Viking Age England
Page 18
Burial customs indicate that Scandinavian settlers apparently assimilated Christian ideas quite rapidly (chapter 10). Scandinavian paganism embraced a broad pantheon of gods, each of which had particular characteristics and might be called upon for specific functions; perhaps the Christian God was one more to be adopted into the fold. At Gosforth pagan and Christian images may have been seen as equivalent by the craftsman, rather than as the triumph of the new over the old; perhaps they were even regarded as aspects of the same theme.
HOGBACKS
A particularly distinctive form of Viking Age funerary monument is the so-called hogback tomb, named after its arched form. Hogbacks are recumbent stone monuments, generally about 1.5m in length. They are basically the shape of a bow-sided building with a ridged roof and curved side walls and are often decorated with architectural features such as shingle roofs, and stylised wattle walls. Over 50 hogbacks are also decorated with end-beasts (plate 23). These are generally bear-like creatures, although wolves or dogs are also known; sometimes they are shown with two legs, sometimes with four; many are clearly muzzled.
The distribution of hogbacks is mainly restricted to northern England and central Scotland, with a few outliers (19). They are concentrated especially in North Yorkshire and Cumbria, with none in the Isle of Man, and only single examples in Wales and Ireland. There are no hogbacks in the Danelaw areas of Lincolnshire and East Anglia and their distribution appears to be restricted to those areas which also have Hiberno-Norse and Norse place-names. Thus hogbacks appear to have developed in those areas which were subject to Hiberno-Norse influence, although they clearly spread east of the Pennines. Their absence from the Isle of Man may be explained simply as a function of the local geology, as the Manx slate would be difficult to cut into substantial three-dimensional forms, being more appropriate to flat slabs. Three Cornish hogbacks from Lanivet, St Tudy and St Buryan demonstrate the long-distance contacts of the Norse. This coastal distribution pattern is also seen around Scotland, emphasizing the coastal nature of much of Norse settlement.
19 Map of hogback tombstones (after Lang 1984)
It is likely that hogbacks are a tenth-century phenomenon; it has been suggested that most were carved within the period 920-70 (Lang 1984). Like most of the Anglo-Scandinavian sculpture in England, therefore, they belong not to the initial phase of Scandinavian colonisation in the ninth century, but to a second wave of Hiberno-Norse immigrants. Their origin has been much debated as they have no clear ancestors, either in Britain or Scandinavia. The best parallels are house-shaped shrines. In Anglo-Saxon England, stone shrines were used to contain or cover the body of a saint, although no ‘shrine-tombs’ are known from the area of hogbacks. Recumbent grave slabs were used to mark important burials and the Viking Age grave slabs excavated from under York Minster have central ridges. Perhaps hogbacks should be seen as three-dimensional extensions of this idea. Certainly they combine a number of cultural elements, including Trelleborg style bow-sided halls, Anglo-Saxon shrines and animal ornament. Some may have formed part of composite monuments with cross shafts at the ends, in the same way that some of the York Minster grave-slabs have end-stones. The so-called Giant’s Grave at Penrith combines a hogback stone with cross shafts in this fashion, although the possibility remains that this is a later rearrangement of the stones. The end-beasts may have originated as animals carved on separate end-stones which have subsequently been combined in a single three-dimensional monument. David Stocker has suggested that the significance of the muzzled bear may have been as the Christian symbol of a mother bear licking her cubs and bringing them to life (Stocker 2000).
Most hogbacks are no longer in their original location and so there are few cases where they can be associated with burials, although in the excavations under York Minster two hogback stones were found over burials. It has also been suggested that the spearhead found in Heysham churchyard may have come from the hogback burial (chapter 10). To the east of the Old Minster, Winchester, there was a group of four graves with limestone covers. One of these, grave 119, was covered with a hogback stone. This was the burial of a man of about 23, buried in a wooden coffin, his head resting on a pillow of flint and limestone; a Roman coin had been placed in the coffin. The hogback carried an Old English inscription along its back: ‘Here lies Gunni, Eorl’s [or the earl’s] fellow’. Subsequently, an inscription in Danish runes has been discovered on a fragment of stone found built into St Maurices’s church tower. Both are likely to have been early eleventh-century memorials, possibly commemorating followers of Knutr (Kjølbye-Biddle and Page 1975).
RUNES
The use of runic inscriptions is uncommon in England but is a feature of the Viking Age sculpture of the Isle of Man (Page 1987; 1999). Runic alphabets were developed by various Germanic and Scandinavian peoples in northern Europe in the first millennium ad. They continued in use into the medieval period but always seem to have been reserved for particular functions, such as formal inscriptions. In England a few Anglo-Saxon crosses, such as those at Collingham (West Yorkshire) and Hackness (North Yorkshire), were inscribed with Old English runes.
Some runes appear to have been endowed with magical properties, and weapons may have been inscribed to give them special powers. The runic script is particularly well suited, however, to being inscribed on wood and stone, the characters being formed of combinations of diagonal and vertical strokes. In some areas of Viking Age Scandinavia it became common practice to erect commemorative rune stones to honour the dead. They sometimes mark the grave but frequently they commemorate the death of someone far from home. Often they were erected at the roadside or at bridging points or meeting places. In Norway today there are some 40 rune stones; in Denmark less than 200; and in Sweden some 3500. The practice was not, however, generally followed in Scandinavian settlements overseas. There are no rune stones from Normandy, none in Iceland, two from the Faroes, and only a handful from Ireland. About half a dozen have been found in Scotland, with similar numbers from Orkney and Shetland.
In Britain the tradition was only developed on the Isle of Man, where the largest collection of runes in the British Isles is to be found inscribed on the stone crosses. The Scandinavians who settled in England did not generally maintain this custom and Viking runic finds are rare. Apart from the Winchester rune stone (above) the only other runic memorial in England was discovered in 1852 during excavation for a warehouse on the south side of St Paul’s Cathedral (plate 36). It is likely that this eleventh-century stone was in its original position marking a grave, as the remains of a skeleton were found immediately to the north of the slab. Along one edge of the stone was the inscription ‘Ginna and Toki had this stone set up’, probably to commemorate a Danish or Swedish follower of Knutr. Ginna may have been his widow and Toki his son; the name of the dead man was perhaps on another slab, never found.
The only other Danish runes from England are casual graffiti: inscriptions on animal bones from eleventh-century butcher’s waste from St Albans, and a comb case from Lincoln. On the other hand, Norse runes continued in use for some time in the north of England. There are runic graffiti from Carlisle Cathedral, Dearham (Cumbria) and Settle (North Yorkshire), and late eleventh and twelfth-century inscriptions on a sundial from Skelton-in-Cleveland, and on a font from Bridekirk (Cumbria). An inscription from Pennington (Cumbria) records the builder and mason of the church in bastardised Norse.
ANGLO-SCANDINAVIAN IDENTITIES
In summary, Viking Age stone sculpture represents the invention of new cultural traditions which developed at the interface between Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Scandinavian peoples. These memorials symbolised identity and power, combining Christian traditions with the needs of the secular aristocracy. In Anglo-Saxon England, monasteries were centres of power and wealth, and the standing crosses would have been recognised as symbols of authority. It was natural, therefore, for the new local elites who came to power as a result of Viking incursions to seek to express their own power through the erect
ion of stone monuments in Scandinavian art styles. Those patrons who commissioned crosses, such as that at Gosforth, supported craftsmen who drew extensively upon local traditions, but added motifs from pagan iconography. It should not be surprising that those areas where former large estates were being broken up into smaller land units under private ownership often coincide with a high density of sculpture. It was in these places where there were new claims to land which required representation in solid stone monuments which invoked the power of the Church, as well as the sword.
Viking Age England was a melting pot of cultural traditions. In all aspects of society, from settlement patterns to industrial production, it has been shown that for over 250 years England was subject to rapid and far-reaching changes. One of the questions posed at the start of this book was to ask how far the Vikings were responsible for this. In many aspects of life they had a catalytic role, but it is rather simplistic just to speak of Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. Over the course of the Viking Age new identities were being forged, and language and customs were each used to define and articulate an Anglo-Scandinavian identity. Whether it was through new place-names and new words, new forms of burial, new building types, or simply new dress fashion accessories, the peoples of Viking Age England were constantly re-inventing themselves. This process continues to the present day where, as the inhabitants of England continue to redefine their relationship with each other and with the peoples of continental Europe and Scandinavia, it is as relevant as ever.
FURTHER READING
1 THE VIKING AGE
Amongst the best general overviews of the Viking Age are:
J. Graham-Campbell (ed) Cultural Atlas of the Viking World (Abingdon 1994)
H. Loyn The Vikings in Britain (Oxford 1994)
E. Roesdahl et al. The Vikings in England (London 1981)
E. Roesdahl The Vikings (London 1991)
P. Sawyer (ed) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings (Oxford 1997)
Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man are outside the scope of this book; for recent surveys of Scandinavian settlement in these areas see:
B.E. Crawford Scandinavian Scotland (Leicester 1987)
W. Davies Wales in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester 1982)
C. Fell et al. (eds.) The Viking Age in the Isle of Man (London 1983)
R.A. Hall Viking Age Archaeology in Britain and Ireland (Princes Risborough 1990)
O. Owen The Sea Road: A Viking Voyage through Scotland (Edinburgh 1999)
J.D. Richards ‘Scandinavian Britain’ in J. Hunter and I. Ralston (eds.) The Archaeology of Britain (London 1999), 194-209
A. Ritchie Viking Scotland (London 1993)
C.E. Batey and J. Graham-Campbell Vikings in Scotland: An Archaeological Survey (Edinburgh 1998)
For issues of definition of Vikings and the Viking Age see:
M.P. Evison ‘All in the genes? Evaluating the biological evidence of contact and migration’ in D. Hadley and J.D. Richards (eds.), 2000, 277-94
C. Fell ‘Old English wicing: a question of semantics’ Proc Brit Acad 72 (1986) 295-316
C. Fell ‘Modern English Viking’ in T. Turville-Petre and M. Gelling (eds.) Studies in Honour of Kenneth Cameron, Leeds Studies in English, New Series 18 (1987) 111-22
D. Hadley ‘ “And they proceeded to plough and to support themselves”: the Scandinavian Settlement of England’, Anglo-Norman Studies 19 (1997) 69-96
D. Hadley and J.D. Richards (eds) Cultures in contact: Scandinavian settlement in England in the ninth and tenth centuries (York 2000)
M. Innes ‘Danelaw identities: ethnicity, regionalism and political allegiance’, in D. Hadley and J.D. Richards (eds.), 2000, 65-88
M. Müller-Wille ‘The political misuse of Scandinavian prehistory in the years 1933-1945’ in E. Roesdahl and P.M. Sørensen (eds) The Waking of Angantyr (Århus 1996) 156-75
B. Myhre ‘The beginning of the Viking Age – some current archaeological problems’ in A. Faulkes and R. Perkins (eds) Viking revaluations (London 1993), 182-204
B. Myrhe ‘The archaeology of the early Viking Age in Norway’ in H.B. Clarke, M. Ní Mhaonaigh and R.Ó. Floinn (eds.) Ireland and Scandinavia in the Early Viking Age (Dublin 1998), 3-36
S. Trafford ‘Ethnicity, migration theory and the historiography of the Scandinavian settlement of England’ in D. Hadley and J.D. Richards (eds.), 2000, 17-39
A. Wawn The Vikings and the Victorians: inventing the old north in nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge 2000)
D.M. Wilson ‘The Viking Age in British literature and history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ in E. Roesdahl and P.M. Sørensen (eds.) The Waking of Angantyr (Århus 1996) 58-71
2 VIKING RAIDS
E. Bakka ‘Some English decorated metal objects found in Norwegian graves’, Arbok for universitetet i Bergen, humanistisk serie, I, 1963
M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle ‘Repton and the Vikings’, Antiquity 66 (1992) 36-51
M.A.S. Blackburn and H. Pagan ‘A revised check-list of coin hoards from the British Isles, c.500-1100’, in M.A.S. Blackburn (ed.), Anglo-Saxon monetary history: essays in memory of Michael Dolley (Leicester 1986) 291-313
N.P. Brooks and J. Graham-Campbell ‘Reflections on the Viking-Age silver hoard from Croydon, Surrey’, in M.A.S. Blackburn (ed.), Anglo-Saxon monetary history: essays in memory of Michael Dolley (Leicester 1986) 91-110
J. Dent ‘Skerne’, Current Archaeology 91 (1984) 251-3
J. Dyer ‘Earthworks of the Danelaw frontier’, in P.J. Fowler (ed.), Archaeology and the landscape (London 1972) 222-36
B.J.N. Edwards ‘Viking silver ingots from Bowes Moor, Yorkshire’, Antiq J 65 (1985) 457-9
J. Graham-Campbell ‘Anglo-Scandinavian equestrian equipment in eleventh-century England’, Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992) 77-89
J. Graham-Campbell (ed) Viking treasure from the north west: the Cuerdale hoard in its context, National Museums and Galleries of Merseyside Occasional Papers 5 (Liverpool 1992)
H. St G. Gray ‘Trial excavations in the so-called “Danish camp” at Warham’, Antiq J 13 (1933) 399-413
S.B.F. Jansson Swedish Vikings in England, the evidence of the rune stones (London 1966)
S.B.F. Jansson Runes in Sweden (Sweden 1990)
S. Keynes ‘The Vikings in England, c.790-1016’, in P. Sawyer (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings (Oxford 1997), 48-82
S. Kruse ‘Ingots and weight units in Viking Age silver hoards’, World Archaeology 20 (1980) 285-301
P.H. Sawyer The Age of the Vikings (London 1971), second edition
W.A. Seaby and P. Woodfield ‘Viking stirrups from England and their background’, Medieval Archaeology 24 (1980) 87-122
D.M. Wilson ‘Some neglected late Anglo-Saxon swords’, Medieval Archaeology 9 (1965) 32-54
3 VIKING COLONISATION
Settlement patterns
D. Hadley ‘Multiple estates and the origins of the manorial structure of the northern Danelaw’, J Hist Geography 22 (1996) 3-15
D. Hadley ‘And they proceeded to plough and to support themselves’, Anglo-Norman Studies 19 (1997) 69-96
G.R.J. Jones ‘Early territorial organization in northern England and its bearing on the Scandinavian settlement’, in A. Small (ed.) The Fourth Viking Congress (Edinburgh 1965), 67-84
T. Unwin ‘Towards a model of Anglo-Scandinavian rural settlement in England’ in D. Hooke (ed.), Anglo-Saxon settlements (Oxford 1988) 77-98
Place-names and linguistic evidence
K. Cameron ‘The Scandinavians in Derbyshire: the place-name evidence’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 2 (1958) 86-118
K. Cameron Scandinavian settlement in the territory of the Five Boroughs: The place-name evidence (Nottingham 1965)
K. Cameron ‘Scandinavian settlement in the territory of the Five Boroughs: the place-name evidence part II: place-names in Thorp’, Medieval Scandinavia 3 (1970) 35-49
K. Cameron ‘Scandinavian settlement in the territory of the Five Boroughs: the place-name
evidence part III: the Grimston-Hybrids’, in P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (eds) England before the Conquest (Cambridge 1971), 147-63
E. Ekwall ‘How long did the Scandinavian language survive in England?’ in N. Bøgholm, A. Brusendorff and C.A. Bodelsen (eds.) A Grammatical Miscellany offerred to Otto Jespersen on his seventieth birthday (London 1930), 17-30
G. Fellows-Jensen ‘Scandinavian personal names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire’, Navnestudier 7 (Copenhagen 1968)
G. Fellows-Jensen ‘Scandinavian settlement names in Yorkshire’, Navnestudier 11 (Copenhagen 1972)
G. Fellows-Jensen ‘The Vikings in England: a review’, Anglo-Saxon England 4 (1975) 181-206
G. Fellows-Jensen Scandinavian settlement names in the East Midlands (Copenhagen 1978)
G. Fellows-Jensen Scandinavian settlement names in the North-West (Copenhagen 1985)
G. Fellows-Jensen ‘Danish place-names and personal names in England: the influence of Cnut?’ in A. Rumble (ed.) The Reign of Cnut (London 1994), 125-40
J. Hines ‘Scandinavian English: a creole in context’, in P. Sture Ureland and G. Broderick (eds) Language Contact in the British Isles (Tübingen 1991), 403-27