The four centuries prior to 1050 are known as the Middle (650–850) and Late (850–1066) Saxon periods, which I will sometimes lump together in the deliberately vague ‘Later Saxon’. The term ‘Saxo-Norman’ is also sometimes used to describe the overlap between Late Saxon and early Norman in the mid-to-late eleventh century. As I have already suggested, it is now appreciated that the first four hundred years of the medieval period were fundamental to the development of British society in the Middle Ages. It was the time when Britain acquired its county system and its basic administrative geography. It was the time, too, when English became the accepted language in the most populated areas. It was, of course, also the period of the Vikings, who we must now see as far more than the rapists and pillagers in horned helmets beloved of movie-makers. For me the story of Later Saxon and Saxo-Norman Britain is as exciting as archaeology gets, because it is currently going through a period of major reappraisal. Turmoil might be a better term. Nothing seems beyond dispute, whether it be the role of the Vikings or Britain’s place within Charlemagne’s Europe. The more we understand about Viking Britain and the earliest England, the more we realise that their inhabitants did not dwell in Little Britain. They were part of a far larger world.
These are the reasons why I have decided that this book will depart from the usual convention of dismissing Saxon Britain in a chapter, before devoting the rest of the text to the high Middle Ages. Instead I have divided the medieval period into two Parts (I and II) of four and five centuries each. Part I will mainly be about Britons, Scots, Saxons and Vikings; Part II will be about aspects of town and country in the Middle Ages which are separated from the Saxon period by the Norman Conquest of 1066. I have attempted to be fair in the way I have apportioned chapters. But when it came to writing the book I was forcibly struck by the fact that there was far more interesting new material emerging about the pre-Norman, or Saxon, periods than about the Middle Ages. Furthermore, as much of this new work is taking place in southern Britain the book will, I am sorry to say, be biased towards the south and east in its geographical coverage. I regret this, but as I shall reiterate from time to time, this is not a textbook. I want it to reflect the way ideas are changing. The new information about Later Saxon England is having a profound effect on the way we view what happened later. So it cannot be ignored. As a result, the first four chapters are slightly longer than the following four.
While I was writing I became increasingly aware that the archaeology of buildings was a major new field in its own right. Today it involves detailed drawings, but also techniques of remote sensing that range from digital photography to enhanced forms of computer-aided design. I would very much have liked to discuss this in the pages that follow, and I must confess that I tried to put something on paper, but sadly none of it worked. I simply lacked the necessary hands-on experience to write with any conviction. So rather than fake it, I decided to leave it out.
Another important development has been the study of medieval woodworking and carpentry. I was introduced to this subject by my wife Maisie Taylor, who had begun to research the development of Bronze Age carpentry joints we encountered at Flag Fen. So she invited the leading expert on medieval carpentry, Cecil Hewitt, to come and see them. At the time he was recovering from a stroke, but even with slightly impaired speech he managed to give us one of the most exciting and rewarding days of our professional lives. Cecil’s excitement knew no limits, and was instantly transferred to both of us. The great man made us both look at our Bronze Age timbers through fresh eyes. What I didn’t know then was that Hewitt’s work was just one aspect of a rapidly growing new field of study which I will briefly touch on in Chapter 7.
I acquired an enormous respect for medieval archaeologists when I was a student in the mid-1960s. In fact I nearly forsook the True Path of prehistory to follow them. One of my teachers at Cambridge was Brian Hope-Taylor, who today is rightly regarded as an extraordinarily innovative pioneer. We all liked Brian. He was down to earth and never gave himself airs or graces. He was also a perfectionist, and refused to compromise on quality. His reports were beautifully illustrated, because earlier in his life he had been a professional artist and illustrator. He was particularly famous for the cover he had drawn for the Ordnance Survey Map of Britain in the Iron Age (sadly out of print).
While I was a student Brian was in the final throes of writing his most famous work, a huge report on his excavations at Yeavering, in Northumberland. Yeavering, or Ad Gefrin, to give it its Saxon name, was an Anglo-British palace complex beside a major pre-Roman hillfort, known as Yeavering Bell. The area was also stiff with prehistoric remains, which was why I was sitting at Brian’s feet. I had no intention of staying for more than the first lecture of his course, because then he would start on the post-Roman material. In the event I attended the entire course, and I even bought his great report shortly after it appeared in print in 1977, for the then huge sum of £33.5 It is still one of the most treasured books in my library. At the time Brian was one of a small group of medieval archaeologists who believed in ‘open area’ excavation. This was a new style of excavation that has now become commonplace: it involves the exposing of huge areas of land to get a clear impression of the totality of a site.
Brian didn’t just expose single buildings. Instead he looked at the spaces between and around the various structures, and in the process was able to build up a picture of a developing royal centre. His excavations took place over several seasons, mainly between 1953 and 1962, and seemed to touch on all aspects of life, from graves to humble dwellings, halls both great and small, and even a huge timber grandstand-like theatre. This was a vision of the seventh century AD that I desperately wanted to paint for earlier periods. It was quite simply inspiring, and it fundamentally affected my own style of archaeology.
Brian was a pioneer in the developing study of (in his case early) medieval archaeology. Medieval archaeology is still a very young discipline. The national learned society devoted to the subject, the Society for Medieval Archaeology, was founded in 1957, four years into the Yeavering project. This can be compared, for example, with my own field, where the Prehistoric Society came into being in 1935, as a development from the earlier Prehistoric Society of East Anglia (1908–35). There are many reasons for this relatively late academic acceptance of subjects like medieval and post-medieval archaeology (1967). In part one can blame simple academic snobbery along the lines of: ‘If it’s earlier it’s got to be better and more important.’ I also once detected (thankfully I think it has largely vanished) an attitude to these more recent subjects, among certain colleagues, which implied that the archaeology of recent times is somehow easier to do, and makes fewer intellectual demands on its practitioners. Nothing, but nothing, could be further from the truth.
But I must return to my own early exposure to medieval archaeology. Like every archaeological student in Britain, I had heard of the Wharram Percy deserted medieval village project in Yorkshire. The project was one of the longest-running research programmes in England (1950–90), and reports on various aspects of the work are still appearing in print. The results from Wharram continue to surprise. For example, recent work by Dr Simon Mays on the bones from the village churchyard has produced some unexpected results: babies were breast-fed until they were eighteen months old.6 During this period they thrived, but then began to fall behind when compared to modern infants. Comparisons between the rural population at Wharram and the nearby city of York show that although life in the country was generally healthier, women in the city did less demanding physical work. The urban population was exposed to a greater risk of infection, which also resulted in greater disease resistance. The rural population did not escape all the urban ailments. One would expect them to suffer from the ‘bovine’ form of tuberculosis, which they would have caught from animals, whereas they were actually infected by the ‘human’ form, which they probably contracted from regular visits to York, where the disease was relatively common. Only four of the 687 skeletons from Wharram showed signs of violent death, which was in stark contrast with the smaller Fishergate