Markets in Early Medieval Europe

by Tim Pestell

  Discussion

  The presence of many medieval monasteries on or near Middle Anglo-Saxon ‘productive’ sites is curious and interesting. Of the thirteen sites considered here, five subsequently had a monastic house founded on them or nearby while a sixth, Coddenham, nearly did. Instead, Coddenham and a further three ‘productive’ site locations came to act as endowments for monastic houses. To what extent was this a result of chance or the deliberate policy of such earlier sites being especially selected? Two issues seem particularly important here, topography and continuity.

  Topographical considerations

  The siting of monasteries has most usually been seen in terms of their location on isolated sites or in quiet valleys. In fact, this isolation is increasingly understood to be as much a mental projection on the part of monastic inmates as reflecting a true existence within harsh or liminal settings (Menuge 2000). A brief examination of the wider geography of monastic settlement in medieval East Anglia is required. In the years between 1066 and 1199, seventy-one monasteries, of a wide variety of orders, were founded in the diocese of Norwich. However, from this we may exclude those thirteen ‘alien’ priories which acted essentially as small land endowments for Continental houses. The remaining fifty-eight monasteries show a distribution favouring certain areas, in particular to either side of the clayland central watershed which runs up East Anglia, dividing Norfolk and Suffolk into east and west. Within these areas there were other concentrations and absences, for instance monastic foundation appears to have been retarded in west Suffolk by the presence of Bury St Edmunds Abbey.

  Essentially those areas of more dense monastic foundation relate to prevailing soil conditions. The reason would seem to be not a preference as such for certain soil types but the influence topography had on population density and tenurial control. An ideal foundation endowment was a unified block of land over which the monastic founder had control. Domesday Book shows that land held by free men predominated in certain areas, for instance, in Norfolk their distribution was most strong to the south and east. Sokemen, who owed slightly more services to estates, predominated in areas of greater lordly power. While far more free individuals held land in the east of Norfolk, the west was more bound to a smaller number of single lordship vills – precisely those areas where land of suitable area and tenurial control might make an acceptable or unified foundation endowment.

  This picture is reiterated in Bruce Campbell’s analysis of medieval manorial structure, using the 1316 Nomina Villarum. This record of the names of vills and their lords, arranged by hundred, shows that the complex lordship attested in Domesday was maintained into the early fourteenth century. Only 23 percent of vills were held by a single lord, but of these, many were in the west of the county, and usually of high value (Campbell i986, 227–30). Not only was this the area in which we find many of Norfolk’s medieval monasteries, it is the location of many ‘productive’ sites. While it would be unwise to suggest similar ties of lordship pertained in the 300 years between 800–ii00, as did in the 230 years from i086–i3i6, it is of note that the overlapping pattern of monasteries and ‘productive’ sites extends also to the east of Suffolk.

  Religious continuity

  The second issue arising from our discussion of ‘productive’ sites’ afterlives concerns the number which subsequently came into monastic ownership. With evidence for several sites having had Anglo-Saxon minsters, this ownership may be seen as a process of monastic refoundation, a process which allowed incoming Norman families to reorganise indigenous priestly communities in their own Continental image. Indeed, one of the striking features in East Anglia is just how many monasteries appear to have had some form of an Anglo-Saxon ‘past’, especially in the earlier period of post-Conquest foundation when the larger, better-endowed, houses were established.

  Of the fifty-eight monasteries, seventeen or 29.3 percent had some definite locational importance in the Anglo-Saxon period, a further nine or i5.5 percent a possible earlier importance. Thus, 44.8 percent of these monasteries probably had some former importance suggesting monastic foundations had a locational rationale associated with topography, existing settlement and the tenurial implications of lordship (Pestell forthcoming). Does this mean that we should see in the ‘productive’ site an ecclesiastical origin, attenuated at times but frequently recast as a monastery in the years following the Conquest? The documentary evidence from Burnham and Coddenham, and to a lesser extent Rudham, could be argued to point this way. The problem is that some form of ‘importance’ to a site, for instance in having large quantities of coinage, is not the same as providing evidence for Anglo-Saxon minster communities.

  Other ways to identify ‘productive’ sites as minsters have been proposed, notably through the presence of styli. These writing implements have been found at a number of East Anglian ‘productive’ sites including Bawsey, Brandon, Coddenham, Wormegay and perhaps Burrow Hill, and have frequently been seen as an accoutrement of religious life. No-one can deny the pre-eminent position of the Church in the practice of literacy and that we might expect to find styli most often on religious sites. Unfortunately, this is not the same as saying writing implements always indicate a minster. There is increasing evidence for lay literacy from archaeological sources, in addition to recent reassessments of the documentary evidence. Additionally, many styli are appearing on perfectly normal Anglo-Saxon sites. A stylus metal-detected at Otley in Suffolk came from an area with Ipswich ware but little to suggest a high-status or ‘productive’ site, and still less can be said about the stylus finds from Grimston and Tibenham in Norfolk. The two styli recovered in excavations at Sedgeford, also in Norfolk, derive from a site with no evidence for being anything other than a nascent manor. It may be that these finds indicate various literate and butter-fingered clerics stalking the countryside but if they do, we may well question what they were doing. An obvious answer is carrying out bureaucratic and administrative duties, as likely for the secular elite as the Church. This also does not preclude the laity from being literate themselves and using styli on occasions.

  With some i,300 vills in Norfolk and Suffolk, the high coincidence between the fifty-eight post-Conquest monasteries and handful of ‘productive’ sites is striking and insistently suggests a link between them. One explanation is that many ‘productive’ sites were minsters in which a strand or tradition of religious life continued to be maintained. The role of the Church in trade in the eighth and ninth centuries similarly provides an easy explanation for the artefactual wealth found on ‘productive’ sites. That so many sites do not appear ‘religious’ by the time of Domesday Book need occasion no surprise, as much land appears to have been secularised by the West Saxon kings in the wake of the First Viking Age (Fleming 1985; Dumville i992). Indeed, as Hadley has pointed out, a burgeoning land market operated by the tenth century, in which even the humble bought and sold, contributing to the dismantling and creation of multi-vill territories (Hadley 2000, 158). Some sites, like Coddenham, have good evidence for an ecclesiastical component while others, such as Bawsey, can arguably be inferred. The difficulty is that extrapolating such links on the basis of one or two examples is unhelpful and at worst obscures what is likely to be a far more complex picture. Wormegay and Butley, for instance, have no hard evidence for any ecclesiastical origin in the Middle Anglo-Saxon period, despite religious foundations occurring at each after the Conquest. More seriously, other sites like West Walton and Hindringham at best have an association with other, adjacent, centres. At Congham and Barham, the wealth that was generated by trade in the eighth and ninth centuries appears to have had no successors.

  We have, perhaps, become too obsessed with the idea of identifying and categorising site types. The example of styli illustrates how difficult it is to use finds to make specific identifications of a site’s secular or ecclesiastical character. In the same way, Flixborough has recently been argued to represent a settlement which featured both lay and clerical occupation, possibly in d
ifferent periods of the site’s use (Loveluck 2001). We may see a very similar picture in any number of our other sites. While the Church may frequently have represented a stable locational presence in the landscape and produced documents with vastly greater chances of survival than those of the laity, this should not encourage us simply to accept an ecclesiastical origin to all sites. It was royalty and the secular aristocracy, after all, who patronised the Church, granting it lands, rights and goods. If the Church was of fundamental importance in bringing mechanisms to exploit and run estates more efficiently, we can hardly be surprised if the laity did not also rapidly adopt these tools.

  Finally, the difficulty in tracing the afterlife of several ‘productive’ sites may reflect the fluid nature of trade and redistributive networks themselves. Just as the Fen basin proved to be constantly evolving as sea levels changed and old watercourses silted up or were redirected, so sites like West Walton and Bawsey arguably became re-sited; others like Barham and Congham simply went out of business. To explain the nature and presence of ‘productive’ sites, the influence of topography and soils must, arguably, not be ignored. The fluidity in trading settlements and their survival (or not) owed much to the development of tenurial control. The principal feature of the East Anglian sites’ afterlives is their usual association with larger land units in places which came to have high concentrations of single lordship vills. Their very survival as land units, in a majority of cases, reflects this tenurial importance. This was to result in the continuation, renewal or creation of religious life through monasteries or monastic endowment, but also in two cases, Wormegay and Burgh Castle, in castle building. The challenge in interpreting ‘productive’ sites may not, therefore, be to question whether they are really ‘normal’ or ‘above-average’ sites revealed by metal-detection, but what they can tell us of local settlement hierarchy and why, in a few cases, they failed. The evidence from East Anglia suggests ‘productive’ sites are indeed exceptional and must relate to the origins of land organization and social control. Certainly, their development had a lasting effect on landscape organization beyond the Norman Conquest.

  CHAPTER 12

  Middle Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire: An Emerging Picturex

  Kevin Leahy

  Recent years have seen a revolution in our knowledge of the Early Medieval period in Lincolnshire. An increase in archaeological excavations and the work of metal-detector users has produced large numbers of finds and previously unknown sites.* This paper will look at the overall picture presented by these finds and will then go on to look in detail at one ‘productive’ site and attempt to place it in context.

  The distribution maps (Figs 12.1–12.3) show all Anglo-Saxon and Viking metalwork from Lincolnshire known to the writer as of December 2000. This includes i, i86 metal-detector finds, with additional information from the Lincolnshire County Sites and Monuments Record. A problem inherent in all distribution maps is whether the pattern revealed represents an historical reality or merely concentrations of fieldwork. The figure shows a fairly good coverage, but with some areas where finds are lacking or sparse. These lie along the coastal margins, around the Wash and inland to the south of Lincoln; all are marshland areas where the Domesday Survey recorded a low population (Darby i977, 87–94, figs 34–6). A further gap in the pattern of finds, in the central section of the Wolds, may correspond to an area of woodland at Domesday (ibid., 193, fig. 64). It appears then, that the recorded pattern of metal-detector finds is providing us with a credible distribution of Anglo-Saxon metalwork in Lincolnshire from which we can begin to discuss settlement patterns.

  FIGURE 12.1. Finds of Early Anglo-Saxon metalwork from Lincolnshire. Much material will have come from previously unknown cemeteries but, set against a background of single finds, a hierarchy of cemeteries may be inferred.

  To place the Middle Anglo-Saxon material into its historical context it is necessary to consider the earlier and later Anglo-Saxon finds. The i, i86 recorded items of Anglo-Saxon and Viking type recorded break down as follows:

  Table 12.1. The breakdown of Early Medieval metalwork recorded in Lincolnshire to December 2000.

  The distribution of fifth-to seventh-century finds presents a startling picture (Fig. 12.1). This material is surprisingly common and, in some areas, it appears that every parish (to use a later term) had a cemetery. In addition to the cemeteries, there are many single finds of Early Anglo-Saxon metalwork. Some pieces must represent casual losses, but other finds probably represent small family burial sites. A phenomenon recently observed in Lincolnshire is polyfocal cemeteries where one parish contains a number of small, separate burial places, perhaps again relating to individual family plots.

  Until recently our knowledge of Middle Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire was restricted to a few isolated finds of fine metalwork, * and it came as something of a revelation to find that metalwork of this date is both common and widespread (Fig. 12.2). This suggests a high level of prosperity in the Middle Anglo-Saxon period with small metal objects becoming common.† It might also reflect the homogenisation of the population with ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture no longer being the preserve of one social group.

  The finds suggest that Middle Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire was divided into three zones: a northern zone where finds are common and with some ‘productive’ sites; a south-western zone where Middle AngloSaxon metalwork is also common, but without ‘productive’ sites; and a south-eastern zone where finds are rare. This pattern of finds may be explained in political and geographical terms. The three zones equate to the historic ‘Parts’ of Lincolnshire: the kingdom of Lindsey in the north, Kesteven to the south-west and Holland to the south-east. Lindsey was an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom (Foot i993) and likely to have had a well-developed economy and identity. Indeed, the quantity of Middle Anglo-Saxon metalwork and coins from Lindsey led Mark Blackburn to suggest that it was one of the wealthiest regions of England during the eighth and ninth centuries (Blackburn 1993b, 83). Holland, to the south-east, was largely marshland and carried a low population density at Domesday (Darby 1977, 87–94, figs 34–6). It is interesting that the two recorded finds of Middle Anglo-Saxon metalwork from Holland come from the area where the Fenland Survey found a concentration of Middle Anglo-Saxon sherds (Lane 1993). The absence of ‘productive’ sites in Kesteven may have been due to its heavy soils and higher level of woodland. A lack of political cohesion, on the edge of Mercia, may also have played a part. Comparisons between the zones suggest, therefore, that there were factors which allowed the development of ‘productive’ sites in some areas but not in others.

  FIGURE 12.2. Middle Anglo-Saxon finds from Lincolnshire and imported material of similar date. Roman roads and early trackways are shown as broken lines.

  FIGURE 12.3. Tenth-century and Viking metalwork shown against the pattern of Middle Anglo-Saxon finds. Only earlier Scandinavian objects (Borre and Jelling styles) have been included on the map. The findspots of eighth- and ninth-century metalwork are included toillustrate the changing pattern of settlement.

  Ulmschneider (2000b, 63–5) drew attention to the strong correlation between ‘productive’ sites and lines of communication. Fig. i2.2 draws on the same data as her work, and shows that increasing numbers of finds have reinforced her observation that these rich sites are linked into trade routes. Imported metalwork is most common in Lindsey and is, again, found along lines of communication, one group of findspots running down Caistor High Street, Barton Street and Middlegate, the main north-south routes through Lindsey. A second group runs across the Fen-edge from Welton le Marsh towards Lincoln and, in the south of Lincolnshire, finds of imported metalwork probably mark routes inland through the rivers entering the Wash.

  The ‘productive’ sites appear to have come to an end with Viking settlement after 877 (Leahy and Paterson 2001, 189). Viking and tenth-century Anglo-Saxon metalwork is common in Lincolnshire (Fig. 12.3) and, while it occurs on some of the ‘productive’ sites, finds are too few to suggest that they survived in a
nything other than an attenuated form. This may have been a result of the division of estates among an incoming Danish population, or of more complex social and economic changes.

  While the regional distribution of finds is of great interest, it is important to look at individual sites and place them into their historical and geographical context. A particularly interesting ‘productive’ site lies on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds between the parishes of Melton Ross and Barnetby le Wold. Here, systematic metal-detecting has resulted in the recovery of large quantities of Anglo-Saxon metal- work and coins.* The site lies on major lines of communication, the east-west route through the Lincolnshire Wolds passing close by, to cross the marshes of the Vale of Ancholme at Brigg, their narrowest point. Melton Ross is also on Middlegate Lane, the ancient north-south track leading along the edge of the Wolds to the River Humber at South Ferriby.