19 - A Search for Identity

The fifth century is a time of some difficulty for the historian. Together with the following century he refers to it as the 'Dark Ages' because of the paucity of documents. But to the archaeologist it is not so gloomy because archaeological evidence remains is the main tool for interpreting the period.

There is still some debate about the size of the immigration of 'Anglo-Saxons' across the North Sea during the fifth and sixth centuries. It is useful to employ the term 'English' for these people since they seem to have included Franks, Jutes and Swedes as well as Angles and Saxons amongst their numbers.

From the fourth century onwards the Roman authorities settled a number of them in the eastern part of the provinces as federates who helped to repel raids by their cousins on the coast and after the end of Roman administration this system was continued by the British authorities who seem also to have welcomed the newcomers as settlers on their estates.

Two sites that seem to support this last suggestion are at Mucking in Essex and West Stow in Suffolk where immigrant villages have been excavated which were established on villa estates. At Mucking almost all the dwellings were sunken-floored huts similar to many on the continent. On excavation these structures are found to have a shallow pit which was surrounded by the walls of the building. Whether there was a floor over the pit to convert it into a sort of cellar is still a matter of debate. At Mucking also was a timber-framed building which was probably thatched and walled with wattle-and-daub. It is referred to as a hall and halls and sunken-floored huts are the two characteristic dwellings of the pagan English period.

At West Stow near Bury St Edmunds another immigrant pagan English village dates, like Mucking, to the early fifth century. Here there were two halls with sunken-floored huts and animal pens nearby. Further north in Norfolk there were one or more communities, so far unlocated, totalling some 550 to 850 people, who buried their dead in a cemetery at Spong Hill in over 2000 burial urns during the fifth and sixth centuries.

Outside eastern Britain, people must have tried to carry on the Romano-British way of life that they had been accustomed to over the previous three hundred and fifty years but the withdrawal of the Roman army and administration would have resulted in a less secure society and economy. Although the towns were still inhabited there is little development during the fifth century. On the villa estates, excavations on the main residences demonstrate an abandonment at the end of the fourth and early fifth centuries. Clearly, the resources for keeping the houses up were in most cases no longer available and so villa owners moved out to more modest accommodation and the 'big house' in several instances was turned over to agricultural uses.

Changes were taking place on the western coast with some form of immigration taking place from Ireland. The evidence is not overwhelming but we have grass-marked pottery which is taken as evidence of Irish settlement in Cornwall and memorial stones to individuals inscribed in the Irish Ogham script in the area of the Devon/Cornwall border, as well as in Wales and the Isle of Man. Inscriptions in Latin recording Irish personal names and Irish place-name elements are also found and in southern and southern Wales a settlement of the later fourth-century has been accepted with an eastern spread during the late-fifth century AD.

Further north, in North Wales and in Galloway in south-western Scotland similar settlement has been identified by people from northern Ireland known as the Scotti who gave both their name and the celtic language to Scotland. The indigenous people of Scotland, the Picts, ruled until the ninth century AD when an union took place between them and the Scotti. Like the English, the Scotti were sufficiently dominant to colour the character of the country in which they settled.

It is difficult to estimate the number of English immigrants into Roman Britain. Attempts have been made by using the numbers of burials in cemeteries like Spong Hill but the difficulty is that we cannot be sure how many of the graves are those of English and how many of British women who were taken as wives. If the English arrived as immigrant mercenaries or labourers they would not necessarily have brought their families with them. But the jewellery buried in the female graves would have been in the English style dictated by the menfolk and the same would go for the cinerary urns which must be some of the ugliest pottery ever produced.

Most of the early pagan villages had long lives. Mucking lasted from the fifth century through to the eighth century AD. West Stow had a similar life-span. And, as time went by, English villages appeared further east. At Catholme in the Trent valley the settlement was founded during the sixth century and disappeared some time during the tenth. Some 58 halls were uncovered in the excavation as well as six sunken-floored huts and a new type of large hall which we refer to as boat-shaped since this is how its bowed sides look like in plan. Spinning whorls, loom weights and other textile equipment was found in the huts as they were at Mucking and West Stow.

Chalton in Hampshire existed from the fifth century to the seventh. Some of the 52 huts were built with plank walls ands some were of a considerable size, 11.0m by 5.7m wide, and supported by external oblique supports (raking struts). Internal hearths were found and the association of large with small buildings suggests that the settlement consisted of a number of farms with celtic fields surrounding them.

Thirlings in Northumberland, a village of the sixth and seventh centuries, had houses built of horizontal planks rather than vertical as at Chalton but the raking struts were similar. Occasionally we find solitary farmsteads rather than villages. A rather grand example is at Cowdery Down in Hampshire with an enclosure divided across the middle. Perhaps the enclosed site at Stonea Grange in the Fen District was similar.

Evidence of farming activities comes from various sites. At Bishopstone in Sussex is an example with the farmers growing barley and raising sheep, cattle, pig and horse and this is fairly typical.

Early society seems to have been divided into peasants and aristocratic warriors but by the middle of the sixth century craftsmen are operating. Jewellers seem to have been important, judging by the objects found in the graves, catering for a range of customers from the wealthy down to the peasantry. But pottery was still made by hand in a domestic workplace.

By the end of the sixth century, there seems to be a different motive for the movement towards the west. No longer was it a colonising movement, accomplished relatively peacefully, in which small groups of individuals are involved (to judge by the numbers of small pagan English cemeteries further west), for by this time these immigrants must have established themselves in permanent homes in the east, but a movement of conquest led by ambitious warlords like Ceawlin, ruler of Wessex, whose aims were to carve out territories over which they could set themselves up as kings. This was already beginning to happen in the east so that kingdoms like Kent, Northumbria and East Anglia were fairly established by the seventh century.

Also in the seventh century, settlements peculiar to the period were being set up in the form of trading places known as wics or emporia which were located in many cases just outside the ancient Roman towns in order to take advantage of their widely-known locations and, in some cases like London, because the ancient towns already occupied the best sites for trading purposes.

Londonwic, to the west of the City of London (Roman London), occupied the area of modern Aldwych. Fisherwic lay south of the River Foss and the ancient Roman city of York. Hamwic was on the confluence of the Rivers Test and Itchen in Hampshire and there are a number of other examples in England. On the Continent the trading partners of the English wics have been located on the north coasts of France and the Low Countries.

Hamwic has been most extensively excavated and it was found to have been laid out along gravelled streets lined with timber-framed houses with outbuildings and rubbish pits which preserved most of the important archaeological evidence about diet, trading activity, foreign contacts and standard of living. It seems that the settlement bought in its food rather than produce it for itself and maintained itself as an entrepôt trading mainly with the Frisian (Dutch) merchants.

We learn most about the way of life of the aristocracy from the ship burial of an East Anglian king in the royal cemetery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. This was Redwald who died in AD624/5. The burial chamber in the ship contained a good many grave-goods including weaponry, royal regalia and domestic equipment of the royal household. A strange ritual accompanied the burials of the royal personages on this hilltop. Inhumations were placed on the perimeter of the royal mounds containing the almost decayed remains of individuals who had suffered torture and/or a traumatic death.

An unusual inhumation is described as that of 'a prince' with his horse in an adjoining grave. It contained weapons and a variety of objects not found in the other burials. The arrangement is similar to another 'horse and rider' burial on an air base in Suffolk where the grave-goods included a sword, the remains of a shield and a bucket. Remains of the bridle and horse harness are the best so far found in Saxon Britain. Estimation of the size of the horse is 16 hands. Dates for the cemetery in which this burial was found fall within the second half of the sixth century, earlier than the Sutton Hoo burial ship finds.

At Sutton Hoo a fine helmet was included in the burial, one of only four discovered in this country. The latest is an iron example in a grave at Wollaston in Northamptonshire with a boar's head crest mounted on it. It was part of a grave deposit which included, beside the poorly-preserved skeleton, an iron sword in a wood and leather scabbard with a horn grip and guard, a small iron knife, iron buckles and a bronze hanging-bowl with a single escutcheon (single mount) decorated with millefiori glass. The burial probably dates from the second half of the sixth century.

One royal site has been excavated at Yeavering in Northumberland that was one of the several royal palaces or villae regalis (sing. villa regalis) belonging to the kings of Northumbria. In those days the rulers were peripatetic, moving from one of their estates to another around their kingdoms. At Yeavering a number of timber halls were discovered together with a 'grandstand' and a building that may have been in turn pagan temple and christian chapel. There are probably a number of these royal sites to be found in each of the English kingdoms.

The Britons in the western part of Britain continued to live in towns but the villas were abandoned and some of the leaders of society turned themselves into war-lords and took up residence in strongholds like Iron Age hillforts. Excavations at South Cadbury and other hilltop refuges all over the West Country and Wales have demonstrated this as a facet of a British Christian society that is not well understood by archaeologists.

Various memorial stones record leading members of this society that still strove to maintain a sub- Roman way of life with the use of Latin, imported Roman pottery and wine from the Mediterranean. Places like Bantham on the south coast of Devon probably operated as the equivalent of the wics further east.

And Christianity was thought to be one of the marks of the civilised Roman and the religion persisted and was strengthened in the west by the despatch of missionaries to Ireland during the fifth century AD. Amongst these was Patrick who laid the foundations of a christian country which welcomed monasticism from the Mediterranean and played an important part in the establishment of a Celtic church in the west of the British Isles.

Monasticism, imported from the eastern Mediterranean, was established in Ireland on a considerable number of sites which can still be seen above ground. In Scotland, Whithorn is an example that was later rebuilt as a Benedictine monastery. In England such sites have been difficult to identify except by documentary evidence but a recent discovery is the cemetery of a monastery at Llandough in South Glamorgan in which several Late Roman Christian burials have been found which suggests that the monastery may have developed out of a late-Roman christian centre. Continuity of this sort is very difficult to establish in Britain although comparatively common in Europe.

Christianity also seems to have survived in a weakened form amongst the pagan English in eastern Britain. It was to the court of one of the kingdoms in 597AD, Kent, that the Pope sent the mission of St Augustine. The King's Frankish wife was a christian and due to her efforts the saint was successful in winning over the aristocracy and later extending the work of his followers to other royal courts of the English kingdoms.

The English kingdom of Northumbria first received Christianity from Irish missionaries during the seventh century but the most important early christian figure there was the Roman Christian, Benedict Biscop, who was responsible for founding several monasteries.

Churches began to be built in Kent and Essex after the arrival of Augustine and he was responsible for founding a monastery at Canterbury. Most early churches were very small, some re-using stone from decaying Roman buildings, a source of building materials right through the Saxon period.

It was the growing wealth of the Benedictine monasteries, introduced by St Augustine, from gifts and donations from aristocratic patrons, that attracted the cupidity of the Vikings, a mixture of Scandinavian ethnic groups, during the eighth century and sparked off their raids on the British and Irish coasts.

The Norwegians were mainly responsible for the attacks on Scotland and Ireland and the Danes for those on England. These attacks led on in the ninth century to the arrival of Danish armies who scoured the English countryside, reducing the English kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia (in the English midlands) to subservience, but meeting their match in Alfred, king of Wessex, in AD878 at the battle of Ethandune. Part of the agreement the Danes made with him was that they should settle in eastern and northern England (the Danelaw) and leave Wessex.

Wessex became the strongest of the English kingdoms, defending itself against further Viking attacks with a system of defended settlements (burhs) placed around the perimeter of the kingdom and around reconquered Mercia.

Later Wessex kings reconquered England, leaving the settled Vikings to be assimilated, and it was a Wessex king Edgar who was crowned as the first king of all-England at Bath in AD973.

By the eighth century the English kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex had become firmly established and the manorial system by which the coutryside was governed by local lords ruling over their estates. Manorial centres have been discovered at Raunds in Northamptonshire, North Elmham in Norfolk, Wicken Bonhunt in Essex and Flixborough in Lincolnshire. Recent excavations at Flixborough show that the site existed from the seventh to the tenth century when the area was taken over by the Vikings.

Flixborough shows itself to be a wealthy site with fine pottery, craftworking and a range of food debris. Imported goods include Seine Valley pottery from France, wheel-thrown ware from Belgium and France, Bardorf ware from Germany, glassware and lava quernstones from the Rhineland and silver coinage. The largest collection of Middle-Saxon Ipswich yet found was discovered in the excavations. Domestic industry included iron and other metalworking, textiles, carpentry, leatherwoking and boneworking.

The most complete collection of food debris gives a very full picture of the Anglo-Saxon rural diet. Cereals, cattle, sheep, pigs, chicken and geese bones were found together with remains of wildfowl on the Trent flood-plain. Evidence for hunting included bones of roe deer, hare, and woodcock. Oysters were collected while fishbones which included whale and dolphin demonstrate that off-shore and coastal fishing was practised.

Between five and seven large domestic hall buildings stood on the site at any one time. Altogether Flixborough shows that the great country estates were established in England long before the Norman Conquest.

The last years of the Saxon period was a time of great achievement by the English. English coinage was the major trading currency of northern Europe, great churches like Winchester were created although none, unfortunately, remain to us today, the English economy thrived, English cloth and embroidery like the Bayeaux Tapestry was renowned throughout Europe and the structure and pattern of English parishes and settlement that remains to us today was laid down.

18 - End of Empire
Contents
20 - The Medieval Period