by Tim Pestell
FIGURE 4.3. Regression analysis of Type 15 secondary sceattas of ‘Hwiccian’ style, mapped in contours.
We should continue to view any ‘hot-spots’ with caution because the proportions could change as new finds come to light. Provisionally, one can say that they are intriguing, and that they chime in with other evidence. The numbers of single finds of primary porcupines which create the excess proportions are small in the general scale of things. They are important for Hwiccia, but they make up only a very modest proportion of all the primary porcupines which silted up in England. Series U, Types 23b and d, shows a polarized distribution, in the south-east and in the Oxford region, with finds of 23b from Abingdon, Dorchester-on-Thames, and Moulsford (Metcalf 1994, 552). Similarly, the London coins of the secondary phase include a large group of Type 15 etc., in the so-called ‘Hwiccian’ style, which again seem to reflect trade from London to the upper Thames region (ibid., 406). Fig. 4.3 shows the coins in question consistently reaching proportions of over 20 percent in Hwiccia. The same style also occurs in the London (Thames) hoard, and it is noticeable at East Tilbury. The two specimens from Ford, near Old Sarum may or may not be a mini-hoard. They, and the finds from north of London, have been seen as tipping the balance against a Hwiccian mint-attribution. Whatever the location of the mint, the pattern of finds points strongly to the trade route along the Thames. The problem is best assessed by comparing the pattern for Series L in other styles, which is quite different (Fig. 4.4). The explanation could be partly chronological, but the contrast certainly gives pause for thought.
The ‘hot-spots’ are the nearest thing which I can find in the evidence to a different composition of the currency at inland sites, and the best-evidenced for statistical reasons. The context to which they point us is the opposite of what, perhaps, we might have assumed: not rural isolation, but rather the long arm of international trade. That perspective does not rule out the minting of a few sceattas at inland centres of the second rank. The obvious candidates, I suppose, for such attribution would be the various eclectic types which are mostly K-or L-related – the ‘Animal Mask’, ‘Triquetras’, and ‘Celtic Cross’ groups, for example (ibid., 417, 423, and 447). They are so scarce that they would completely fail to pass any statistical test; but in any case they show no signs of clustering. They were carried about over long distances in southern England, as is demonstrated often enough by die-duplicate specimens found far apart.
A game that one can usefully play is to make an imaginary comparison with the eleventh century, when all the coins were mint-signed and when there were inland mints with relatively very tiny outputs. There tend to be very few single finds from those mints, naturally enough, and none from the towns where they were minted (Metcalf 1998a, 191–248). We can try to imagine the possibility of a similar framework of argument in the eighth century. In neither case, however, are there any grounds to suppose that the currency of those little inland mint towns was heavily coloured by the local issues: there are no grounds to postulate rural isolation.
FIGURE 4.4. Regression analysis of Series L sceattas, mapped in contours.
The English monetary economy in the eighth century, it seems to me, was not only integrated regionally, with the wic as the focal point, but also it displayed the free movement of currency between regions (and between kingdoms). The distributional evidence suggests that by the first half of the eighth century it already functioned to create patterns that are remarkably similar to those from the eleventh century. The Aston Rowant hoard, from Oxfordshire, is a useful example of a large sum of money in transit, and which belonged (one imagines) to a wealthy merchant who was familiar with trading along the Thames valley. The hoard contained a lot of primary porcupines, but also sceattas of many other types. Behind the stray losses of single coins, which because they are random provide us with such splendid evidence, there lies big money. The great scale of the inflows of foreign currency is measurable pro rata through die-estimation of the contemporary English issues, and it offers a secure macro-economic perspective of which no historian of eighth-century England should be unaware.
I have tried to show how the evidence of single finds can be used through a version of regression analysis designed to be appropriate when it is unknown where a distribution is starting from. It has the merit that it sums up the totality of the evidence on a regional basis, and throws light on regional variation on a rolling basis all over England, thus permitting us to gain reliable perspectives on the ways in which coins circulated in the inland districts.
Postscript
I am indebted to Mr David Holman, of Sandwich, who has pointed out that an abbey was founded at Folkestone in the later 630s by King Eadbald and his daughter Eanswythe, an aunt of Earcongota. Could it be, he asks, that the tremisses of Loco Sancto arrived there in the context of a family connection between the abbey and that of Faremoutiers, and the close ties between the Kentish royal family and their Frankish contemporaries? Given the probable date of the tremisses, it might be that the context of the use of coinage was the building of the abbey.
CHAPTER 5
The Hinterlands of Three Southern English Emporia: Some Common Themes
Ben Palmer
It has been traditional to study the emporia of England, and their place within the economy and society of the Middle Anglo-Saxon period by looking at, and extrapolating from, the physical evidence from these sites. The approach adopted in this paper is to place the emporia within their geographical and economic contexts by surveying the increasing evidence for contemporary rural sites in receipt of traded goods in their surrounding regions.
Figure 5.1 shows the major emporia or wics in southern England in the Middle Anglo-Saxon period at Ipswich, London (Lundenwic), and Southampton (Hamwic). It is the regions around these three southern emporia that form the basis of this paper. The wics are unusual for the period because they mark the first non-rural settlements of substantial size and with large populations in the post-Roman era. Consequently, they are sometimes regarded as the first towns of the Anglo-Saxon period. The semantics regarding this terminology have been heavily debated and this is not the place to go into it further; the key point to note is that these sites, in the archaeological and historical record of Anglo-Saxon England, represent a distinctly different and new type of settlement.
Since the 1970s, the study of the emporia has been central to the question of Middle Anglo-Saxon trade, and the impact of Richard Hodges’ seminal Dark Age Economics (1989) has led to the development of something of an orthodoxy regarding the position of these sites within the Middle Anglo-Saxon society and economy. In brief, emporia have come to be regarded as an isolated and, ultimately, a failed experiment in the kingdom-building process. They were ‘gateway communities’ between the developed core (Francia) and the underdeveloped periphery (England and Scandinavia) in the Early Medieval world where native raw materials and craft products, the latter themselves produced in the wics, were exchanged for luxury goods from Europe. The emporia were royally created, supplied and controlled and were symbolic of a command economy, existing to provide the elite with a monopoly access to luxury traded goods, and hence to allow royal patronage, which was still very much the language of power (Hodges 1989a; Hodges and Whitehouse 1983; Astill 1985; Coutts 1991, 195). Small, occasional, rural markets may have existed, but they were unimportant to this system as a whole (Hodges and Whitehouse 1983, 101).
FIGURE 5.1. Distribution map of sites in receipt of traded goods, based on Palmer (1998). The numbers refer to sites identified in the text.
The decline and collapse of the emporia in the late eighth and early ninth centuries led to an hiatus of about a hundred years until a different set of royally-created settlement foci appeared. These were the burhs – walled population centres at key points in the West Saxon kingdom, originally developed as part of the defence of Wessex against the Vikings, and then extended as part of the policy of reconquest. Many became towns by Domesday as a result of their market func
tions. It was these royally-created, defended and legislated burhs that brought about the first inland production and trading centres – a development which led the way for the urbanisation and commercialisation of England (Scull 1997, 275).
This ‘Hodgean’ model of development has survived as long as it has partly because of the prevalence of the ‘kings and bishops’ school of Anglo-Saxon history, evident even in the recent Cambridge Medieval History (McKitterick 1995), and partly because it was believed that the archaeological evidence for rural sites of the Middle Anglo-Saxon period was insignificant. Discussion of Middle Anglo-Saxon exchange has therefore centered on the emporia themselves and inevitably Hamwic, as the best excavated and published example, has become something of a type site.
Early evidence for trade and settlement at burh sites that became towns by Domesday indicates that those which succeeded tended to have had several common elements, notably the siting of a seventh-or eighth-century minster on a navigable river or major road, with early evidence of trade, even if only on a small scale (Palmer 1997). This called into question just how much of an hiatus there was between the apparently outward looking command economy of the emporia and the later inland centres represented by the burhs. The latter were, after all, often sited on the very routes which led towards the emporia and along which Bede’s ‘many nations coming by land’ probably arrived (Historia Ecclesiastica, ii, 3).
Several important regional surveys have emerged in recent years which, together with the conference papers in this volume, and from the 1989 ‘Productive’ Sites conference, have pointed to the importance of new trends in research. Notable among these surveys has been the Ipswich Ware Project, currently in preparation by Paul Blinkhorn (see also Blinkhorn 1999), and Katharina Ulmschneider’s work on ‘productive’ sites. The Ipswich Ware Project, a detailed survey and analysis of all known findspots of this first mass-produced domestic pottery of the Middle Anglo-Saxon period, has identified one hinterland of this emporium and has illustrated that not only was the distribution of the ware much wider than was previously suspected but that, as well as being almost ubiquitous within the East Anglian kingdom, it was not restricted merely to ecclesiastical and royal sites outside of that kingdom. Katharina Ulmschneider’s work on ‘productive’ sites has for the first time tied together on a regional scale from Hampshire and Lincolnshire the increasing amount of information available from metal-detecting, pointing to an increasing number of hitherto unrecognised central places, many of which appear to have had some sort of market function (Ulmschneider 2000a).
It is in the spirit of these regional surveys that this paper offers a synthesis of the published evidence for sites in receipt of traded goods in the counties behind the three southern emporia (for a more detailed presentation, see Palmer 1998). Most importantly, the question of rural trade is addressed in order to set the emporia in the context of their surroundings. This has allowed a more regional, and therefore comparative, approach to the question of the emporia, and a multi-artefactual context in which to place the evidence from coin-rich sites discussed at this conference. A number of themes common to the development of the inland regions behind the emporia can now be addressed.
The distribution of rural sites in receipt of traded goods – some general observations
Figure 5.1 shows the distribution of the large number of Middle Anglo-Saxon sites which even a fairly cursory survey will identify as having had access to traded goods. In East Anglia, not all Ipswich ware findspots have been included because, as has already been observed, the ware is ubiquitous within this region; consequently only sites with exceptional concentrations of the pottery or with other imported goods have been included. A comparison with the map of navigable rivers c. 1750 (Fig. 5.2) prepared by Andrew Sherratt (1996), with reference to later prehistoric trade, shows quite markedly the influence of navigable waterways on the Middle Anglo-Saxon distribution.
Thus, the crucial role that navigable rivers, coastline and Roman roads had to play in the movement of traded goods is apparent even before the question is addressed of what sorts of sites received what sorts of goods. These transport routes, many of which follow those of antiquity, had a key part to play in shaping the hinterlands of the emporia.
The influence of ecclesiastical settlements
The next important factor that emerges is the key role apparently played by ecclesiastical centres within this distribution. Care must be taken when handling this evidence as there has been something of a tendency in recent years to regard any particularly material-productive site as ecclesiastical. Nevertheless, in terms of their artefactual assemblages, positions within the landscape and interconnections, ecclesiastical sites and particularly the old minsters, do seem to have played a major part in the shaping of the hinterlands of the emporia.
FIGURE 5.2. Navigable rivers in England before the era of canals (after Sherratt 1996).
For instance, these sites are usually the richest in terms of imports. North Elmham (Fig. 5.1:1), the seat of the posited northern see of the East Anglian kingdom, has produced about 30 percent of the imported sherds of pottery known from Norfolk (Wade-Martins 1980), while excavations at Barking Abbey (Fig. 5.1:2) have unearthed quantities of imported pottery and glass, styli, gold and silver artefacts and eight sceattas (Webster and Backhouse 1991; Redknap 1992). Furthermore, in purely geographical terms, minster communities (founded usually around the late seventh century) often occupy key positions within the distribution map. This is highlighted in the northern see of East Anglia. Burgh Castle (Fig. 5.1:3) and Caistor on Sea (Fig. 5.1:4) represent probable ecclesiastical foundations in receipt of traded goods (Johnson 1983; Rigold and Metcalf 1984; Darling 1993). They were situated on either side of the mouth of the major navigable inlet of the Yare, which was joined by a major east-west Roman road at North Elmham. At the other end of this route, where it joins Roman Ermine Street and the river route to the Wash, is Castor (Fig. 5.1:5), another site productive in imports, which is believed to have been attached to the Middle Anglo-Saxon nunnery of St Kyneburgha (Green et al. 1987). These routes encompass other sites in receipt of traded goods.
It appears that the founders and later heads of some of these minsters were well aware of the trade potential created by the location of their abbeys. For example, Bishop Eorcenwald (later a bishop of London) was instrumental in founding abbeys at Chertsey (Fig. 5.1:6) and Barking in the late seventh century at a time when Lundenwic was starting to expand. Eorcenwald had links with the Kentish royal family and held lands for Barking in Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex (Redknap 1991, 359; Dyson 1980). According to a charter of 672, he managed to gain land for Chertsey to the south of the Thames ‘opposite where the boats tie up’ at the confluence of the Thames and a public road (Whitelock 1955, No. 54; Dyson 1980). This land was probably at Southwark (Fig. 5.1:7) where Watling Street from Kent reaches the Thames, and where two sceattas have been unearthed (Youngs et al. 1986, 142; Youngs et al. 1988, 251). This suggests that both sides of the river were involved in trade and that there may have been a whole series of connections between the Thames riverbank and, especially, ecclesiastical sites in the hinterland. Such arrangements may even represent a precursor to references to bishop’s hagae within the burhs at London and Worcester (Whitelock 1955, Nos 92 and 99).
The emergence of settlement hierarchies
In terms of the artefact assemblages, there seems to be something of a settlement hierarchy emerging, with those sites unusually rich in metalwork and coinage forming the upper tier of a variety of inland sites which, throughout the Middle Anglo-Saxon period, appear to have gained access to a wide range of traded goods. As this conference and its predecessor have illustrated, increased metal-detecting over the last two decades or so has led to the classification of a new kind of site, termed ‘productive’. This may in some ways be slightly misleading as many of these sites have not been excavated and little is known about their context. However, the suggestion that the coin-rich sites in this category
may have fulfilled an inland central place or market function does not appear to be misleading in terms of geographical relationships.
Predictably, some of the richest of these ‘productive’ sites were probably ecclesiastical. A sceatta-rich site on the Isle of Wight (Fig. 5.1:8) was possibly associated with an early minster of St Mary (see Ulmschneider 2000a and this volume). Certainly Tilbury (Fig. 5.1:9), which has now produced well over the originally published eighty-six sceattas (Newman 1999; Blackburn this volume), is associated with a monastic foundation by Cedd. Burrow Hill, Butley in Suffolk (Fig. 5.1:10), has produced several sceattas and Beonna proto-pennies. Given its enclosed, causewayed, construction and finds of styli, imported wares and glass, along with production evidence (Fenwick 1984 and 1985), it may also be an ecclesiastical settlement. Other coin-productive sites, however, do not have evidence suggesting ecclesiastical links and these may have been seasonal inland markets. Coin-find clusters at hillforts around Winchester (Fig. 5.1:11) have been interpreted in this way (Metcalf 1984a, 27 and 41), as have the coin finds from an unexcavated site near Royston (Fig. 5.1:12) (Blackburn and Bonser 1986). Barham near Ipswich (Fig. 5.1:13), however, has produced nearly fifty sceattas and some structural evidence, and the site has thus been claimed as a rural marketplace of more permanent character (Youngs et al. 1984; Newman 1999, 38 and 43; this volume).
