by Adams, Max;
The original gift of land, by King Oswald in 635, consisted of two royal estates, Islandshire and Norhamshire, close to what is now the Scottish border with Northumberland; others followed under Oswald’s successors.15 Over the next two centuries further estates were acquired, and we are afforded a unique glimpse of the mechanisms by which the early minster portfolios were accumulated. During St Cuthbert’s lifetime Lindisfarne received a royal grant of lands at Crayke, near York, so that the holy man might have somewhere to stay when travelling to that city, and at Carlisle, in the formerly independent British kingdom of Rheged—both, it seems, as part of a deal in which Cuthbert would leave contemplative retirement on Inner Farne to take on the politically critical and onerous bishopric of Northumbria at a time of key church reforms.
The same king, Ecgfrith, later gave the community lands at Cartmel and Gilling, after Cuthbert raised a boy from the dead.∂ In 679 Cuthbert was granted an estate at Carham on the banks of the River Tweed because his prayers for the king’s victory against Mercia in a battle on the River Trent had been successful. King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, the dedicatee of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, abdicated in 737 and, retiring to Lindisfarne, brought with him the gift of a substantial royal estate at Warkworth on the Northumbrian coast;16 and so it went on. Later kings, notably Osberht,π ‘stole’ some of these estates and recycled them to the royal portfolio although, almost needless to say, he was divinely punished for the offence.∆ Behind these donations lie political realities: a king’s need for ecclesiastical and divine support; the hope of sins expiated and of assured entry into the everlasting joys of heaven; the need to liquidate assets in a time of crisis.
No Early Medieval minster site can be reconstructed in its entirety: almost all of them lie beneath later churches and towns and we are only ever afforded glimpses of their layout and workings. Our model minster is a compilation of hard-won fragments: a church, perhaps two churches; monks’ cells, a guest house; an enclosing vallum or ditched enclosure. Mills, a key marker of stability and technical innovation, have been excavated at Tamworth, Wareham, Barking and Ebbsfleet in England (all associated with minster complexes) and, most extensively, close by the island monastery of Nendrum at the head of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland.17 Many others, such as that identified by the excavators of Portmahomack, must have stood among the several hundred minsters in existence in the eighth and ninth centuries. At the same Pictish site vellum was produced at an industrial complex which required expertise to construct, manage and maintain it. The smiths’ hall at Portmahomack also shows how much infrastructure was required for the iron-working industry; and a seventh-century charter survives which records the gift of an iron mine in the Kentish Weald to the abbey of St Augustine in Canterbury.18 Rights to deposits of lead ore and to stone quarries which fed monastic sculpture workshops were similarly granted to and traded by ecclesiastical communities. The larger establishments, such as the twin monasteries of Jarrow and Wearmouth in Northumbria, boasted nearly 600 fratres, or brothers (effectively their supply of cheap manual labour) in the early eighth century.19 Their minster complexes, with lofty stone buildings, stained glass windows and the craftsmen to maintain them, were the most sophisticated institutions of their day.
If the smaller minsters, whose existence can often only be inferred, relied mostly on their food renders for survival, the greater establishments were able, with their large labour forces and extensive estates, to operate as sustained economic enterprises. Some minsters seem to have evolved relationships with outlying farms that either supplied their provisions while the minster intensified production of particular livestock, grain or manufactured goods, or supplied specialist materials to them. Archaeologist Duncan Wright calls them ‘home farms’.20 Often these seem to have been situated upstream from minsters on rivers so that their produce might be floated conveniently downstream. Lands were not acquired randomly, but to supply key resources or to fill niches in a minster’s portfolio, like woodland for coppice or marsh for reeds and waterfowl.
The minster of St Peter at Medehamstede, later known as Peterborough, is unusually well documented. Although its surviving founding charter is a later forgery, analysis shows that its core lands were formed out of a small defunct Anglian fenland kingdom, North Gyrwe, in the seventh century.21 These lands were rich in riverine resources, enjoying access through inland rivers to the Wash and to unknown numbers of island communities, amounting to around 600 hides—that is, the render expected from the estate was worth that of 600 family farms. The minster of St Peter was no minor foundation. Its original estate was donated by King Wulfhere of Mercia from about 674, later enhanced by generous lands across the East Midlands, whose inclusion in its portfolio must have reflected the need for the minster to be supported by more than just the grazing, fishing and fowling of the fens.
An entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 852 records the leasing by the abbot of Medehamstede of an estate at Sempringham, some 30 miles (48 km) away in Lincolnshire, providing that the estate still rendered annually to the minster sixty waggon-loads of wood, twelve of brushwood, six of faggots and sundry other items. Sempringham, it seems, rendered to the minster its requirement for timber and firewood—nearly 80 tons of it a year. Such were the functionings of the monastic economy. Minsters at Brixworth in Northamptonshire, Yarnton in Oxfordshire and Ely in the Cambridgeshire fens were focal points for densely clustering settlements, interacting with them economically and, we might suggest, socially.22 King Wulfhere’s apparent role in the foundation of both Medehamstede and the trading port of Lundenwic is suggestive of increased royal interest in trade and exchange; and that interest seems also to have driven a dramatic increase in the administration and quantity of coinage at the same period.
If this sounds as though a small industrial revolution were taking place in parts of Britain, the historian and archaeologist must exercise caution: this is not a full-blown medieval manorial system but a series of local and regional responses to opportunity. Even so, minsters produced and traded goods because they had become centres of consumption, not as a coherent strategy to stimulate the economies of their kingdoms. Their unique advantages, in privileges and international connections to a Europe-wide web of Latinate, educated, capital-intensive centres of social and economic excellence, loaded trade in their favour, and they exploited it to the full.
However, although there is a broad consensus that minsters evolved during the eighth century as central places with a range of social, economic and spiritual functions (including burial) the picture has to be pieced together from disparate sources. Such evidence as exists shows a dramatic rise in trade after about 725. The phenomenon is easiest to detect in East Anglia, where the first post-Roman industrial manufacture of wheel-finished, kiln-fired pottery at the trading port and production site of Gipeswic (Ipswich) seems to have been stimulated by an influx of Flemish potters from the Continent in the 720s. Fragments of Ipswich ware turn up in excavations across the region, with small quantities reaching as far south as London and Kent, inland along the Thames corridor, through Lincolnshire and as far north as York.23 A single sherd has been recovered from excavations at Hamwic on the south coast.
The distinguished ceramicist Paul Blinkhorn believes that the pottery, often retrieved from sites with ecclesiastical associations, reflects a rapid expansion of internal trading networks across the kingdom of East Anglia, just as finds from the trading ports of the east and south coasts echo international production and exchange in high-value luxury goods.24 Evidence from excavated rural settlements, both secular and ecclesiastical, seems to show that this expansion in trade coincided roughly with physical structural alterations: re-alignments of buildings; construction of rectangular enclosures—suggestive of intensive, specialized farming. In East Anglia the new type of pottery, showing a limited range of forms, is found almost exclusive of any other local wares: it became a badge, almost, of regional identity.
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Widespread gif
ting of royal estates to the church over 200 years across the kingdoms of Britain and Ireland fostered dynamic, productive economies which those of Scandinavia could not match. In Norway, Denmark and Sweden opportunities for the forms of patronage and exploitation evolving in partnership with the church and a compliant, not to say enthusiastic, warrior élite, were extremely limited: fertile land was scarce and confined to narrow coastal plains. Shifting alliances and groupings of warrior kindreds, often armed to the teeth and with vengeance in their hearts, were not easy even for the most formidable kings to control.
The agricultural, industrial and political expertise of the Insular peoples, in part indigenous and in part learned from the Romanized Frankish empire, was largely absent from the loose-held kingdoms of Scandinavia. They did not enjoy the legacy of an Imperial road system or the protection of its ruined forts. Their seafaring, mercantile and boat-building skills were, however, highly advanced. With those skills Scandinavian raiders were able both to relieve the western Christian kingdoms of some of their material wealth and to observe at close quarters the sophistication of their economies. They admired much of what they saw. The price which Bede had foreseen the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms paying, in their enthusiastic patronage of the church, was that, economic miracles and statehood notwithstanding, they surrendered something of the military prowess with which they had amalgamated the small kingdoms of the post-Roman tribal reshuffle.
The Insular psyche saw its world in terms of produce, labour, patronage, lordship and regional bragging rights, tied to the soil. The poor, unlanded, unfree cottar travelled to the ceorl’ s farmstead with his or her waggon-load of wood, eggs or wool; the ceorl to his lord’s vill to render his services to a thegn; thegn travelled to ealdorman or to abbot and might occasionally fight with the men of his shire against their neighbours. Ealdormen travelled through the lands of their shires dispensing justice in disputes over boundaries, livestock, theft, murder and the return of escaped slaves. They led their levies into battle against their, or the king’s, enemies and, like the bishops, attended royal assemblies. Kings concerned themselves with exacting tribute and toll; with planning and plotting their succession; with their wills and with treasure chests full of scrap metal and precious objects; with the activities and ambitions of rivals at home and abroad; with the distribution of gifts and favours; with the movements and provisioning of their warriors and the probity or otherwise of their moneyers.
It is hard to exaggerate the psychological unpreparedness of the Insular states against a fast-moving, water-based, entrepreneurial enemy with nothing to lose but their skins, playing by a new set of rules and uncaring of retribution, their wives and children safe at home waiting for son, brother, husband to return home from what amounted to a hunting expedition, with bounty to supplement their meagre living from fishing, farming and domestic crafts.
Scandinavia was uniquely blessed with a tradition of excellence in shipbuilding, with ample supplies of slow-grown, straight-grained wood, supreme skills in carpentry and a seaward-facing culture. Long experience, experimentation and competition for naval supremacy led, by the middle of the ninth century, to something like perfection in the construction of a wide variety of vessels capable of deep-sea sailing, coastal trading, raiding, and the penetration of navigable rivers. Ships were more than merely transportation: in Scandinavian culture they carried a symbolic role greater even than that of Britain’s eighteenth-century ‘wooden walls’: they were named, famed, celebrated in song and verse as sea steeds riding the whale road.
On the north bank of Limfjord in northern Jutland, close to an important ancient crossing point, lies the Viking period cemetery of Lindholm Høje.** Hundreds of graves, the cremated remains of villagers and traders, are marked by placements of stones in the unmistakeable shapes of boats. The gently sloping hillside looks like nothing so much as a grassy harbour crowded with jostling stone ships, a flotilla of memorials tying Danish culture to the sea and to boats. Ship burials are known from Orkney, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, mainland Scotland and England, most famously the monumental burial of King Rædwald at Sutton Hoo overlooking the River Deben in Suffolk—the legacy of Scandinavian contact before and during the Viking Age. In Scandinavia they occur, as at Sutton Hoo, in association with royal cult sites. At Lindholm Høje a more subtle rendering of maritime sensibility is displayed; no ships were buried here, but the cemetery’s inhabitants saw themselves as peoples of the sea, cremated on pyres, like Beowulf, before being, as it were, launched on to the breeze-ruffled waters of the afterlife.
The famous Norwegian ship burial at Oseberg,†† excavated in 1904, was no abstraction of salty sentiment; no mere model. The length of a cricket pitch, 22 yards (20 m), the Oseberg vessel, clinker-built of oak planks, had been buried in a huge trench and, to ensure that it stayed put, it had been ‘moored’ to a large boulder. This was the last resting place of two royal women, interred with their waggons, sleighs, weaving equipment, horses, dogs and treasure, as well as provisions and equipment for their last journey. Constructed in about 820, the Oseberg ship lies three quarters of the way along the evolutionary path towards the perfect Viking vessel, represented by another Norwegian burial: the Gokstad ship. Their clean, refined lines, their high carved prows, shallow draught and rakish low freeboard, are predatory refinement: these were fast, light war machines with no concession to comfort, designed for attack and a quick getaway. The Oseberg ship had served her time on inshore waters for more than a decade before being sacrificed to the otherworldly needs of her queenly owners.
For a deeper understanding of Scandinavian shipbuilding craft and the brilliance of its technologies, one must travel to Roskilde at the head of a long, narrow fjord on Sjælland, the largest island of the Danish archipelago.‡‡ Here you can see longships and their more modest cargo-carrying cousins being built and sailed, and talk to the craftsmen and sailors who study, construct and crew them. At some time in the eleventh century Roskilde Fjord was blocked, 15 miles (24 km) north of the city, at a place called Skuldelev, by five ships deliberately scuttled to prevent attack from the sea—Scandinavian states were as vulnerable to Viking predation as the rest of north-west Europe.
8. CARSTEN HVID, skipper of the Sea Stallion of Glendalough, in the rope works at Roskilde ship museum, Denmark.
In 1962 the five vessels were excavated from inside a temporary coffer dam and their remains form the core displays of the Roskilde Ship Museum. An admirable programme of research has led, first, to the reconstruction of these vessels in order to understand their capabilities, technologies and materials and, second, to the development of expertise in the shipbuilding techniques of the Viking Age. The Skuldelev ships offer a hint of the wide range of vessel designs belonging to the regional repertoire, from the small inshore two-bench rowing boats called færings, to medium range cargo vessels (the knarrs ), to larger deep-sea trading ships; from small warships of the snekkja type right up to the cruisers of their day, represented by Skuldelev 2, a longship 100 feet (30 m) long and 12 feet (3.8 m) wide, designed for a crew of sixty, with a mast and square sailing rig.
In 2007 Skuldelev 2, reconstructed as the Sea Stallion of Glendalough, was sailed and rowed to and from Dublin, at an impressive maximum speed of 15 knots. The voyage commemorated Viking links with Ireland, especially poignant because Skuldelev 2 had been built on the banks of the Liffey in the middle of the eleventh century.
Scandinavian ships had many design features in common: all were clinker-built with overlapping strakes; all were equipped with oars, many also with a single mast that bore a square, woollen sail for use when the wind lay aft. Unlike Mediterranean and Frankish vessels, they were plank- rather than frame-built. The earliest ships were built up from a keel plank rather than a true keel, to which the first strakes, or hull planks, were attached on either side. Each successive plank was fastened in order to fashion the basic shape of the hull; internal framing, a keelson§§ and mast step were added to stiffen the hull later. Strakes were generally
attached using clench nails (effectively large iron rivets), their joints caulked with moss, tar and wool.
9. THE SEA STALLION OF GLENDALOUGH, a reconstruction of Skuldelev 2, which sailed from Roskilde Fjord to Dublin in 2007.
Aside from the larger cargo vessels, broad in the beam and relatively deep-draughted, ships were designed to sail in shallow water, often as little as 2 feet (60 cm) deep, and so that they could be pulled up on to a sloping beach or drawn overland on skids. The lack of a true keel until, for example, the Oseberg and Gokstad ships of the ninth century, meant that at sea ships made substantial leeway: they slid sideways and downwind of their intended course. The exaggerated leeway meant, in turn, that with their square-rigged sails they could not make rapid progress to windward except by rowing. Steering was accomplished with a side-rudder so that the clean, sweeping leaf-shaped lines of the vessel, and her stiffness, should not be compromised by a stern transom.##
