The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  If the economic basis of leadership in the fifth and sixth centuries was a unit later termed the township, it equates to what Bede, using Latin, called the vill. Its central place, the hall (and the hall may equally be a barn) to which food renders and services were owed, became synonymous with the vill, so that Gefrin, for example, was the central place of a township also called Gefrin, or Yeavering in English. As larger economic and military polities evolved, one vill among many became the focus for renders from other vills. This is the apparent origin of the royal vill or villa regia so often mentioned by Bede. Gefrin was not only the central place of the vill of the same name; it also emerged as the royal vill of the shire of Gefrin which consisted of a number of vills—in the region of a dozen—which were required to support the grander pretensions of those local governors/warlords who would lay claim eventually to the title of king.

  Thanks to the work of Colm O’Brien and others in teasing out the many complexities of medieval historical documents, we can now describe a large proportion of the shire structure of Northumberland—effectively Bernicia—in the centuries before the Norman Conquest. Bamburghshire is one of the largest and the earliest attested of these. It is the shire seemingly given as dower to Æthelfrith’s wife Bebba as early as the 580s and may have formed the core land of the Iding dynasty from which Ida’s sons were able to expand their territorial control in the second half of the sixth century. A shire was sufficient to support a warband leader of Ida’s status. His sons and grandsons having more expansionist pretensions, the nature of kingship similarly evolved so that as renders came to shire centres, kings now had to travel between shires in order to consume the fruits of their authority. And that is one reason why Oswald was required to make the journey from Bamburgh to Yeavering and thence to his other royal estates, month on month, year on year. Brian Hope-Taylor, Yeavering’s excavator, saw the acquisition of this ancestral tribal seat as an annexation by the Idings, recently established at Bamburgh, of a native British royal institution. Forty years later, it is still hard to argue with him.

  By extraordinary luck Bede gives us an unintended clue to the duration and economic significance of such visits. In describing Paulinus’s visit to Yeavering in 627 to baptise the apparently enthusiastic populace of Bernicia, he relates that the bishop stayed with King Edwin and Queen Æthelburh for thirty-six days, which were spent dipping pagan heads in the cleansing waters of the River Glen.170 Perhaps this coincided with Beltane,*2 when the king would be there to oversee the tributes of his vassals and perhaps give his blessing to betrothals and petty alliances.

  The critical detail is the thirty-six-day length of the visit. In this number O’Brien sees a neat division not of months but of tenths of a year. This has strong echoes in the early law codes and in the later tithes of the church and it now seems plausible to suggest that the basic unit of economic render in the Early Medieval period (perhaps also in the late Roman period) was a ten per cent tax on agricultural surplus. If kings took a tenth render of the produce of a royal shire and stayed there for just over a month, it stood to reason that they must have been able to exact such renders from at least ten estates over a year. There might be several complications to this neat model, not least because it is hard to see the royal entourage traipsing the length of the kingdom through the depths of winter. This may explain why some royal shires—Bamburgh is the prime example—were larger than others, to cater for the extra needs of a prolonged overwintering.

  What goods and services were rendered to kings, and how did the system work in detail? For Bernicia, in particular early seventh-century Bernicia, we have little direct evidence. The best early material is the law code of Ine, King of Wessex between 688 and 726. His code only survives as an addendum to that of King Alfred in the late ninth century, so it has to be treated with caution; but we can see in Ine’s dooms (laws) some idea of the measure of control which late seventh-century kings wished or tried to impose on their territories. Ine expected that an estate of ten hides would render:

  10 vats of honey

  300 loaves

  12 ambers [probably something like a bushel—8 gallons] of Welsh ale

  30 ambers of clear ale

  2 full-grown cows or 10 wethers (castrated rams)

  10 geese

  20 hens

  10 cheeses

  A full amber of butter

  5 salmon

  20 pounds of fodder

  100 eels171

  A small estate looking forward to the visit of its lord had to keep back from its surplus sufficient to meet appetites on this scale. A king’s entourage would consume these victuals in very short order, so we must suppose that a royal estate was much larger than the ten hides offered by Ine as an exemplar. It must be able to provide something like thirty-six days’ consumption for a gesith’s establishment; and by extension we can say that the food render might represent something like a tenth of the annual agricultural production of an estate of that size. So, what can be said about the hide, the unit of economy on which Ine’s lawyers made their calculation? It is a term fraught with problems, if for no other reason than that it meant various things at different times and in different places to various people. Bede uses the Latin term familiarum to denote this unit of landholding, with a clear implication of size. Iona, he says, is only five hides in extent; the islands of Anglesey and Man, conquered by Edwin, were respectively nine hundred and sixty and three hundred hides in extent.172 A generation of historians, working back from medieval documents, came to believe that the hide equated to about a hundred and twenty acres. But this is not really satisfactory, certainly not for the seventh century. More modern opinion would rather see the hide as a unit of render—in other words, not the size of a holding but its economic and agricultural potential so that more fertile, cultivated parts of the land could be rendered at a higher hidage than the same area in a poorer part of the land.173

  The Tribal Hidage, the list of tributary kingdoms possibly produced by Paulinus for King Edwin in the late 620s, shows that the hide could be used as a measure of tribute to be exacted, sometimes punitively as in the case of the rapacious demand made on Wessex of a hundred thousand hides. At the most local level a single-hide estate might support a very small community or, as Bede’s term familiarum implies, a single family. Hild, grand-niece of King Edwin and illustrious abbess of Whitby, began her holy career with an estate of a single hide on which she survived for a year with a small group of companions.174 In that sense, the single hide is no more than a unit of subsistence. The smallest kingdoms listed in the Hidage—East Wixna or Sweordora (unlocated but probably in the fenlands south and west of the Wash) for example—were assessed at a paltry three hundred hides, like the Isle of Man. Ine’s list of the render expected from a ten-hide estate suggests that this was the sort of holding which would be required to support a gesith or thegn who, having fought in the king’s host, would need sufficient land to marry and support his martial, social and economic needs. Might a ten-hide estate be equated with the render from a small vill ?

  The best clue comes, again, from Bede when he describes the gift of lands by King Oswiu to found monasteries in the late 650s.*3 The donation consisted of twelve estates, six in Bernicia and six in Deira, each of ten hides. If the basic geographical logic of the township/vill is reasonably consistent, then these estates are vills, perhaps on the small side but vills nevertheless and identifiable to contemporaries by their estate centres, which became monastic establishments under an abbot or abbess. In effect, Oswiu was alienating his right to extract render from these estates to support twelve communities of monks and nuns.*4 The communities would, in addition to consuming the customary renders of these estates—that is to say, a tenth of their surplus—be exempt from the military duties a gesith would owe from the same estate. Moreover, they would hold those rights and exemptions in perpetuity.

  There is, here, an implicit acknowledgement of the existence of peasants or small tenant farmers, tied to the land
, whose lives, because they were taken for granted by the gesith or monastic classes, lie beneath the radar of history. Their labour produced the surplus that supported a warrior class and, subsequently, a non-fighting class of monks, abbots and abbesses. We suspect from later sources that the range of obligations from a holding to its lord was not confined to agricultural surplus and military service. Drengs, who form a sort of middle class in early British law and in Northumbrian tax accounts as late as the thirteenth century, were responsible for services like truncage (the hauling of timber to the estate centre) and probably also for bridge maintenance, for supplying labour to work the lord’s own fields and perhaps for ship-building. There were marriage taxes (merchet) and inheritance dues (heriot), which seem also to have been customarily imposed on those whose privilege it was to hold land for a life-interest. Underlying these dues and services is a concept of the cow or, more probably the ox, as a primary unit of wealth, almost a unit of currency in the absence of coin.

  By the end of the seventh century we detect, in the laws of Ine, attempts not just to render was what owed to the king but also to assert social control and impose administrative and fiscal order. A man who holds twenty hides, for example, shall sow twelve hides under cultivation; if a ceorl buys a beast and finds a blemish in it within thirty days he shall send it back to its former owner; if anyone finds swine intruding on his wood pasture he may seek compensation; and so on. There are monetary fines for infringements against these laws and historians see in such penalties not just an attempt at legal consistency but also a means of gathering income via fines. That kings were beginning to understand landscape in terms of the potential for exploiting resources is also evident in penalties for cutting down large trees, for failing to fence cultivated land properly, for infringing shared rights to common land. But this concept was still in its infancy in the year 700. A large proportion of the seventy-six caputs in Ine’s Laws deal with issues at the heart of tribal society: individual rights and responsibilities and attempts to limit feuding over civil and criminal disputes; fewer are concerned with the church’s role in ordering society and with agriculture; just one deals with regulating the activities of traders.

  In Oswald’s day, fifty years earlier, there is almost no evidence of royal interference at such a minute level. It is debatable how far the church acquisition of bocland—that is, land held in perpetuity—was a factor in this move towards fiscal and administrative royal control. Under Oswald’s brother Oswiu and Oswiu’s sons Ecgfrith and Aldfrith the expansion of royal interest in administration appears to coincide with the strengthening of the economic and social role of the church, not to mention its wealth. Kings may have learned more from their clerics than just a new moral code. If so, Oswald’s apparently ingenuous gift of estates to ensure the security and longevity of Aidan’s mission set a profound historic precedent, the implications of which he can only dimly have realised but which were, by Bede’s day, matters of profound concern.

  Gefrinshire, assuming it to be a royal estate in the seventh century, can be estimated to have been assessed for hidage purposes sufficient to provide thirty-six days’ supplies for the royal entourage; unfortunately that does not mean that we can say how many loaves, cheeses, eggs or wethers that might equate to. We need to look more closely at the contemporary landscape to catch a glimpse of the workings of the shires. The wholly exceptional Yeavering complex aside, only two archaeological sites in Bernicia which might count as the centres of estates have been identified; and only one of these has been excavated. At Sprouston, on the south bank of the River Tweed a little to the east of Kelso, a substantial crop-mark site revealed by aerial photography shows what looks like the site of a township, complete with halls, barns, cemetery and field systems: the physical manifestation of the establishment of a senior royal companion of the seventh century.*5 A dozen or so miles to the east, tucked into the fertile terrace between the rivers Glen and Till in the Milfield Basin, a similar-looking site at Thirlings was excavated in the 1970s and early 1980s by Roger Miket and Colm O’Brien, revealing a detailed plan of the domestic arrangements of either Oswald’s warrior elite or, perhaps, of the more modest dreng.175

  Thirlings sits in a landscape crowded with the remains of prehistoric monuments: henges, pit alignments, standing stones and much more as yet undetected, which testify both to its long-term attractions for settlement and to the ritual associations of river, glen and mountain so obviously meaningful to the Bernician kings at Yeavering a couple of miles to the south-west. At the heart of the settlement was a hall-type building, modest by Yeavering standards, thirty or so feet long, built of round posts a foot in diameter set in a trench and infilled with wall panels set with vertical planks. This hall stood within an oval fenced enclosure—fenced, presumably, both to keep stock out and to provide the privacy which was such an intangible but precious commodity to the Early Medieval elite. There is no real defensive component to the site, any more than there is at Yeavering or Sprouston: these settlements flourished in an orderly land. This hall and its enclosure were replaced by a bigger building in a larger rectangular fenced enclosure. This is the so-called Thirlings ‘A’ hall which has been reconstructed at Bede’s World in Jarrow. It is an open-plan building with a single hearth, a longitudinally ridged roof and perhaps room for a sleeping platform. To the modern visitor it is no more than a humble cottage, if attractively honest and robust.

  On three sides externally the subsoil was pockmarked with pits and posts, the paltry remains of all sorts of domestic installations whose functions can be inferred from other, less damaged sites around the country: posts and frames for drying, curing, stretching, workbenches and jigs for securing work in progress; pole lathes and shaving horses, hurdles and, lest we forget them, the evidences of children’s play.

  The use of timber in-the-round in some of the buildings shows a lack of architectural pretension compared to those constructed in Yeavering’s prime in which the timbers were larger, much larger, and squared off; it also shows that the vill of Thirlings had access to woodland where there was a plentiful supply of trees, probably oak, in the order of forty to fifty years old. The Yeavering builders were able to commission the felling of much larger trees, perhaps a hundred years old; we might see here in subtle reflection the reach of the more modest thegnly hand as opposed to the royal fist, whose truncage renders commanded more extensive, more mature woodlands. But there are larger, grander buildings at Thirlings which show distinct similarities, albeit on a smaller scale, to the grand halls at Yeavering; the fashion for squared posts and great thick planks was eventually shared at both sites.

  It is tempting to see in the variation of style, size and technique in these buildings a chronological succession, a manifestation of larger and more pretentious halls being consecutively constructed at Thirlings, which might show the influence of the Yeavering architects and builders and the increasing economic wealth of its proprietors. Building C, to the south of the enclosed halls, was in the order of fifty feet long, comparable in size to the smaller buildings at Yeavering. It had had a porch added at its west end and at the east end what looked like a small square annexe may have been a stairwell intended to give access to an upper floor, perhaps a set of private apartments or an agricultural loft: the walls had been reinforced, like those at the royal estate, with external buttresses. This is the apparent apogee, the grand design of the Thirlings estate and on a standard model ought to have been the latest building on the site.

  Unfortunately for this convenient thesis, the radiocarbon dates do not support it. Timbers from all the hall-type structures at Thirlings were dated and their range, from perhaps the beginning of the sixth century to the first quarter of the seventh, does not appear to reflect progress from simple, small and primitive to large and sophisticated. Given the limits of radiocarbon dating techniques the excavators allowed for the possibility that all the buildings on the site were in use at the same time, roughly coinciding with the major structural phases at Ye
avering. But there are two distinct alignments of buildings here: post-built, smaller buildings on a north–south alignment while the halls are broadly constructed east–west; this might be functional or an aspect of change in ownership.*6 There is also a much wider range of construction techniques than we see at Yeavering. I must say, though, that I can easily envisage a span of a hundred years here during which thegnly fortunes waxed and waned with those of the region and its leaders. Whether its inhabitants believed themselves to be British or Anglian, whether they cared either way, we will never know. Just as frustrating, archaeology is only now beginning to recover material evidence in this part of the North for the smaller hamlets and dispersed farms which must have supported the elite.

  In all six halls were constructed at Thirlings, along with many other rectangular post-built structures which must have fulfilled a variety of functions for storage, grain-processing, weaving and overwintering of animals. Some of the halls may have stood at the same time, forming a substantial complex; the earliest may have been adapted for use as barns or accommodation for functionaries and guests. The architectural quality might vary along with the size and neatness of the timbers used, either chronologically or following economic and social fortunes; eventually they were all dismantled and, like Yeavering, the site was probably abandoned later in the seventh century.