by Adams, Max;
Óláf’s brief, triumphant entry onto the lists of Insular kings has left an indelible mark in the archaeological record. Immediately replacing the stock of Æðelstan’s silver penny coinage in York, more than 100 dies covering just two years’ minting there (and, perhaps, further south) testify to a large series proclaiming ANLAF CVNVNC (Anlaf, King)—the first recorded appearance of Old Norse in the Roman alphabet.28 The name surrounds a stylish and distinctly Norse-looking depiction of a raven (see p. 396). If his new wife Aldgyð disapproved, the fact is unrecorded.
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Under Eadmund’s new West Saxon regime the normal business of royal administration resumed on a less imperial scale than in his predecessor’s day. In 941 he held a royal council in villam qui cælebri æt Ceodre: the ‘famous’ palace of Cheddar.29 The grant that survives to confirm the visit is insignificant: a small estate in Hampshire, given to one of the new king’s ministers. The West Saxon kings were generous with their property portfolios, buying the support and loyalty of key men in their shires both new, as in Danish Mercia, and old. In the early years of their reigns such grants were numerous, and carefully chosen.
Cheddar is the only West Saxon royal residence to have been excavated so far.30 It stood at the navigable head of the River Axe (which empties to the north-west into the Bristol Channel), squeezed between the foot of the Mendip hills and the Somerset levels. Like several similar sites, it probably began as a small minster founded close to an earlier Roman site at the centre of a villa regalis, to which a royal hunting lodge was attached. During the secularization process of the ninth century the fortunes of the minster declined and the lodge became a royal township like that at Yeavering in north Northumbria.
51. ‘THROUGH DIFFICULT PATHS unto the edge of a precipice.’ A hollow way leading from Cheddar up onto the Mendip hills.’
A major construction phase seems to have been undertaken in the reign of Æðelstan, providing the site with halls, a chapel, a fowl-house and a wind-powered corn mill, all protected from periodic flooding by an elaborate drainage scheme. The carefully laid-out entrance was graced by a flagpole, whose setting included a plinth made from recycled Roman brick. The palace was still being expanded and refurbished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.31 Each successive incarnation of Cheddar’s great hall shows engineering taken to new levels of sophistication. The only material traces left for the archaeologist are foundations, but its architecture must have impressed and awed its visitors: the royal court, subreguli, archbishops, duces, bishops, envoys, petitioners and ministri.
The bland record of Eadmund’s Cheddar council of 941 is enlivened by a series of events later thought to portend the future glory of a major celebrity. The greatest of the late Saxon archbishops of Canterbury, Dunstan (who held the see between 960 and 978) was born near Glastonbury in about 910 at a time when few, if any, functioning monastic houses survived. In the case of Glastonbury its community consisted of no more than a clerical school; but such were its ancient reputation and the virtues of its relics that it was much visited. Dunstan attended the school there before being introduced into Æðelstan’s court by the then archbishop of Canterbury, Æðelhelm, and taking vows to become a monk.32 Dunstan was a gifted silversmith and illustrator;π he also managed to attract the jealousy of his peers. He fell foul of court rivalries and gossip and the new king, Eadmund, threatened him with disgrace and exile.
Both Roger of Wendover and Dunstan’s anonymous biographer record the story that at Cheddar events came to a head when the king went out hunting on the wooded hills above the palace:
A multitude of deer took to flight, one of which, of extraordinary size, the king singled out for the chase, and followed with his dogs alone driving him through difficult paths unto the edge of a precipice, over which the stag and dogs fell headlong and were dashed to pieces.33
The king, fearing that he must follow the beasts into the infamous depths of the gorge and unable to rein in his mount in time, is supposed to have uttered a prayer and at that instant, realizing that he must have offended Christ by his unjust treatment of the monk, was saved by the miraculous intervention of Dunstan’s prayers.
The king, it was said, promptly rode with Dunstan to Glastonbury and installed him as its abbot. As it happens, a charter of 940 records King Eadmund granting Abbot Dunstan twenty hides of land at a place called Cristemalforde (‘the ford with a crucifix’) in Wiltshire.34 If the Cheddar story is true, the event must have taken place a year earlier than the council recorded in 941. More likely, the recorded sequence is accurate, but the two events have been conflated by the wishful thinking of later biographers. Either way, Dunstan’s political survival allowed him to establish, under successive kings, an organized community of monks following a form of Benedictine rule from which a great monastic reform movement was born in the 970s.35
The treaty signed at Leicester, meanwhile, did not prevent King Óláfr from extending his influence northwards from York, into the lands of the Bernician lords. In 941 his forces ravaged the church of St Bealdhere at Tyninghame in East Lothian; and the Men of York were said to have laid waste the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.36 But Óláfr seems to have died during this northern campaign, ‘smitten by the justice of God’ according to Roger of Wendover. In his stead, from across the Irish Sea, came a namesake, Óláfr Sigtrygsson, nicknamed Kváran or ‘Sandal’, son of the Norse Dublin king who had married Æðelstan’s sister and ruled Northumbria for six years after 921. Kváran may already have been in York from 940; he had by then bequeathed the kingship of Dublin to another scion of the dynasty of Ívarr, Blákári Guðrøðsson, brother of the deceased Óláfr.
When the Chronicle picks up the narrative again, in 942, it is in the form of thirteen split lines of alliterative poetry, one of its most celebrated entries:
Her Eadmund cyning
Engla þeoden,
maga mundbora
Myrce geeode,
dyre dædfruma...
Here King Edmund, lord of the English
Men’s protector, overran Mercia
(Dear deed-doer) As bounded by Dore,
Whitwell Gate and Humber river,
The broad brimming stream; and Five Boroughs:
Leicester and Lincoln,
Nottingham, and also Stamford and
Derby. Danes were before,
Under the Northmen, forced into submission,
In heathen bondage,
A long time, until he afterwards freed them,
For his honour, defender of warriors,
Edward’s offspring, king Eadmund.37
This is the first documentary source to name the Five Boroughs, and such an enigmatic entry raises more questions than it answers. It is generally understood, in the first place, that it represents a record of the military conquest of Danish Mercia by Eadmund in 942. Then, there is the clear statement in the poem of a new boundary line between the lands of the Norse kings of Northumbria and those of Eadmund, redrawn somewhat to the north of Watling Street and on a very ancient line dividing the historical Mercia from Deira: Dore (meaning literally a door, or narrow pass), half a dozen miles south-west of Sheffield, and the Whitwell Gap to the south-east. Linking this line, between the eastern Peak District (lands of the Pecsætan), the western fringes of Sherwood and the River Humber, the border would follow the line of either the River Idle, to its junction with the Trent in Lincolnshire or, similarly, the River Don whose course runs a little to the north.
This had been a much fought-over zone in earlier centuries and if, as Michael Wood suggests, we can place Brunanburh in these debatable lands, it would reinforce the sense of a dynamic landscape of fluctuating, competing fortunes. Significantly, perhaps, place names indicative of Scandinavian settlement occur much more frequently east and south of the Trent, in the heartlands of the Five Boroughs, than they do to its north and west.
The 942 poem is followed in the Winchester version of the Chronicle by a prose statement: that Eadmund stood sponsor for Kváran
and a second Norse king, an otherwise obscure Rögnvaldr, at their baptisms, a sure sign of their submission. But perhaps the most intriguing element of the entry is its suggestion that Danes had been subjected to bondage by the heathen Norse. The implication is that assimilated Danes, settled north and east of Watling Street since the days of the mycel here, now Christianized and perhaps, like Urm, married into native families, resented the overt heathenism of the two Irish Norse kings, with their aggressively apocalyptic iconography. Danish Mercia had, finally, sided with Wessex.
It is very difficult, perhaps futile, to attempt an analysis of such niceties of identity. Overlordship was a distant influence on ordinary lives. Coinage was one thing; few inhabitants of Danish Mercia would ever have seen a king. More likely, I think, loyalties and identities were subtly complex and local, looking to the burghal towns and their governors, of whatever persuasion, for markets, opportunities for patronage and cultural influences while they guarded their own backs. Domestically, identities would have been displayed in a variety of media, from dress fashion to tableware to language and the naming of children; to the stories they were told and the games they played. One suspects that women played a far greater role in managing such subtle processes than the historical record, or even the archaeology, allows.
The lord and lady of Goltho, an abandoned medieval settlement lying close to a Roman road some 14 miles (23 km) north-east of Lincoln,∆ experienced these tensions at first hand. Dane or native, their family had seen the turmoil of the ninth century come and go and had prospered, although not without dramatic adaptations to events within and beyond the old territorial limits of Lindsey. Archaeologist Guy Beresford’s excavations of the early 1970s, during which he pioneered the strategic use of machinery to strip and expose complex horizontal and vertical stratigraphic relationships in large, open-area excavations, revealed a settlement history spanning more than a millennium.38
What had appeared, from surface earthworks, to be the grassed-over remains of a Norman motte and bailey castle, in fact started life as a Romano-British farmstead. For 400 years after the end of the Roman occupation of Britain the site was abandoned, or shifted elsewhere in the vicinity, before a new farmstead, the substantial home of a senior thegn or dux, was refounded here in about 800. Guy Beresford believed that a complete lack of evidence for destruction deposits at the site and the paucity of Scandinavian artefacts argued for a native incumbent and that its re-establishment may have been the result of a minor land grant by a ninth-century overlord, one of the still-independent kings of Mercia.
In about 850 Goltho’s two or three moderately substantial longhouses, of a type familiar across contemporary Britain, set in a rectangular fenced enclosure, were replaced by something much more impressive. A prestigious new hall, comparable in size with the earliest hall at Cheddar and capable of hosting large public assemblies, was constructed on the same site.** It formed part of a complex, aligned squarely around a courtyard, with a large barn or weaving shed, byre and kitchen block.
After perhaps a generation (which would coincide neatly with the annexation of East Mercia by the mycel here and the expulsion of King Burghred) the whole was enclosed by a very substantial defensive earthwork, reconstructed analytically by Beresford even after its virtual obliteration by later ditches and ramparts. That it was genuinely defensive rather than merely pretentious is evident from its dimensions: the ditch was 8 feet (2.5 m) deep and nearly 20 feet (6 m) across, with the rampart probably topped by a palisade. Whether it was designed to prevent raids by Vikings, West Saxons, Danish war bands or fellow members of Lindsey’s élite is frustratingly impossible to say but, again, one is reminded of the provisions of Æðelstan’s Friðgegyldum Ordinance, which hint at tensions among powerful local kindreds. The lord of Goltho had enemies.
For most of the period between 865 and 950 Goltho lay outside the area subject to the kings of Wessex. Lincoln was its closest and most important central place. If one supposes that the regio of Lindsey, the north part of Lincolnshire, was ruled by a jarl of the stamp of Urm, then it must have been his patronage to which the thegn or hold of Goltho owed his status and, one presumes, the permission to construct such a powerful personal statement of his wealth and status.
The defended enclosure at Goltho was remodelled several times over the next two centuries, always within the same enclosure and on the same co-axial alignment. In time a regularly laid-out village of tofts†† and cottages grew up close by, its earthworks partially excavated before being razed by the plough in the 1970s. The remarkable preservation of what has been called a ‘private burh’ owes much to the construction, in the Norman period, of a motte whose earthworks covered and sealed the earlier phases.
Large quantities of domestic refuse were recovered from the excavation, showing that Goltho was well within the distribution compass of Lincolnshire potteries, the subject of the intriguing analysis described in Chapter 8. At about a day’s travel from Lincoln, Goltho is a prime candidate for the putative burghal estate proposed by Symonds and Ling, its lord perhaps owning a small estate plot and chapel in the city and fitting neatly into the élite club of its Anglo-Scandinavian heyday. If that were the case, though, we might expect more material finds reflecting contact with the highly networked metalworkers and artisans of Lincoln; and Goltho retained its Old English name while, nearby, the village of Wragby, possibly ‘Vragi’s settlement’, underwent a period of extended Norse ownership. Goltho seems resolutely native.
Goltho must have lain at the heart of a land-holding sufficiently large to support its needs and the grandeur of its buildings. Like Flixborough and Cheddar, its management required a complex machinery of customary obligations and services in which each individual was bound by duty and privilege to all other parties.
A compilation dating from about the early eleventh century‡‡ and known as Gerefa, ‘the Reeve’, sets out an idealized relationship between an estate and those who owed service to it under the watchful eye of its reeve, or steward.39
ÐEGEN LAGV IS þæt he sy his boc rihtes wyrðe
7 þæt he ðreo ðinc of his lande do fyrd
7 burhbote 7 brycgeweorc.
The law of the thegn is that he be worthy of his book-rights and that from his land he must do three things: fyrð-duty, burhbote and bridgework.
These ‘common burdens’ are first recorded under King Offa of Mercia in the eighth century. All those of thegnly rank must raise a company of armed and trained men when called upon by their lord (fyrð-duty); must contribute to building and repairing the walls of the burh (burhbote) and repair bridges when required. The use of the Old Norse term lagu (‘law’) is significant: its adoption must derive from usage in Danish Mercia.
Below the thegn comes the geneat: the dependent tenant or, in earlier times, the ceorl. In Danish Mercia and parts of East Anglia, but especially in Lincolnshire in the late Anglo-Saxon period, classes of tenant called sokemen and liberi homines, or freemen are widely attested. They were able to pass their holdings onto their heirs, like booked land. Historians used to equate their distribution with the Danelaw and drew the quite reasonable inference that here was evidence for independent, free veterans of the mycel here settling the land and sharing it out, just as the Chronicle recorded. For many reasons the argument has not stood the test of time.40 Now, the survival of such distinct classes, or more properly castes, also found in Wales and Kent, for example, is seen as another facet of regional diversity, reflecting earlier customary territorial relations between lords and those who rendered services and goods to them.
The estate demanded duties from its free tenants in the form of a gafol, or tax on the land that they held; in the provision of horses for team work and load carrying; by providing food; in the maintenance of hedges and fencing, as well as supporting the church. In a fascinating aside, we learn that it was the duty of the geneat to ‘lead newcomers to the enclosure’: that is, to ensure that traders or free men entering on the estate lands should be supervised,
given hospitality and brought to the lord to see what they were about.
The duties of the kotesetlan, or cottar, were defined by local custom, so conspicuous a feature of Early Medieval cultures everywhere. He had his own land and must render services to the lord and ‘always be available to work’. The poor, unfree gebur carried the heavy burden of unremitting labour and render, working two or three days per week for his lord, paying taxes such as heorðpænig (hearth-penny) and ploughing and sowing the lord’s fields; he must give up part of his barley harvest, two of his hens and a young sheep; he must provide half of the feed for a hunting dog and pay six loaves to the lord’s swineherd when he drove his pigs to wood pasture in autumn. In return, the gebur was provided with tools and with 7 acres of land to plough and sow, two oxen, a cow and six sheep.
Additional clauses in the Gerefa address provisions for bee-keepers, bound and free swineherds, male and female slaves, oxherds, shepherds, cheesewrights and plough-followers, for the beadle and the forester. It is an idealized portrait of a well-mannered and structured hierarchical society whose wealth was produced for the benefit of men like the lord of Goltho: those worthy to ride with and attend upon the king.
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The Midlands campaign of 942 may have involved military engagement; the poem preserved in the Chronicle entry for that year is not explicit. Some scholars have noted the granting of estates in 941 by Eadmund in the central Trent valley and suggested that, following the earlier precedents of his father and half-brother, the young king was purchasing territories from Danish or Norse control and assigning them to more Wessex-friendly lords.41 This deployment of West Saxon patronage (and cash) which had already reached as far as Amounderness in the north-west and the community of St Cuthbert in the north-east, was an essential tool in the extension of royal authority outside the West Saxon and Mercian heartlands. But Eadmund must have been schooled, and early, in other means of showing political clout. In the same year, the Annales Cambriae record that Idwal Foel, grandson of Rhodri Mawr and king of Gwynedd, was killed along with his son Elisedd by the ‘Saxons’;§§ whether by military expedition or assassination is uncertain. Idwal, and Gwynedd, had maintained an uneasy relationship with the West Saxon project—regional Venedotian policy traditionally looked to Man and the Irish Sea for allies; and Norse place names suggest that, like the Wirral, there was a significant Norse/Irish constituency in the north Welsh kingdom.
