Everyday Life in Viking-Age Towns: Social Approaches to Towns in England and Ireland, c. 800-1100

242 Pages·2013·16.149 MB·English

by  Dawn M. Hadley, Letty ten Harkel (eds.)

EVERYDAY LIFE IN VIKING-AGE TOWNS
Social approaches to towns in
England and Ireland, . 800–1100
c
edited by
D. M. Hadley and Letty ten Harkel
OXBOW BOOKS
Oxford and Oakville
Published by
Oxbow Books, Oxford, UK
© Oxbow Books and the individual authors, 2013
ISBN 978-1-84217-532-3
Front cover: An artist’s impression of Viking-Age Lincoln
at dawn (by Marcus Abbott)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Everyday life in Viking-age towns : social approaches to towns in England and Ireland, c.
800-1100 / [edited by] D. M. Hadley and Letty ten Harkel.
1 online resource.
Includes bibliographical references.
Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource
not viewed.
ISBN 978-1-78297-009-5 (epub) -- ISBN 978-1-78297-010-1 (mobi (Kindle)) -- ISBN
978-1-78297-011-8 ( pdf) -- ISBN 978-1-84217-532-3 1. City and town life--England--
History--To 1500. 2. City and town life--Ireland--History--To 1500. 3. Sociology, Urban-
-England--History--To 1500. 4. Sociology, Urban--Ireland--History--To 1500. 5. Great
Britain--History--To 1066. 6. Ireland--History--To 1172. 7. Urban economics--History--
To 1500. I. Hadley, D. M. (Dawn M.), 1967- II. Ten Harkel, Letty.
DA152.2
307.760942--dc23
2013026325
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Berforts Information Press Ltd, Eynsham
CONTENTS
Locations of places referred to in the volume drawn by Letty ten Harkel iv
Preface D. M. Hadley and Letty ten Harkel vii
Section 1: Introductions
1 Living in Viking-Age towns 1
David Griffiths
2 Towns and identities in Viking England 14
Gareth Williams
3 Viking Dublin: enmities, alliances and the cold gleam of silver 35
Emer Purcell and John Sheehan
Section 2: Constructing and experiencing urban landscapes
4 Beyond longphuirt? Life and death in early Viking-Age Ireland 61
Stephen H. Harrison
5 From country to town: social transitions in Viking-Age housing 73
Rebecca Boyd
6 Childhood in Viking and Hiberno-Scandinavian Dublin, 800–1100 86
Deirdre McAlister
7 Whither the warrior in Viking-Age towns? 103
D. M. Hadley
8 Aristocrats, burghers and their markets: patterns in the foundation
of Lincoln’s urban churches 119
David Stocker
Section 3: Urban trades and activities
9 More than just meat: animals in Viking-Age towns 144
Kristopher Poole
10 No pots please, we’re Vikings: pottery in the southern Danelaw, 850–1000 157
Paul Blinkhorn
11 Of towns and trinkets: metalworking and metal dress-accessories
in Viking-Age Lincoln 172
Letty ten Harkel
12 Making a good comb: mercantile identity in 9th- to 11th-century England 193
Steven P. Ashby
13 Craft and handiwork: wood, antler and bone as an everyday material
in Viking-Age Waterford and Cork 209
Maurice F. Hurley

Locations of places referred to in the volume (drawn by Letty ten Harkel).

PREFACE
D. M. Hadley and Letty ten Harkel
The study of early medieval towns has frequently manifested itself as an investigation of urban
beginnings and the search for broadly applicable definitions of urban characteristics. While the
catalyst for urbanisation remains contested (e.g. Scull 1997; Valante 2008), the chronological
development of towns has become more clearly understood over the course of the last quarter
of the 20th century following large-scale urban excavations in advance of development (see
Griffiths, this volume). Far less attention, in contrast, has been paid to the experience of living in
towns, and, accordingly, this volume focusses on urban identities, as expressed through material
culture, and on what characterised urban dwellers as different from their contemporaries in the
countryside during the Viking Age (c. 800–1100).
Towns: origins and definitions
The most influential definition of ‘the town’ for early medieval archaeology in the British Isles is
undoubtedly that provided in a study of Anglo-Saxon towns by Martin Biddle (1976, 99–100)
a generation ago. He suggested that the identification of Anglo-Saxon towns demanded the
presence of at least three or four of the following characteristics: defences; a planned street-
system; a market; a mint; legal autonomy; a role as a central place; a relatively large and dense
population; a diversified economic base; plots and houses of ‘urban’ type; a complex religious
organisation; and a judicial centre. Over the years, Biddle’s definition of a town has been both
adapted (e.g. Wickham 2006, 591–6) and criticised, since some of his characteristics rely on
historical evidence that is often not forthcoming in an early medieval context, while others
(such as markets and judicial activities) can be found in undoubtedly non-urban contexts
(Scull 1997, 271). In addition, scholars have commented on the difficulty of distinguishing
between small ‘towns’ and large ‘villages’, as both may share the same characteristics (Gardiner
2006, 24). Meanwhile, others have doubted the value of identifying defining characteristics
for towns on the grounds that ‘towns carry different meanings to different people at different
times’ (Perring 2002, 9).
In the context of Scandinavian settlement, debates about towns have tended to focus on
whether the settlers were the catalyst to the emergence of towns, or whether they merely added
a new dimension to existing processes of urbanisation in England and Ireland (Hinton 1990,
92–6). It is widely acknowledged that when Scandinavian raiding and settlement commenced,
English and Irish societies were essentially non-urban, even if in England the ruins of the –
largely deserted – Roman towns still served as tangible reminders of a period when they were an
integral part of everyday life. Nonetheless, in the centuries following the decline of these Roman
towns, various settlement forms developed that have been identified as important stages in the re-
emergence of urbanism. The middle Anglo-Saxon trading centres known as wics – such as Ipswich
viii D. M. Hadley and Letty ten Harkel
(Suffolk), Hamwic (Southampton, Hampshire) and Eoforwic (York) – undoubtedly provide the
best examples (Scull 1997), although more recently Blair (2005, 248–9) has argued in favour of
middle Anglo-Saxon minsters as the forerunners to the late Anglo-Saxon town, on the grounds
that they were focal points for manufacture and trade. Even more importantly in his opinion,
the minsters corresponded more closely than wics to the idea of the civitas that was envisioned in
Biblical texts and explored in early medieval writing, such as St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (‘The
City of God’). As Blair (2005, 249) has observed, ‘it was within the stone walls of Romano-British
ruins, so enthusiastically adopted by monastic founders, that lay perceptions of special places in the
landscape coalesced with literary ones of the heavenly and earthly Jerusalems’. Ireland, in contrast,
was not incorporated into the Roman Empire and therefore had no urban legacy comparable to
that of England (Edwards 1990, 1–5). As a result, discussions about the origins of urban settlement
forms have been less extensive, and largely restricted to considerations of the emergence of towns
in the wake of Scandinavian influence in the 10th and 11th centuries (Valante 2008, 57–80). It
has certainly been argued in some studies that the Irish monastic settlements of the 7th and 8th
centuries were every bit as complex as the wics and minsters from the Anglo-Saxon realm (Doherty
1985; Clarke 1990), but the extent to which they were really the direct fore-runners to the towns
of later centuries has been doubted (Valante 2008, 26–30).
Despite the fact that traces of urban activity can be identified in the 7th and 8th centuries, many
of the sites concerned were abandoned or relocated in the 9th century (e.g. Hall 2004, 488–97),
and the period from the later 9th to 11th centuries is now widely regarded as having witnessed
the (re-)emergence and growth of the towns that were largely to provide the urban framework
of the Middle Ages (Astill 2009, 262–5). These developments coincided with the conquests of
the Scandinavian raiders-turned-settlers in England and Ireland, and the degree to which the
Scandinavian settlers were responsible for urban origins and development has been subject to
much debate. For example, in Wessex and Anglo-Saxon Mercia, the construction of defensive
burhs as a response to the Viking raiders in the late 9th and early 10th centuries has long been seen
as a first stage in the re-urbanisation process in those regions. These burhs subsequently acquired
a range of urban characteristics, including a market, a mint, a diversified economic base and a
large population (Hill and Rumble 1996; Astill 2006, 236, 243, 254; 2009, 262–5). Without
the benefit of hindsight, King Alfred’s biographer Asser already attributed the construction of
‘cities and towns … where previously there were none’ to his king (Asser, Life of King Alfred ch.
91; Stevenson 1904), inspiring – at least in part – the school of thought that viewed urbanisation
as an intentional and ideological act on the part of the West Saxons and Mercians (e.g. Carver
1993; 2000; 2010; 2011). In contrast, in northern and eastern England, as in Ireland, the Vikings
have often been held more directly responsible for the development of towns, which were seen
as trading and manufacturing sites having developed out of the base camps of various segments
of the armies that were now in the process of settling down and colonising the regions they had
previously plundered (Hall 1981, 95–9). However, the paucity of diagnostically Scandinavian
material culture from some towns has often appeared puzzling (Biddle 1976, 122–3; Hall 1980,
152–3, 205), and many studies have accordingly looked to the influence of other factors in urban
development in those regions, such as trading links within Britain and with the continent, as much
as to the impact of Scandinavian settlement (e.g. Hall 2000; see also Blinkhorn, this volume).
In northern and eastern England, whatever level of influence has been ascribed to Scandinavian
settlers in the development of urbanism, towns of the 9th and 10th centuries have always been
recognised as being integral to existing economic networks, even if their relationship with
surrounding rural regions remains under-explored and consequently poorly understood (Roskams