The tenth century was a period of economic growth with the development of new trade networks in the North Sea region. Archaeological excavations reveal that Dublin and York were part of this network and shared in the rise of prosperity (Hudson 1999, 42). Dublin was a new settlement, established on the east coast of Ireland by Norse immigrants and traders (see Figure 7.1). The results of a twenty-year excavation project led by Breandán Ó Ríordáin and Patrick Wallace of the National Museum of Ireland show that Dublin was the site of intensive occupation and craft-working from the tenth to thirteenth centuries (Wallace 1985; 1988). York, on the other hand, had been an important Roman town and later, an ecclesiastical and commercial centre in the mid Anglo-Saxon period (AD 700–900). The nature of the archaeological evidence changes in the late ninth and tenth centuries with the redevelopment of the site under Scandinavian influence (Hall 1994, 31–33). The most significant material for illustrating this change comes from the five-year excavation directed by Richard Hall at 16–22 Coppergate. Prior to this there is only limited data for jet-working, while amber may not have been worked at all (Rogers 1993, 1317, 1378–1379). From the tenth century, large quantities of amber products and waste occur alongside fragments of jet. In York this amounts to over 300 finds of amber, and in Dublin to almost 4,000 amber finds, an assemblage comparable in size to those found at Haithabu and Groß Strömkendorf in northern Germany (Harvey forthcoming; Ulbricht 1990; Gerds 2001) (Figure 7.1). Although the number of finds at York and Dublin may be sufficient to suggest that amber was imported from the Baltic rather than from the east coast of England (Hall 1994, 85), the clearest indication of this amber’s origin lies in the range of finished products. Comprising finger-rings and pendants, this new range of objects is distinctly North European in character, mirroring types made in the trading centres of the Baltic, at Haithabu, Groß Strömkendorf and Ribe. Amber-working was practised at these three Continental sites from the ninth century, before such products appear in Dublin and York. It therefore seems most probable that after trade routes had been extended to include the British Isles in the tenth century, traders imported amber from the Baltic, perhaps directly from an entrepôt such as Haithabu.
This new pattern of cultural affiliations to emerge from the tenth century is apparent elsewhere in the British Isles. Whilst no other site in England has to date produced the same quantities of amber as York, the few settlements that have yielded amber finds for this period all lie within the Danelaw, the northern and eastern regions of England under Scandinavian influence (see for instance Mann 1982; Evans and Tomlinson 1992; Stamper and Croft 2000; Wade-Martins 2000). Jet-working, meanwhile, remained largely a craft indigenous to the British Isles. The jet fingerrings that appear in both York and Dublin at this time are most probably a cultural innovation, inspired by the amber forms imported from the North Sea realms.
The finger-ring proves especially useful here for detecting whether artisans worked in both amber and jet. The evidence of tooling marks and the marked standardization achieved in producing this object – both in Dublin and in York – strongly suggest that the same craft-worker creating objects of amber, could – and did – make objects of jet as well. This is hardly surprising: jet and amber are soft materials, formed by a similar process (see Sources and Chronological Overview above), and the same tools are used to work both. The same set of tools – knife, awl and lathe – are also used for bone-working; it has therefore been suggested that amber- and jet-working were practised as subsidiary crafts by artisans of bone. This certainly seems to have been the case in eleventh-century London, where waste deposits of crudely-worked rings of shale have been discovered alongside rings made from cattle metatarsals (Pritchard 1991, 123). The resemblance in design between many gaming counters and dice of bone, amber and jet from the later medieval period further substantiates this theory. These gaming pieces, however, occur as single finds, and their rarity implies that they may have been individually commissioned, rather than mass-produced (Coulter forthcoming).
The only other object that appears in all three materials, and thereby permits direct comparison of manufacturing technique, is the finger-ring. The finger-rings of amber and jet at Dublin and York were finished to a high standard, D-shaped in profile and beautifully polished. By contrast, the few bone rings discovered at these sites had been roughly sawn, leaving the final product irregular in form and rectangular in profile (MacGregor et al. 1999, 1922, 1943; Coulter forthcoming). More significantly, the preponderance of waste material from bone-working in Dublin came from excavations on the Dublin High Street, while jet and amber debris predominated in a plot at Fishamble Street (Wallace 1988, 159). A similar spatial distinction between jet and amber waste, and debris from bone-working can also be discerned from the excavations in York: whilst bone-working was fairly widespread, perhaps as a household craft, debris from amber- and jet-working was concentrated in deposits from 16–22 Coppergate with further amber waste at Clifford Street (Mainman and Rogers 2004, 470–75). The craft-workers of Dublin and York, it would seem, specialised in different materials.
The striking similarity between bone combs from sites across Northwest Europe at this time has led to the supposition that comb-makers may have been itinerant craft-workers (Ambrosiani 1981, 40). The same conjecture may well be applied to artisans of amber and jet, for their products at York and Dublin display a remarkable degree of uniformity with the objects that occur at other trading sites in Northern Europe. Yet, within the range of artefacts produced across these settlements, there exists a certain creativity and tailoring to local demands, unique to each site. In effect, each assemblage possesses its own distinctive character. At Kaupang in Norway, for instance, the amber figurine of a woman has been discovered (Blindheim 1969, 17); at Hedeby, Thor’s hammers and axes number among the finds of amber (Ulbricht 1990, 116, 120). None of these characteristically Scandinavian symbols has been discovered among the amber and jet objects of Dublin and York. Instead deposits in Dublin have yielded two small amber cross pendants. To date the closest parallels to this amber form come from Eastern Europe (Krumphanzlová 1992, 354). In York cross pendants are made of jet and decorated with a ring-and-dot motif. These jet crosses may not have been manufactured in York, but at the monastic site of Whitby where waste debris has been discovered (Peers and Radford 1943, 68) (Figure 7.5). Finds of jet waste are limited within York itself. Several pieces were recovered from 16–22 Coppergate with two further fragments from the Cathedral. This was sufficient evidence for the excavator to posit the presence of a jet workshop (Mainman and Rogers 2004, 474). Jet- and amber-working may never have been a full-time professional craft during the tenth to eleventh centuries. Nevertheless, the successive layers of waste and unfinished products that have been recovered from York and Dublin imply that artisans were residents with their own workshop areas. Indeed, at one particular plot in Fishamble Street, Dublin, the concentration of amber finds indicates that whether these artisans were originally of Scandinavian extraction or not, theirs was a family business spanning several generations (Wallace 1985, 136; Harvey forthcoming). But for whom – and for what purpose – did they produce these objects? The following sections will now examine the written record and historical context to answer this question.