites. At York, the famous Viking dig at Coppergate, and excavations in many other sites across the city, produced very substantial evidence for trade and industrial production from the end of the ninth century onwards. The trading settlement of pre-Viking York, evidenced by artisan production and finds of exotic imports, was dispersed along its riversides and around the fringes of the Roman citadel; but it was hardly a populous place.19 The interior of the former Roman fortress was dominated by ecclesiastical precincts and, perhaps, a royal estate, probably appropriated by its new Scandinavian leaders after 875.
Coppergate’s four excavated tenements belong to the first decades of the tenth century and indicate a new, dynamic phase in that city’s history, when the population grew to perhaps 10,000. The long, narrow plots seen in other Viking Age towns are present here for the first time. Coppergate was the street of the wood-turners (coopers) and archaeology shows that specialized crafts occupied distinct urban niches—the origins, perhaps, of the medieval guild system. But it is not clear whether the people of Coppergate were full-time, seasonal or merely domestic producers of bowls, tools, handles and so on; even, in fact, whether they were dwellers, rather than commuters. Coppergate also housed metal, leather and textile craftsmen and women—dyers, weavers, spinners and finishers.
Elsewhere, on other streets so far only partially excavated or inferred from stray finds, comb-makers, potters, jewellers and glass-makers plied their trades, satisfying local, regional, élite and foreign markets. Coppergate was well placed: it lay 100 yards (90 m) south of the corner of the old fortress and the same distance from a new crossing of the River Ouse, whose approach road, Micklegate (the ‘Great Street’), turns away from the site of the former Roman bridge towards the new bridge and skews the neat grid street pattern around it.
South of the River Humber, Lincoln, which seems to have remained under Scandinavian control until the 930s, was closely integrated into the Danish Mercian borough network. There are good reasons for thinking that the ancient kingdom of Lindsey maintained a stronger regional identity than any of the new shires forged from East Mercia in the tenth century, and that it remained the most Scandinavian of all the towns south of the Humber. It had never comfortably been part of either Mercia or Northumbria; had never been tributary to the West Saxon kings.
40. LINCOLN: the Viking town was superbly sited to exploit the economic potential of Roman road, canal and river connections.
Lincolnshire is much larger than any of those other Anglo-Scandinavian shires centred on towns; and the city’s geography is striking: highly visible in its landscape, sitting on a bluff overlooking a gap in the long straight limestone ridge along which the dead-straight Ermine Street runs north towards the Roman crossing of the Humber. It looks down on a semi-natural pool at the confluence of two rivers, the Witham and Till. The Witham flows into the Wash near Boston; but Lincoln is also connected to the great watery highway of the Trent by the Roman canal called the Fossdyke, which terminates at the site of the Danish camp and productive site at Torksey. It was a superbly well-connected place.
Lincoln’s medieval cathedral, its castle and bailey occupy the northern core of what had been the Roman city, with its colonia projecting south to the edge of the high ground. Bishop Paulinus founded a church here in the seventh century and at least one of Lincoln’s churches, St Paul in-the-Bail, shows evidence of Christian continuity from the fourth century onwards.∫∫ As at York, the interior of the Roman city seems to have remained the preserve of élite landowners, among them bishops and petty kings, while its Early Medieval population clustered south along the river in a small suburb called Wigford, and outside the east gate in a settlement called Butwerk, dominated by potters. By the time of the Domesday survey, Lincoln could boast more than thirty churches, and analysis of their histories, archaeology and geography has yielded significant insights into the city’s development.20
Some churches were founded there by wealthy rural patrons owning lucrative urban estates. Others seem to have been established on small burghal plots in response to pressure from town-dwellers needing a place to worship and be buried. Another group of churches served more specific interests, set up in or next to markets where potters, salters and other artisans had their quarters and traded their wares. Some churches seem to have catered for the needs of travellers, or were sited to collect lucrative tolls on entry and/or exit.
There is no hint that Lincoln offered any provision for the veneration of the pagan idols of its conquerors: far from it. A rare coinage series minted here in the 920s bears the name of St Martin,ΩΩ derivative of the York St Peter money and an echo of the St Eadmund coinage of East Anglia, indicating ecclesiastical patronage of and close involvement in trade. There is some speculation that this dedication, to a legendary saint and bishop of fourth-century Tours in Gaul, might in some way reflect a special trading relationship between Lincoln and the Loire, possibly under the ultimate patronage of the kings or archbishops of York. The single church in Lincoln dedicated to St Martin lies at the dead centre of what had been the Roman colonia.
Characteristic of all those towns and productive sites founded in or flourishing from the early tenth century is the manufacture of metalwork. A detailed study of decorated metal dress accessories (brooches, tags and fittings) by Early Medievalist Letty Ten Harkel has yielded valuable insights into the ways in which Scandinavian and indigene interacted and expressed their hybrid identities≈≈ in Lincoln, and also into the development of a substantial industry whose output was dispersed widely across the region.21 In turn, their motifs, style and production techniques demonstrate a subtle set of interactions with and influences from Scandinavia and Francia, set within a strong indigenous tradition. Brooches, strap-ends and harness fittings in myriad varieties were made in shapes and styles either distinctly Scandinavian (such as convex brooches) or as local variants (flat brooches with Scandinavian-style motifs). Some designs were inspired by Scandinavian motifs but deployed in novel media, or using base metal rather than silver.22 The firm impression is of incomers adapting to local ways, with little evidence of a defensive or self-conscious need to express their Scandinavian identity overtly through material culture.
An equally fascinating study integrating finds of Lincoln-made pottery with a digital view of Lincolnshire’s hinterland (a Geographical Information System, or GIS) opens a window onto what might be called the cognitive landscape of Anglo-Scandinavian Lincolnshire.23 Researchers Leigh Symonds and R. J. Ling created a map of sites that have yielded pottery made in Lincoln, Stamford and Torksey—about 1,000 sherds in all. It shows that the distribution of pottery declines with distance from the production site, as one might expect. The further away from the potter’s workshop, the less of his or her product is found. But the picture is messy: behind this apparently simple observation lies some complexity. As the Tube map concept of Viking Age Britain demonstrates, linear distance ‘as crows fly’ is a poor indicator of the way in which travellers (armies or traders) experience their landscape;24 and traders move in ways dictated by the bulk, fragility, value and perishability of their goods. For relatively low-value, bulky, heavy and fragile goods like pottery, water transport by barge or punt, or road transport by pack horse were competing delivery systems. We might ask, does the distribution of pottery across Lincoln’s hinterland tell us anything about the Viking Age delivery system?
In a digital model of the landscape, estimates of average speed by known Roman road and navigable waterway reflect not linear distance from production centres, but the time taken to deliver goods. The results are striking: when measured by road-time, there is a very clear cluster of pottery consumption at sites at the limit of a day’s travel from Lincoln, with smaller clusters at two and three days’ distance. When measured by river routes the clusters lie at about a day and a third. My reading of the latter figure is that the model underestimates the speed of water transport.
In a ring around Lincoln, at the distance of a day’s travel by road or water, wealthy thegns lived in large timber halls whence they could easily travel into town and from which they could be supplied with an attractive range of goods. Another day’s travel out from town, thegns and jarls had less access to consumer goods, and must have paid more for them; they would have heard town gossip less often; been less connected with the movers and shakers of Lincoln’s busy markets.
Symonds and Ling suggest, in a highly appealing insight, that those high-status rural sites (what would later become Domesday survey manors), where pottery was consumed en masse, belonged to proprietors owning lucrative urban estates in Lincoln, with access to the new products of its growing mercantile and industrial population; and perhaps these are the same patrons who founded the burghal churches there. It is too early to suggest that the same economic and social rules applied in the other towns of Danish Mercia, let alone the new burhs of Wessex; even so, it provides an attractive and plausible model of distribution and consumption, integrating town and countryside.
The lords of Lincolnshire’s more remote farms and estates may have been among the last to hear of Æðelflæd’s violent occupation of Derby in the late summer of 917; to hear of the surrender of Leicester, Northampton and Bedford and the assaults on Danish burhs at Colchester, Tempsford and Huntingdon. These events marked hugely significant territorial gains for the Mercian–West Saxon alliance. Their effects on the populations of those burhs and the territories they controlled (effectively, the later shires of Essex, Bedford, Northampton, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Leicester and Derby) can only be imagined. Potters’ kilns and smiths’ forges may have lain cold for days, if not weeks. Only the most intrepid trader would take to his punt with a full cargo, not knowing whom or what he might meet on the river.
Wise old heads among the townspeople would have cheered the conquering heroes, offering them meat and ale and metaphorically sticking flowers in the muzzles of their guns. The alternative, to judge from hundreds of earlier and later examples of towns being sacked by victorious troops, is an unattractive but real possibility: theft, despoliation, rape, massacre and arson. The truth probably lies on a spectrum between the two; Derby’s population suffered more than that of Leicester, perhaps, if we accept the Chronicle’s account that the former was stormed by Æðelflæd with great loss of life while the latter was taken ‘by peaceful means’.∂∂ Merchants and artisans might well have wondered how long it would take to revive their trade, having lost loyal customers and fearful of the instability that new regimes bring. One ought, certainly, to be wary of over-egging an image of crumbling battlements, crowd-filled streets, burning tenements and the chaos of surrender or flight. Huntingdon, for example, was perhaps only partially occupied; most, if not all, the burh walls (Towcester a recent exception) were no more than wooden palisades crowning earth ramparts. Their streets may have numbered half a dozen or fewer: their traders and merchants departed to their country piles leaving the fighters to it, their stalls taken down, their tenements boarded up and empty of goods.
That native Mercian and East Anglian burghers saw the West Saxon and West Mercian levies as liberators is very doubtful. Antipathy towards the house of Ælfred Æðulfingππ may have overridden any anti-Danish sentiment, especially since the Host and its active merchants and artisans seem to have successfully revived a flagging economy and integrated successfully with the native population.
In the immediate,aftermath of this reversal in the fortunes of Danish Mercia and East Anglia, there must have been a real possibility of insurgency from scattered elements of the Host—some of them naturalized Mercians and East Anglians, or of mixed ancestry. If so, the Chronicle is silent. On the other hand, ecclesiastical institutions, mindful of the extensive patronage that Ælfred’s children were beginning to lavish on the churches of West Mercia and Wessex, might have seen nothing less than salvation in the arrival of the levies. There is evidence, too, that Eadweard had prepared the ground for military conquest with more subtle means at his disposal. Two charters from the reign of Æðelstan confirm grants of lands in Derbyshire and Bedfordshire which had, in the time of King Eadweard, been bought ‘from the Pagans’ with 10 lbs (4.5 kg) of gold and silver.25 By encouraging, perhaps funding, the purchase of estates by West Saxon thegns in Danish Mercia, Eadweard could begin to establish secure lines of patronage in his and his sister’s new conquests.
By the time of the conquests of 917, then, ownership of land and its concomitant rights of patronage, its trading and production networks, may already have looked more like a patchwork, especially in the border zone. Formerly great estates, once the sole perquisite of a king to dispose of as he saw fit, had been subject to fragmentation and the possibility of purchase for cash. Their tenants would have had no choice in the matter.
*
In the early part of 918, according to the Mercian Register, the people of York, that is to say the nobility of southern Northumbria, negotiated a peace with Æðelflæd. At the very least this suggests that Danish control of the North, so apparently effective during the previous half century, had suffered some reverse and that York’s thegns, jarls and burghers now actively sought the Mercian leader’s protection, preferring her overlordship to that of her brother, perhaps. We might go further and suggest that the Danish king slaughtered with so many of his senior commanders at Tempsford the previous summer had been the king of Anglo-Scandinavian York, and that no suitable candidate had emerged to succeed him. Other northern events at this time, unrecorded by the West Saxon scribes of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tell of the revived fortunes of the kings of Bernicia and of a perhaps even greater threat, from Constantín in Alba.
That hazy picture would come into sharp focus after midsummer when Æðelflæd, seemingly at the peak of her military powers and on the brink of achieving greatness for Mercia, died at the royal burh in Tamworth. She was probably in her late forties. Eadweard received this momentous intelligence at Stamford, where he had just built a fortress on the south bank of the River Welland and where the Danish fortress now surrendered. He went immediately with his forces to Tamworth, 60 miles (95 km) due west, and occupied it. The seamless account preserved in the Chronicle masks any suspicion of opposition or discontent:
7 him cierde to eall se þeodscype on Myrcna lande þe Æðelflæde ær underþeoded wæs...
And all the people of Mercia who had been under allegiance to Æðelflæd turned in submission to him. The kings of North Wales, Hywel, Cladog and Idwal, and all the North Welsh [Norðweallcyn] gave him their allegiance. Then, he went thence to Nottingham and occupied the borough: he had it repaired and garrisoned by both Danish and English and all the people settled in Mercia, both Danish and English, submitted to him.26
Eadweard’s triumphant coup in Mercia, Wales and Danish Mercia was completed when he removed Æðelflæd’s presumptive successor, her daughter Ælfwynn, to Wessex. She seems to have been ‘retired’ to a secure life of monastic contemplation, and lived out her days.27 Eadweard’s intention, now that his celebrated sister was dead and Mercian independence neutralized, was to rule Wessex and Mercia together under his own formidable leadership. He might have capitalized on the earlier submission of the Men of York, too, but for the unanticipated emergence of a new power in the North.
The Chronicle has nothing to say of these events. The most compelling Insular account is that of the faithful chronicler of St Cuthbert, continuing the story of that Elfred who had been driven across the mountains by Norse pirates harrying or settling in Cumbria after the expulsion from Dublin in 902.∆∆ He, we are told, faithfully held the lands given him by the community, rendered services to them (military protection, in other words) until King Rægnald came with a great multitude of ships and occupied the territory of Ældred son of Eadwulf.
Ældred, who has been identified with the Bernician dynasty at Bamburgh,28 sought aid not from Eadweard but from King Constantín of Alba. It was too good an opportunity for the Scot to pass up. The Men of Alba rode south along the ancient Roman Dere Street to join their Bernician allies and, at the point where it crosses the River Tyne at Corbridge, engaged the Irish Norse forces of Rægnald (entering stage left from a beach head at Carlisle, surely) in a fierce battle. The date of the conflict is securely fixed in the year of Æðelflæd’s death, 918, by a notice in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba and by a fuller account in the Annals of Ulster.
So far as the Alban chronicler was concerned, the Scotti ‘had the victory’. The Ulster annalist saw it rather differently, offering convincing detail of Constantín’s initial success, killing two Norse commanders, before a late rally by Rægnald slaughtered many of his opponents. The Historia of St Cuthbert agrees that the Norse won the victory; it also records that the faithful Elfred was put to flight; that all the English magnates were killed except Ældred and his brother Uhtred. The following passage in the Historia explains the devastating effect of this new invasion on the community:
When they had fled and the whole land was conquered, he [Rægnald] divided the estates of Cuthbert... And this son of the devil was the enemy, in whatever ways he was able, of God and St Cuthbert.29
Who was this Rægnald, more properly Rögnvaldr in Old Norse? He first appears in the Annals of Ulster under the year 914, fighting and winning a naval battle off the Isle of Man against Barðr Óttarsson, who might be identified as the son of that jarl Ohtor whose ships harried the Severn estuary the following year. That great fleet had sailed from Brittany and in 914, apparently after the fight off Man and its disastrous expedition up the Severn, it arrived somewhat battered in Waterford harbour, the Loch dá Caech of the Irish Annals. They were joined the following year by more ships and enjoyed several seasons of plundering.
The year 916 drew to a close, we are told, with a terrible winter of snow, extreme cold and unnatural ice, during which many Irish rivers froze, cattle and fish died and comets in the night sky foretold evil times.30 In the following year Sigtryggr, grandson of Ívarr, and his senior cousin Rögnvaldr, made separate but co-ordinated attacks on southern Ireland, on the coast of Laigin and against the fleet from Brittany which had set up in Waterford harbour.
Niall Glúndub mac Áedo, king of the Cenél nEógain (centred on the Inishowen peninsula north of Derry/Londonderry) and high king of Ireland, marched south with a large army to make war against the combined Norse forces. In August they fought a battle at Mag Femen in Leinster, in which they inflicted heavy casualties on the Norse. A second battle was more decisively won by Sigtryggr, whose men slaughtered more than 500 of the Irish. In the aftermath, Sigtryggr entered Dublin, re-establishing Norse rule over the city for the first time in fifteen years.
The following year, 918, his cousin invaded North Britain. I am inclined to suggest that Rögnvaldr must, by this time, have imposed himself as king of Man, giving him a base from which to plan and implement raids on both sides of the Irish Sea. That he was able to successfully impose his rule on the old Danish kingdom of York after the battle at Corbridge is attested by coins bearing his name. But his rule was cut short,*** and when ‘this same accursed king perished with his sons and friends... of the things that he had stolen from St Cuthbert he took away nothing except [his] sin’.31
One of the recipients of these stolen lands was a jarl called Onlafbald, the ‘son of a devil’:
One day, while filled with an unclean spirit, he entered the church of the holy confessor in a rage... and with the whole congregation standing there he said, ‘What can this dead man Cuthbert, whose threats are mentioned everywhere, do to me? I swear by my powerful gods Thor and Odin that from this hour I will be the bitterest enemy to you all’... [then] turned away with great arrogance and disdain, intending to leave. But just when he had placed one foot over the threshold, he felt as if an iron bar was fixed deeply into the other foot. With the pain transfixing his diabolical heart, he fell, and the devil thrust his sinful soul into Hell. St Cuthbert, as was just, regained his land.32
* The ‘C’ and ‘D’ manuscripts that record it do not agree.
† Donald Scragg argues that other relics of Oswald were acquired by Æðelflæd for her new Chester foundation at the same time. Scragg 2008.
‡ See above, p. 145 and below, p. 366ff. Under Æðelstan the Oswald cult also became firmly embedded in Continental tradition.
§ Æðelweard sets the battle at Wednesbury, a few miles to the east; this may indicate that there was more than one engagement and might explain the slight disparity in dates with the Chronicle. Campbell 1961, 53. Tettenhall is Teotanheale: Teotta’s nook; Wednesbury is Wadnesberie: Woden’s fort. Watts 2004. Æðelweard adds that the Host recrossed the Severn at Bridgnorth, the closest vulnerable access across the Severn from the territories of the Five Boroughs. Tettenhall lies at the source of the River Penk, which runs north through Staffordshire before joining the River Sow and thence the Trent. Campbell 1961, 53.
# Æðelweard adds a third: Inwaer, or Ívarr.
∫ The locations of three of the burhs built in this decade have yet to be identified: Bremesburh might be Bromsgrove, close to the head of the River Salwarpe, which would have protected royal interests in salt production at Droitwich. Weardburh (915 ), Scergeat (912) and Wigingamere (920) are similarly obscure, although strategic gaps in both the Wessex and Mercian garrison provisions provide endless opportunities for speculation.
Ω Watling Street seems consciously to rationalize the zig-zag line of the watershed.
≈ The ancient Mercian capital may already have been fortified under King Offa.
∂ A few miles south-east of Chester, protecting its approach through the Beeston gap and providing a forward base to penetrate further east.
π I would place my chips, for what they are worth, somewhere along a line between Whitchurch and Newcastle-under-Lyme.
∆ The Annals of Ulster note a ‘great new fleet of the heathens’ basing itself on Loch dá Caech, that is Waterford harbour, in the previous and following years; it was probably the same fleet.
** Edward later ransomed him for 40 lbs (18 kg) of silver, according to the detailed account of this campaign in the ‘D’ manuscript of the Chronicle. Archenfield, the earlier Welsh kingdom of Ergyng, seems to be the subject of the Dunsæte Ordinance; see Chapter 9.
†† The name of the king is unknown, as is the identity of the monastery which he raided. Llangorse is the only crannog, or lake dwelling, so far identified in Wales or England; they were widespread in Scotland and Ireland.
‡‡ Jeremy Haslam (1997) identifies it as Old Linslade, a probable location for the signing of the Peace of Tiddingford, close to Leighton Buzzard. If so, it protected the line of Watling Street some 15 miles (24 km) to the south-east towards London.
§§ The analysts of York’s Coppergate environmental remains, Allan Hall and Harry Kenward, estimate that a staggering 45 cubic metres of human faecal waste was deposited in Anglo-Scandinavian Coppergate, much of it preserved in anoxic ‘composting’ conditions. Hall and Kenward 2005.
## That is, foods rich in vitamin C, to prevent scurvy.
∫∫ Whether it is the church founded or refounded by Bishop Paulinus is the subject of ongoing debate.
ΩΩ Bearing the inscription LINCOLIA CIVITAS on the reverse; Stewart 1967. For more on the context, see Hadley 2007, 165 and Stocker 2013, 135.
≈≈ See below, Chapter 9, for more on the interaction of native and incomer in the tenth century.
∂∂ See above, p. 287.
ππ From Æðelwulf, Ælfred’s father.
∆∆ See above, pp. 236 and 238; HSC 22.
*** The Annals of Ulster record his passing in 921.
