In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  30 The term ‘heptarchy’ belongs to the post-Medieval period; the idea that the Saxons ‘established seven kings’ can be traced as far back as Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum of the early twelfth century.

  31 The Tribal Hidage is a list, drawn up perhaps as early as the seventh or eighth century, which records the tribute owed by subject tribes or smaller kingdoms to an unnamed king, possibly Edwin of Northumbria. Hide: generations of historians have argued over this very difficult term. If the vill is a place – a real piece of land with boundaries, fields, settlements—then the hide (Bede used the term familiarum) was a unit of render from the farms within a vill. But there is no arithmetical equivalent, no standard number of hides in a vill. The hide was a concept used to calculate how much such-and-such a settlement or kingdom owed in tribute or render; it was also used as a shorthand for value, but that value depended, naturally enough, on the productive surplus and wealth of that land.

  32 Known as Æthelræd Unræd: an Anglo-Saxon pun. The whole name translates as ‘Noble-counsel Ill-counsel’.

  33 The Battle of Maldon. English Historical Documents Volume I: c.500–1042, edited by Dorothy Whitelock, 2nd edition, Eyre Methuen, 1979.

  34 Their supreme commander was known, in the late fourth century, by the impressive title of Comes Litoris Saxonici per Britanniam: Count of the Saxon Shore.

  35 Bretwalda; a term which first appears in the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, denoting a king able to wield imperium over all the other kings of Britain. In his Historia Ecclesiatica Bede makes claims for the overlordship of the same kings, but does not use the term.

  36 Beowulf, lines 2649–56, translated by J. R. R. Tolkien, Harper Collins, 2014.

  37 From The Wanderer, translated by K. Crossley-Holland, The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.

  38 Rendered indefensible by the demolition of palisades and gates and the filling in of some ditches.

  39 Light + raDAR is a remote-sensing technology that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser and analysing the reflected light.

  40 Adomnán’s term – though by the late sixth century the name is archaic; Gaul has become Frankia.

  41 E-ware: a form of handmade pottery identified on many Early Medieval sites along both sides of the Atlantic coasts of Britain, often in association with royal or monastic settlements. It is believed to belong to the late sixth to seventh centuries and to have been made somewhere in south-west Francia. The vessels are for domestic use, and may have been the property of merchants; some of the globular forms seem to have held valuable products such as dyes and spices.

  42 Pelagius, born probably in Britain in the late fourth century, was accused of preaching the doctrine of free will and rejecting the idea of original sin, anathema to later church orthodoxy. His teachings seem to have been especially popular in his native land; Gaulish orthodox bishops took it upon themselves to stamp his ‘heresy’ out.

  43 The whirlpool is caused by an underwater chasm nearly seven-hundred-feet deep which runs adjacent to a pinnacle just seventy feet below the surface, across which the yard-high tidal discrepancy must flow.

  44 St Michael the Archangel was a heavenly warrior rather than an earthly martyr, and early visions of him by Pope Gregory and others seem to have occurred on hills. The Benedictine monastery of Mont-Saint-Michel is the most famous of these elevated foundations.

  45 In spite of a great deal of speculation, no one has been able to convincingly demonstrate that it was anything other than an accident caused by reckless driving and sheer bad luck.

  46 Richard Morris is a distinguished polymath, Early Medievalist and church archaeologist, a veteran of the York Minster excavations of the 1970s and former Director of the Council for British Archaeology. He was one of my most inspirational teachers, and a generous patron and consultant in our later work at Christ Church, Spitalfields.

  47 Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals, cited in John Morris, Phillimore, 1980.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Gildas, De Exidio et conquestu Brittaniae, in Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom, Phillimore, 1978.

  50 Augustine’s legacy was more complex; its long-term success can be attributed to the eighth Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore (669–90), and his endorsement by Oswald’s younger brother, King Oswiu, after the Synod of Whitby.

  51 In tenths of nano-Teslas.

  52 A Lifelong Learning community that actively researches Early Medieval Northumbria: www.bernicianstudies.eu.

  53 Bede: Historia Ecclesiastica, III.5, translated by Bertram Colgrave, Oxford Medieval Texts, 1969.

  54 Anglesey is an Old Norse name: ‘the island of the Angles’ (or English); first recorded in 1098. Môn and Man were collectively known in the Early Medieval period as the Mevanian isles.

  55 Hogan: a circular, square or multi-sided wooden or stone dwelling roofed with bark or turf whose joints were and are packed with earth or mud for insulation.

  56 Sections 40–2 which come part-way through the Kentish Chronicle, after Vortigern’s granting of Kent to Hengest.

  57 The smallest administrative division of a province in the Western Roman Empire from the later third century.

  58 Keeper of a small trading post or hostelry where horses and accommodation might also be obtained. The term gave rise to the surname Chapman.

  59 ogham: a twenty-letter alphabet of Old Irish inscriptions formed by carving vertical and diagonal strokes across the corners of memorial stones recording the name of a deceased person. It often accompanies a Latin inscription and may have derived from a direct transliteration of Latin. More than four hundred examples are known from Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Scotland.

  60 Afon: Welsh for river; so River Avon is a pleonasm. Aber in Brythonic means mouth or confluence, the equivalent of Gaelic Inver.

  61 The other island, ironically, is owned by that latter-day hard man, Chief Scout and intrepid adventurer Bear Grylls.

  62 Following King Oswiu’s ruling at the Synod of Whitby in 664—see Chapter Nine. The Irish and British churches disputed Rome’s means of calculating future Easter dates, the correct form of monks’ tonsure and other matters of discipline and liturgy. Wilfrid denied the legitimacy of British or Irish bishops to ordain.

  63 ‘Eddius Stephanus: Life of Wilfrid XXII’, translated by J. F. Webb in The Age of Bede, Penguin Classics, 1983.

  64 Sanctus: holy; sanctior: holier; sanctissimus: holiest.

  65 Chiselled recesses on opposite faces of a stone block into which fit the points of a pair of levered calipers which grip as they lift.

  66 total station theodolite (TST): measures distances and angles very accurately by bouncing a laser off a prism placed on the object or surface to be measured. The data are recorded digitally in three dimensions.

  67 Eccles names: deriving from Latin ecclesia (and surviving in Welsh ‘eglwys’), the name is believed to denote the presence of a late Roman British church; in each case, linguistic rules are applied to determine if the root of the name is indeed ‘ecclesia’ or something similar but unrelated.

  68 Dumfries would return a ‘No’ vote of 66 per cent to 34 per cent, and the Scottish Borders a ‘No’ vote of 67 per cent to 33 per cent.

  69 Confiscations of land by the English crown and its colonisation by English and Scottish settlers, almost all Protestant, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  70 ‘Everted’: to turn inside out.

  71 Crucks were formed from the long curved trunk of a tree split lengthways to make a matching pair. Two pairs formed the gable ends of a timber building.

  72 Ireland boasts more than forty thousand of these sites called, depending on scholastic nomenclature, ringforts, raths or cashels. There are dozens on Inishowen; so many that to represent them on my map would be to give it a dose of the measles.

  73 In the wake of the abolition of customs checks between European Community member state
s as part of the European single market, and the easing of the security situation following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

  74 Harnessing the Tides: the Early Medieval Tide Mills at Nendrum Monastery, Strangford Lough (Northern Ireland Archaeological Monographs) by Thomas McErlean and Norman Crothers, Stationery Office Books, 2007.

  75 Vill; shire: the vill was the fundamental territorial unit of the Anglo-Saxon rural economy. In the north of Britain these have survived as townships; in the south they equate roughly to, but predate, the old church parishes. The vill (tref in Wales; ‘tech’ on the West coast of Scotland) was the customary unit from which services might be rendered; in time, the term vill was applied to the settlement or central place at the heart of its territory, and the name of the vill was applied to the place. Early Medieval shires, unlike the counties with which they have been conflated in the modern period, were groups of vills with an important central place, belonging to a lord of at least the rank of gesith. The villa regia, or royal estate centre, is probably represented by the Anglo-Saxon palaces at Cheddar in Somerset, Rendlesham in Suffolk and Yeavering in Northumberland.

  76 An insight offered by Alex Woolf in his great survey From Pictland to Alba, 789–1070, Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

  77 A brewster is a female brewer, giving rise to a rare female surname; a baxter is a female baker. Other female surnames include Kempster (a wool-comber—as in ‘unkempt hair’) and Webster (a weaver).

  78 The Origins of Newcastle upon Tyne by Robert Fulton Walker, Thorne’s Students’ Bookshop, 1976.

  79 A Z-rod looks like a stylised lightning bolt often with decorated terminal; it is often found inscribed over a double disc (shaped like the link in a bicycle chain). V-rods, shaped as the name suggests, are often found inscribed over crescents.

  80 ‘Bede: Life of Cuthbert XXVII’, translated by J. F. Webb in The Age of Bede, Penguin Classics, 1983.

  81 dene: a north-country word for a small valley, often wooded; the south-west equivalent is combe.

  82 There was an unintentional break between my arrival home and the continuation of the journey—several months, in fact, during which I had to strip down and rebuild the bike’s brakes, have a puncture fixed and then sit on my thumbs as winter’s ice made a long bike journey too perilous.

  83 bastle—a two-storey dwelling in which cattle were byred on the ground floor, with external steps leading to accommodation above. The Old English word botl and French bastille share a similar etymology.

  84 A settlement constructed for retired legionary veterans, given special privileges. Britannia had five: besides York, at London, Lincoln, Colchester and Gloucester.

  85 Via a letter sent to Bishop Mellitus a month after his first injunction to the king.

  86 The other four were: Nottingham, Stamford, Leicester and Derby. They were retaken during the campaigns of Æthelflæd of Mercia and her brother Edward the Elder of Wessex during 916–17, reconquered by King Olaf of York in the 940s and finally recovered a year later by King Edmund.

  87 hundreds: administrative units originating in Anglo-Saxon England and equating to the Welsh cantrefi.

  88 Liudhard may have died shortly after the arrival of Augustine, whose fellow missionaries, according to Bede, first worshipped in the church before being allowed by the king to travel more freely and to restore or build their own churches.

  89 R. J. Cramp, ‘Monastic sites’ in The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, edited by D. M. Wilson, Cambridge University Press, 1976.

  90 Snorri Sturluson, King Harald’s Saga, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, Penguin Books, 1976.

  91 gesiths: the hereditary male warrior elite of Anglo-Saxon England, deriving from words that mean ‘spear’ and ‘shield’. Once proven in battle, gesiths would expect to be rewarded by a gift of land on which to dwell and raise a family and from which to draw render as income.

  92 Bede: Historia Ecclesiastica, II.16, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors.

  93 English Historical Documents Volume I: c.500–1042, edited by Dorothy Whitelock, Eyre Methuen, 1979, 2nd edition.

  94 carr: wet, scrubby land characterised by stunted trees—dwarf birch and willow, etc.—bog, reeds and tussocky grasses; usually low in fertility.

  95 Discovered in a field by a metal detectorist in 2009, it is a hoard of material scavenged from a battlefield, comprising more than seventeen hundred objects and fragments of gold and silver, precious stones, millefiori and cloisonné, weighing a total of less than fifteen pounds. A suggested deposition date between the mid-seventh and eighth centuries may yet be refined by ongoing analysis.

  96 Bede, Historia Ecclesiatica, III.23, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors.

  97 The Laws of Wihtred in English Historical Documents Volume I: c.500 –1042, edited by Dorothy Whitelock, Eyre Methuen, 1979, 2nd edition.

  98 Bede translates Streanæshalch as sinus fari; some historians doubt his ascription, since the name is better translated as ‘a secluded spot used by lovers’. Strensall, near York, is a modern equivalent.

  99 Stephen Leslie, Bruce Whinnet et al., Nature, volume 519, 19 March 2015, 309–33.

  Recommended reading

  This is a list of those books which I have found to be most useful on many travels, mental and physical, through the landscapes of the Dark Ages, and which might be of interest to readers wanting to continue their own journeys of discovery. Some are intrinsically readable; others I use for reference. Each one is a monument in its own right of scholarship and writing. Useful editions of some of the main historical sources are cited in the Notes, pages 433–442.

  LESLIE ALCOCK: Arthur’s Britain, Penguin (1971). There is a 2nd edition of 1989. Still the best overall guide to the archaeology of the Early Medieval period.

  —— Kings and warriors, craftsmen and priests, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (2003). The opposite end of the reductionist spectrum from Arthur’s Britain: encyclopaedic coverage of Northern Britain in the Early Medieval period, but not a narrative read.

  —— ‘By South Cadbury is that Camelot…’ Excavations at Cadbury Castle 1966–1970, Thames and Hudson (1972). Riveting account of how excavation was done in the 1960s

  STEVEN BASSETT (ed.): The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, Leicester University Press (1990 ). An impressive overview by experts in their own regions.

  KEN DARK: Britain and the End of the Roman Empire, History Press (2002). I can’t agree with some of Ken’s conclusions, but it’s a thought-provoking and valuable thesis.

  NANCY EDWARDS: The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland, Routledge (1996). A very useful short summary of the complexities of the Irish material.

  THOMAS CHARLES-EDWARDS: Wales and the Britons 350–1064, Oxford University Press (2014). A hugely impressive and comprehensive scholarly look at the fortunes of the British nations in the Early Medieval period. Fascinating; not bedtime reading.

  JAMES FRASER: From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795, Edinburgh University Press (2009). Sometimes I don’t recognise the North Britain portrayed by Fraser, but it’s a serious account, and current.

  W. G. HOSKINS: The Making of the English Landscape, Book Club Associates (1981). A classic.

  LLOYD and JENNIFER LAING: A Guide to the Dark Age Remains in Britain, Constable (1979). It is now quite out of date and there are a few key omissions; but it’s still the Dark Age traveller’s Baedeker.

  RICHARD MORRIS: Churches in the Landscape, Phoenix Giant (1989). The seminal work: beautifully written and indispensable.

  HYWEL WYN OWEN and RICHARD MORGAN: Dictionary of the Place-names of Wales, Gomer Press (2007). Definitive.

  OLIVER RACKHAM: The History of the Countryside, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2000). The late woodland historian’s splendid take on our landscapes: witty, quirky, intelligent.

  PAULINE STAFFORD (ed.): A Companion to the Early Middle Ages. Britain and Ireland c.500–c.1100, Wiley Blackwell (2013). A collection of authoritative summary articles on all sorts of aspects of soc
iety and narrative history.

  CHARLES THOMAS: The Early Christian Archaeology of North Britain, Oxford University Press (1971). Long out of date and in need of an upgrade; but I find myself going back to it time and time again. Compelling, passionate and insightful.

  VICTOR WATTS, JOHN INSLEY and MARGARET GELLING (eds): The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, Cambridge University Press (2011). The latest edition of this comprehensive guide to place names in England. The standard work of reference if you can’t get at or your area has no coverage by the individual county English Place Name Society volumes.

  DOROTHY WHITELOCK: English Historical Documents Volume I: c.500–1042. 2nd Edition, Eyre Methuen (1979). The definitive collection in English of our earliest history.

  About In the Land of Giants

  DAYS AS DARK AS NIGHT...*

  Save a handful of chroniclers, few voice have survived from the shadowy centuries between the end of Roman Britain (410) and the death of Alfred the Great (899). But Britain’s ‘Dark Ages’ can still be explored through their material remnants: buildings, books, metalwork, and, above all, landscapes.

  Max Adams, best-selling author of The King in the North, sets out to rediscover Britain’s lost Early Medieval past in eight walks, an epic sea voyage and a north–south dash by motorbike. He seeks out the Essex creeks where Saxon warriors made their first landfall; the hilltop Camelot of King Arthur at South Cadbury; the ancestral seat of the ancient Scottish kings of Dál Riata at Dunadd; and the maritime wilderness of the sea-kingdom of Rheged. From London to Sutton Hoo, from Falmouth to Mallaig and from Anglesey to Donegal, his ten journeys offer both individual narratives and a broader portrait of a land of crypt and crannog, fort and fyrd, Saxon and Briton, Pict and Gael.