Building Anglo-Saxon England

John Blair

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400889907
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

A radical rethinking of the Anglo-Saxon world that draws on the latest archaeological discoveries This beautifully illustrated book draws on the latest archaeological discoveries to present a radical reappraisal of the Anglo-Saxon built environment and its inhabitants. John Blair, one of the world's leading experts on this transformative era in England's early history, explains the origins of towns, manor houses, and castles in a completely new way, and sheds new light on the important functions of buildings and settlements in shaping people's lives during the age of the Venerable Bede and King Alfred. Building Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates how hundreds of recent excavations enable us to grasp for the first time how regionally diverse the built environment of the Anglo-Saxons truly was. Blair identifies a zone of eastern England with access to the North Sea whose economy, prosperity, and timber buildings had more in common with the Low Countries and Scandinavia than the rest of England. The origins of villages and their field systems emerge with a new clarity, as does the royal administrative organization of the kingdom of Mercia, which dominated central England for two centuries.Featuring a wealth of color illustrations throughout, Building Anglo-Saxon England explores how the natural landscape was modified to accommodate human activity, and how many settlements--secular and religious—were laid out with geometrical precision by specialist surveyors. The book also shows how the Anglo-Saxon love of elegant and intricate decoration is reflected in the construction of the living environment, which in some ways was more sophisticated than it would become after the Norman Conquest.

PART I

Contexts

1

Exploring Anglo-Saxon Landscapes

The English landscape, in all its unique variety, has been moulded by every stage of human habitation. Yet it is to the least obvious and least regarded of those stages that it owes some of its most distinctive features, both in broad-brush regional diversity and in local detail.

This book explores that lost world of the Anglo-Saxon built environment and its relationship to the wider natural and man-made environment. It analyses the division of England into culture zones, their fluctuation through time, and the regional distinctiveness of settlements within them. Its sources are mainly archaeological, above all the rich harvest of developer-funded excavations since the 1980s, but its various strands lead outwards from the material to the economic, social, cultural, and conceptual. Its unifying theme is how people behaved within constructed space: the rural space of farms, the ritual space of holy landscapes, the administrative and defensive space of forts and installations, the hierarchical space of great halls and proto-manorial sites, the commercial space of towns. It argues that those various constructed spaces were often both sophisticated and elegant, outcomes of the same distinctive aesthetic culture that has long been celebrated for its small-scale artistic products.

Notwithstanding the many and excellent books that have both ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘settlement’ in their titles, mid- to late Anglo-Saxon settlements—strictly defined—were little studied until recently. Compared with any other period from the late Iron Age onwards, hard evidence for the layout of houses, farmsteads, villages, and complex settlements has been remarkably fragmentary, so that accounts of historical, environmental, agrarian, and linguistic phenomena have tended to patch over the hole in the middle—the settlements themselves—with projections from much later evidence. Nonetheless, the historiographical tradition of exploring the social and topographical contexts of settlements is centuries old and sets the agenda for important parts of this book.

HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, AND PLACE NAMES

Curiosity about English settlement forms, and their relationship to environment and social structure, is nothing new. Famously, the topographer William Harrison was already expressing it in Elizabeth I’s reign:

It is so, that our soyle being devided into champaigne ground and woodlande, the houses of the first lye uniformely buylded in every towne togither, with streetes and lanes; whereas in the woodlande countries … they stande scattered abroad, eache one dwelling in the midst of his owne occupyng.¹

Harrison appreciated the broadly regional nature of this dichotomy and its implied contrast between what might be called the ‘structured’ and the ‘individualistic’ zones of England. Its origins and causes, and the extent to which the more integrated and organised forms of settlement reflect stronger top-down direction and control than the dispersed and unstructured ones, have intrigued many writers since then. The present book confronts that persistent problem from a new angle.

Another long-abiding theme, once thought to go to the heart of early English identity, is concerned less with the form of individual settlements than with the bonds of territorial organization and obligation linking them together. It goes back to what early Victorian scholars (following German ones of the previous generation) defined as the ‘mark theory’: the idea that early Germanic folk groups lived in territories with grazing and other resources held in common.² Shorn of its ethnic overtones, the basic reality of this mode of organization—what I shall call the regio—in most parts of early medieval Britain was recognised afresh, with varied emphases and terminologies, during the second half of the twentieth century, notably by the historical geographer Glanville Jones and the historian Steven Bassett.³ Still helpful is James Campbell’s definition from 1979:

The essence of the argument is that the system of lordship and local government over much, possibly all, of early England resembled, and at least in wide areas, was connected with that of early Wales. The main unit in such a system was an area of varying but substantial size (say, not less than a hundred square miles) centred on a royal vill. To this vill the settlements within its area owed dues and services of some complexity, including those intended to provide for the ruler and his court on regular tours, and to maintain his men, horses and dogs on other occasions. The area centred on the royal vill would often or always have common grazing. The subordinate settlements could vary in the nature of their obligations.⁴

Many of the settlements discussed in this book—at least in the period before 950—will have been located in large, internally diverse territorial entities like this. Characteristic of such territories are the forms of control and exploitation from above that Geoffrey Barrow and Rosamond Faith have termed ‘extensive lordship’:⁵ conservative rather than entrepreneurial, receiving complexes of services and renders rather than rents, and based on established connections between broad ecological zones rather than the dynamic exploitation of confined ones. It was probably only gradually, with the expansion of ecclesiastical bookland from the late seventh century and small-scale secular proprietorship from the mid-tenth, that more intensive structures of lordship and exploitation developed.⁶

Did these successive territorial and land-management frameworks have much impact on the form of the settlements within them? The ‘regio model’ runs some risk of seeming stereotyped, changeless and all-embracing: life cannot have been so uniform, and there must have been significant diversity. In particular, the archaeologically rich zones of the East Midlands, Lincolnshire, and Norfolk are essentially undocumented, and we should not assume that the people whose buildings and possessions we find there lived under these or any other forms of socioeconomic constraint. Also, as we shall see, the notion of a stable ‘royal vill’ at the centre of each territory is archaeologically very problematic. Nonetheless, the ‘regio model’ is an essential context for themes that will be discussed here at length, notably the ‘great hall complexes’ of the seventh century and the constellations of linked functional settlements with -tūn names formed in the eighth.

Touching ultimately on the same range of issues, though from a different starting point, are the approaches that a series of scholars since the 1970s have applied to place names in their landscape contexts. It was above all Margaret Gelling who recognised the potential of these names, hitherto dismissed as ‘trivial’, to help us understand how ordinary Anglo-Saxons viewed the world around them. As Gelling indignantly wrote:

They have much to contribute to linguistic and geographical studies, and they offer marvellous opportunities for imaginative contact with the Anglo-Saxons. They are never ‘trivial’; the wolves of Woolley, the geese of Goosey and the swine of Swinford were matters of life and death to the Anglo-Saxons, and the choice of word to describe the settlement-site is as serious as any statement which our forefathers have bequeathed to us.⁷

In this justly stirring passage, we should pause on ‘the choice of word to describe the settlement-site’. We can be confident that place names describing hills, rivers, and valleys mean what they seem to say; but does a -hām or a -tūn necessarily describe, or even refer to, the village that now bears that name? The presumption that it does, in the absence of other evidence, is one of the few problematic strands in the work of Gelling and some of her followers. Still, Gelling not only showed that the Anglo-Saxons had a fine-tuned sense of the landscape, its vegetation and resources, but also traced the gradual emergence—against this background of names describing the natural world—of new layers more concerned with proprietorship and control.⁸ Cautiously used, some of these names can tell us something about the physical form of settlements.

Gelling’s methodology (and her outstanding qualities as a teacher) inspired a new generation. Two names stand out: Della Hooke, whose meticulous and insightful studies of the West Midlands, drawing on charter-boundary evidence, have recovered whole swathes of the Anglo-Saxon landscape in remarkable detail;⁹ and Ann Cole, whose flair for grasping the geographical forms underlying place-name elements led to an inspiring collaboration with Gelling herself, as well as a study of the landscape as perceived by Anglo-Saxon travellers.¹⁰ Recently, a series of workshops organised by younger scholars, resulting in a remarkable collection of essays called Sense of Place in Anglo-England (2012),¹¹ moved place-name studies beyond landscape and lordship to the dynamics of doing things: the multifarious agrarian, craft, and commercial activities in the landscape indicated by elements such as -wīc, or by ‘functional -tūn’ compounds such as Drayton, Charlton, or Eaton. These new understandings have done much to inspire the present chapter 6.

While some historical geographers have been attracted to the potential of place names, others have mined the evidence of historic maps for settlement forms and their development through time. In the 1970s it was Christopher Taylor who set an agenda for landscape history in his broad-brush but highly stimulating surveys, which did take account of such exiguous archaeological data as were then available.¹² The technique of using the layouts of still-surviving villages to construct hypotheses about settlement change and reorganization during the tenth to thirteenth centuries was taken much further by Brian Roberts,¹³ though his focus on northern England meant that he was almost completely unaided by direct archaeological evidence, or by written evidence before Domesday Book.

No general research on the historic landscape of England could avoid engaging with the dichotomy that William Harrison set out more than four centuries ago. His conception of ‘champaigne ground’, where ‘the houses … lye uniformely buylded in every towne togither’, was given a new lease of life in two magisterial publications by Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell, An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England and Region and Place: A Study of English Rural Settlement.¹⁴ Their outstanding achievement was to present, in various forms and in exquisite detail, the distributions of dispersed an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Source Citation Conventions
• Abbreviations
• Part I: Contexts
• Part II: The First Transformation, circa 600–700
• Part III: Consolidation, circa 700–920
• Part IV: The Second Transformation, 920–1000
• Part V: Beyond Anglo-Saxon Landscapes
• Bibliography
• Illustration Sources and Credits
• Index