In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  At Leeds the travellers were met by a nobleman called Gunderic (an English name) who took them to York. Obviously it was best to make prior arrangements with a sponsor: unidentified travellers off the main roads ran the risk of being killed out of hand if they did not shout and blow their horns. Gunderic rode with them to York itself and into the court of Eric, whose wife is stated to have been a kinswoman of Catroe. What Eric made of Catroe we are not told, except that he received him as any king would a distinguished guest. It had been a long journey, and doubtless at this point the pilgrims rested for a few days before carrying on south. There were many places to stay in the city, for York was used to receiving a great influx of travellers and merchants. They might stay as guests of nobles or freemen in the city in their houses. They might, if they were important enough, be received in the Archbishop’s house. They might find space in the ‘hospitium’ near St Peter’s where Celtic holy men, ‘culdees’, worked among the sick and poor. Or there was a host of other places where travellers could stop, whether churchmen going south to the West-Saxon court, pilgrims, pedlars or salt sellers, merchants from Scandinavia or the Danelaw, or even travelling warriors on the tracks of news that a king like Eric was looking for men and generous with his gold.

  YORK: ‘METROPOLIS OF THE NORTHUMBRIAN PEOPLE’

  The city the pilgrims woke up to was one of the richest and most exciting places in the northern world. A place where old and new existed side by side. Towns, as Fernand Braudel has said, are electric transformers. ‘They increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and ceaselessly stir up men’s lives.’ They have the best foods, the luxury industries, currency, trade with the outside world bringing new ideas, produce and artefacts. York had all this. ‘Once nobly built (by the Romans) and most solidly constructed with walls which are now decayed by age, indescribably rich, packed with the goods of merchants who come from all over but especially from the Danes, a multitude of people numbering 30,000, not counting infants’, says a tenth-century writer. His estimate has provoked disbelief, for the Domesday Book population would appear to have been around 10,000 in 1066; but by then the city was past its heyday, and may have been much larger in the 940s.

  The first thing that would strike the visitor about the city was its Roman character. This was what struck Alcuin in the eighth century, and William of Malmesbury in the twelfth. Along the river was a massive eight-towered frontage built in the early fourth century. Where the Minster stands today stood the principia, the headquarters building where Constantine the Great and other emperors had sat in state, and which stood roofed as late as the Viking era. The whole area of the Roman fortress was inhabited, with ribbon development to the northwest and southwards over the Foss, and the area now within the medieval walls west of the Ouse, centring on Micklegate, also had a large population. In the tenth century there were at least eleven churches with new ones being built to cater for the booming population and the spread of Christianity among fourth-generation Danes and second-generation Norse settlers.

  VIKING INDUSTRY

  The Viking quarter of the city lay south of the fort on the Ousegate axis, extending to the Foss, where there were wharves, fortified with an extended bank, gritstone revetment, palisade and ditch: this had been partly demolished by Athelstan in 927. The Danish sector was densely populated, damp, squalid and dirty, an industrial quarter with timber walkways onto which the long, narrow timber-framed houses were built with gable ends facing onto the streets. The houses were made of vertical planks with clay daub, or wattle and daub, and were probably thatched. Some of these have been discovered recently, preserved in the waterlogged soil to a height of six feet. There were craftsmen’s enclosures, earmarked as such, and archaeological evidence supports the early place-names of York which suggest that this goes back to the Viking period. The name Coppergate, for instance, shows the presence of carpenters (koppari), who were most necessary to the town, since they were the men who put up the wooden housing. Parts of the town will have turned the noses of visitors from the rural north. The area of leather workers’ tenements was uncovered in the dig beneath Lloyds Bank and the coffee house in Pavement. They lived and worked in flimsy wattle and daub buildings where they did all the processes of their trade: skin stripping with bone strippers, rotting them with chicken dung (which covered the floors of their shops), curing them with elderberry ferment, dyeing them with heather dye, stretching (remains of wooden stretcher frames have been discovered), finishing and working into shoes, jerkins, belts and so on (masses of scraps and cuts have been found). These shops stank, and swarmed with flies. Leather workers were numerous in Eric’s York, and their goods must have formed an important part of the city’s trade. A large number of their shops have been found along Pavement, which was probably the main thoroughfare of Viking York.

  Apart from leather goods you could buy most things in the shops of the Viking quarter. There was a comb factory with a huge turnover of plain and carved bone combs. Knives, axes, buckles, shears, hooks and nails found all over York were probably made by smiths near the tanneries in Coppergate. Here too Danish bronze foundries have been found which provided pins, brooches, buckles and suchlike for both the luxury and the mass trade: everybody needed cloak fastenings, belt strap ends and buttons. There was a glass bead workshop in Clifford Street in Pavement, and in the same area amber workshops cut great lumps of raw amber from the Baltic and turned them on lathes into beads, finger rings, spindle whorls, chessmen (chess was a very popular Viking game) and pendants like coiled serpents.

  The city was the gateway between Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England, and its trade routes reached out to Ireland, the Shetlands, the Rhineland, the Baltic, and further afield: one of Sihtric’s York Vikings lost his purse in Bangor in 925 with coins minted in Samarkand. At the Foss, wide-bellied Viking cargo ships tied up to discharge amber, furs, whalebone, cable, skins from the Baltic, whetstones, hones and soapstone from Norway, pottery from the Rhineland, lava querns from the Rhineland, and even wine from France. And here they took on treated leather, textiles, wool, jewellery, and if the sagas are right, agricultural produce: if there was famine in Iceland, corn could be bought from merchants in York and shipped north. The impression is of a Viking centre like Dublin, Hedeby, Birka or Trondheim, only far bigger, and with a larger and more mixed population, and a more settled sense of urban life, as befitted a former Roman city.

  CHRISTIANITY

  The head church of York was St Peter’s, the ancestor of the present York Minster. We are not certain of its site, but it probably lay between the west end of the Minster and High Petergate, and there are few sites in Britain on which archaeologists would rather get their hands. Here had been the wooden church of King Edwin, and the stone church of St Wilfrid which was rebuilt in the eighth century, ‘A paragon of lofty beauty, supported by massive pillars,’ says Alcuin, who was educated there. In that part of the city there were many other chapels as well as the parish churches, clustered around the huge Roman principia which was only demolished in the Viking era (its foundations can be seen in the undercroft of the present Minster). To the north of the principia was the archbishop’s house and court, where according to Northumbrian tradition, he gave bread to the people. Nearby was another magnificent late eighth-century church, that of the Holy Wisdom, and a ‘hospitium’ attached to St Peter’s where Celtic holy men tended the poor and sick. St Peter’s was still a royal burial place: King Guthfrith, a Danish convert to Christianity, had been buried inside the church in 895, ‘in the high basilica’. An important Viking-age cemetery with carved grave covers and markers has been found under and near the present Minster, presumably from the old cathedral graveyard, and the style of carving has suggested an ‘Anglo-Scandinavian’ taste on the part of wealthy York citizens. By the 940s there must have been numerous Christian Vikings in York, and these probably included members of the upper classes. At this time English, Danes and Norsemen intermarried, and a common culture and language developed which mingle
d Scandinavian and English words. One Anglo-Scandinavian noble of the period, Regenwold, appears in the confraternity book of the continental monastery of Pfäffers around 940. Earl Orm was perhaps at least nominally Christian, if, as we think, he had an English wife. Another Norse earl in Yorkshire, Gunner, was favoured by the West-Saxon kings and may also have been Christian. The tenth-century inscription of St Mary’s Castlegate is written in Anglo-Saxon and Latin but says that ‘Grim’, and others with Norse names, established the church on naman drihtnes haelendes, in the name of the Lord Saviour; the church was founded to serve the growing Danish population in the industrial quarter around Castlegate, and though Grim need not be the man who is sometimes found in Athelstan’s court, we can see this may well have been the background of such men. The church of St Peter doubtless also had benefactors among the Scandinavians in York, and they would be among those buried in the cemetery. The impression they make is a far cry from the traditional one of uncouth pagan pillagers; here we have relatively sophisticated city-dwellers.

  This kind of attitude can also be seen in the monuments of the period. The carvings in the York cemetery, the cross heads found at Ripon, the elaborate cross shafts at Middleton, were all done by English sculptors for Scandinavian patrons to satisfy Scandinavian Christian tastes. Most remarkable of all is the tomb monument at Nunburnholme near Beverley where a chief in Viking dress and war gear is portrayed with his patron saint and a holy lady with a book satchel, complete with cornucopia and centaurs. (The allusion is to the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche.) The aspirations of the landed Viking nouveaux riches could hardly be better shown up. The patrons of such a work may not have got the point of its subtler iconography, but the sculptor obviously thought he was following the best models: Norse hero stories, classical paintings and religious motifs off portable ivories from the Ottonian empire.

  A sculpture in St Mary’s Museum in York shows us what these prosperous York ‘gentry’ looked like to meet in the street. It dates from the ninth century, but doubtless the members of the Northumbrian council in 947 wore the same kind of gear. The first man has a long skirted tunic with a girdle (its strap ends might be decorated with interlace and gilded), he carries a hunting horn, and over his head a voluminous hood fastened with a small brooch at the front. The other has a heavy woollen cloak down to his ankles with a collar probably of fur. They both wear shoes of the kind found in the artisans’ shops in Coppergate. They look prosperous. The kind of personal adornments they wore can be seen in the Museum too: a silver disc brooch with intertwined animals in the Danish style; a silver armring with a punched decoration; an animal-headed comb; a sword with a decorated bronze scabbard chape; a silver brooch incorporating a cast of a coin of Valentinian. But if one artefact could be chosen to represent their taste it would be the beautiful gold finger ring which someone lost in Fishergate in the early tenth century. Its front shows two animals clasping a man’s head in their paws; an ancient northern motif, but here a reference to St Edmund of East Anglia, whose cult was enthusiastically fostered by the Danish settlers of East Anglia in the time of Alfred the Great, and which spread rapidly to Northumbria through the merchants and travellers who coasted up to York. Any of the wealthy citizens of Viking York might have worn this: Earl Orm, Aethelferth the moneyer, Grim, Archbishop Wulfstan, Eric himself.

  THE KING’S HOME: ‘ERIC WENT TO TABLE AS USUAL, AND THERE WERE VERY MANY MEN WHO SAT WITH HIM’

  The royal hall where Eric sat in state and which is mentioned in the sagas, the ‘king’s garth’, was near King’s Square, whose name recalls it. It was still known as Kuningsgard in the thirteenth century, at which time the memory of the Koningsgarthr of Eric was still current in Iceland. Hereabouts was the south-eastern gatehouse of the Roman fort with its great arches and an inscription commemorating Trajan’s rebuilding which was discovered here in 1970. It may be that the Norse hall was built around and incorporated the still massive remains of the gatehouse: indeed there is nothing against the idea that the structure was still roofed in the tenth century, as the principia was in the ninth. If this was indeed the case, then it would be typical of the Viking ability to use the past, as it would of their sense of political style. This has been called one of the most important sites in the Viking world, and would repay intensive excavation. As yet, the digs around King’s Square have revealed little, save that the Norse hall was right in the middle of the most populous area of the city, with wooden tenements right up to it; the numerous finds there of this period have been domestic – cooking pots, pitchers, the ubiquitous bone combs, wooden bowls, whetstones, antler horns, a stone spindle whorl, a skate. Living cheek by jowl with the crowd, kings like Eric could keep themselves in the know, for York was a place where political intrigue, instability and violence ran hand in hand. Everyone who came here – merchants, craftsmen, poets, sailors, mercenaries, traffickers – all were accustomed to revolution and followed in the wake of the armies to profit by every change of regime. It is easy to imagine men like the moneyer Aethelferth playing it by ear and living to a rich old age!

  And what of Eric himself, seated in the high chair of the royal hall in York, surrounded by his armed following? The description of him in the sagas may go back to the lost Eric saga: ‘A big man and handsome, strong and valiant, a great warrior and victorious in battle, very impetuous in disposition, cruel, unfriendly and silent.’ Like other Norse kings, Eric surrounded himself with poets; they recorded his battles in Bjarmaland by the White Sea, and among those who told of his deeds in England were the skald Egil Skallagrimson and the anonymous poet of the Eiriksmal, his last elegy. In the fragmentary remains of this skaldic verse we can read of the ideals and hopes of Eric’s Norse followers, and perhaps some of his English supporters too. As we would expect, what they wanted differed little from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s portrayal of Alfred or the Brunanburh poem’s of Athelstan: except that Eric was a pagan, and moved in the old-fashioned world of Norse kingship. ‘I have spared no deed or word which might make your glory greater,’ says Egil, ‘I will display to men the leader’s glory … this high lord gives gold freely … rules his land strongly and deserves praise.’ The poems are full of references to the giving of gold, or ‘hawkstrand’s goldshower’ as Egil puts it in one of the elaborate kennings so beloved of the Norse poets. Eric’s prowess in war is held up: he is an ‘artist’ in battle, a ‘whetter of swordplay’ and his reputation spreads far and wide: ‘across the sea leaps his fame … most of mankind have heard what battles the king has fought, and Odin saw where the dead lay … I have praised the king’s merit and brought it forth so everyone might hear it … high minded mighty king’s son.’ That was evidently what Eric wanted to hear when he sat at table in York, and in Old Norse the technique of Egil’s poem was clever stuff, not exactly avant garde, but something for a sophisticated audience used to the poet’s art.

  The Eiriksmal, the great poem in praise of Eric’s valour, by contrast is a very traditional piece. Composed within a few years of his death, perhaps in Orkney rather than at York, it was commissioned by his widow to commemorate Eric’s deeds. The images of the poem invoke the warlike ideals of Eric’s rule, the pagan’s ultimate hope for eternal life, the nature of his mortuary beliefs, presided over by the shamanistic figure of Odin. It also invokes a sense of material wealth which may not be out of place in York: it starts with the raising of the house of the wealthy to prepare for the great feast, a formula as traditional as the drapa in praise of the king. It pictures the royal hall, the benches spread with cloths and furs, the walls hung with tapestries, and it glorifies the warlike, aristocratic ideals of that society.

  From the sagas and poems we can picture Eric and his kin in the hall with guards on the gates and surrounded by their armed following, quick to exact vengeance. A dramatic picture, but how true it is difficult to say. The archaeological evidence suggests the Norse kings in York were preoccupied with controlling trade, minting coins and engaging in diplomacy. But it is the images of Egil
’s poems which linger on:

  Mighty king, son of the Ynglings … Under a helmet of terror the all powerful lord of the people sat over the land and gave lavish gifts. The king ruled in York with harsh thought for his sea-washed shores.

  It was not safe, nor without terror, to look at the light of Eric’s eye, when serpent keen, the eye of the all-powerful shone with terrifying light.

  Egil’s Saga

  WAR IN THE NORTH: THE BURNING OF RIPON

  Eric’s first rule in York was brief. As far as we know it lasted from late in 947 into 948. In that time coins were minted bearing his name – Eric Rex – by the moneyer Rathulf who had minted coins for Eadred. They were a purely English design and would have circulated with ease beside English coins of the same date, and York merchants who we know sailed down to Thanet to sell their goods could use them as easily as the coins of Eadred. But the clash with the southern king could not long be put off. The Northumbrians and Archbishop Wulfstan had after all broken their faith with Eadred in making Eric king, and his response was inevitable. In the summer of 948 he collected an army of South Angles, and like a bretwalda of old rode into Northumbria to ‘subdue their pride’. The campaign of 948 was etched on people’s minds in Northumbria for a long time to come. Eadred used terror as a tactic to force the Northumbrian council to reject Eric and submit to him: he ‘burned down towns, razed fortifications, slaughtered opposition and arrested suspects’ (John of Wallingford). The route of his ravaging took him up the Great North Road, ‘and in that ravaging the glorious minster at Ripon which St Wilfrid built was burned down’ (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle).