Chapter 19
Post-Roman Times
By AD300 a region of small farming settlements had developed beyond the north-eastern European Roman border. During the years of the Roman occupation of Gaul a good deal of exchange took place across this frontier. In the region closest to the border it must have been in the nature of organised trade. Further out, beyond a 200 km zone, rich, aristocratic burials of the late-second and early-first century BC contain many Roman goods and suggest a less structured exchange. Such graves have been excavated on the northern European plain and in Scandinavia.
The finest discovery was made in a grave at Hoby on the Danish island of Lolland which contained silver cups and ladle, a bronze situla (bucket), patera (plate) and jug, two bronze-mounted drinking horns, a gold brooch, silver and gold rings, bronze belt fittings and a knife. Similar appreciation of Roman products was common along the Dutch coast where Samian pottery is common in cemeteries. One part of the region, Frisia, had briefly been part of the Roman Empire and the area thereafter was particularly influenced by Roman culture and open to Roman imports.
This pattern of exchange and trade beyond the Roman border resulted in an admiration for the Roman way of life amongst the barbarians which became an important factor in the development of post-Roman continental Europe but not in Britain where the legacy of four hundred years of Roman rule was negligible.
Our understanding of this area is greatly helped by the waterlogged condition of some of the sites which has resulted in the preservation of many perishable articles. A good example of such an excavation is Feddersen Wierde. Wierde is the German word and equivalent to the Dutch word ‘terp’ for an artificial mound on which a coastal settlement was placed. Feddersen Wierde lies on the Weser estuary in north Germany. By the end of the second century AD it had grown into a village of about fifty houses set around a central open place. The lower parts of the wattle-and-daub house walls and posts of fences and enclosures are preserved in the waterlogged archaeological layers. Many of the houses were long-houses divided internally into two halves; one with a hearth serving as a living-room and the other as a byre with stall-spaces for twenty or so cattle. Cattle were the most popular domestic animals with sheep next most common followed by horse, pig and dog. Beside each farmhouse stood a square granary. Barley and oats were the commonest grains while other crops included beans and flax. Smaller buildings served as workshops for a wood-turner, a wheelwright and bronze and iron-workers. One substantial three-aisled building without internal divisions perhaps was used as a meeting hall. Roman imports found in the village included coins, pottery and bronze vessels. The site was abandoned along with other wierden and terpen in the fifth century when coastal flooding made agriculture impossible. Some suggest that this disaster could have been a spur to immigration across the sea to Britain.
Other sites in northern Europe produced evidence of a similar lifestyle. House-plans were like those at Feddersen Wierde. The ubiquitous sunken-floored huts called grubenhutter or grubenhauser, found across Europe from the Ukraine to England, and small 'halls' and long-houses are common and confirm a picture of a landscape peopled with independent peasant farmers, some of them quite prosperous. Where evidence of the nature of the fields has been obtained, they are small and squarish rather like the celtic fields of the Iron Age.
Industrial production outside the Roman borders was usually small-scale, geared to the manufacture of brooches and similar adornments, but weapons and armour were also produced, usually copied from Roman models. Some areas may have concentrated on metallurgy; we have one example from Poland at Lyso Góry where at one place fifty iron-smelting sites have been identified.
Most of the metal finds come from votive hoards particularly in north Germany and Scandinavia. The best known of these objects was found at Gundestrup and is a silver bowl decorated with mounted men, gods and animal figures. This dates to the second century AD. Also known from Scandinavia are ritual war-booty offerings. Notable amongst them are a series of votive boat deposits of which the earliest example is from Hjortspring on the Danish island of Ais. The boat was of sewn-plank construction, 17.7 metres long, probably accommodating 50 or so paddlers and was accompanied by 150 wooden shields, 138 spearheads and 20 coats of mail. It dates from the third century BC. Later in the series and found in the Nydam bog on Jutland, a deposit included, amongst other objects, over a hundred swords inside a clinker-built boat of oak, 23 metres long, 3 metres wide, with planks fixed in position with iron nails. The vessel probably accommodated 30 oarsmen rather than paddlers and belongs to a period some seven hundred years later than the Hjortspring find but earlier than the well-used Sutton Hoo ship which was probably built around 600AD. Evidence of the weapons found at Nydam demonstrates that by this time Roman armourers were having a considerable influence on the design of Germanic armaments. Judging by the finds from a dozen or so similar weapon hoards in Denmark, it is clear that by the early first century AD the Iron Age long sword had been replaced by the Roman gladius or short sword.
There was nothing to oppose the migration into Gaul of a combination of barbarians in 407. The year before, the troops that guarded the Rhine frontier had finally been withdrawn to defend Italy from a similar movement. Only the troops in Britain were available to oppose the barbarians and these were led across the Channel by a general who was keener to set himself up as Emperor in the West with the aid of the Franks, Burgundians and Alemanni than defeat them on the field of battle. However he did not succeed in his ambition. His only accomplishment was to strip Britain of its garrison. Soon afterwards Gaul began to slip out of Roman central control. In AD418 the Roman authorities were forced to grant the Visigoths a kingdom in Aquitaine which they later abandoned in favour of Spain and North Africa and in 443 the Romans settled the Burgundians in Savoy which was afterwards conquered by the Franks in 534.
Other parts of Roman Gaul were gradually nibbled away. The Franks were systematically expanding in the Rhineland while Britons were crossing the Channel to set themselves up in Brittany and give their name to the region. Eventually the north-central part of France became the kingdom of Soissons under the rule of a rebellious Roman general while the area further south was gradually wrested from Roman hands by advances by the Visigoths from the west and the Burgundians, Alemanni and Franks from the east. All this was accomplished by AD470.
The 'Saxon Pirates' of the Romano-British period achieve definition at this time when we are assured by Bede, a monk of Jarrow, that they were not only Saxons, but Angles, Jutes, Frisians and Franks. Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History during the early eighth century and this work is sometimes accepted as the first genuine history of the English people. However, 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 a substantial influx by the English tribes. On the other are those who see the evidence of innovations in material culture (burial, village settlement, art-style etc) as indigenous developments, a view that has been supported by recent studies by geneticists.
However, some of the barbarians, the Saxons certainly, had been present in Britain for some years already during the late-Roman period when they were employed by the authorities as mercenaries to guard the east coast. These 'federate' were settled on the land and expected to take up arms against their cousins when their pirate ships appeared on the horizon. Roman-period cemeteries with Saxon burials and grave-goods have been found at Caistor in East Anglia and at York.
Bede’s traditional explanation written at least one hundred and fifty years later is that a revolt by these people heralded the expansion of the migrants into more westerly parts of Britain. It may be significant that Germanic coastal settlements in north-western Europe come to an end during the climatic deterioration of the fifth century. Did their inhabitants uproot themselves and join their cousins in Britain? Nowadays, the extent and importance of such a migration is downplayed by maritime archaeologists and others who suggest that small numbers that perhaps crossed the North Sea were speedily absorbed into the indigenous population.
The rule of hospitalitas was imposed on major landowners in the western Roman Empire after AD418 obliging them to cede part of their land to the Germanic migrants and it is possible that it happened in Britain if there were such migrants. It is certain that the Romano-British economic system had broken down and the villas could no longer operate as commercial, large-scale, agricultural producers, so there must have been a quantity of surplus land available for the erstwhile workers on the villa estates to take over and establish new communities of their own. After the demise of the Romano-British villas, these erstwhile estate labourers became mixed-farmer peasants and lived in farms grouped together in villages similar to settlements on the Continent where the same thing was happening but on the Continent it is possible to demonstrate continuity of a settlement from the Roman to the post-Roman period. At St Martin-de-Mondeville (Basse-Normandie), for example, a Roman villa gave way in the fourth century to a village of grubenhutter and halls and later was the site of a medieval village. Excavations elsewhere in France and Belgium produce similar evidence of progression on the same spot. In England excavations have not produced any signs of such continuity from Roman to pre-Roman times on the same site: people seemed to have moved away from the crumbling villas.
Some important excavated post-Roman rural sites in Britain include 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. The site included two cemeteries that provided the rare opportunity to excavate graves alongside an associated settlement. Mucking contained 53 post-fast buildings and 200 grubenhutter and dates from the early fifth century when a dense grouping of buildings started to drift northwards during the following two centuries. By the end of the seventh century AD the arrangement had changed to dispersed farmsteads. West Stow, Suffolk contained timber halls as well as grubenhutter. After the excavation a number of reconstructed buildings were built on their original sites. The excavator believes that the grubenhutter were cellared buildings rather than sunken-floored buildings and his simulations include an example of each interpretation. The original settlement dates from cAD450 to cAD650. Heslerton in Yorkshire was a village and cemetery dating from cAD450 to cAD850. Catholme, Staffordshire. An extensive settlement with all three building types (sunken-floor huts, rectangular halls, long-houses) represented which dates from the sixth century and later.Chalton, Hants was a village on the chalk dating from the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Other significant excavations of such sites are at Stonea in Cambridgeshire and Bishopstone in Sussex.
Apart from this selection of peasant sites, one villa regalis, (royal house) has been 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 excavations at Foxley in Wiltshire and at Cowdery's Down near Basingstoke have produced wooden great-halls of the sixth to seventh centuries which may mark the location of similar royal establishments. Comparable British aristocratic or royal settlements have been recognised at Castle Dore in Cornwall, Dinas Powys near Cardiff, Bryn Euryn in North Wales and at Dunadd in Scotland.
Timber-built smaller 'halls' (shrunken longhouses without internal roof supports) and the well-known grubenhutte or 'grub-hut' were the main elements in the repertoire of the English farm-builder. As suggested above, controversy surrounds the grubenhutte because the traditional view 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. At Tilleda in Germany, the Ottonian palace, large numbers of grubenhutter formed an industrial quarter for the production of iron, bronze, leather, pottery, bone objects and cloth. There is also good evidence in England that grubenhutter were used for weaving and, possibly, other industrial purposes. A grubenhaus at Swindon, for example, contained a whole row of doughnut-shaped loom-weights that had fallen from an upright loom.
In the villages there are traces of other domestic industry apart from weaving which is the one most often met with. Ironworking is one activity and some settlements may have produced their own pottery, although the domestic variety is not always a common find on every site. A kiln at Cassington in Oxon is the only production site of this sort known, making coarse bag-shaped pots. It seems that other containers apart from domestic ware were in use. Best known is the cinerary pottery, probably the ugliest ceramics ever made. Some evidence for the commercial production of cinerary pottery comes in the mid-sixth century when a producer described as the Illington/Lackford potter was distributing such monstrosities in western East Anglia.
Cremation burials are more numerous than inhumations in the early 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 grave goods and the best examples are found in south-eastern England. But in Yorkshire a large cemetery has been identified at West Heslerton where study of the teeth of 24 individuals identified one person of Continental origin, 13 from across the Pennines and the rest locals.
Graves have been categorised in the usual archaeological fashion into 'warrior-graves', 'female-graves' and 'poor-graves. In England almost all the early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries were initiated on 'green-field' sites but on the Continent more cemeteries were in use both in the later-Roman and the post-Roman periods. Wasperton, Warwickshire, and Frilford in Berkshire are the only two documented examples in England of cemetery-continuity from Romano-British times to post-Roman . Across the Channel, more examples can be found at Frénouville in Normandy (with late-Roman graves at one end of the site and post-Roman at the other), at Krefeld-Gellop in the Rhineland and at Sezegnin near Geneva. Some 40,000 Merovingian (post-Roman) burials have been excavated so far in France.
By the sixth century jewellery workshops, perhaps set up by Frankish immigrants, can be discerned in England, 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. The burials of the period, like those of any period, are the best indicator the archaeologist has of social ranking. The discovery of a 5th to 7th century pagan cemetery at Buckland near Dover is typical of the south-east. 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. 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 wives of wealthy Merovingian immigrants..
In northern Europe we can trace the emergence of small kingdoms by identifying royal and noble burials in various areas. 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 which 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 c625, more or less contemporary with the Swedish cemetery.
The goods buried inside the Sutton Hoo (Essex) ship are what we can regard as a representative sample of the royal wealth of a minor 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 helmet, Merovingian coins and silver objects from Egypt and the Byzantine Empire. The fact that these latter objects were present in western Europe demonstrates that the little 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 and emporia 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. The last is the best excavated and has proved to have been a site of about 12 hectares in the ninth century built with 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 riverine route and issued sceattas from its mint and dealt with a variety of merchandise including expensive goods from the eastern Mediterranean and glassware and hides and wool from its hinterland. The settlement came to an end round about AD863 at the hands of Viking raiders.
In England, wics are often found outside the decaying or decayed old Roman towns and existed from c650-c850. Finds inside them include the sceattas, the silver 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 and at Hamwic near Southampton. The Venerable 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 on the Anglian wic at Fishergate in York produced some evidence of the products and traded goods present on the site. Niedermendig lava querns from the Rhineland, Frisian combs from the same part of the world, Rhenish and possible Frankish pottery suggest a trading link with the mouth of the Rhine (Duurestede) while craftsman on the site made spindle whorls and loomweights for the woollen industry and 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 which 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 wool production in the Middle Saxon period. In Wessex such wool could have been exported through this 'royal' port. Another considerable export of the period was slaves which does not leave many archaeological traces behind. Interestingly enough in this connection is the story of an 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 people were struggling to keep up some semblance of the traditional Romano-British life-style. 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. Trade links of some sort were in existence with western France and the Byzantine Empire which 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 some form of continuity are the post-Roman Christian cemeteries in the West Country like Cannington (mid-C4-late-C7AD) and Henley Wood (C5-C7AD) both in Somerset. Latin memorial stones and tombstones demonstrate the continuation of burial tradition and also provide us with the names of some of the worthies of the British West: Vorteporix, 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 suggesting that a semblance of traditional Romano-British society was still surviving in this area.
The British homesteads have been difficult to track down but those that are known range in status from a possible peasant site like Gwythian in Cornwall to chieftain sites like Dinas Powys in Wales, Castle Dore and Tintagel in Cornwall, Dunadd in Scotland and Amesbury in Wiltshire. Dating is the chief problem for, unless there is some 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. Some of the chieftain sites were re-used and refortified Iron Age hillforts like South Cadbury in Somerset and Chun Castle in Cornwall. Their occupation by the ruling class of the time is a sad come-down from the town houses and villas their ancestors probably occupied during the Romano-British period.
Alongside the secular sites and also containing imported Mediterranean 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 Christian period.
But most surviving monastic sites, like the site of Sceilig Mhichil (Co. Kerry), are in Ireland, Christian since the fifth century and the source of a christian 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 revived in northern Britain in the form of illuminated manuscripts and metalwork in which it was blended with the animal style favoured by the British and the realistic classical art of the Mediterranean world re-introduced into England in the late sixth century when Roman missionaries despatched by Pope Gregory arrived at the court of the king of Kent. This began the renaissance of masonry building which was considered by the missionaries as proper for churches. Two regions in England were involved. The south-east, almost as a matter of course, since it was closest to Europe 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 which 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 Britain.
An example of a Celtic foundation has been excavated in south-western Scotland at Whithorn, a monastery which 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 overseas links. During the eighth and ninth centuries the church became a fine building constructed not in stone but in the timber that was characteristic of British tradition. 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 church at Whithorn, the pre-Romanesque English stone churches in the north were very small and were either built by great people or formed part of monasteries like Jarrow and Monkwearmouth in Northumbria. In the south, St Augustine's Abbey at Canterbury, was built on a larger scale. 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 (early Frankish kingdom) architecture apart from the baptistery of St Jean at Poitiers (Poitou-Charentes) which was begun during the fifth century. Elsewhere, missionary activity converted the Visigoths in Spain to Christianity and inspired a splendidly creative period both in the art of goldsmithery and metalwork but also in architecture that followed the traditions of Italy and North Africa. The oldest dated church is at San Juan de Bãnos at Cerrato, dating from the mid-seventh century.
The first masonry churches were built in Kent after the arrival of the Roman missionary, Augustine, in AD597. He and his followers, who must have included some masons, began the Benedictine monastery 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 places like St Peter-ad-Murum at Bradwell in Essex built inside the old Roman Saxon Shore fort 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 the local church 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 as 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
By this time, the Carolingian empire was firmly established in Europe, surviving until 987. Perhaps its outstanding achievement in the field of architecture is the Palatine Chapel of Charlemagne at Aachen built between 790 and 805. More than 400 monasteries, 27 new cathedrals and about a hundred royal residences bear witness to the architectural drive of the Carolingian sovereigns.
When church-building revived in England after the Viking scourge had passed, a great deal of it went on in towns but there was a flush of construction by local lords on their estates in the tenth century - 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 church at Athelney in Somerset, the inspiration for which must have come from the eastern Mediterranean by way of the chapel at Aachen. But most were much less ambitious and were influenced by local tradition.
The pre-Romanesque style was the commonest stone-building tradition in Europe and the characteristics of the English version of the style are 'long-and-short' work at angles of the buildings, splayed window openings, barrel-vaults over narrow spans and the use of pilaster strips on exterior walls. There are good examples of the style at Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire and 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 pre-Romanesque work in them. Unfortunately, none are large churches.
In Germany, Carolingian society was omnivorous in its appetite for innovation. It can be seen in the manuscripts and more dramatically in all its churches. .In the later ninth century came Corvey on the Weser with its rather heavy westwerk (towered western end) which gave rise to the Ottonian churches like Mainz in middle Germany and Hildesheim in north Germany, both built in the early eleventh century. In England at the same period, excavations have shown that such churches became the blueprint for cathedral churches at Winchester and Canterbury. Not one example of these survives today.
In some places in Britain the construction of country churches was preceded by the erection of a standing cross, either in timber or stone. Presumably it marked the site of the 'preaching place' which almost invariably was in the graveyard. In fact, in most localities the graveyard must have been the earliest christian 'place'.
An excavation on the island of Ardwall in Dumfries and Galloway demonstrated this sequence where a burial ground grew up around a important primary burial or tomb-shrine 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 was taken down and incorporated into the fabric of the new church as at Avebury in Wiltshire or where a church was not built until modern times the cross was left standing as at Bewcastle in Northumbria. A timber cross in Stafford was buried 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 in Northumbria and the Ruthwell example in Dumfries and Galloway are examples of very fine quality but at the other end of the spectrum there are some dreadful examples of provincial work which are mainly in the abstract animal style that seems to survive in the provinces until the ninth century as at Colerne in Wiltshire. However it should be said that this example is better quality than most. In many cases the style of carving of the better quality crosses is a blend of motifs from the Mediterranean and animal-art repertoires. Pictish carved symbol stones are mainly of high quality. 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 scripts. 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.
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, like the Northumbrians, by foreign artists. In the case of the Merovingians, the inspiration came from the eastern Mediterranean. Alpha and Omega symbols in the Sacramentary of Gelasius and the Gellone Sacramentary from Laon (Picardie) are just one indication 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. 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 Bristol. In the south of England the earliest glazed ware was produced at Winchester, the capital of Wessex.
We are gradually learning about rural industries in middle and later pre-Norman England. Some of them were on a considerable scale. In the estuaries of the Essex rivers, for example, fishing was established and miles of posts for fish-weirs have been discovered in the estuary of the Blackwater. It is probable that such large-scale production was for the London dried-fish market. Evidence for the use of machinery in industrial contexts in England is provided by the discovery of water mills used for grain milling and iron processing. 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 was only rivalled in size by the triple vertical-wheeled mill at Old Windsor which may date up to two hundred years earlier. The English woollen cloth and embroidery were renowned and trade was burgeoning. England was a prize that a Duke of Normandy was sure to covet.
The silver penny appeared, 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 towns, defended sites called burhs, enclosed by a ditch and palisaded bank, which were used to defend the borders of the kingdom of Wessex and, later, Mercia. A list of the Wessex burhs is contained in the 'Burghal Hidage', a document of Edward the Elder's reign. This document is a list of 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 which were fortified with bank and ditch for the purpose but some, like Cricklade in Wiltshire or Lydford in Devon were newly-founded. The burhs provided a ring of fortresses around the borders of the kingdoms of Wessex and , later, Mercia and are a tribute to the energy and determination of the Alfredian dynasty. There were 33 of them in Wessex 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.
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. 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 as in several late-Saxon layouts in Britain like Winchester.
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 the later tenth century revived. England's silver coinage was regarded everywhere in Europe as a most trustworthy currency.
In France the Vikings settled in Normandy and, as in England, were swiftly integrated into the contemporary culture. The duchy of Normandy became the most powerful in France, able in 1066 to extend its frontiers to include conquered England.
| Religion, Towns and Frontiers |
 |
| main page |
 |
| The Vikings |
 |
