by Adams, Max;
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 h
ave 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
