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Chapter 20

Post-Roman Times

The 'Saxon Pirates' of the Romano-British period achieve a dubious definition at this time when we are told by Bede, a monk of Jarrow, and other replicative writers that they were not only Saxons, but Angles, Jutes, Frisians and Franks who participated in an invasion of Britain.  Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History during the early eighth century and his work is generally accepted as the first history of the English people but his was the traditional view of his time, garnered from uncorroborated earlier sources like the writings of the British mank Gildas.

It is proper at this point to give warning that the question of the colonisation of Britain by these people has become the subject of one of the latest archaeological controversies.  On one side are ranged the proponents of the traditional view of an overwhelming invasion by Germanic tribes. On the other are those who see the evidence of changes in material culture (burial, village settlement, art-style etc) as indigenous and concomitant with contemporary developments on the Continent. However, one needs to remember that people from various parts of Europe settled in Britain throughout the Roman period as entrepreneurs, economic migrants and retired Roman soldiers/officials so that parts of the province would in time no longer have presented the homogeneous British appearance that they had in pre-Roman times.

Surveys of Y chromosomes in the British Isles suggests that the Anglo-Saxons failed to leave much of a genetic stamp on the UK. It shows that the Britons weren’t pushed to the remote fringes of Scotland and Wales by invading barbarians, they lived where they had always lived - in England and central Ireland. Saxons and the Danes left their mark amongst the people in central and eastern England and mainland Scotland and biological traces of Norwegian invaders show up in the northern British Isles, including Orkney.

Corrobative evidence comes from the post-Roman cemetery at West Heslerton in Yorkshire where the teeth of 24 skeletons were examined for isotope values which are ingrained in teeth by the local environment before the age of twelve.  One individual was thought to have been from Continental Europe i.e. an immigrant, presumably an Anglian. Of the British people, thirteen came from across the Pennines and the rest from the surrounding area.  What is interesting about this report is that there seems to have been some internal movement of the population at that time, folk were more mobile than the traditional view we have of them rooted in their villages. The Vale of Pickering was a well populated and rich agricultural area at that time so that one can understand why it would attract people from elsewhere in the country.

However, it is possible that some outsiders, the Saxons probably, had been present in Britain for many years during the late-Roman period employed by the authorities as mercenaries to guard the east coast and perhaps as security guards by the civitates in the fortified towns. These 'federate' would have been settled on the land and expected to take up arms against their cousins when the pirate ships appeared on the horizon. Roman-period cemeteries with some immigrant burials and grave-goods have been found at Caistor in East Anglia and at York.

The traditional explanation by Bede and other early historians that a revolt by these people heralded their expansion into westerly parts of Britain probably belongs to the realm of myth as does the identification of the immigrants as invaders and the idea that the early ‘kings’ in eastern England were all Germanic war-lords. These extreme beliefs about incomers are analogous to the extravagant notions that people in the twenty-first century have about immigrants

As far as is known the early movement westward of some few ‘'English', as we might call the assorted foreign ethnic groups, seems to have been a peaceful mingling and integrated settlement amongst the indigenous British. Now that the Romano-British economic system had broken down and the villas could no longer operate as commercial, large-scale, agricultural producers, there must have been plenty of surplus land available for prospective peasant farmers to occupy. Perhaps the British landowners shared or rented land with incomers if the practice described as 'hospitalitas' on the Continent was promulgated and practised in Britain. The rule of hospitalitas was imposed on major landowners in what remained of the western Roman Empire after AD418, obliging them to cede part of their land to the Germanic migrants. It is possible that the site at St Martin-de-Mondeville in France (below) is evidence of this practice and in England one might suggest that this was the case in similar places.

On the Continent it is possible to find villages where continuity of settlement extends from the Roman to the post-Roman period. At St Martin-de-Mondeville (Basse-Normandie), a Roman villa gave way in the fourth century to a village with sunken huts (grubenhauser) and halls. Later still it was the site of a medieval village. Excavations elsewhere in France and Belgium produce the same evidence of a change from Roman site to post-Roman settlement.    In England no post-Roman villages have as yet produced earlier evidence.

The most important excavated or partially excavated early post-Roman settlement sites in England are:

Mucking, Essex established on the windy north shore of the Thames estuary on a gravel terrace which was excavated over a number of years in the 1970s and early 1980s in advance of gravel digging. Latest research suggests that it was estabkisdhed as a base for Germanic mercenaries brought across to Britain by the Roman authorities to guard against incursions by either raiders or settlers from across the North Sea. Within the site are two cemeteries that provided the rare opportunity to excavate graves alongside the associated settlement. Mucking contained  190 grubenauser, buildings that on excavation appear as large, shallow holes in the ground, sometimes referred to as sunken-floor buildings or sunken huts and some timber rectangular ‘halls’. Mucking begins in the early fifth century. By the end of the seventh century AD the settlement picture was of dispersed farmsteads and the site had been inhabited for some 250-300 years.

West Stow, Suffolk contained timber halls as well as sunken huts. After the excavation, a number of reconstructed buildings were raised on their original sites and the excavator believes that the grubenhauser were cellared structures rather than sunken-floored buildings so that the simulations include an example of each interpretation. The original settlement lasted from cAD450 to cAD650.

West Heslerton in Yorkshire was a village and cemetery occupied from cAD450 to cAD850.

Catholme, Staffordshire.  An extensive settlement with three building types (sunken-floor huts, rectangular halls, long-houses) dated from the sixth century and later.  A longhouse is an elongated rectangular building which required internal roof supports.

Chalton, Hants was a village on the chalk dating from the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Other significant excavations of similar sites are at Stonea in Cambridgeshire and  Bishopstone in Sussex. 

Apart from these peasant sites, one villa regalis, (royal court) has been identified and fully excavated at Yeavering in Northumbria, consisting of a great hall and a collection of other timber-framed buildings.  Another is known nearby at Milfield and another at Northampton where a mortar-mixer was found suggesting that masonry building was under way. This is a rare find at this time since traditional British building material was timber. The only other mortar-mixer known from the post-Roman period is at Duxford (Cambridgeshire), inviting us to the same conclusion. Further south, excavations at Foxley in Wiltshire and at Cowdery's Down near Basingstoke have produced wooden great halls of the sixth to seventh centuries that may mark the location of similar superior establishments. These so-called ‘royal courts’ were clearly residences of important individuals whom we might identify as the descendents of the civitas leaders of Roman times who, still in positions of power, were adapting themselves to reduced circumstances and were on the way to styling themselves or their descendants as ‘kings’.

Smaller timber-built 'halls' (shrunken longhouses without internal roof supports) and the well-known sunken huts were the main elements in the repertoire of the settlement builders. As suggested above, controversy surrounds the sunken hut because the traditional view derived from excavations like those at Warendorf and Gladbach in Germany is that it was, as its name implies, a pit-dwelling, is challenged by the suggestion that the pit was a cellar under the floor of a rectangular hall. In the former case it has been said that the easily-erected huts could have been the first shelters of newly-arrived immigrant groups.  But, to introduce a personal note, they struck me, as I helped to excavate them at Mucking in the teeth of the biting easterly wind in the Thames estuary and the encroaching gravel-digging machines, that they could only have been used as very temporary and uncomfortable accommodation. On the Continent, the broad consensus is that examples east of the River Weser with hearths were houses and those west of that river were working sheds.

So, at Tilleda, a few kilometres east of the Weser in Germany, the Ottonian palace has examples of both types - large numbers of sunken huts formed an industrial quarter for the production of iron, bronze, leather, pottery, bone objects and cloth that was in use up to the twelfth century while others with hearths and ovens, were dwellings. And there is certainly evidence in England that sunken huts were used for textile production. A sunken hut at Swindon, one of many examples in different parts of the country, contained a whole row of the doughnut-shaped loom-weights that had fallen from an upright loom.

In the settlements there are traces of other domestic industry apart from the weaving which is most often met with. Ironworking is one activity and most settlements seem to have produced their own pottery, although this domestic task is not commonly found on every excavated site. A kiln at Cassington in Oxon is the only production site known, making coarse bag-shaped pots. It seems that other containers apart from pottery were in use. More common in excavation is cinerary ware, probably the ugliest pottery ever made. We  have some evidence of its manufacture in the mid-sixth century when a potter described as the Illington/Lackford potter was distributing his wares in western East Anglia.

Cremation burials are more numerous than inhumations in the early post-Roman cemeteries and grave-goods consist mainly of brooches. At Spong Hill in Norfolk, for example, there were 2400 cremations and only 57 inhumations. Inhumation burials contain more in the way of 'goodies' and the best are found in south-eastern England

Graves have been categorised, in the usual archaeological fashion, into 'warrior-graves', 'female-graves' and 'poor-graves. Outside Kent, most graves are fairly unexciting findwise, containing iron knives, coarse pottery, perhaps a comb and, in a few cases, cast bronze brooches, but all types that so far have been categorised as Anglo-Saxon, a description which is beginning to be seen simply as indicating fashion and not ethnicity. In England almost all the early post-Roman cemeteries were initiated on 'green-field' sites as though actually burying the dead was part of the ‘nouvelle vie’ for most erstwhile Romano-Britons. We don’t have anywhere near enough earlier commonplace Romano-British burials. Where, for example, are the cemeteries outside the walls of many towns?

But on the Continent cemeteries were in use both in the later-Roman and the post-Roman periods.  Examples can be found at Frénouville in Normandy (with late-Roman graves at one end of the site and Merovingian at the other), at Krefeld-Gellop in the Rhineland and at Sezegnin near Geneva.  Apart from these cemeteries, some 40,000 Merovingian (post-Roman) burials have been excavated so far in France alone. On this side of the Channel, cemeteries at Wasperton, Warwickshire, Frilford in Berkshire and Cannington and Henley Wood in Somerset are so far the only documented examples in England of burial-continuity from Romano-British to post-Roman times but other early post-Roman burials on ‘green field’ sites run into several thousand..  

By the sixth century native jewellery workshops can be discerned, the best probably attached to royal households like that of the Kentish and East Anglian kings as represented in the fine burials around Canterbury and the renowned ship-burial at Sutton Hoo. 

Burials of the period, like burials at any period, are the best indicator the archaeologist has of social ranking. A recent find of a 5th to 7th century cemetery at Buckland near Dover is characteristic. It contained about 410 graves of individuals of varying degrees of wealth, the wealthiest containing quantities of gold, silver and gem-encrusted jewellery and swords while the poorest burials were accompanied by bronze jewellery and spears.  Even these last graves do not indicate abject poverty and suggest that they were at least ‘middle class’ in economic terms.

Many of the richest graves in Kent belonged to women. The most splendid was the grave of a 30 year-old woman with a necklace of 175 glass beads, two pendants of silver and crystal, five silver brooches, two inlaid with garnets, a headband of gold thread, and two crystal balls, one enclosed in a silver cage. Influences from the Frankish Rhineland are evident in the glass wine beakers and some of the jewellery and it has been suggested that the female graves represent the burials of women who were wives of immigrant Merovingian Franks.

In northern Europe we can trace the emergence of small kingdoms by identifying royal burials.  Childeric, the Frankish king, who died in 481, was buried at Tournai (Hainaut. Belgium).  His richly furnished warrior grave contained a mass of polychrome jewellery, weapons and royal regalia. In Sweden during the fifth century, centralisation of power is shown by the burial mounds at Uppsala that were probably the resting places of a royal clan. Not far away are the rich cemeteries at Vendel and Valsgarde containing 26 sumptous boat burials. One of them produced a warrior equipped and caprisoned with two swords, harnesses, clasps and a grim iron helmet which is the best match for the helmet found in the Sutton Hoo ship-burial dated to cAD625, more or less contemporary with the Swedish cemetery.

Goods buried inside the Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, ship burial are what we can regard as a representative sample of the royal wealth of a monarch of the period in England. They consist of personal weapons, regalia and household goods and include a number of objects that demonstrate connections with places outside the kingdom: Swedish armour and the helmet, Merovingian coins and silver objects from Egypt and the Byzantine Empire. The fact that these latter objects were circulating in western Europe demonstrates that the little post-Roman kingdoms was not as far off the beaten track as we might think.

Certainly there seems to have been a lively local trade in Europe. The addition of sail to northern European ships around AD500 was an immense improvement in transport. Lately, wics (market-places) have been recognized as trading and manufacturing settlements on both sides of the North Sea and the English Channel. Quentovic (Nord-Pas-de-Calais), Rouen (Haute-Normandie) and Wijk-bij-Duurestede (Netherlands) are three emporia in northern France and on the lower Rhine.  (Wijk = district)

The last is the best excavated and has proved to have been a site of about 12 hectares by the ninth century and consisted of wooden houses spread out along more than half a mile of the bank of the River Rhine. A large dock flanked the stream and the whole site was enclosed by a palisaded earthen wall. It was one of the chief toll stations of the Frankish Empire along this important route and issued sceattas from its mint and dealt with a variety of merchandise including expensive goods from the easterm Mediterranean, glassware and hides and wool from its hinterland. Occupation of the settlement came to an end round about AD863 at the hands of Viking raiders.

In England, some wics (the term used on this side of the Channel to identify trading places at this time) are found outside the decaying or decayed old Roman towns and existed from c650 to c850. Finds inside them include the sceattas that were silver trading coins produced only in wics and emporia from cAD650-c750. Manufacturing evidence is of bone combs, metal and pottery. East of London, at Barking, on a site that was probably a wic, a glass workshop has been discovered. Wics have also been discovered at Fishergate in York, in London at Aldgate west of the City, at Lincoln, Ipswich and at Hamwic (Southampton). Bede described London (presumably one or other or both wics) as 'an emporium visited by many people coming by land or sea' during the early eighth century.’

Excavations of the wic at Fishergate in York produced some evidence of the products and traded goods present on the site and they included Niedermendig lava querns from the Rhineland, Frisian combs from the same part of the world, Rhenish and possible Frankish pottery suggesting a trading link with the wic at the mouth of the Rhine (Dorestad) while craftsman on the site made spindle whorls and loomweights for the burgeoning woollen industry as well as various metal objects.

At Hamwic, on Southampton Water, timber-framed houses and workshops were laid out along gravelled roads with refuse pits in the backyards whence a great many of the finds have come. Trading links are demonstrated by foreign sceattas and continental pottery. Hamwic seems to have come into existence at the beginning of the eighth century probably as a foundation by the Wessex king and has its earliest nucleus inland and not on the waterfront that was only settled when overseas trade began to develop in the place. This development may be related to conclusions of recent research that suggests a shift towards large-scale woollen cloth production in the Middle Saxon period. In Wessex such textiles could have been exported through this market-place. Another considerable export of the period was slaves which normally does not leave any archaeological traces behind. But a pointer to this trade at this time is the story of the English slave-girl Balthild who must have been a lady of much charm and character for she married the Merovingian king Clovis II (AD639-657) and on his death became regent of the kingdom. She died in AD677 greatly respected for her piety and honoured as founder of several monasteries including the house at Chelles on the outskirts of Paris.

While kingdoms were forming and reforming in eastern and central England, in the west more traditional folk were struggling to keep up some semblance of a more ordered Romano-British life. As elsewhere in the country, the economic system had collapsed so that Roman coins no longer circulated and Romano-British markets were no longer in operation no doubt a barter system operated. However, the trade links that brought ships in pursuit of the metals of the West Country were apparently still operating with western France and the Mediterranean and they provided amphorae of wine and classy red pottery to give a veneer of gracious living and civilised continuity to the homesteads of the West.

The best evidence for the continuity, as mentioned above, are the late/post-Roman Christian cemeteries in the West Country like Cannington (mid-C4-late- C7AD) and Henley Wood (C5-C7AD) both in Somerset. Memorial stones and tombstones elsewhere demonstrate the continuation of middle- and upper-class burial tradition and Latin literacy and also provide us with the names of some of the worthies of the West Country. Voteporix, a minor 'king' from the Welsh borders, another called Cadman remembered on a stone in Anglesey and other 'good' people including a doctor, a magistrate, priests and bishops suggest that some semblance of Romano-British society and  Roman culture was surviving.

Post-Roman British homesteads have been difficult to track down in the west but those that are known range in status from a possible small-holding like Gwythian in Cornwall to chieftain or upper-class sites like North and South Cadbury in Somerset, Dinas Powys in south Wales, Bryn Euryn in north Wales, Castle Dore, Chun Castle and Tintagel in Cornwall, Dunadd in Scotland and Amesbury in Wiltshire. Some of the chieftain sites were re-used and refortified Iron Age hillforts like South Cadbury and Chun Castle .

Dating so far has been the chief problem for unless there is some of the imported pottery or a dateable penannular brooch on the site there is not much to go on. The only native pottery recognisable in western Britain is a crude hand-made variety. There is very little of it and the best-known type appears about AD500 and is referred to as grass-marked ware   

Alongside the secular sites and also containing imported Byzantine pottery are a number of ecclesiastical sites that have been identified as monasteries of the Celtic church. The cemetery of one such site has been found at Llandough, South Glamorgan, in which the earliest burials date from the Late-Roman period.

But most of monastic sites, like the later site of Nendrum (Co. Down), are in Ireland, Christian since the fifth century and the source of a culture that was spread by the Celtic missionaries to Northumbria and eastern England and further afield to Europe by the end of the sixth century. In this way the La Tène art style, kept alive in Ireland during the Roman period, was re-introduced into northern Britain in the form of illuminated manuscripts and metalwork where it was blended with the Germanic art-styles derived from the Continent via Kentish craftsmen (Kentish Style II). It found favour in the Northumbrian monastic scriptoria whose artists displayed their preference for non-realistic and abstract forms of decoration in their manuscripts such as the Book of Durrow (later seventh century).  Monastic scriptoria existed because there was no other way of obtaining books for the monastery libraries except by borrowing texts and making copies and augmenting them with extremely artistic decorations.  

Realistic art of the Mediterranean world was re-introduced into southern England in the late sixth century when missionaries despatched by Pope Gregory arrived at the court of the king of Kent in 596. In archaeological terms the event is recorded with the renaissance of masonry construction for building the first post-Roman churches. Two regions in England were involved:  the south-east, almost as a matter of course, and, later, Northumbria, at this time the premier kingdom in England where strenuous attempts were made by the Roman missionaries to outface the Celtic church which was already well dug in there.

It was from their base on the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, granted to St Columba by a Scottish king in AD563, that Irish missionaries had converted northern Britain. As a first step they founded the site of Lindisfarne in Northumbria in AD635 that served as the springboard for the establishment of further Northumbrian Celtic religious houses at Jarrow, Hexham and York. Even after the Celtic church was subsumed into the Roman, Lindisfarne continued as an outstanding centre of Christian activity until AD793 when it was extinguished by the first Viking raid on England.

An example of a Celtic foundation has been excavated in south-western Scotland at Whithorn, a monastery that contained Scotland's earliest church building and was the base for the conversion of southern Scotland. The settlement was first established c450  together with a cemetery that was used almost continuously from that time until the late-medieval period. In the fifth and sixth centuries, Mediterranean and Gaulish pottery on the site emphasize the links with Europe. During the eighth and ninth centuries the church became a fine timber building. Later, the economic links seem to have been with the English kingdom of Northumbria but these declined by the eleventh century and that part of south-western Scotland became a segment of the Irish Sea trade network.

Unlike the timber church at Whithorn, the early English stone churches were very small and were either built by great people on their estates or formed part of monasteries like Jarrow and Monkwearmouth in Northumbria or St Augustine's at Canterbury. Also at Canterbury, on the site of the present cathedral, another early church was recently unearthed with the characteristic features of nave and narthex (entrance hall) to the west and porticus (extension to the nave) to the north.

On the Continent little remains of Merovingian (the name given to the earliest northern  French kingdom) architecture apart from the baptistery of St Jean at Poitiers (Poitou-Charentes) which was begun during the fifth century but perhaps the best sequence of early churches in Europe are the Visigothic ones in Spain which began in the mid-seventh century.

Earliest post-Roman masonry churches were built in Kent after the arrival of the Roman missionary, Augustine, in AD597. He and his followers, who probably included some masons, began the Merovingian-style Benedictine example at Canterbury dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, the church of St Pancras in the same city and perhaps St Andrew in Rochester in cAD604. After that the church of St Mary appeared in Canterbury in cAD620, St Mary in Lyminge in AD633 and St Mary in Reculver in AD669. By this time churches started to spring up elsewhere in the south-east in monastic contexts like St Peter-ad-Murum at Bradwell in Essex built around AD660. Missionary activity in Northumbria by the Roman ecclesiastics Benedict Biscop and Wilfred resulted in the construction of monastic churches at Monkwearmouth in AD675, Hexham and Ripon in the same year and Jarrow and probably at Escomb in County Durham around AD685.

Beginning in the middle of the eighth century, larger basilican churches at Brixworth and Deerhurst and elsewhere were built as 'minsters' where communities of priests could be based to serve the Christians in the surrounding countryside. This was part of a policy of taking Christianity to the ordinary country folk. Several of these churches have since disappeared like that at Wareham in Dorset and Cirencester in Gloucestershire but excavations at the latter place show that the building had a ring-crypt at its eastern end which suggests that the inspiration for some of the later large churches came from Carolingian Germany. Still standing and the best preserved of these minsters is Deerhurst in Gloucestershire

When church-building revived after the Viking scourge had passed, there was a flush of construction during the tenth century by local lords - the definition of a thegn at the time was one who could afford to have a church by his gate. King Alfred led the way with a now-destroyed, centrally-planned, old-fashioned building at Athelney in Somerset, the inspiration for which came from St Germigny-des-Prés built in 808, some eighty years before. But most were much less ambitious although still influenced by continental tradition.

The pre-Romanesque style was universal in Europe and the characteristics of the English version of the style are 'long-and-short' work at angles of the buildings, splayed windows, barrel-vaults over small spans and the use of pilaster strips on exterior walls.  Most of these features can be seen at the late martyrium at Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire and there are good examples of the style at Wing in Buckinghamshire, Worth in Sussex, Earl's Barton in Northants, Barton-on-Humber in Leicestershire, St Benet in Cambridge and Breamore in Hampshire. In all, about 400 churches still stand that have some Saxon work in them. Unfortunately, none are large churches.  (Taylor)

Cathedral churches of Ottonian inspiratrion appeared at Canterbury, at Hereford in 825 Winchester in 980, Worcester in 983, Peterborough in 966 and several other places but none survive today, all victims of the ecclesiastical development fever that Norman prelates suffered from.    

In Germany the Carolingian society that preceded the Ottonian was omniverous in its appetite for foreign influences. It can be seen in the manuscripts and more dramatically in its churches. Charlemagne built his chapel at Aachen c800 in the Byzantine style, modelling it on S. Vitale at Ravenna. Later came Corvey on the Weser with its rather heavy westwerk (towered western end) which gave rise to the Ottonian churches of middle Germany like Mainz and Hildesheim in north Germany, both built in the early eleventh century. In England at the same period, excavations have shown that 'westwerk' churches became the blueprint for cathedral churches at Winchester and Canterbury.

In some places in Britain the construction of local churches was preceded by the erection of a standing cross, either in timber or stone. Presumably it marked the site of the preaching place that almost invariably was in the graveyard. In fact, the graveyard must have been the earliest ‘Christian 'place' in most localities.

An excavation on the island of Ardwall in Dumfries and Galloway perhaps demonstrated a common sequence where a burial ground grew up around an important primary burial or tomb-shrine of a local Christian luminary which was later superseded by a minute rectangular timber building which was itself replaced by a dry-stone chapel. In other places a cross was superseded by a church and taken down and broken up to be incorporated into the fabric of the new church as at Avebury in Wiltshire. Where a church was not built until later times, the cross was left standing. A fine example is the striking pictorial cross at Bewcastle in Northumbria which stands alongside the much later church. A less prestigious timber cross in Stafford was consigned to burial under the floor of the medieval church of St Bertolin.

Some of the standing crosses were works of art, carved with instructional scenes from the Bible and intricate decoration. The Bewcastle cross and the Ruthwell example in Dumfries and Galloway are examples of the best workmanship but at the other end of the spectrum there are some dreadful examples of provincial work mainly in the Germanic/Scandinavian animal style that seem to survive in the provinces until the ninth century. However, a fragment exists at Colerne in Wiltshire, which is of better quality than most and demonstrates that some local carving can be of a higher standard. In some cases the style of carving of the better quality crosses is a blend of motifs from the Mediterranean and germanic animal-art repertoires.

Pictish carved symbol stones in the main are skilfully and artistically crafted. Earlier ones have animal and human figures carved in relief and later ones ornamented crosses. Some carry ogam inscriptions in either one of two celtic languages (Foster). In Ireland the high crosses carved with scenes from the scriptures comprise the finest collection of crosses in Europe and together with the manuscripts and metalwork of the period demonstrate the unity of inspiration amongst artist-craftsmen of the time in that island (de Paor). 

Manuscript illumination ranks as one of the greatest achievement of the period. The Northumbrian golden age of artistic endeavour produced the Book of Durrow in the seventh century with its Irish-inspired interlace, the Lindisfarne Gospels a little later, probably the finest of all, and the Book of Kells in the ninth century with the final flowering of the interlace tradition.

In France, the Merovingian illuminators produced their most impressive work in the eighth century. The scribes were inspired by foreign artists. In the case of the Merovingians, the inspiration probably came from the eastern Mediterranean. Alpha and omega symbols in the Sacramentary of Gelasius and the Gellone Sacramentary from Laon (Picardy) are just two indications of this borrowing. Scribes of the Carolingian period introduced the miniscule (lower case) script, the basis of later bookhand and our own modern type. The illuminations that accompanied it in the manuscripts brought together many influences in a variety of styles of which the most impressive is that seen in the Utrecht Psalter (c820) in the British Museum. 

From about AD850 economies began to thrive. As a result of this, in eastern England an unusually satisfying sequence of pottery types can be detected. Ipswich ware appeared in the eighth century. It was shaped on a slow wheel and made with a hard, sandy, grey-black fabric. By the ninth century it was being turned on a fast wheel, presumably in response to increased demand. Vessels included pitchers, bowls, storage-jars, water-bottles and lamps. Later still, perhaps under the influence of pottery from the Rhineland, a hard, grey pottery was being produced at Thetford, Torksey and Grimston. St Neots ware is similar, made in a purplish-grey fabric with crushed sea-shell filler but the outstanding pottery of the period is Stamford ware, unmatched until post-medieval times. Unlike other pottery in tenth-century England, it was often glazed. The hard, white fabric with yellow, green or orange exterior glaze is unmistakable and examples of it are found as far west as Wiltshire and Bristol. In the south of England some early glazed ware was produced at Winchester, the capital of the Wessex kingdom.

We are gradually learning about industries in middle and later Saxon England.  Some of them were on a considerable scale.  In the estuaries of the Essex rivers, for example, fishing was established and kilometres of posts for fish-weirs have been discovered in the estuary of the Blackwater. It might be that such large-scale production could well have been for the London dried-fish market.  ‘Fish-days’, Fridays, became commonplace in Christian times and the demand for fish recketed and accounts for the extraordinary development of the fishing industry in the post-Roman period.  In another sphere, English woollen cloth and embroidery became renowned throughout Europe.

Evidence for the use of machinery in industrial contexts in later Saxon times is provided by the discovery of water mills developed by the milling and textile trades.  About half a dozen of these had horizontal mill-wheels like those at Tamworth in Staffordshire and in the River Tyne near Corbridge. The latter dates to between the eighth and the tenth centuries AD and is the only multiple mill amongst them and is only rivalled in size by the triple vertical-wheeled mill at Old Windsor that may date up to two hundred years earlier.

Silver pennies appeared in the kingdom of Mercia, the old Roman city of London revived together with other Roman towns but, unfortunately, this rebirth of trading activity coincided with the Viking attacks on England and other parts of western Europe and trade-routes were disrupted and towns sacked. Curiously enough, a by-product of these attacks on England was the appearance of more settlements, defended sites called burhs, enclosed by a ditch and palisaded bank, which were used to defend the borders of Wessex and, later, Mercia.

A catalogue of the Wessex burhs is contained in the 'Burghal Hidage' (Rumble and Hill), a document of Edward the Elder's reign. This lists fortified places and the 'hides' (estates) that provided them with garrisons. Each hide provided one soldier and four were required to man each 5.5 yards of parapet. Some of these burhs were old Roman settlements like Bath (becoming a walled town for the first time) fortified with bank and ditch for the purpose but some, like Cricklade in Wiltshire or Lydford in Devon were newly-founded. Burhs provided a ring of fortresses around the borders of the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia and are a tribute to the energy and determination of the Alfredian dynasty. There were 31 of them with an average area of 32 hectares, far larger than any contemporary fortifications in Europe and their construction must have imposed a considerable strain on the local economies but they proved to be an important spur to the development of urban life in southern and middle England.

The revival of the old Roman towns began all over western Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Only one town seems to have enjoyed uninterrupted prosperity  throughout the earlier period and that was Cologne whose manufactured products continued to be in demand from the germanic farmers. Rhenish glassware and Mayen pottery can be found in a wide radius around the city and as far afield as Scandinavia and England.

In Britain the Romano-British towns had been more or less abandoned when the Roman-style economy collapsed. True to their Mediterranean ancestry, the Romans in their towns had brought together three important elements of western life: administration, religion and trade. After the demise of the town in Britain, these elements were still necessary in the changed society and it has been said that they were dispersed to different centres.  Professor Mick Aston has suggested as an example that in northern Wiltshire, Bedwyn was the site of a royal hall (administration and justice), Marlborough (the market) and Ramsbury (regional minster church).  

A market probably has to be located where trade can be centralised, the minster where the necessary land was donated by a patron but the king’s tun could be placed wherever the king held land since he led a peripatetic life at the time and did not spend very long in one place.  So this theory does not need a central town to operate until government became more centralised and urban life revived in the tenth century.

When the Roman cities stirred again into life, the rotten cores inside the ancient walls were replaced with fresh buildings. Roman streets were supplanted by a network of small lanes as at Trier (Rhineland) or with a planned network like several late-Saxon layouts in Britain as at Winchester. In the north, the Viking kingdom of York established Jorvik as its premier trading settlement and laid the foundations of its later importance as the seat of the archbishopric and as the northern metropolis.

After the defeat of the Vikings by Alfred, the settlement of many of them as peasant farmers in eastern England in the Danelaw and the subsequent re-conquest of England by Edward the Elder, the great period of Saxon England began. Edgar was the first Saxon king to be crowned as king of all-England in 971 and, in the years up to the Norman Conquest of 1066 the country grew prosperous. A market-based economy was established, coins becoming common, found on many excavation sites of the late tenth century and early eleventh century, and long-distance trade that had been pretty subdued during earlier times revived. In the context of burgeoning foreign trade, England's silver coinage was regarded in Europe as a most trustworthy currency.

End of Empire
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The Vikings