Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England 9781783276868, 9781800105089, 9781800105096, 178327686X

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England
PART I Material Culture
The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat: The Role of Early Medieval England
Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art
Minding the Gaps: Early Medieval Elite Sites in England and the Perimeters of Current Knowledge
Part II Crossing Borders
Imagination at the Edge of the World: Luxuriating Women in Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audi
Britain, the Byzantine Empire, and the Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’: Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s Nin
Wulfstan in Truso: Old English Text, Baltic Archaeology, and World History
Part III Origins and Comparisons
Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins from a Eurasian Perspective
Historical Origins of a Mythical History: The Formation of the Myth Supporting Anglo-Saxonism Recon
Boniface and Bede in the Pacific: Exploring Anamorphic Comparisons between the Hiberno-Saxon Missi
Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit: Displaying the Sacred
Index
Previously published titles: ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

Citation preview

Anglo-Saxon Studies 44

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Anglo-Saxon Studies ISSN 1475-2468 GENERAL EDITORS

John Hines Catherine Cubitt

‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’ aims to provide a forum for the best scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon peoples in the period from the end of Roman Britain to the Norman Conquest, including comparative studies involving adjacent populations and periods; both new research and major re-assessments of central topics are welcomed. Books in the series may be based in any one of the principal disciplines of archaeology, art history, history, language and literature, and inter- or multi-disciplinary studies are encouraged. Proposals or enquiries may be sent directly to the editors or the publisher at the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Emeritus John Hines, School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University, John Percival Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff, Wales, CF10 3EU, UK Professor Catherine Cubitt, School of History, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, NR4 7TJ, UK Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, IP12 3DF, UK Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the back of this book

Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England

Edited by Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2022 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 78327 686 8 (hardcover) ISBN 978 1 80010 508 9 (ePDF) ISBN 978 1 80010 509 6 (ePUB) The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: Spong Chairperson, Norfolk Castle Museum 1994.192.1. Provenance: Spong Hill, 5th century. Copyright Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery Photo R7J4748, by permission.

Contents

List of Illustrations vii List of Contributors x Acknowledgements xiii Abbreviations xv Introduction: Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks

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I: Material Culture 1 The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat: The Role of Early Medieval England Debby Banham 2 Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art Jane Hawkes 3 Minding the Gaps: Early Medieval Elite Sites in England and the Perimeters of Current Knowledge Carol Neuman de Vegvar

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II: Crossing Borders 4 Imagination at the Edge of the World: Luxuriating Women in Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience Jonathan Wilcox

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5 Britain, the Byzantine Empire, and the Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’: Hārūn ibn Yahyā’s Ninth-century Arabic Description of Britain Caitlin R. Green

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Contents 6 Wulfstan in Truso: Old English Text, Baltic Archaeology, and World History John Hines

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III: Origins and Comparisons 7 Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins from a Eurasian Perspective John D. Niles

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8 Historical Origins of a Mythical History: The Formation of the Myth Supporting Anglo-Saxonism Reconsidered Kazutomo Karasawa

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9 Boniface and Bede in the Pacific: Exploring Anamorphic Comparisons between the Hiberno-Saxon Missions and the Anglican Melanesian Mission Michael W. Scott

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10 Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit: Displaying the Sacred Karen Louise Jolly Index

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Illustrations

2 Hawkes, ‘Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art’ Figure 2.1a: Funerary Urn Figurine, Spong Hill, Norfolk, sixth century. Figure 2.1b: Canoe Prow Figurine, Solomon Islands, twentieth century. Figure 2.2a: Face Mask, Vanuatu, twentieth century. Figure 2.2b: Face-mask Helmet, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, c. seventh century. Figure 2.3: Canoe Prow-board, Trobriand Islands, New Guinea. Figure 2.4: Gold Bracteate Pendant, Freshwater, Isle of Wight, sixth century. Figure 2.5: Silver-gilt Square-headed Brooch, Chessell Down, Isle of Wight, early sixth century. Figure 2.6a–b: Gold Buckle, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, early seventh century, showing different lighting effects. Figure 2.7: Shoulder Clasp, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, early seventh century. Figure 2.8: Rubin Profiles/Vase. Figure 2.9: Lindisfarne Gospels Carpet Page (Mark), late seventh/ early eighth century.

39 39 42 42 42 44 44 45 47 49 51

3 Neuman de Vegvar, ‘Minding the Gaps: Early Medieval Elite Sites in England and the Perimeters of Current Knowledge’ Figure 3.1: The Yule Feast, engraving based on a painting by Knut Ekwall and used as an illustration in Esaias Tegnér, Frithiof’s Saga: A Legend of Ancient Norway. Figure 3.2: Cowdery’s Down: reconstruction of Building C12. Figure 3.3: Yeavering: reconstruction of Building A2. Figure 3.4: Lyre from the Mound 1 ship burial, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. Figure 3.5: Drinking horn rim mount, sixth–seventh century, from the princely grave at Taplow, Buckinghamshire.

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55 59 60 62 66

Illustrations

5 Green, ‘Britain, the Byzantine Empire, and the Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’: Hārūn ibn Yahyā’s Ninth-century Arabic Description of Britain’ Figure 5.1: Location map of some of the key sites mentioned in the text along with the extent of the Byzantine Empire in the later ninth century. Figure 5.2: A Byzantine copper alloy coin of Justin II, minted Constantinople, 575–6. Figure 5.3: A late fifth- to mid-seventh-century St Menas ampulla from St Menas’s pilgrimage site at Abu Mina, Egypt. Figure 5.4: The sixth-century Penmachno stone from North Wales, which includes a consular dating considered to refer to the successive consulships of the Emperor Justin II, 567–79. Figure 5.5: A Byzantine copper alloy coin of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus with Zoe, minted at Constantinople in 913–19.

105 108 109 111 114

6 Hines, ‘Wulfstan in Truso: Old English Text, Baltic Archaeology, and World History’ Figure 6.1: The route of Wulfstan’s voyage to Truso, showing the locations named in the Orosius text, and other major sites referred to in this paper. Figure 6.2: Sketch plan of the location of Truso on the bank of Jeziora Drużno at Janów Pomorski, Woj. Warmińsko-mazurskie, Poland, in relation to the reconstructed hydrography of the ninth century. Figure 6.3: Areas of geophysical prospecting and research excavations at the site of Truso, Janów Pomorski. Figure 6.4: Schematic plan of the wrakowisko (‘wreck-site’) at Truso and the outlines of buildings (numbered I–XI) in the immediate vicinity. Figure 6.5: A ninth-century Insular strap-end from Truso, Janów Pomorski.

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121 126 127 130

7 Niles, ‘Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins from a Eurasian Perspective’ Figure 7.1: Bracteate hoard, Bolbro, Fyn. AD 475–525. Figure 7.2: C-bracteate, Gotland, Sweden. AD 475–525. Figure 7.3: Cicada mount, Tournai, Belgium. Late fifth century. Gold and garnet cloisonné. viii

152 154 160

Illustrations Figure 7.4: Four cicada brooches. Hunnic, fifth century. Silver, copper alloy, iron. 160 Figure 7.5: Horse burials, tomb of Childeric, Tournai, Belgium. Late fifth century. 161 Figure 7.6: Horse burials, Kostromskaia kurgan, southern Russia. Mid-first millennium BC. 162 Figure 7.7: Raptor mount, neighborhood of Concesti, Romania (formerly Moldavia). Circa AD 400. Gold with garnet and mother-of-pearl cloisonné. 167 Figure 7.8: Raptor mount, Ossmanstedt, Thuringia. Fifth century. Gold with garnet cloisonné. 167 Figure 7.9: Purse lid with highly stylized animal-style ornamentation, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. Early seventh century. Gold with garnet cloisonné and millefiori enamel. 168 Figure 7.10: Map showing location of chief archaeological sites mentioned in the text.  169

9 Scott, ‘Boniface and Bede in the Pacific: Exploring Anamorphic Comparisons between the Hiberno-Saxon Missions and the Anglican Melanesian Mission’ Figure 9.1: The Martyrs’ Pulpit, Exeter Cathedral, by George Gilbert Scott, installed 1877. 192 Figure 9.2: The Martyrs’ Pulpit, Exeter Cathedral, detail depicting the death of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson. 193

10 Jolly, ‘Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit: Displaying the Sacred’ Figure 10.1: Hoa Hakananai‘a. Figure 10.2: Spong Chairperson.

222 223

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The editors, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

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Contributors

Debby Banham is a historian of early medieval England, specialising in food production, diet and medicine, with a sideline in monastic sign language. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, and taught for many years at Birkbeck College, London. Now semi-retired, she still does some teaching in Cambridge. Her publications include Monasteriales indicia: The Old English Monastic Sign Language (1991), Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England (2004), and, with Rosamond Faith, Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming (2014). Current research includes the Early English Bread project, with Professor Martha Bayless of the University of Oregon, and a new edition and translation of Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III, two of the earliest medical collections in English, with Dr Christine Voth. Britton Elliott Brooks is assistant professor of English at Kyushu University. Raised in Hawai‘i, he received a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford. His research centres broadly on the environmental humanities, as can be seen in his 2019 monograph, Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac. His current project, Early Medieval Soundscapes, funded by a three-year Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) grant, explores the use of sounds and soundscapes in early medieval English literature. This has led to several publications, including his English Studies article, ‘Biophonic Soundscapes in the Vitae of St Guthlac’, as well as a book chapter, ‘The Sound-World of Early Medieval England: A Case Study of the Exeter Book Storm Riddle’, in the forthcoming volume Ideas of the World in Early Medieval England. Caitlin Green is a tutor at the University of Cambridge, Institute of Continuing Education, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford in 2011 and is the author of a number of books including Concepts of Arthur (2007) and Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650 (2019). Her principal research interests lie in the history, archaeology, place-names, and literature of early medieval Britain, with a particular focus on Anglian–British interaction and the early Arthurian legend. She is currently engaged in another book project concerning long-distance trade, migration, and contacts in Late Antiquity and the medieval period.

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Contributors Jane Hawkes is professor of art history in the Department of History of Art and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York (UK), where she has taught for over 20 years, following appointments at the universities of Newcastle (where she received her PhD in English Language and Literature), Edinburgh and NUI-Cork. She specialises in the cross-cultural contexts of the art of early medieval Britain and Ireland with a particular interest in the early sculpture of these islands. She has published widely on all aspects of Insular art and architecture and the historiography of Anglo-Saxon sculpture, a topic on which she is currently writing a monograph. John Hines is Professor Emeritus in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University, Wales, where he was previously Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in the Department of English. He works and publishes on multidisciplinary cultural history across northern Europe over the last two millennia. He is a former President of the Viking Society for Northern Research and editor of Medieval Archaeology, and is General Editor of the series Anglo-Saxon Studies and Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology for Boydell & Brewer. He has given the Welsh O’Donnell Lecture; the Quiggin Lecture (Cambridge); and the Toller Lecture (Manchester). He is currently Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Karen Louise Jolly is professor of medieval European history at the University of Hawai‘i, where she has taught for more than 30 years after receiving her PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1987. Her first book was Popular Religion in Late Saxon England (1996) and her most recent book The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 (2012). She is currently working on a historical fiction biography of Aldred the scribe exploring life in tenth-century Northumbria. Kazutomo Karasawa is professor of English philology at Rikkyo University, Tokyo. He received a PhD from Sophia University, Tokyo. He published The Old English Metrical Calendar (Menologium) (2015), to which the ‘best edition’ award was granted in 2017 by the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (renamed as the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England). He is currently coediting a volume entitled Ideas of the World in Early Medieval England, and is also preparing a monograph on the Old English gnomic poems Maxims I and Maxims II. Carol Neuman de Vegvar is emerita professor and continuing instructor of art history at Ohio Wesleyan University. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981. Her first book was The Northumbrian

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Contributors Renaissance: A Study in the Transmission of Style (1987); more recently she was co-editor (with Éamonn Ó Carragáin, University College Cork) of Roma Felix – Formation and Reflections of Medieval Rome (2008). Her publications also include numerous articles on the links between material/ visual objects and their contexts in early medieval England and Ireland: particular foci include the roles of drinking horns in the social discourse of feasting, objects as indices of the identities of both monastic and secular women and their communities, and the sources and deployment of imagery in sculpture, manuscript illuminations and textiles. John D. Niles retired in 2011 from his position as Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Before that he taught for twenty-six years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees as well. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of sixteen books on the literary culture of early medieval England, including Beowulf: The Poem and its Tradition (1983) and the 2019 publication God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. Michael W. Scott is associate professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he has taught since 2001 – the year he received his PhD from the University of Chicago. His monograph, The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands (2007), is an historically informed ethnographic examination of the secretive dynamics of competing land claims among the Arosi of the island of Makira (Solomon Islands). His more recent work focuses on Arosi discourses according to which their island contains a secret and preternaturally powerful subterranean army base. In his 2012 article, ‘The Matter of Makira’ (History and Anthropology), Scott compares these discourses about the Makiran underground to the Matter of Britain as represented in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. Jonathan Wilcox is Professor of English and Collegiate Fellow at the University of Iowa, where he specializes in medieval literature and culture. Since Ælfric’s Prefaces (1994), he has published widely on Old English homilies and manuscripts and is also interested in humour from the period, as in ‘Understatement and Incongruity: Humour in the Literature of AngloSaxon England’, in Humour in the Arts: New Perspectives, ed. Vivienne Westbrook and Shun-liang Chao (2019). These interests come together in the recent essay, ‘The Pains and Pleasures of Vercelli Homily IX and the Delights of Textual Transmission’, in The Anonymous Old English Homily: Sources, Composition, and Variation, ed. Winfried Rudolf and Susan Irvine (2021). xii

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to offer profuse thanks to our contributors for their scholarly excellence and patience in the production of this volume. We would also like to acknowledge the many scholars of early medieval England, often speaking from marginalized positions in academia, who have contributed new and compelling perspectives on race, class, and gender not represented in this volume’s collection but that have challenged, informed, and inspired their colleagues.

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Abbreviations

ASPR Bede, HE

DOE

EETS, e.s. EETS, o.s. EETS, s.s. MGH

The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, ed. by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols (New York, 1931–53). Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969); trans. B. Colgrave, R. A. B. Mynors, and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Dictionary of Old English: A to I Online, ed. by Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonett dePaolo Healey et al. (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2018, https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/). Early English Text Society, extra series. Early English Text Society, original series. Early English Text Society, supplementary series. Monumenta Germaniae Historicae: Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum et Italicarum saec. VI–IX, ed. L. Bethmann and G. Waitz (Hannover, 1878).

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Introduction: Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks Brittania Oceani insula, cui quondam Albion nomen fuit, inter septentrionem et occidentem locata est, Germaniae Galliae Hispaniae, maximus Europae partibus, multo interuallo aduersa. Breoton is garsecges ealond, ðæt wæs iu geara Albion haten: is geseted betwyh norðdæle and westdæle, Germanie 7 Gallie 7 Hispanie þam mæstum dælum Europe myccle fæce ongegen. Britain is an island in the ocean, formerly called Albion, lying between the north and the west, opposite, though far apart, to Germany, Gaul and Spain, the chief divisions of Europe. Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People I.i1

B

ritain, as Bede notes, may be an island in an ocean, but its diverse inhabitants in the early medieval period were neither insular nor isolated. Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England examines some of the ways in which the emergence of an English cultural identity and polity within a culturally contested island was fundamentally joined to and interpenetrated by other parts of the world. Ideally, a global perspective can work to undermine anthropogenic borders, combat nationalistic ideologies, and reveal connections and commonalities. Less ideally, globalization as a universalizing or totalizing perspective has been adopted as a tool of power colonizing other peoples and their histories. This volume focuses on the complex interdependencies that develop through human mobility in zones of contact, while remaining cautious about the limits and abuses of global and comparative methodologies. For the study of early medieval England, a global approach offers the opportunity to break free of the ethnic nation-state paradigms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century western historiography, not coincidentally the defining stage for the field of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies. The interdisciplinary essays in Global Perspectives present various starting points 1

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 14; The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. T. Miller, EETS o.s. 95 (London, 1890), pp. 24–5.

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Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks for rethinking the subjects specialists in the field engage with, and how they do so utilizing diverse frames of reference. First of all, a global perspective suggests closer attention be paid to the ways in which ethno-linguistic English communities inhabiting the island of Britain during the period circa 450–1100 were not only not a singular homogeneous ‘Anglo-Saxon’ polity, but were also part of a North Atlantic Insular world connected to the Eurasian continent and the Mediterranean in complex ways. Consequently, the various insular cultures of both Britain and Ireland were not just peripheral recipients of continental imports, but also contributed their own ‘global’ views and practices, if conceptually positioned at the centre of a complex web of historical interactions, rather than on the fringe. Running as a thread throughout these explorations is how what is called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ looks through global eyes. A global perspective on Anglo-Saxonisms was a key aspect of the 2017 meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) that was held in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, an event that gave initial impetus for the present volume of essays. The 2017 conference generated productive and necessarily difficult conversations about colonialism in the history of the field, the impact of medievalists of colour in scholarly communities lacking diversity, and the very name of the organization, subsequently changed to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME). The editors are grateful to all those who have raised their voices before, during, and after the meeting to speak to these issues. This volume aims to contribute to one aspect of this discussion, by focusing on how world historical and comparative approaches offer new interdisciplinary ways of thinking about early medieval England, with essays addressing the transmission of material culture across borders, the limits of comparative approaches, and the historiographic implications of origin narratives.

Redefining Terms Before proceeding, some definitions are in order, or rather, some uncomfortable deconstructing of key terms and methodological approaches. Global Perspectives implies a world historical and comparative approach, but also brings insights from postcolonial and Indigenous studies. These latter perspectives have led to challenges to the conception of ‘AngloSaxon England’ and its current alternative Early Medieval England, while also viewing the emergence of this insular identity within the island of Britain in relation to places external to it. Both parts of the title require some explanation relative to the contents of the volume.

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Introduction Contrary to popular belief, world or global history is not a vain attempt to write the history of everyone and every place, but represents a fundamental shift away from nation-based histories toward a transcultural understanding of humans in the past. A world historical approach draws attention to zones of contact between communities of people by examining physical, economic, political, social, and cultural movements across traditionally constructed geographic and temporal boundaries, whether exchanges along the Silk Road in Eurasia, cross-cultural interactions in the Indian Ocean world, or the contingent spread of ideas and diseases with empires.2 Adopting a world historical perspective can be challenging because it means acknowledging the dominance of a western historiographical model, and being open to decolonizing that perspective by listening to other ways of thinking about the past and the human condition.3 That decentring process is part of the editors’ own intellectual journeys as reflected in their approach to the volume’s theme. Along with several of the authors, the editors bring global perspectives on early medieval England from a cultural orientation in Oceania.4 The Global Perspectives conference in Honolulu was in part dedicated to Karen Jolly’s colleague 2

3

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Suggested introductory readings on theories of world history for medieval studies: S. Lomuto, ‘Becoming postmedieval: The stakes of the global middle ages’, postmedieval 11(2020), 503–512; P. Frankopan, ‘Why We Need to Think About the Global Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval Worlds 1 (2019), 5–10; G. Heng, ‘Afterword: Medievalists and the Education of Desire’ in Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-used Past, ed. A. Albin et al. (New York, 2019), pp. 275–90; G. Heng, ‘Early Globalities and Its Questions, Objectives, and Methods: An Inquiry into the State of Theory and Critique’, Exemplaria 26 (2014), 234–53; Global Intellectual History, ed. S. Moyn and A. Sartori (New York, 2013); and A Companion to World History, ed. D. Northrop (Chichester, 2012). For an overview relevant to this field of study, see C. E. Karkov, ‘Postcolonial’, in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, ed. J. Stodnick (now Fay) and R. Trilling (Chichester, 2012), pp. 149–63; and S. Harris, ‘Race and Ethnicity’, in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, pp. 165–79. For ongoing discussion and bibliography on race and racism in medieval studies, see the In the Medieval Middle blog, [accessed 03 August 2021]; M. RambaranOlm, M. Breann Leake, and M. J. Goodrich, ‘Medieval studies: the stakes of the field’, postmedieval 11 (2020): 356–370, and subsequent essays. For decolonization and Indigenous studies, see F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox, with commentary by J.-P. Sartre and H. K. Bhabha (New York, 2004); L. T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, 2012); and Z. Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: “Ontology” is Just Another Word for Colonialism’, at Urbane Adventurer: Amiskwacî, blog post, October 24, 2014, [accessed 05 August 2021]. For a critique of world historical approaches in Oceania, see D. Hanlon, ‘Losing Oceania to the Pacific and the World’, The Contemporary Pacific 29 (2017), 286–318. Britton Brooks was raised in Hawai‘i, and Karen Jolly has lived and worked in Hawai‘i for thirty years, as reflected in her essay in this volume. For other orientations toward Oceania, see the essays by Hawkes, Karasawa, and Scott.

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Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks and mentor, world historian Jerry H. Bentley (1949–2012), founding editor of the Journal of World History.5 His successor, Fabio López Lázaro, co-directed with Jolly the pre-conference graduate workshop introducing seminar participants to world historical theory and its possible applications to the study of early medieval Europe. Some of the readings addressed problems of ethnic nationalism.6 Others explored the modern– medieval binary.7 These discussions led to new insights on the fundamental importance of decolonizing early medieval studies, part of the reason for hosting the Global Perspectives meeting in Honolulu, one of the most highly colonized places on the planet, and the site of a vibrant movement to restore sovereignty through Indigenous cultural practices enacted on sacred sites.8 Decolonizing has become an imperative in all fields of study, and listening to Indigenous voices is the place to begin. 5

6

7

8

For a biography, see F. L. Lázaro, ‘Editorial Introduction: A “Festschrift” for Jerry Bentley’, Journal of World History 25, Special Issue in Honor of Jerry H. Bentley (December 2014), 459–73; for Bentley’s historiography, see J. H. Bentley and K. L. Jolly, ‘In Search of a Global Cultural History’, in Architects of World History: Researching the Global Past, ed. K. R. Curtis and J. H. Bentley (Chichester, 2014), pp. 215–37. We are grateful to Bentley’s widow, Carol Mon Lee, for her generous donations supporting the graduate workshop and the conference in 2017. P. Geary, ‘Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages’, Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellsschaft in Wien 113 (1983), 15–26; S. Reynolds, ‘The Idea of the Nation as a Political Community’, in Power and the Nation in European History, ed. Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (Cambridge, 2005); A. Wimmer and N. G. Schiller, ‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology’, International Migration Review 37 (2003), 576–610; T. Zahra, ‘Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis’, Slavic Review 69 (2010), 93–119. J. H. Bentley, ‘Beyond Modernocentrism: Toward Fresh Visions of the Global Past’, in Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World, ed. V. Mair (Honolulu, 2006), pp. 17–29; K. Davis and N. Altschul, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of the ‘Middle Ages’ Outside Europe (Baltimore, 2009); K. Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998), 611–37, and Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008); C. Dietze, ‘Toward a History on Equal Terms: A Discussion of Provincializing Europe’, History and Theory 47 (2008), 69–84. See also J. Davies, Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages (Manchester, 2018); B. Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, 2005); R. Utz, Medievalism: A Manifesto, Past Imperfect (Kalamazoo, 2016); and I. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013). See the Kia‘i (protectors) of Mauna Kea using the cultural protocols of kapu aloha to resist the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at Pu‘uhonua o Pu‘uhuluhulu, [accessed 31 May 2021]; ‘Kapu Aloha’, Hawaii Review: Literary and Arts Journal (University of Hawai‘i at Mnoa), July 25, 2019, [accessed 31 May 2021]. See also A Nation Rising:

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Introduction Within these decolonizing movements, ‘a sense of place’ connects the local and the global. This ‘sense of place’ in current discourse provides a way to rethink the field of study here called ‘early medieval England’ in place of ‘Anglo-Saxon England’. What is this place ‘Anglo-Saxonists’ study, and what constitutes a population known as the ‘Anglo-Saxons’? Such questions are not merely aimed at changing nomenclature, but, as was the case with ISSEME, are aimed at reckoning the histories and practices of various forms of scholarship. As with world history, the bibliography on the history of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as simultaneously a scholarly technical term for a temporal era and a cultural phenomenon, and an ethnic label associated with white supremacy, is voluminous. Suffice it to say that the problematic aspects of the term are not confined to recent events or exclusively to the United States, but are deeply implicated in the formation of ‘Anglo-Saxon studies’ in the nineteenth century and part of an ongoing scholarly debate.9 This volume has chosen to use ‘early medieval’, a relatively uncontested term, to denote the temporal framework of circa 450–1100. While eschewing the use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in the title, the editors have retained ‘England’, rather than ‘Britain’, as an adequate descriptor of the volume’s geographic focus. Both terms have complex meanings that developed in and after the early medieval era. The relationship between England and Britain underlies much of the effort taken here to adopt more global perspectives, and thus the benefits and disadvantages of these perspectives require some examination. At the time Bede wrote the opening description of Britain quoted at the outset of this introduction, England did not exist as a geo-political entity, nor does Bede imagine such an existence. However, Bede’s narrative does

9

Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, ed. N. Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, I. Hussey, and E. Kahunawaika‘ala Wright (Durham, 2014), and Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i, ed. H. K. Aikau and V. V. Gonzalez (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). See S. Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons?”’, The Journal of British Studies 24 (October 1985), 395–414; R. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, 1986); J. D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Chichester, 2015); C. Jones, Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2018); and D. B. Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures (Earth, Milky Way, 2019). On England versus Britain, see for example G. Molyneaux, ‘Why Were Some Tenth-Century English Kings Presented as Rulers of Britain?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (2011), 59–91; E. M. Tyler, ‘England Between Empire and Nation in “The Battle of Brunanburh”’, in Whose Middle Ages?, pp. 166–80, and ‘England and Multilingualism: Medieval and Modern’, in Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, c.800-c.1250, ed. E. M. Tyler (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 1–13, esp. 2 for a brief discussion of England in preference to Britain.

5

Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks seek to portray the emergence of an ethno-linguistic community of the English in Britain, and to link their cultural identity and stability to Christianization, as well as aligning that process with the universalizing power of Christianity as centred in Rome.10 Britain in Bede’s sense of the island (and near-shore islets) includes both those territories that came to be dominated by descendants of Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish settlers of the fifth and sixth centuries, and those territories that retained a dominant population descended from earlier British inhabitants in Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria, and Scotland. There were also settlers from Ireland, as well as others from continental Europe, from Scandinavia in particular, and the Mediterranean world who travelled through or settled in Britain. Conversely, the use of the term Britain even in Bede’s geographic sense cannot escape the longer history of colonialism and imperialism embedded in the term ‘Great Britain’, and the reality of ‘British’ hegemony over other peoples in the island, neighbouring Ireland, and around the globe. England as a geo-political entity has a complex historical relationship to the English as an ethno-linguistic community. A single delineated political entity called England only came into being near the end of the period covered by this volume with the emergence of a West Saxon hegemony in the post-Viking tenth century, one that retained power and influence up to, and beyond, the Norman Conquest.11 Prior to that development there were numerous competing and allying kingdoms, including those of Anglian or Saxon identifying peoples in Mercia, Wessex, Northumbria, and elsewhere, as well as ‘Celtic’ ethno-linguistic zones in Cornwall, Wales, Strathclyde/Cumbria, and much of Highland Scotland, and a Pictish ethno-linguistic zone in the northeast, with the subsequent addition of Scandinavian groups in the Danelaw and in parts of northern and western Scotland during the Viking era.12 Tenth-century England as a Wessex-centred kingdom emerged under Kings Athelstan and Edgar, which controlled the former Wessex, Mercia, and most of the Danelaw, but struggled to gain control over York, Northumbria, and Cumbria, amid shifting alliances with polities in Wales, Scotland, Scandinavia, and Ireland. Thus, the territories in Britain that, over time, become identified as a single kingdom of England with relatively identifiable borders or claims thereto overlap, but are not identical to, places throughout Britain where 10 11

12

See N. Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven, 2008), pp. 80–1, 105–7, 132–7. S. Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England (New Haven and London, 2011); G. Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford, 2015); and D. N. Dumville, ‘Origins of the Kingdom of the English’, in Writing, Kingship, and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R. Naismith and D. A. Woodman (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 71–121. For a discussion of the pre-Viking era heptarchy, see Green, this volume, p. 94.

6

Introduction English language heritage speakers were the dominant population – and always in relation to other ethno-linguistic groups within and outside of the geo-political conception of a singular ‘England’. In the global perspective adopted by the authors, the use of ‘England’ in the title acknowledges that the histories of the various peoples inhabiting the island of Britain are so intertwined that studying the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ in isolation from ‘British’ peoples is disingenuous at best, and at worst perpetuates the notion of a homogenizing and monolithic cultural identity of Englishness.13 This approach in no way subsumes the separate study of Ireland, Scotland, or Wales to an English-centred history. Rather, a postcolonial historiography notices the power differential in the way that English histories have subordinated those of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. As a result, those who study ‘English’ history, even in the pre-Conquest era, are obliged to take into account the intertwined history of the marginalized peoples by decentring Englishness and emphasizing hybridity.14 Meanwhile, postcolonial scholars re-centre colonized territories’ histories independent of an English hegemonic narrative. Regardless of the geographic, linguistic, or cultural identities associated with the material and written evidence analysed in these essays, even if they are primarily labelled today as ‘English’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’, a global and postcolonial approach acknowledges that these objects of study did not occur in isolation but lived in relation to a web of cultural and linguistic identities overlapping and interacting on and outside of the island called Britain. Thus, the editors have opted for ‘early medieval England’ for the title of this volume. The fallout from the effort to displace the term ‘Anglo-Saxon England’, and a continuing scholarly ferment, is reflected in the essays of this volume, as each author grapples with the theme of global perspectives from different disciplinary positions using a variety of nomenclatures. Given the unsettled nature of the field and the ongoing conversation regarding the appropriate uses of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, each author has chosen terms that seem best suited to that person’s scholarly perspective.15 For specialists in material culture, whether art history or archaeology, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has served as a descriptor for styles or types of material evidence that distinguish them from those of other ethno-linguistic populations in Britain. Banham, in examining the development and distribution 13

14 15

Britain continues to be used in this geographic sense inclusive of diverse ethnic groups in scholarly writing. For example, in E. James, Britain in the First Millennium (London, 2001), R. Fleming, Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400–1070 (London, 2010), and M. Carver, Formative Britain: An Archaeology of Britain, Fifth to Eleventh Century AD (London, 2019). L. Brady, Writing the Welsh Borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 2017). In order to respect each author’s choice of terminology and definition, the editors here in the introductory survey of the volume employ the terms in the sense established by each author in the context of their individual essays.

7

Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks of bread wheat, focuses on Lowland Britain, primarily the Germanic peoples who settled there and have traditionally been designated ‘AngloSaxon’, while also noting that the Indigenous inhabitants of this region would have shared in these changes in material culture.16 For Hawkes, who interrogates the problematic standard of classical art, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ marks a distinctive style of Insular art marginalized as other in the western canon, along with other so-called traditional or ‘applied’ arts, such as ‘Celtic’ and ‘Viking age’. Consequently she uses the adjective ‘Anglo-Saxon’ primarily in reference to the ethno-linguistic communities of ‘the Germanic-speaking peoples living mostly, although not exclusively, in the geo-political region now known as “England” during the early Middle Ages (c. 450‒1100)’, while acknowledging their presence also in Scotland, as well as, over time, in the colonized spaces of Ireland and Wales.17 Her fellow art historian, Neuman de Vegvar, likewise notes the specialized use of ‘Insular’ as inclusive of early medieval Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England.18 However, because Neuman de Vegvar examines halls only from the emerging kingdoms of Angles and Saxons, she substitutes ‘early medieval England’ and variants for the ‘historically rooted connotations of racial superiority’ in the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, noting that ‘no satisfactory and concise alternative adjective exists for material culture studies’.19 Similarly, those essays dealing primarily with textual traditions, historic and literary, are alert to the geo-political meanings of terminology, past and present. Wilcox, in choosing to use early medieval England/English, is sensitive to the intersectionality of gender and race in relation to ‘AngloSaxon’: he begins from ‘recent discussions about the racist underpinnings of early medieval English studies’ in order to conclude that ‘teasing out such complexity of response and the potential for resistance matters because it discourages a sense of early England as a monologic construct that can serve simplistic political sloganeering’.20 Green highlights the use of Barṭīniyah (Britain) by ninth-century Persian and Byzantine writers, a term which in that context refers to ‘pre-Viking southern and eastern Britain (the area conventionally termed Anglo-Saxon England)’, while arguing for continued scholarly use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ over ‘Early English’ for the ninth century and before, in part because it seems more appropriate than ‘Early English’ for this era with its multiplicity of competing and changing identities and kingdoms and also because the composite term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was used by King Alfred as well as being 16 17 18 19 20

Banham, p. 23, note 18. Hawkes, p. 34, note 1. Neuman de Vegvar, pp. 53–4, note 2. Neuman de Vegvar, pp. 53–4, note 2. Wilcox, p. 91.

8

Introduction prefigured in earlier documents.21 In placing Britain in a wider network of contact with the Continent, Hines uses ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ to locate it in relation to other regions, and like Green, references the hybrid compound ‘Anglo-Saxons’ in the sense in which early medieval sources used it to describe a people.22 The third section of essays in this volume directly addresses the origin myths for the ‘Anglo-Saxons,’ particularly the long reach of nineteenth-­ century ideas of ethnic roots. John D. Niles’ essay opens by questioning the assumptions behind modern conceptions of Anglo-Saxon origins, and where that questioning may lead. In line with his thesis that one must look to Eurasia as a whole, and not just Europe, as a geographic frame of reference for exploring questions of origins, Niles defines Anglo-Saxon ‘in specific reference to the history and culture of the English-speaking people of Britain in the period before the Norman Conquest, with an eye also to the northern continental antecedents of those people’. Likewise Karasawa, in surveying the history of Anglo-Saxonisms, uses the term in an ethno-linguistic sense to ‘refer to the people of Germanic descent who began to settle in England in the fifth century and whose primary language was Old English’.23 Focusing on Oceania in relation to Britain and its Christian heritage, Scott avoids ‘Anglo-Saxon’ by making specific reference to ‘Bede’s England’ and the ‘Hiberno-Saxon mission’ legacies of Iona and Lindisfarne as transformatively reproduced by the Melanesian Brotherhood. Jolly, like Niles and Karasawa, intentionally uses the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to explicate how it functions, in this case, in the contemporary landscape of museum exhibitions as seen through the eyes of visitors from Oceania. Like Scott, she considers ways in which multiple narratives from ‘non-Anglo-Saxon perspectives’ might help reframe the conversation. Jolly prefers ‘early medieval Britain’ over ‘England’ in order to acknowledge the diverse ethno-linguistic communities within which English speakers lived on the isle, regardless of shifting geo-­ political boundaries. These different approaches to the changing terminology for historic eras and peoples suggest ways to rethink how we conceptualize the past in relation to the present. Consequently, this volume offers readers the opportunity to experiment with hearing alternative uses of, and alternatives to, the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’.

21 22 23

Green, this volume, p. 94 and note 2. Hines, this volume, pp. 115–16, note 3. Karasawa, this volume, p. 171, note 2. On the term ‘Germanic’, see Niles, this volume, pp. 139–70.

9

Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks

Part I: Material Culture The three essays in this section highlight the range of ways that global perspectives on material culture carry both the potential and peril of comparative and transcultural studies. Thinking globally about bread wheat, as Banham does, expands the contemporary view of early medieval England and its relationship to world history. The confines of traditional western historical art categories, once exploded, allow a view of early medieval artistic endeavours free of certain assumptions, as Hawkes shows with some careful comparisons to Pacific societies. But as Hawkes suggests, and Neuman de Vegvar elucidates, filling gaps in current knowledge with comparative materials often feeds an illusion that we have a complete picture of what, for example, an early medieval hall in England might have looked like. Debby Banham in ‘The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat: The Role of Early Medieval England’ examines how the growth of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L., Aestivum group) into a world-wide crop was influenced by its adoption in England during the early Middle Ages. By drawing on hagiography, historiography, archaeology, and law codes, Banham demonstrates that the increase in the production and consumption of bread wheat came about through a mixture of social emulation, ecclesiastical preference, agricultural innovation, and aristocratic taxation. This preference for strikingly white, soft bread, evidenced by food rents and historiographical accounts, allowed it to become an object declaring social status. By the end of the Middle Ages, however, inhabitants of England of every status were used to eating wheat bread, a preference which continued through successive ages of empire and colonization, to the present day where wheat bread is consumed and adapted in nearly every corner of the globe. With ‘Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art’, Jane Hawkes breaks western conceptual boundaries concerning the traditional art-historical narrative that privileges scholarly criteria developed in relation to the art of the classical world. By gesturing to non-western contexts, Hawkes argues that the urge to ‘taxonomize, categorize, capture, and classify […] is largely irrelevant for understanding much of the art produced across the globe, whether historic or contemporary’. In particular, she compares AngloSaxon artistic productions with those of Oceania, revealing that in both these cultural/geographical zones, the common art-historical dichotomy between the ‘decorative’ and ‘functional’ is largely unhelpful, as the canoe prow-boards in Papua New Guinea are clearly both; the same, she argues, can be said about much of Anglo-Saxon art. She concludes that AngloSaxon art, when looked at with this global view, does not conform to the traditional art-historical narrative. Further still, she concludes that 10

Introduction Anglo-Saxon art was not meant to be categorized and taxonomized in such a system, and that it necessitates a different kind of analysis. Carol Neuman de Vegvar’s ‘Minding the Gaps: Early Medieval Elite Sites in England and the Perimeters of Current Knowledge’ offers a cautionary note to a global perspective by demonstrating the extraordinary lacunae in current understanding of daily lives in early medieval England. She focuses her analysis on the lived experience of the hall, a space often conceptualized in scholarly and popular discourse as a coherent and understood reality, but which remains largely unknown. Neuman de Vegvar highlights the gaps in surviving evidence by systematically exploring the early medieval hall through specific categories of sensorial experience: acoustics, illumination, food and water, waste disposal and hygiene, and pests. Her analysis reveals that a comparative approach, even with the cognate cultures of Scandinavia and western Europe, runs the risk of overestimating correspondences and gliding over the profound lack of evidence for the specifics of daily life in an early medieval English hall. The specific physicality of material culture offers a counterbalance to the potential overgeneralizations of a global approach. As this first set of essays demonstrates, such a focus on the material culture of early medieval England allows for grounded, revealing analysis that works to breach conceptual boundaries even while remaining fixed to items of profound human particularity: a gleaming belt buckle, a latrine for waste, a loaf of bread. Neuman de Vegvar’s cautionary call frames the overall argument, and highlights how a focus on the material remnants of early medieval England reveals gaps in scholarly knowledge, while also suggesting how those physical objects might be utilized to address these gaps in a rigorous and focused manner.

Part II: Crossing Borders Boundaries are necessary for any concentrated analysis, as is reflected in the self-imposed limitations of the sciences. The same could be said for the humanities, where productive scholarship is directed by extrinsic and intrinsic limitations. Yet those boundaries are inherently anthropogenic and can, if their nature is forgotten, lead to mistaking the circumference of a particular critical inquiry with a statement of fact. This section reimagines the outermost conceptual boundaries of early medieval England, revealing the ways its inhabitants were connected to, and interdependent with, cultures and peoples beyond their island home. Critical frameworks that we take for granted, including conceptual boundaries of race, class, and gender, benefit from reflection and revision, and often resistance. 11

Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks Jonathan Wilcox’s ‘Imagination at the Edge of the World: Luxuriating Women in Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience’ deploys a postcolonial approach to reveal the diversity and complexity of theological engagement in early England with the wider world using Vercelli VII, an Old English rendering of John Chrysostom’s Greek Homily XXIX, written at Constantinople in 403–4. Although the Vercelli homily is faithful to its source in giving an elaborate condemnation of two sins, which Wilcox identifies as ‘softness’ and ‘gluttony’, he explores the sharp contrast between the condemnatory behaviour described by the homilist, including always being indoors, not performing arduous labour, bathing frequently, anointing oneself with pleasing unguents, and always lying on soft beds, and the lived experience of the majority of contemporary English audiences, whether male or female. He argues that congregants would likely have been so ‘ill-suited’ to this message as to resist the admonition, and instead the homiletic material would likely have conjured a desire for such uncommon luxuries. In her chapter ‘Britain, the Byzantine Empire, and the Concept of an Anglo-Saxon “Heptarchy”: Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s Ninth-century Arabic Description of Britain’, Caitlin Green connects early medieval Britain to Byzantium in a different way than Wilcox, through the eyes of Syrian writer Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā. This late ninth-century Muslim or Christian author records the notion that Barṭīniyah (Britain transliterated) is ruled by seven kings, the earliest known reference to the so-called Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, and describes its capital city, arguably London, as a major trading port. In addition, Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā notes that Barṭīniyah is on the outer edge of the Rūm (the Roman or Byzantine empire), a view repeated in a later tenth-century source. That writers in the eastern Mediterranean as late as the tenth century thought of Britain as the furthest outpost of the Greco-Roman empire challenges existing geographic, temporal, and cultural frames of reference, while also serving as a reminder of the interconnections Britain continued to have with the Byzantine world in this period. Geographic reorientation towards the east continues with John Hines’ essay ‘Wulfstan in Truso: Old English Text, Baltic Archaeology, and World History’. Hines utilizes a multi-disciplinary world historical approach to provide new insight into the text of the Old English Orosius, and to the real-world locations it mentions. Hines centres his essay on Truso, a town in the Baltic, and the various sources that ‘cohere around’ it, in such a way as to allow Wulfstan’s particular report to reveal evidence of the ‘multifaceted and significant crossroads between zones and areas which they physically and directly embodied’. He argues that such an approach, which demands critical attention to a ‘multiplicity of aspects’ and a wide range of sources from literary to archaeological, allows for a more robust analysis. 12

Introduction Questioning, even resisting, boundaries is a useful approach from a global perspective. The purpose is not so much to erase the existence of borders in history, but instead to explore how they function, and interrogate their degree of permeability. Most of all, however, such global perspectives undermine prevalent assumptions about temporal, geographic, and cultural boundaries in early medieval studies.

Part III: Origins and Comparisons The final section of the volume takes aim at the conceptual categories that define early medieval English studies, reflecting on foundational terms like ‘Anglo-Saxon’, and the use of a ‘global perspective’, in such a way as to open the field to novel and potent approaches. In particular, this section examines origin narratives from the nineteenth century, as well as returning to the benefits and limits of comparative studies. John D. Niles, in ‘Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins from a Eurasian Perspective’, begins this section by challenging the ‘false binarism’ of what he calls the ‘Germanizing’ and ‘Romanizing’ orientations of scholarship related to the Migration Age. He situates the peoples who became known as the Anglo-Saxons within their wider context by analysing the influence of the multi-ethnic empire of the Huns. His wide-ranging study focuses on three primary areas of intersection between Pontic-Danubian and northwestern European practices visible in material culture: horse burial, gold-and-garnet polychrome jewellery, and the adaptation of a specific type of stylized animal ornamentation. Niles’ advocacy here for widening critical perspective into what he calls ‘Eurasia without boundaries’ sets the foundation for further scholarship which can speak to the interconnections between the peoples of Britain and those of other parts of Eurasia. In ‘Historical Origins of a Mythical History: The Formation of the Myth Supporting Anglo-Saxonism Reconsidered’, Kazutomo Karasawa interrogates the pervasive founding narrative of English identity, that the Anglo-Saxons ‘constitute the major part of the ancestry of English people’. This narrative includes the myth of ethnic singularity after the Anglo-Saxons had supposedly eliminated the Indigenous peoples of Britain. This mythos is often employed by those seeking to assert the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’, and consequently the modern English white ‘race’, a historical distortion that Karasawa traces all the way back to the early medieval period. Karasawa demonstrates how the myth began with Gildas’ De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, was adapted by Bede, modified by Æthelweard in his late tenth-century Chronicle, picked up by William of Malmesbury in his Gesta regum Anglorum, revised by 13

Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks Geoffrey of Monmouth largely from the perspective of the displaced, and brought into the early modern period by John Milton, drawing from both Æthelweard and William of Malmesbury. The repetition of this myth by medieval historians allowed early modern historians to follow suit, which then provided a foundation for an Anglo-Saxonism with racial bias that began to flourish in the mid-nineteenth century, and which continues to the present moment. Taking the nineteenth century as his point of departure, Michael W. Scott offers a view from the Pacific of seminal figures of early English history in ‘Boniface and Bede in the Pacific: Exploring Anamorphic Comparisons between the Hiberno-Saxon Missions and the Anglican Melanesian Mission’. As an anthropologist of Oceania, with field research experience in Island Melanesia, Scott signals a new direction for comparison that embraces the fact that comparisons compose and recompose the terms they compare. Scott describes this process as ‘anamorphic’: each term in a comparison causes the other to appear as something other than what it was before. Arguing that comparison ought to be an object as well as a method of study, Scott explores the ways in which Victorian Anglicans caused their mission work in Island Melanesia to appear as a reprise of the Hiberno-Saxon monastic missions to and from Britain in the age of Bede. He highlights how, in the context of this comparison, other smaller-scale comparisons enabled a Solomon Islands man named Ini Kopuria to become the founder of the Melanesian Brotherhood, and set the European tradition of monastic missions on a new Pacific trajectory towards globalization. Today, one of the most vibrant living legacies of Hiberno-Saxon monasticism is Melanesian. More than a source of Pacific perspectives on the English, the Melanesian Brothers are the decolonized and decolonizing transformation of the Hiberno-Saxon missionary tradition. Articulating one of the voices from outside the field of medieval history, Scott’s essay suggests a direction by which careful use of comparative analysis can open the study of early medieval England to a more global perspective. In her concluding essay, ‘Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit: Displaying the Sacred’, Jolly reverses Scott’s anamorphic comparison by looking at Oceania in Britain in the twenty-first century. Her analysis is based in large part on University of Hawai‘i study abroad students’ responses to the British Library’s 2018–19 Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibit in comparison to their reactions to British exhibits of Oceania. The global perspective in this essay draws on postcolonial and Indigenous studies to move towards a post-secular historiography that questions the sacred–secular divide of modernity as applied to the medieval era. Like Hawkes and Scott, her essay considers how engagement with Pacific cultures enlightens and broadens understanding of medieval history, particularly the 14

Introduction way that decolonizing operations need to be applied to European history in order to free the study of early medieval Britain from the effects of ethnic nationalism. The approaches taken by the essays in this section help to articulate both the necessity and the potential inherent in the careful re-contextualizing of the field of early medieval studies in a global context. Such a move also serves to frustrate simplistic uses of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ material for modern racist political purposes. However, re-contextualizing must always take into account gaps in our knowledge and critical awareness, even as scholars specializing in medieval studies, and in the humanities more generally, probe and question the core tenets of their disciplines. The editors and the authors of Global Perspectives thus invite readers to probe and question the scope of early medieval studies, its materiality and geography, its narrative framework and boundaries, and the ways these scholarly pursuits ripple out into the wider cultural sphere. In particular, we encourage a collaborative effort to displace the abuse and misuse of medieval materials by promoting a more inclusive and diverse global perspective on early medieval England.

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PART I

MATERIAL CULTURE

Chapter 1 The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat: The Role of Early Medieval England1 Debby Banham

T

he global triumph of bread wheat is a phenomenon that is, in a sense, too big to see, so total that most people in the modern world are not even aware of it. In the twenty-first century, travellers from Europe and North America can take it for granted that, almost anywhere they go in the world, bread will be available, and not just any old bread, but the kind they are familiar with: light, white bread, raised with yeast and made from bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L., Aestivum group). This kind of bread is now so ubiquitous that any other kind has to be specified as ‘spelt bread’, for example, or ‘flat bread’, and the type of wheat it is made from is called bread wheat, so closely are the two identified. Its alternative name, ‘common wheat’, derives from its status as by far the most common of the wheats at the present time, and for centuries past. All this is well known to many, but our representative European or North American traveller is unlikely to think about how this situation came into being. How is it that a crop originating in a relatively small area of the eastern Mediterranean became the second or third most abundant crop in the world today, grown on every continent except Antarctica, and consumed even more widely?2 This paper examines one episode in the story of bread wheat’s global triumph, the episode that took place in England in the early Middle Ages. It will argue that this apparently minor episode, taking place on a small island off Europe within a few hundred years, was in fact a crucial turning 1

2

Acknowledgements: Much of the research for this paper was conducted during my tenure of a Collaborative Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to work on Early English Bread with Professor Martha Bayless. I am very grateful to both the Council and Professor Bayless for that opportunity, and also to our research assistant, Katie Haworth. One of the readers for the press made suggestions which improved this paper considerably, and I’d especially like to thank Professor Karen Jolly for information about food in Hawai‘i, as well as her editorial support. Both editors deserve our gratitude for making sure this volume came to fruition, even though that often looked far from certain. Its competitors for first place are rice and maize, both unsuitable for making raised bread, and the latter grown mainly as animal feed. For current global cereal production figures, see the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Cereal Supply and Demand Brief at fao.org.

19

Debby Banham point in the spread of bread wheat, and with it wheat bread, throughout the world. Medieval England became a repository, as it were, of Mediterranean dietary preferences, which were then disseminated across the world by British colonial activities in the early modern period. But first, we shall take a look at the wider picture, and the longue durée of cereal globalization. In doing so, I draw upon the work of a recent research project at the Archaeology Department in the University of Cambridge, ‘Food Globalisation in Prehistory’, directed by Professor Martin Jones. As their example of the extremes which bread wheat has reached, the project’s members chose northern China, where ‘spring is welcomed with a light white steamed bread known as huamo (colourful bread), which local women decorate just as their mothers and grandmothers have done before them […] the fluffy white texture of the huamo requires bread wheat, whose origins are in the west’.3 Bread wheat arrived in China as part of what might be called ‘Stage 1’, the prehistoric stage, of its global triumph, in which it spread through temperate Eurasia from its origins in the ‘Fertile Crescent’ of south-west Asia, both eastwards, across Asia, and westwards, around the Mediterranean.4 Stage 2 took place in Europe in the ‘early historic period’, that is to say the Roman period and the Middle Ages, but is rarely documented in written sources. As a result, this stage has to be reconstructed largely from archaeological remains, just like Stage 1, although written sources do shed some light on its motivation and reception, as we shall see. Martin Jones summarizes the historic stages as follows, and in doing so suggests some mechanisms and motivations for the spread of bread wheat: The power of bread has taken many forms in many episodes of an originally east Mediterranean tradition that travelled with the Roman Empire, and then with Christianity around the world. The dominance of bread wheat within our modern food chain as the major calorific source of our species has been driven as much by bread as an artefact, rich in meaning, as wheat as a source of nutrition, rich in calories.5

In this scenario, Empire and Church, two enormously powerful institutions, each with huge cultural prestige, are seen as major drivers in spreading the taste for bread, and thus for bread wheat, across Europe and then beyond. 3

4

5

M. Jones et al., ‘Food Globalisation in Prehistory: The Agrarian Foundations of an Interconnected Continent’, Journal of the British Academy 4 (2016), 73–87, at 73. The domestication and initial spread of bread wheat were an important part of the ‘Neolithic revolution’ explored and deconstructed in The Origins and Spread of Domestic Plants in Southwest Asia and Europe, ed. S. Colledge and J. Conolly (Walnut Creek, CA, 2007). M. Jones, Feast: Why Humans Share Food (Cambridge, 2007), p. 273.

20

The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat Stage 2 covered such a small area that it might be seen as insignificant, if it had not been an essential precursor to Stage 3, driven by the European empires of the early modern period. The ‘voyages of discovery’, which led to vast swathes of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania being conquered by Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal, also disseminated European tastes in food, and, in particular, bread, to large parts of the world, from which they have spread to virtually every corner of the globe today. North American tastes in food, so dominant at the present day, were formed not only by the native crops of North America, but by the expectations of European colonists, who, with assumptions formed by the Bible and the Eucharist, found it hard to contemplate life without bread and bread wheat.6 Before we go on to examine the role of early medieval England in the spread of bread wheat around the world, it is worth pausing to consider the crop we are dealing with, and the alternatives. In addition to the prestige attached to bread, especially that made from bread wheat, which we shall return to below, what was it that originally made, and still makes, bread wheat so much more attractive than other cereals, or non-cereal staples such as potatoes or yams? To take that last point first, the main advantages of cereals over other foods are thought to be not only that they are a concentrated source of nutrition, but also that they are stable.7 Once cereal crops have dried out after harvest, they can be stored for long periods, allowing people to survive ‘hungry gaps’ that would be fatal if they relied on more perishable foods.8 Thus populations that base their diets on cereals are able to experience more or less steady, if not necessarily rapid, growth, interrupted only by epidemic disease or really exceptional climatic conditions. This growth may be accompanied by the accumulation of wealth and allow the emergence of more stratified societies.9 Such developments do seem to have taken place in England, as demonstrated by the proliferation of nucleated settlements, including

6

7 8

9

This was part of a complex phenomenon, with immense ramifications, that has taken its name from the pioneering study of A. W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (Westport, Conn., 1972). Jones, Feast, p. 194. For some of the means by which this could be achieved, see H. Forbes and L. Foxhall, ‘Ethnoarchaeology and storage in the ancient Mediterranean: beyond risk and survival’, in Food in Antiquity, ed. J. Wilkinson, D. Harvey, and M. Dobson (Exeter, 1995), pp. 69–86, esp. 74. A recent version of the ‘cerealization to civilization’ thesis is J. C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, 2017). For how political change might have followed on from cerealization in early medieval Ireland, see F. McCormick, ‘The Decline of the Cow: Agricultural and Settlement Change in Early Medieval Ireland’, Peritia 20 (2008), 210–25.

21

Debby Banham large trading centres, as well as the increasing visibility of wealth, for example in the richest burials, and the development of kingdoms.10 Among the cereals, bread wheat is only one of four main kinds of wheat. The others are spelt (Triticum aestivum L., Spelta group), the main bread corn of Roman Britain,11 emmer (Triticum turgidum L., Dicoccum group), and einkorn (Triticum monococcum L.), the earliest wheat to be cultivated.12 Bread wheat is considered preferable to the other kinds of wheat in the present day because it is ‘naked’, or ‘free-threshing’, that is, it has no inner layer of chaff adhering to the grains, which would have to be removed before the threshed grain could be ground into flour.13 Bread wheat is by no means the only free-threshing cereal: there are naked forms of barley, too, and even of oats, while rye is the most free-threshing of all the temperate cereals. But in addition to requiring less processing than many cereals, bread wheat is also considered more palatable; that is, as we have seen, it makes lighter, whiter bread than any other cereal, not only the other kinds of wheat, but also rye or barley, which all make a rather darker coloured and less well-risen bread by comparison. The ability of a type of flour to retain gas, and thus make a well-risen loaf, depends on the presence of elastic high-molecular-weight glutenins (known collectively as gluten). Bread wheat is much richer in these than any other type of cereal.14 To turn now to early medieval England, the British Isles in the early Middle Ages clearly fall into Stage 2 of the global triumph, the early historic spread of bread wheat in northern and western Europe. What we know about Roman and early medieval Britain seems to fit in with the proposal by Martin Jones that the Roman Empire and the Church were responsible in turn for the spread of bread wheat in this area. Although spelt was the main bread corn in Roman Britain, bread wheat was also used, and may have been cultivated, allowing some people to emulate dietary trends in the Mediterranean at this time.15 What happened to 10

11 12

13

14 15

For a recent essay relating such developments to changes in, and the success of, agriculture in England, see T. Pickles, ‘Review Article: Why Should We Write about Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming?’ Early Medieval Europe 28 (2020), 466–82. See also M. McKerracher, Farming Transformed in Anglo-Saxon England: Agriculture in the Long Eighth Century (Oxford, 2018), pp. 121–4. H. E. M. Cool, Eating and Drinking in Roman Britain (Cambridge, 2006), p. 75. Wheat taxonomy has been subject to intensive revision in recent years. Here I follow the terminology of S. A. Francis, British Field Crops, 2nd ed. (Bury St Edmunds, 2009). For domestication, see Colledge and Conolly, Origins and Spread. For a more detailed, but accessible, discussion of the difference between hulled and free-threshing, or naked, cereals, see J. M. Renfrew, Palaeoethnobotany: The Prehistoric Food Plants of the Near East and Europe (London, 1973), pp. 32–4. See R. Sallares, ‘Molecular Archaeology and Ancient History’, in Food in Antiquity, ed. Wilkinson et al., pp. 87–100, at 97. The reasons for doubting the cultivation of bread wheat in Roman Britain

22

The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat eating habits in Britain after the Roman administration broke down is hard to know, as so few settlements from this period have been identified. With the end of urban life and the loss of military spending power, as well as deterioration in the climate, it is likely that the population declined considerably in both size and prosperity, to the degree that dietary ambitions were probably limited to having enough to eat.16 Pollen evidence shows that woodland regeneration was relatively limited in lowland Britain in the post-Roman period; that is to say, some form of human land-use continued, and there is some evidence for cereal cultivation, but which crops were grown is more difficult to establish.17 Following the fifth century, when Germanic immigrants started to arrive in Britain, we have more information, as a distinctive material culture makes the settlements of this period, and especially the cemeteries, easy to identify.18 The recent work of Mark McKerracher has shown that bread wheat (or free-threshing wheat, which would in practice be mainly bread wheat) became more common in England between the fifth and ninth centuries.19 It looks as if it was increasingly widely cultivated up until the eleventh century, replacing the hulled wheats, such as spelt and emmer, which had virtually ceased cultivation by the time of the Norman

16

17

18

19

are set out by L. Lodwick with T. Brindle, ‘Arable Farming, Plant Foods and Resources’, in M. Allen et al., New Visions of the Countryside of Roman Britain, vol. 2: The Rural Economy of Roman Britain, Britannia Monograph series 30 (London, 2017), pp. 11–84, at 19–20; see also M. McKerracher, Anglo-Saxon Crops and Weeds: A Case Study in Quantitative Archaeobotany (Oxford, 2019), p. 30. For diet, see Cool, Eating and Drinking, p. 70, and for the Mediterranean, G. Kron, ‘Agriculture’, in A Companion to Food in the Ancient World, ed. J. Wilkinson and R. Nadeau (Chichester, 2015), pp. 160–2, at 162. On the economics of agricultural production in Roman Britain, see M. Allen and L. Lodwick, ‘Agricultural Strategies in Roman Britain’, in M. Allen et al., New Visions of the Countryside, pp. 142–77, at 173–7. S. Rippon et al., The Fields of Britannia: Continuity and Change in the Late Roman and Early Medieval Landscape (Oxford, 2015), tables 3.1 and 3.2, and figures 3.3 and 3.4, pp. 62–7. This material culture, which came to occupy large parts of Lowland Britain, has traditionally been designated ‘Anglo-Saxon’, associating it with those Germanic immigrants, although it is likely to have been adopted by some of the existing population as well. On the dating of this early material, the two most influential studies are Anglo-Saxon Graves and Grave-Goods of the 6th and 7th Centuries AD, ed. J. Hines and A. Bayliss (London, 2013), and C. Hills and S. Lucy, Spong Hill IX: Chronology and Synthesis (Cambridge, 2012). Rippon et al., The Fields of Britannia, pp. 113–17, discuss how assumptions about migration may have influenced understandings of agrarian change in the post-Roman period. For a detailed analysis, see now M. McKerracher, Anglo-Saxon Crops and Weeds: A Case Study in Quantitative Archaeobotany (Oxford, 2019), pp. 66–7, and especially figs 16, p. 68, and 20, p. 71. Rippon et al., The Fields of Britannia, table 3.6, shows a rise in the amount of oats, rye and barley between the Roman and early medieval periods, and a concomitant fall in wheat, but does not distinguish different types of wheat; see also discussion on pp. 314–15.

23

Debby Banham Conquest.20 Rye and oats, both of minor importance in Roman Britain, also became more common during the course of this period, but neither was ever grown as much as wheat or barley in England.21 The suggestion by Martin Jones that the Church played an important role in popularizing bread wheat is corroborated for England by Bede’s famous story of the kings of Essex: Cumque uiderent pontificem, celebratis in ecclesia missarum solemniis, eucharistiam populo dare, dicebant, ut uulgo fertur, ad eum barbara inflati stultitia: ‘Quare non et nobis porrigis panem nitidum, quem et patri nostro Saba’, sic namque eum appellare consuerant, ‘dabas, et populo adhuc dare in ecclesia non desistis?’ (‘And when they saw the bishop, having celebrated the solemnities of the mass in church, give the Eucharist to the people, puffed up with barbarian stupidity, they said to him, as is commonly recounted, “Why do you not offer us too the white bread which you also gave to our father Saba”, for that is what they used to call him, “and which you have not yet stopped giving to the people in church?”’.)22

‘White bread’ was clearly unfamiliar, even to royalty, in early seventh-­ century Essex.23 This particular panis nitidus was of course the Eucharist, but we should note that it was its whiteness that struck the sons of Sæberht as remarkable. Due to their barbara stultitia, the theological significance of the eucharistic bread was lost on them. All they could see was what it looked like. And evidently it looked not only unusual, but desirable. What then was new about this ‘white bread’? It is likely that it was made not only from a new kind of grain, bread wheat, but by methods previously unknown in England. Until bleaching techniques became available in the nineteenth century, white flour could only be made by sieving out the bran, and then bolting the resulting flour through cloth to remove the remaining coloured particles.24 The finer the cloth, the finer and whiter the flour. This can only be done with bread wheat, however; 20

21

22 23

24

For the tenth and eleventh centuries, we still rely on the summary in D. Banham and R. Faith, Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming (Oxford, 2014), p. 33, based on a much smaller body of data than McKerracher’s. McKerracher, Anglo-Saxon Crops and Weeds, figs 18, p. 69, and 22, p. 72. For the Roman period, see Lodwick, ‘Arable Farming’, pp. 17 (for rye, a ‘minor crop’) and 18–19 (for oats, either a very minor crop or a weed). Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, II.5, ed. C. Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae opera historica (Oxford, 1896), p. 91. Translation my own. This took place in AD 616 or 617, between the death of their father Sæberht and that of all three sons in battle against the Gewisse: see S. Keynes, ‘Appendix I: Rulers of the English, c. 450–1066’, in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of AngloSaxon England, ed. M. Lapidge et al., 2nd ed. (Chichester, 2014), pp. 521–38, at 532. E. David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 30–1.

24

The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat other grains yield a greyish or beige flour, however finely they are bolted. For Ælfric, Latin far, a term for hulled wheat that seems to cover both emmer and spelt, meant græg hwæte (‘grey wheat’): it was colour, not processing requirements or ‘baking quality’, that distinguished other kinds of wheat from bread wheat, as far as the grammarian was concerned.25 Thus, to produce flour white enough to impress the kings of Essex, it seems likely that the Church was using both a novel cereal and new processing methods, in the shape of bolting and probably mechanical milling (see below). In fact, at this early stage, only twenty years after the arrival of the Augustinian mission, it is possible that neither new crops or new technology had yet arrived in England: ready-prepared flour, or even bread, may have been imported from areas, most likely Francia, where the Church was already well established. But it was not long before new technology took root in England. In the next century, we see a king of Kent making considerable efforts to gain access to a mill belonging to an ecclesiastical institution, St Augustine’s at Canterbury: In nomine Domini nostri Iesu. Possessio quedam est terra in regione que uocatur Cert monasterii scilicet beatorum Petri et Pauli apostolorum quod situm est ad orientem ciuitatis Dorouernis. In hac autem terra habetur molina cuius quippe semis utilitas, id est dimidia pars molendine, a possessoribus prefati monasterii ac terre huius ad uillam regalem que nominatur With tradita est, pro hac uidelicet conditione atque commutatione, ut homo ille qui hanc terram in qua molina est tributario iure teneret unius gregis porcorum pascuam atque pastinationem in saltu Andoredo iugiter haberet. Hanc autem commutationem ego Æthilberhctus rex Cantie ut rata inperpetuum existat signo dominice crucis roborare curaui et testes religiosos ut id ipsum facerent adhibui. Actum in ciuitate Dorouernis, anno incarnationis Domini. dcclxii. (‘In the name of our Lord Jesus. Some land in the region called [Great] Chart is the property of the monastery, namely of SS Peter and Paul the Apostles, which is located to the east of the city of Canterbury. On this land, moreover, there is a mill, of which in fact the half use, that is a half part of the mill and of its land, has been conveyed by the owners of the said monastery to the royal vill which is called Wye, namely on this condition, and in exchange, that that person who may by tributary right hold that land where the mill is, should have the pasture and feeding of one herd of pigs in the wood of Andred for ever. I, Æthelberht, king of Kent, have taken care moreover to confirm this exchange with the sign of the Lord’s cross so that it may remain settled in perpetuity, and invited religious witnesses to do the same. Enacted in the city of Canterbury in the year of Our Lord’s incarnation 762’.)26 25 26

Ælfric, Grammar, ed. J. Zupitza, Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar (Berlin, 1880), p. 43. Charters of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, and Minster-in-Thanet, ed. S. E.

25

Debby Banham We cannot be sure that the Kentish crown did not already possess mills of its own by the mid-eighth century, but evidently it did not have enough capacity to satisfy demand. It was the Church that had that capacity. It was probably in order to manufacture communion bread in England, as numbers of communicants increased, that the Church had first established mechanical mills, but that is unlikely to be the reason that Æthelberht II was so keen to gain access to the new technology. It is much more likely that he wanted to enhance his own secular feasts with bread that exploited both of the special qualities of bread wheat: not only its white colour, but its light texture as well. Indeed, if English royalty had only had access to unbolted, coarsely sieved, flour before the mission arrived, a well-risen white loaf must have been a revelation to them. Christianity brought them not only eternal life, but a much more prestigious diet here below. We know what kind of bread was considered best for a civilized Mediterranean diet in late antiquity from Anthimus, the Byzantine physician who was shocked to find the Franks eating bacon, but, as far as bread was concerned, considered them within the Mediterranean pale: In primis, panem nitidum bene fermentatum et non azimum, sed bene coctum comedendum, et ubi locus fuerit, cottidie calentem, quia tales panes melius digeruntur. nam si non bene leuatus fuerit, satis grauat stomachum. Hordei natura humida et frigida, et purgatoria sucus palaearum. Hoc ut agnoscas, hordeum non frixum sic coque in aqua et uidebis defluentem sucum copiosissimum. (‘First of all, white bread is to be eaten, well leavened, and not unleavened, but well cooked, and where there is the opportunity, hot every day, because this kind of bread is better digested. For if it is not well risen, it weighs down the stomach rather. The nature of barley is moist and cold, and the juice from the husks purgative. To find this out, cook unparched barley just as it is in water, and you’ll see the juice flowing out very abundantly’.)27

The juxtaposition of these passages on bread and barley presumably means he thought the eating of barley bread unwise, although this is not made explicit. The wealthy and powerful of early England are hardly likely to have worked out for themselves the possibilities of using white flour for leavened bread: they must have seen (and tasted) some examples, and the most likely context for this would be secular feasts with ecclesiastics from the Mediterranean. The Church must have offered them models for worldly bread, along the lines approved by Anthimus, as well as the Eucharist.

27

Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters 4 (Oxford, 1995), no. 11, S 25. Translation based on Kelly’s commentary, pp. 44–7. De observatione ciborum 1 and 2, ed. M. Grant (Totnes, 1996), p. 50. Translation adapted from Grant, p. 51.

26

The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat We know that the Augustinian mission had considerable qualms about journeying to the ends of the earth to do the Lord’s work. The Liber responsionum that Bede transmits makes it clear that many aspects of English society and culture at that time were so different from what the missionaries were used to that Augustine had to seek advice from Pope Gregory.28 Diet is not mentioned, apart from the issue of sacrificing cattle, but we can imagine that being able to eat bread they could recognize as such would make the missionaries feel much more at home in this far-flung land, even if it was not something they wanted to bother the pope about. Their feelings must have been very similar to those of Congregationalist missionaries arriving in Hawai‘i from New England in the nineteenth century, unable to find any bread at all.29 It is of course possible that ‘civilized’ bread had already been brought to Kent by Æthelberht I’s Frankish wife, Bertha, before the missionaries arrived.30 She will have been used to the kind of diet recommended by Anthimus, and must have brought with her to Æthelberht’s court the Mediterranean tastes already prevalent in the upper echelons of Frankish society. Later queens have been credited with an important impact on dietary tastes, with Catherine de’ Medicis bringing Italian dining fashions to France, for example,31 but we can only speculate on the degree to which Bertha could, or even wanted to, influence the foodways of pre-­conversion Kent, however primitive or alien she may have found them.32 It also seems unlikely that her retinue brought the whole new suite of technology with it that the Church was able to establish once it was embedded within English society. But if she, or previous contacts with Frankish elites, had made people in the south-east corner of England aware of what was being eaten across the Channel, they may have been primed, as it were, to emulate the eating habits of the Roman missionaries. One question that remains, in reconstructing this sequence of events, is why kings, who must have had effectively unlimited access to labour to grind their flour by hand, were so keen to mechanize the process. In early Kent, we know that a whole category of unfree women was devoted to this task: 28 29 30 31

32

Bede, Historia ecclesiastica I.27, ed. Plummer, Opera historica, pp. 48–62. R. Laudan, The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage (Honolulu, 1996), pp. 173–5. See Bede, Historia ecclesiastica I.25, ed. Plummer, Opera historica, p. 45, who has nothing to say about her dietary preferences. The ‘culinary legend’ of Catherine has been thoroughly deconstructed by B. K. Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (New York, 2011), pp. 43–51. For the attitude to English diet at a slightly later date of one used to continental fare, see A. Gautier, ‘Alcuin, la bière et le vin: comportements alimentaires et choix identitaires dans la correspondance d’Alcuin’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 111 (2004), 431–41.

27

Debby Banham [16] Gif man wið cyninges mægdenman geligeþ, L scillinga gebete. [16.1] Gif hio grindende þeowa sio, XXV scillinga gebete. [16.2] Sio þridde, XII scillingas. (‘[16] If someone lies with the king’s unmarried woman, let him pay 50 shillings. [16.1] If she is a grinding slave, let him pay 25 shillings. 6 [16.2] The third [group?], 12 shillings’.)33

While not necessarily suggesting a large group of people, this categorization does show the importance of bread production to early Kentish royalty. The most likely explanation for their enthusiasm for the new technology is that it would release unfree female labour for sieving and, especially, bolting. This is an extremely time-consuming task, and the finer the desired result, the longer it takes.34 Although less strenuous than grinding by hand, it could easily have absorbed all the time and labour of women who were released from their querns by the mechanization of milling. It is in the aftermath of conversion to Christianity that we see the cultivation of bread wheat take off in England. From being found on 57% of sites in the earliest period (fifth to seventh centuries), according to McKerracher’s figures, it goes to 72% in the middle of the pre-Conquest period (seventh to ninth centuries). This expansion cannot have been easy to achieve. Bread wheat is on the edge of its climatic range in the British Isles. Even at the present time, it is grown mainly in the south and east, where the climate is warmer than in the north, and drier than in the west.35 In the early Middle Ages, long before modern developments in agricultural and crop-processing technologies, and the creation of hardier varieties, these environmental restrictions must have been much harder to overcome. Evidence for bread wheat in early medieval England shows a similar distribution to its modern cultivation; that is to say, it is more abundant in the south and east of the country. Not too much significance should be attached to this pattern, as it has a great deal to do with the distribution of archaeologists in modern Britain, and of redevelopment, which prompts archaeological investigation, and in fact there is little variation between the distributions of different cereal crops across early medieval Britain,

33 34

35

Æthelberht of Kent, Laws (early seventh century), ed. L. Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto, 2002), p. 64. So time-consuming in fact that I had to abandon my own experiments in sieving and bolting by hand, as did R. Fitch of Historic Royal Palaces at Hampton Court (R. Fitch, pers. comm.). For the current climatic requirements of bread wheat, see C. Harkness et al., ‘Adverse Weather Conditions for UK Wheat Production under Climate Change’, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 282–3 (2019), 107862, with map at p. 2 (article individually paginated).

28

The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat once these variables are allowed for.36 Nevertheless, wheat must have been much harder to grow in the north and west than in the south-east, as exemplified by Bede’s story of St Cuthbert on Farne Island: Rogauit ergo afferri sibi instrumenta quibus terram exerceret et triticum quod sereret. Sed seminata uerno tempore terra, nullos usque ad medium aestatis reddidit fructus. Unde, uisitantibus se iuxta morem fratribus, aiebat uir Dei: Forsitan aut telluris huiusce natura aut uoluntas Dei non est ut hoc in loco mihi triticum nascatur. Afferte rogo ordeum, si forte uel illud fructum facere possit […] Allatumque ordeum dum ultra omne tempus serendi, ultra omnem spem fructificandi terram commendaret, mox abundanter exortum fecit fructum copiosum. (‘So he asked for tools to be brought to him, to cultivate the land, and wheat to sow. But the land sown in the springtime had produced no crop up to the middle of the summer. And so, when some brothers were visiting him, as they often did, the man of God said “Perhaps it is not the nature of this land, or the will of God, for wheat to grow for me in this place. Bring barley, please, in case that may produce a crop instead” […] And when barley was brought, while he entrusted it to the earth past any season for sowing, past any hope of bearing fruit, it soon produced a plentiful crop, springing up abundantly’.)37

Leaving aside the issue of divine favour, we see that Cuthbert, used to an ecclesiastical diet at Lindisfarne, wanted to grow wheat for his bread, but, once he abandoned the comforts of his monastery, it was barley he had to content himself with, on the rugged Northumbrian coast. Food rents confirm that the landholding classes of pre-Conquest England had a strong preference for wheat bread, or white bread, which as we have seen came to the same thing. Almost without exception, every list, from the Laws of Ine of Wessex onwards, asks either for bread, or the wheat to make it from: Æt X hidum to fostre X fata hunies CCC hlafa XII ambra wilisc ealað XXX hluttres tu eald hriðeru oððe X weðeras X gees XX henna X cesas amber fulne buteran V leaxas XX pundwæga foðres 7 hundteontig æla. (‘From ten hides as support, ten vessels of honey, 300 loaves, 12 ambers full of Welsh beer, 30 of clear, two mature cattle or ten wethers, ten geese, 20 hens, ten cheeses, an amber full of butter, five salmon, 20 pounds’ weight of fodder, and a hundred eels’.)38 36 37 38

But see now McKerracher, Anglo-Saxon Crops and Weeds, pp. 74–8, for variation between different types of terrain within regions. Bede, Prose Life of St Cuthbert, 19, ed. B. Colgrave, Two Lives of St Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1940; repr. 1985), pp. 220–1. Lawcode of Ine of Wessex (688x726), ed. F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols (Halle, 1903–16), 1:118–21.

29

Debby Banham þæt is .iii. sceppe mealtes 7 healf sceppe hwæte. an slæghryðer .v. scep .x. fliccen. 7 .x. hund hlafa þæt sceal beon gære on pridie nonas Septembris. (‘that is three baskets of malt and half a basket of wheat, one beast for slaughter, five sheep, ten flitches of bacon, and a thousand loaves; it shall be ready on the day before the nones of September [i.e. the fifth]’.)39 Ærest æt ilcan hiwisce feowerti penege to hærfestes emnihte. 7 vi. ciricmittan ealað. 7 iii. sesðlar hlafhwetes […] 7 ðreo pund gafolberes […] 7 iiii. foðera aclofenas gauolwyda […] 7 to easran two ewe mid twam lamban. (‘First from every hide 40 pence at the autumn equinox, and six church measures of beer, and three sesters of bread wheat […] and three pounds of barley as rent […] and four fothers of split wood […] and at Easter two ewes with two lambs’.)40 cxx hwætenra hlafa 7 xxx clænra 7 an hriðer dugunde 7 iiii scep 7 twa flicca 7 v goes 7 x hennfuglas 7 x pund caeses […] 7 xxx ombra godes uuelesces aloð […] 7 mittan fulne huniges oðða twegen uuines. (’120 wheat loaves, and 30 clean ones, and one well-grown beast for slaughter, and four sheep and two flitches of bacon and five geese and ten hens and ten pounds of cheese … and 30 ambers of good Welsh beer […] and a measure full of honey or two of wine’.)41 lx ambra mealtes 7 cl hlafa, l hwite hlafa [cxx elmeshlafes] an hriðer, an suin, iiii weðras, ii wega spices 7 ceses. (’60 ambers of malt, 150 loaves, 50 white loaves [120 alms loaves], one beast for slaughter, one pig, four wethers, two weys of lard and cheese’.)42 ðritig ombra alað 7 ðreo hund hlafa, ðeara bið fiftig hwitehlafa, an weg spices 7 ceses, an ald hriðer, feower weðras, an suin oððe sex weðras, sex gosfuglas, ten hennfuglas, ðritig teapera gif hit wintres deg sie, sester fulne huniges, sester fulne butran, sester fulne saltes. (’30 ambers of beer, 300 loaves, of which 50 are to be white loaves, one wey of lard and cheese, one full-grown beast, four wethers, one pig or six 39 40 41

42

Newton (probably Suffolk) to Bury St Edmunds Abbey, 1016x1040, ed. A. J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters (Cambridge, 1939), no. 104. Hurstbourne Priors, Hants, to the Old Minster, Winchester, c. AD 900, ed. Robertson, Charters, no. 110, S 359. Stanstead, Kent, to Christ Church, Canterbury, 805x810, Charters of Christ Church, Canterbury, ed. N. P. Brooks and S. E. Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters 17 and 18 (Oxford, 2013), no. 42b, S 1188. Mongeham, near Deal, Kent, to Christ Church, mid-ninth century, Christ Church, ed. Brooks and Kelly, no. 84a, S 1197. Note that in the context of the passage, it is impossible to tell whether this means two ‘weys of each’ or ‘two weys altogether’.

30

The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat wethers, six geese, ten hens, 30 tapers if it is a winter’s day, a sester full of honey, a sester full of butter, a sester full of salt’.)43

These examples are fairly typical, and suggest that demands from landlords had a major effect on the amount of bread wheat grown by English farmers as time went on. The cultivation of bread wheat probably continued to expand through the tenth and eleventh centuries, driven not only by the requirements of landlords, but also the beginnings of a market in agricultural produce, and favoured by improving climatic conditions. It seems likely that these conditions deteriorated after Roman political control came to an end, and then, from the eighth to ninth centuries, improved again towards the ‘medieval warm period’.44 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, temperatures were higher than at any time before the late twentieth.45 This would make it possible to cultivate bread wheat across a wider area of England, and might make it available to a greater proportion of the population.46 We are fortunate to have some physical evidence to help gauge how far the triumph of bread wheat had progressed in England by the eleventh century. Several small, round loaves were found when a mid-­eleventhcentury house was excavated in Buttermarket, Ipswich in the 1970s. This unusual find was made possible by the fact that the whole house had burned down, leaving the loaves in a carbonized state, and presented a rare opportunity to analyse the materials of early medieval English bread. However, because this was a rare opportunity, it was a difficult one to take advantage of. It is usually possible to identify the species of whole cereal grains, even after a thousand years in the ground. But when those grains have been ground into flour and baked into bread, the task is considerably more challenging. Identifications have to be based on remains of bran, which is of course absent in white bread. Fortunately, the Ipswich loaves were not of the very highest status, and did contain bran, which was identified as belonging to wheat or rye, or possibly both.47 Subsequent 43

44 45

46

47

Challock, Kent, to Christ Church, 830s, will of the reeve Abba, Christ Church, ed. Brooks and Kelly, no. 70, S 1482. Here again it is impossible to say whether this means one ‘wey of each’ or ‘one wey altogether’. For the warm period, see W. J. Burroughs, Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 252–6. See S. Payne, ‘New insights into climate history’, British Archaeology, January– February 2007, 54, also U. Büntgen et al., ‘2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility’, Science 578 (2011), 578–82. For changes in cereal cultivation across the whole pre-Conquest period, and their relationship to both climate and dietary preferences, see D. Banham, ‘“In the Sweat of thy Brow shalt thou Eat Bread”: Cereals and Cereal Production in the Anglo-Saxon Landscape’, in The Landscape Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. N. J. Higham and M. J. Ryan, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 175–92. P. Murphy, ‘Buttermarket, Ipswich, Suffolk (1AS 3104): (2) Carbonised

31

Debby Banham statistical analysis suggested that two different cereals, namely wheat and rye, were almost certainly present.48 So clearly, even at this relatively late date, the triumph of bread wheat in England had some way to go. The townspeople of Ipswich would be intermediate in wealth and status, and their diet correspondingly intermediate, between the landowners who required wheat bread from their lands, and the peasants who grew bread wheat, but probably could not afford to eat it. In the later Middle Ages, wheat and rye were grown together as a mixed crop, known as ‘maslin’, a type of breadcorn available to a wider section of the population than bread wheat on its own, and this may have been true before the Conquest, as well.49 Nevertheless, it was in this period that the foundations were laid for the triumph of bread wheat in the British Isles. By the time of the Norman Conquest, bread wheat was being grown right across the south and east of England, and wheat bread was being eaten even more widely. Following the Conquest, William Kapelle argues that Norman lords promoted the cultivation of bread wheat beyond where it was grown previously, because they simply refused to eat bread that failed to reflect their status as lords.50 The Anglo-Normans exported the taste for bread wheat to the rest of the British Isles, but it was a long time before its triumph was complete. In the eighteenth century, Arthur Young found the peasantry in the north of England, away from the fertile east-coast plain, either eating oatcakes, or bread made of barley and rye, and Samuel Johnson found that bread that he would recognize was quite absent from the Highlands and islands of Scotland.51 The ‘better sort’ of people, as Young called them, were not so dependent on what could be grown locally, and they were eating wheat bread. At the present day, bread made from wheat is available everywhere in the British Isles, and to everyone. Even so, oatcake traditions in various parts of the British Isles are not quite extinct, nor are

48

49

50 51

Loaves’, Ancient Monuments Laboratory Report 75/90, Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, 1975. I should like to thank Peter Murphy for permission to quote from this report, which is now available on the Historic England website. F. McLaren and J. Evans, ‘The chemical identification of ancient British bread flours: encountering and overcoming some of the obstacles’, Civilisations 49 (2002), 169–82. See D. J. Stone, ‘The Consumption of Field Crops in Late Medieval England’, in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron (Oxford, 2006), pp. 11–26, esp. 12–13. W. E. Kapelle, The Norman Conquest of the North: The Region and its Transformation, 1000–1135 (London, 1979), pp. 214–30. A. Young, A Six Months Tour through the North of England, 4 vols (London, 1770), e.g. 3:16, 33, 38, 48 (Northumberland); S. Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. P. Levi (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 62, 72.

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The Global Triumph of Bread Wheat the barley bannocks of Orkney; indeed, they are now enjoying a revival as part of a general increase in interest in local food customs.52 Such fashions are a very recent development, however. They lay far in the future even when I was a child, in the 1950s. I was lucky enough to live in a Jewish neighbourhood, and thus grew up with rye bread, but most of my family, and most of the British population, knew no bread made of anything other than bread wheat, and white bread was considered almost universally to be superior to bread of any other colour. It was this, somewhat blinkered, view, that Britain was already exporting to its empire in the time of Arthur Young and Dr Johnson. Even by the end of the Middle Ages, Britons of any status above peasant were used to eating wheat bread, and once they became colonialists, they were in a position to demand it, wherever they were in the world. Thus, the British empire was a major vector of bread wheat and wheat bread to its overseas territories. Other colonial powers were equally important in the world at large, but the role of England was pivotal for those territories that became British colonies, including those in North America, whose dietary practices and preferences are so influential across the world today. If St Augustine of Canterbury and his fellow missionaries, or possibly Queen Bertha of Kent and her followers, had not brought Mediterranean eating habits to England in the early Middle Ages, bread wheat might not have achieved the dominant position it occupies today in agriculture and diet across huge areas of the world.

52

See L. Mason with C. Brown, Traditional Foods of Britain: An Inventory (Totnes, 1999), pp. 266–7 and 270–1 for oatcakes, and 228–9 for barley bannocks.

33

Chapter 2 Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art Jane Hawkes Classical vs Anglo-Saxon

S

urprising though it may seem, the study of Anglo-Saxon art does not feature with any great regularity in the history of western European art; in Britain only two or three universities include specialist modules on Anglo-Saxon art in their art history curriculum.1 In large part this is because the art of the Anglo-Saxons is (rightly) not considered to exist comfortably within the parameters of the classical tradition, the art emerging from the visual traditions of ancient Greece and – more usually – republican and imperial Rome. It is this that is prioritized within the canon of art history in the western European tradition, not only in and of itself, but because it is also considered to underpin the art of the Renaissances of the fifteenth 1

Recognizing that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is currently fraught with socio-­ political associations, the term is here used primarily adjectivally as a means to denote the cultural, social, political and economic phenomena associated with the Germanic-speaking peoples living mostly, although not exclusively, in the geo-political region now known as ‘England’ during the early Middle Ages (c. 450‒1100). At certain periods during this time-frame these peoples also engaged culturally, politically and economically with those inhabiting the geographical region now referred to as Scotland; thus, it makes little sense to refer to these phenomena as ‘English’ or ‘British’, both in terms of the early medieval period but also in the light of the current heritage of nineteenth-century relations between the two nation states of Scotland and England; this is also true of course of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ activities in relation to the modern-day island of Ireland, and England’s other early colony, Wales. In relation to the art of these peoples here named ‘Anglo-Saxon’, it is understood to be distinct from the so-called ‘Celtic Art’ of modern-day Ireland and Britain during this period and from that of generally termed ‘classical’ (emerging from the visual traditions familiar to the late antique Roman world) – being produced under the aegis of the Germanic-speaking peoples who came to settle in the region during the course of the fifth century. For summaries see, for example, J. Hawkes, ‘Design and Decoration: Revisualising Rome in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture’, in Rome across Time and Space. Cultural Transmission and the Exchange of Ideas, c. 500‒1400, ed. C. Bolgia, R. McKitterick, and J. Osborne, Conference proceedings, Cambridge 2008 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 201–21; L. Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New History (London, 2012). For further suggestions of appropriate uses of the term ‘AngloSaxon’, see J. Hines, et. al., ‘The responsible use of the term “Anglo-Saxon”’, A Forum for Multidisciplinary Anglo-Saxon Studies [accessed 10 December, 2020].

34

Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art and sixteenth centuries, that of the ‘Baroque’ of the seventeenth century, and to inspire the neo-classical revivals of the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries.2 In other words, the art of the last five centuries articulated within a perceived classical tradition is that which, in effect, forms the canon of art history within the parameters of post-medieval western European art that is the focus of the discipline across much of Europe, North America and Australasia. This is not, of course, the tradition of art produced by the majority of cultures across the globe. But global art is also studied in only a very few art history departments in Britain,3 except in so far as it is deemed to impact on the art of Western Europe, as in the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth century when the art of eastern Asia and that of continental Africa, perceived as exotica, influenced artists working in Europe.4 In other words, Anglo-Saxon art plays as little a role in the canon of western European art history as it is studied today within the university as does any art produced outside that canon. This, of course, is also true of other arts emerging from the islands of Britain and Ireland during the early medieval period: those produced by the Scandinavian settlers in the region and by the ‘Celtic’ peoples of Ireland (and Scotland), so-called since the late eighteenth/nineteenth-century move towards independence from England by these regions.5 These traditional arts – the so-called ‘Vikingage’ and ‘Celtic’ arts – tend to be, like those of the Anglo-Saxons, applied arts based primarily on pattern, linear effects and variegated surfaces, rather than naturalism and the human form. In part, the ‘otherness’ of 2

3

4

5

There is an overwhelming number of publications on this subject, but see, for example, B. Rowland, The Classical Tradition in Western Art (Cambridge, MA, 1963; repr. 2013); Michael Greenhalgh, The Classical Tradition in Art (London, 1978); A Companion to the Classical Tradition, ed. C. W. Kallendorf (Maldon, MA, 2007); The Classical Tradition, A. Grafton, G. W. Most, and S. Settis (Cambridge, MA and London, 2010). The establishment of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia in the late 1970s is a notable exception to this general state of affairs. References to academia and the university here are understood to refer to the situation in Britain and Ireland, although it might well be expected that the situations encountered in this arena are replicated (to some degree) elsewhere in many institutions in North America, Australasia and continental Europe. See the useful summary by D. Murrell, ‘African Influences in Modern Art’, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–Present. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aima/hd_aima.htm (April 2008). See also, as examples of the many publications on this subject, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art, ed. W. Rubin, 2 vols (New York, 1984); L. Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West (London, 2005). See, for instance, the formative introduction to the subject of ‘Celtic Art’ as a construct by the late J. Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: the Celtic Revival 1830–1930 (London, 1980). For discussion of the problematics involved in the term ‘Viking-age’, see, e.g., J. Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (London and New York, 2015), pp. 4‒18.

35

Jane Hawkes these arts in relation to the established canon prioritized within the study of art history is due to the difficulties of subsuming such visual traditions into the remit of classical art as it has been constructed in the scholarship. Historiographically, therefore, when Anglo-Saxon (as well as ‘Vikingage’ and ‘Celtic’) art has been studied within academic discourse it has tended to be forced into constraints enabling it to be considered according to criteria established for engaging with the classical. This has meant that it has been explained largely in formalist terms, focusing on motif, style and technology. The motif of the vine-scroll, for instance, not a detail found in the pre-Christian art of the Anglo-Saxons but inherited from the art of late antiquity via Christian art, has enjoyed considerable scholarly attention in terms of its typologies and the styles by which it has been articulated. Likewise the plain (non-zoomorphic) interlace motif, ubiquitous in the Christian art of the Anglo-Saxons, has received similar consideration, while the zoomorphic interlace of pre-Christian and Christian art has been equally favoured in the scholarship.6 The difficulties inherent in situating Anglo-Saxon art, which is neither naturalistic nor representational, and does not prioritize the human figure, within an art-historical narrative that favours such phenomena gives some indication of why it is that these formal aspects have come to dominate the scholarship. Indeed, Anglo-Saxon art was early castigated as barbaric for the ways in which it fails to conform to the criteria perceived to characterize the classical tradition.7 Rather than favouring naturalism, realism, the human form and, of course, perspectival presentations of the world around us (presentations that have only come to dominate visual representations within western traditions since the sixteenth century),8

6

7

8

See, for example, J. Brøndsted, Early English Ornament: the Sources, Development and Relation to Foreign Styles of pre-Norman Ornamental Art in England, trans. Al. F. Major (London, 1927); R. Cramp, The Grammar of Anglo-Saxon Ornament (Oxford, 1991), pp. xxiv‒xlvi; T. D. Kendrick, ‘Anglo-Saxon Vine-scroll Ornament’, Antiquity 10 (1936), 61‒71; J. Hawkes, ‘The Plant-Life of Early Christian Anglo-Saxon Art’, in From Earth to Art: the Many Aspects of the Plantworld in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. C. P. Biggam (Amsterdam and New York, 2003), pp. 263‒86. See, for example, A. Clapham, English Romanesque Architecture before the Conquest (Oxford, 1930), p. 64; G. B. Brown, The Arts in Early England: AngloSaxon Sculpture, prepared by E. H. L. Sexton (London, 1937), p. 97; T. E. Routh, ‘A Corpus of the Pre-Conquest Carved Stones of Derbyshire’, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 58 (1937), 1–46 at 33; T. D. Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon art to A.D. 900 (London, 1938), pp. 94‒111. See, for example, M. Boulton, ‘“The End of the World as We Know It”: The Eschatology of Symbolic Space/s in Insular Art’, in Making Histories: The Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Insular Art, York 2011, ed. J. Hawkes (Donington, 2013), pp. 279‒90.

36

Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art Anglo-Saxon art is stylized, abstracted, un-naturalistic and notably fails to prioritize the human form.9 Such binaries are, of course, constructs, and in this case they fail to take account of the fact that the art of classical (Roman) late antiquity could also be stylized, operating without recourse to the rules of perspective, and presenting the human form as flattened and two-dimensional; equally, the attention given to the non-figural – to the patterned and linear art forms produced in antiquity – is also ignored, as is the fact that much of it was highly coloured.10 Across the Roman world, for instance, secular and imperial floor mosaics displayed linear patterns in colour and black-and-white often framed by strands of plain interlace. Yet despite the prevalence of this type of art and its continued production from pre-Christian centuries well into the Christian era, such non-figural patterns are not highlighted in the art histories of the ‘classical tradition’.11 Likewise the tendency of figural art to stylization and abstract flattening is also ignored. Imperial and consular ivory diptychs, for instance, carved in relief, are characterized by just such features. Even when a real event is represented (such as public games in the arena), it is presented in a non-realistic manner, with figural proportions unrelated to their situational contexts and animals and figures placed apparently randomly on an empty ground. As has been demonstrated, the organization of such scenes negates any notion of perspective, of the games taking place ‘within’ the arena ‘before’ the consul enthroned in his box. Rather, they illustrate historical events taking place in three-dimensional spaces which have been effectively reduced to two-dimensional planar surfaces in keeping with the visual rhetoric of aulic art – literally: the art of the hall, but a term that refers to the formulaic representations of the ruler enthroned that emerged in the art of late antiquity (particularly to illustrate the emperor), and was replicated in Carolingian art and in early Christian art, in images of David and his musicians, for instance, as in the late eighth/early ninth-century Vespasian 9 10

11

See, for example, Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art. J. B. Grossman, Looking at Greek and Roman Sculpture in Stone (Los Angeles, 2003); Color of the Gods: Painted Sculpture in Classical Antiquity, ed. V. Brinkmann and R. Wünsche (Munich, 2007). See also, E. Swift, Style and Function in Roman Decoration: Living with Objects and Interiors (Burlington, VT, 2009). A notable exception to this trend lies in the work of J. Strzysgowski, Origin of Christian Church Art, trans. O. M. Dalton and H. J. Braunholz (Oxford, 1923). Unfortunately, his scholarship and interest in the non-figural aspects of classical and late antique art were not promoted at the time, due to his status as a Jewish scholar working in Italy during the rise of fascism, and so have not been taken up in the scholarship. See further, M. Bernabo, ‘Un episodio della demonizazzione dell’arte byzantine in Italia: la campagna contro Strzysgowski, Toesca a Lionello Ventura sulla stampa fascista del 1930’, Byantinische Zeitschrift 93 (2001), 1‒10.

37

Jane Hawkes Psalter.12 It is an art that notably distorts representations of space and form, enlarging the figure at the notional ‘back’ of the scene, and reducing in size those nearer the ‘front’, as a means of emphasizing the importance of the (large) figure and reducing, in relative terms, the importance of all other figures in a scene.13

Defining the Decorative Despite such scholarly lacunae, it is clearly the case that in most of the art produced around the globe (including certain periods in the history of classical Greek and Roman art), stylization, abstraction, two-dimensionality, pattern and colour are the norm.14 Art objects produced across human history and around the world, from Anglo-Saxon England to the islands of Melanesia, are decorated with the human form as stylized and abstracted, whether they are fabricated in textiles, wood, stone, coral or metal; whether they are presented in the round or in relief (Fig. 2.1a–b). Likewise, geometric patterns predominate, demanding the viewer see more than one shape at any given time, forcing the eye to move from one to the other and so re-viewing each element with each encounter. And zoomorphs predominate – although the species is generally indistinct. The aim is not to produce an adder, a grass snake, a cobra or a water moccasin (Fig. 2.6). It is the fact that the form is that of a ‘snake’ that is important: its sinuous form; its distinctive movement; its shape shifting in motion.15

12

13

14 15

London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A 1, fol. 30v; see discussion in D. Wright, ed., The Vespasian Psalter, British Museum Cotton Vespasian A. 1, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 14 (London, 1967). For full discussion of these effects, see, e.g., J. Hawkes, ‘Design and Decoration: Revisualising Rome in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture’, in Rome across Time and Space. Cultural Transmission and the Exchange of Ideas, c. 500‒1400, ed. C. Bolgia, R. McKitterick, and J. Osborne, Conference proceedings, Cambridge 2008 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 201‒21, at 208‒13. See also, Boulton, ‘“The End of the World as We Know it”’. For earlier discussion in relation to early medieval manuscript illustration, see Wright, The Vespasian Psalter. This is a potentially wide-ranging subject, but it has yet to receive any scholarly attention in its own right. See discussion in J. Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives: The Visual Evidence’, in The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century, ed. J. Hines, Second International Congress on Historical Archaeoethnology, San Marino, RSM 1994 (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 311‒44. See further below, pp. 47–8. See also, M. Herman, ‘Something more than “Man”: Re-examining the Human Figure in Early Anglo-Saxon Art’, in The Art, Literature and Material Culture of the Medieval World: Transition, Transformation and Taxonomy, ed. M. Boulton and J. Hawkes, with M. Herman, (Dublin, 2015), pp. 278‒93.

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Figure 2.1a Funerary Urn Figurine, Spong Hill, Norfolk, sixth century (Photo: Copyright Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery Photo R7J7481), by permission.

Figure 2.1b Canoe Prow Figurine, Solomon Islands, twentieth century (Photo: Jason Hawkes).

Jane Hawkes Given this, a number of issues follow: the first is that the ‘need to name’ the figure or the animal or the type of pattern which has dominated discussions of the classical tradition – the urge to taxonomize, categorize, capture and classify, which characterizes western post-Linnean culture – is largely irrelevant for understanding much of the art produced across the globe, whether historic or contemporary.16 And yet, of course, the scholarship of Anglo-Saxon art not only tries to identify the figures and creatures depicted – as is the norm with much classical art – but it also depends on a specific set of classificatory terms in order to negotiate the art – to type it – using the terminology developed at the turn of the twentieth century by Bernhard Salin, art historian, archaeologist and Director of the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. Innovatively designated, as Salin’s Styles I, II and III,17 these terms have undergone some refinement,18 but, in the main, Salin’s Styles have remained the dominant means by which the patterns of Anglo-Saxon art have been ordered, related, rationalized and taxonomized – primarily in order to date and provenance the artworks and so chart the movements of peoples into Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries.19 It is a formalist approach, loosely defined as ‘style analysis’, which (as noted) has been maintained almost to the exclusion of any other interrogative strategies that might consider the art in and of itself.20 The second issue to note is the fact that many of the objects that present Anglo-Saxon and global arts are deemed to be both decorative and functional, in the way that a canvas, a mural, or a sculpture made for installation and display are not. Historiographically, this has meant that such art is deemed ‘minor’ or indeed ‘decorative’, as opposed to ‘Fine Art’, and so has not tended, until recently, to attract mainstream scholarly art-­ historical attention.21 And yet, such paintings and sculpture are – just like the decorated mask or helmet – valued in part because of the skill of their production (Fig. 2.2a–b). As Alfred Gell put it some twenty-five years ago: 16

17 18 19

20

21

See M. Boulton, J. Hawkes and M. Herman, ‘Interrogating the Bastard Children of Change: An Introduction to the Critical Terminology of Transition, Transformation and Taxonomy’, in Art, Literature and Material Culture, ed. Boulton and Hawkes, pp. 1‒13. B. Salin, Die altgermanische Thierornamentik (Stockholm, 1904). Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon Art. For a helpful summary, see G. Halsall, ‘The Origins of the Reihengräberzivilisa­ tion: Forty Years On’, in Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity?, ed. J. F. Drinkwater and H. Elton (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 196–207. See discussion in J. Hawkes, ‘W. G. Collingwood. Artist, Art Historian, Critic, Archaeologist and Anglo-Saxonist: Continuities and Ruptures, 1883‒1907’, in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (2015) (=Change/Continuity: Writing about Art in Britain before and after 1900, ed. M. Droth and P. Trippi, 2015). For example, Pattern and Design: Designs for the Decorative Arts, 1480–1980, ed. Susan Lambert, exhib. cat. (London, 1983); M. Snodin and J. Styles, Design and the Decorative Arts: Britain 1500–1900 (London, 2001).

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Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art We recognize works of art, as a category, because they are the outcome of technical processes in which artists are skilled. [Unlike] beautiful people [or] beautiful sunsets [they are admired because they] are beautifully made, or made beautifully. There seems every justification, therefore, for considering art objects initially as those objects which demonstrate a certain technically achieved level of excellence, ‘excellence’ being a function, not of their characteristics simply as objects, but of their characteristics as made objects, as products of techniques.22

While Gell focused his attention on the objects of Melanesian kula exchange in Papua New Guinea and the canoe prow-boards, carved and decorated and used for ‘psychological warfare’ as a means to dazzle opponents (Fig. 2.3), the same can be said for much of the art produced across the world, including the historic arts of the islands of Britain and Ireland.23 For, as he went on to say, in 1998: Patterned objects and utensils are not decorated with ‘simple’ patterns, but with subtle and complicated ones, often comprising a great many motifs deployed in two dimensions simultaneously […] Sheer complexity, involution, and the simultaneous suggestion of a great many formal relations between motifs is a characteristic of decorative art in general. One cannot understand decorative art by generalizing from simple, easily interpreted examples, because the telos of decorative art lies in the opposite direction, towards the complex, the ambiguous, and the multitudinous.24

Pattern and Technique in Anglo-Saxon Art So, how does this relate to Anglo-Saxon art? Well, the first impression that probably strikes a modern western viewer of such art is that of chaos, and this perhaps explains, in part, the scholarly impulse to impose ‘order’ by naming, categorizing and so differentiating the types of pattern. Salin’s Style I, for instance, often characterized as the rearrangement of the exploded body parts of animals on the field of decoration (Fig. 2.4), or more succinctly, as animal salad,25 is clearly an applied art of pattern, involving zoomorphs, that, despite the use of increasingly complex explanatory 22

23

24 25

A. Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, ed. J. Coote and A. Shelton (Oxford, 1992), pp. 40‒63, at 43. This will be the subject of a major forthcoming study by M. Friedrich, Image and Ornament in the Early Medieval West, 400–800. New Perspectives on post-Roman Art (Cambridge, forthcoming 2022); I am grateful to Matthias for discussion on the subject. A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998), p. 79. G. Speake, Anglo-Saxon Animal Art and its Germanic Background (Oxford, 1980).

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Figure 2.2a Face Mask, Vanuatu, twentieth century (Photo: Jane Hawkes).

Figure 2.2b Face-mask Helmet, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, c. seventh century (Photo: British Museum, Creative Commons), by permission.

Figure 2.3 Canoe Prow-board, Trobriand Islands, New Guinea, (Photo: Penn Museum, 2003-22-1), by permission.

Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art diagrams created to explain and identify it, remains relatively incoherent (Fig. 2.5). The same can be said for Style II art, even with the aid of the similarly complex aids designed to help the viewer.26 However, while these diagrams might explain to a reader the distinction between the two styles, they do not provide a viewer with the skills to differentiate between the two in any future encounters. Nor do the diagrams explain the art should a viewer wish to consider it outside the parameters of one style or another – as the original artists and viewers are likely to have done. Such diagrams are intended, after all, to categorize according to constituent parts and so explain the organizational principles of the patterns according to named elements (such as ‘bird of prey’, ‘serpent’, ‘quadruped’ or ‘biped’) for viewers raised in (modern western) cultures where the ‘need to name’ in order to comprehend is paramount. It is unlikely, as the art itself seems to indicate, that Anglo-Saxon viewers needed such aids or, indeed, organized their perceptions of the world around them according to such schemes.27 It is, of course, the patterns themselves that hold the clue as to how to accomplish this. For, as noted by Gell in relation to Melanesian art,28 patterns are composed from a series of repeated, formulaic motifs: in this case, the eyes, heads, jaws, hips, legs and feet of the zoomorphs as set out on the Great Buckle from Sutton Hoo (Fig. 2.6a–b). The motifs, established in a centuries-old visual tradition, enabled those familiar with those traditions to ‘see’ the component parts;29 the chaos lies in the eyes of those (like modern western viewers) existing outside the tradition and unfamiliar with it.30

26 27

28 29

30

See, for instance, britishmuseumblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/05. For a study of the lack of categorizing principles in Anglo-Saxon language and literature that could be mapped onto those of modern western cultures, see E. Lacey, ‘When is a hroc not a hroc? When it is a crawe or a hrafn! A Case-study in Recovering Old English Folk-taxonomies’, in Art, Literature and Culture, pp. 138‒52. For similar phenomena in modern ‘non-western’ cultures, see A. Dewey, ‘Boundary and Batik: A Study of Ambiguous Categories’, in Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia, ed. K. L. Hutterer, A. Terry Rambo, and G, Lovelace, Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia 27 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1985), pp. 177–93. I am grateful to Karen Jolly for bringing this piece to my attention. Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment’; Gell, Art and Agency. L. Webster, ‘Encrypted Visions: Style and Sense in the Anglo-Saxon Minor Arts, A.D. 400–900’, in Anglo-Saxon Styles, ed. C. Karkov and G. H. Brown (Albany, NY, 2003), pp. 11–30; M. Herman, ‘Iconography in Dialogue: Negotiating Tradition and Cultural Contact in the Art of Seventh Century Anglo-Saxon England’ (Unpub. PhD Thesis, 2 vols, University of York, 2013). For an anthropological/cultural articulation of this phenomenon, see Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York, 1973), pp. 3‒30.

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Figure 2.4 Gold Bracteate Pendant, Freshwater, Isle of Wight, sixth century (Photo: British Museum, Courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme: Treasure, 2009T264), by permission.

Figure 2.5 Silver-gilt Square-headed Brooch, Chessell Down, Isle of Wight, early sixth century (London British Museum. ©Trustees of the British Museum), by permission.

Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art

Figure 2.6a–b Gold Buckle, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, early seventh century, showing different lighting effects (Photos: British Museum, Public Domain), by permission.

In other words, Anglo-Saxon art can be considered as being composed of recognizable motifs and it is this that helps the viewer understand the compositional coherence of the patterns and their component parts. This means that innovation lies in variations on the arrangement of the motifs, in transgressing expectations, something that is achieved in numerous ways, such as sophisticated technological artistry: the use of gold lightly incised and highlighted with niello, a black silver-sulphate liquid that is poured into fine incisions on the surface of a piece of metalwork, leaving the surrounding parts plain and so brilliantly clear in contrast – as is the case with the Sutton Hoo buckle.31 At the very least this implies conscious decisions being made at every point in the rendering of the pattern. And one decision clearly involved the use of complex variegated textures and surfaces – a phenomenon also articulated on the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps, where minute garnets are laid over stamped foils of gold allowing 31

See, for example, Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 49‒67. For recent overview, see E. Coatsworth and M. Pinder, The Art of the Anglo-Saxon Goldsmith: Fine Metalwork in Anglo-Saxon England, its Practice and Practitioners (Woodbridge, 2002).

45

Jane Hawkes for light to refract off the surfaces; and where different coloured inlays, gold, garnet and millefiori glass, offset each other (Fig. 2.7). This in turn produces patterns that both hide their component parts while at the same time revealing them, as is the case with the intersecting boars interspersed with filigree serpents between their legs. Or, as Leslie Webster has most recently demonstrated to great effect, the varying shapes hidden and revealed in the patterns of the later (ninth-century) Mercian sword-­ pommel from the Beckley area, in Oxfordshire.32 The patterning thus appears chaotic, demanding active participation on the part of the viewer, and at the same time (in non-mathematical terms), it also appears symmetric in its arrangement. The effect overall is one of visual paradox and complexity, in the technologies of its production, its appearance, and in the way it was intended to interact with the viewer. And this is increased when we consider that the art we have been looking at, decorated objects of personal adornment, was intended to be displayed publicly, and so was intended to vary according to the conditions of display: namely, the lighting.33 While any image can illustrate different lighting effects (Fig. 2.6a–b), they are, of course, static: images can reproduce numerous effects, but they can never capture the manner in which the wearer, and so the object, and the patterns adorning it, move through ever-changing lighting conditions produced by the movement of sunlight, moonlight, candle-flame and firelight. The reality of viewing the pattern involves it constantly shifting and changing; the pattern is going to be always fluid and unfixed – in a state of flux, inherently variable and fluctuating. It is, literally, an art that renders impotent attempts to classify, codify and categorize; it is an art that, being mutable, will defy any attempt to capture, define and fix it like some sub-category of the study of natural history, be it bird or serpent. Yet, like the natural world, the patterned forms, and the patterns overall, were intended to move and change, ever transforming and metamorphosing into something other.34 The art of the Anglo-Saxons thus inherently defies attempts to fix it, to categorize it. Like the emphasis on surface pattern and texture, on variegated surface and refraction, on shifting shapes and patterns constantly in flux, the forms of the figures, whether human or zoomorph, defy fixed definition. Rather, the art requires the eye to move over a series of patterns 32

33 34

L. Webster, ‘Wundorsmiþa geweorc: a Mercian sword-pommel from the Beckley area, Oxfordshire’, in Crossing Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Art, Material Culture, Language and Literature of the Early Medieval World, ed. E. Cambridge and J. Hawkes (Oxford, 2017), pp. 97‒111. See also Webster, ‘Encrypted Visions’. Herman, ‘Iconography in Dialogue’. See M. Herman, ‘Something More than “Man”: Re-examining the Human Figure in Early Anglo-Saxon Art’, in Art, Literature and Material Culture, pp. 278‒92.

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Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art

Figure 2.7 Shoulder Clasp, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, early seventh century (London British Museum. ©Trustees of the British Museum), by permission.

that constantly re-form, in a manner analogous to what Mary Carruthers has termed polyfocal perspective and the bewilderment principle. The apparent chaos encourages the eye to rest on one point in an attempt to ‘see’ it; that point is then undermined or disappears as the eye moves on to the next point, and the next, over and over again. The viewer is thus engaged in a constant act of creation and re-creation.35 It was this principle that Anglo-Saxon artists clearly capitalized on when it came to producing art for Christian purposes – to aid in the inspiration of compunction and contemplation. While the birds, serpentine creatures and anonymous quadrupeds continued to proliferate in early Christian Anglo-Saxon and Insular art, the arrangement of the patterns 35

M. Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013), pp. 135‒64; see also M. Carruthers, ‘Varietas: A Word of Many Colours’, Poetica 41 (2009), 11‒32. See note 22: This will be the subject of a major forthcoming study by M. Friedrich, Image and Ornament in the Early Medieval West, 400–800. New Perspectives on Post-Roman Art (Cambridge, 2022); I am grateful to Matthias for discussion on the subject.

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Jane Hawkes became ever more studied so that definable shapes dominated: usually the form of the cross.36 And in this process the patterns begin to lose their zoomorphic tendencies and resolve into plain knot-work, a rare feature of the non- or pre-Christian art.37 The result in both cases is the prioritization of patterning; something that requires the eye to see both foreground and background at the same time – to actively see more than one pattern at any given point on the decorated surface. In the case of the plain interlacings, this is because (with the removal of a head or tail and intervening limbs and joints) the focus of the pattern becomes the arrangement of the crossings of the strands of the pattern and the spaces in between them.38 This is something familiar to modern scholars since the work of the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin, in his 1915 study of figure/ground reversal, and the recognition that the human brain needs to be able to interpret patterns in terms of external objects.39 To do this the visual system needs to be able to distinguish objects (figure) from their background (ground). But the (now-familiar) vase/profile illusion demonstrates that perception is not solely determined by an image formed on the retina (Fig. 2.8). The spontaneous reversal observed by the viewer illustrates the dynamic nature of subtle perceptual processes. These processes underscore how the brain organizes its visual environment. What today might be broadly termed ‘vision science’ was clearly being exploited to great effect in Anglo-Saxon art in the seventh and eighth centuries – in many media.40

36

37 38

39

40

R. B. K. Stevenson, ‘Aspects of Ambiguity in Crosses and Interlace’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology 44/45 (1981/1982), 1‒27; E. Pirrotte, ‘Hidden Order, Order Revealed: New light on Carpet pages’, in Pattern and purpose in insular art : proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Insular Art held at the National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff 3–6 September 1998, ed. M. Redknap, et al., (Oxford, 2001), pp. 203‒8; Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives’; Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 23‒6. Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives’. Stevenson, ‘Aspects of Ambiguity’; Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives’; Webster, ‘Wundorsmiþa geweorc’. For other examples of this phenomenon – or principle of visual organization – see, for example, Dewey, ‘Boundary and Batik’, 179–82. E. Rubin, ‘Taste’, British Journal of Psychology 27 (1936), 74–85; Experimenta psychologica: Collected Scientific Papers in German, English and French (Copenhagen, 1949); ‘Visual Figures Apparently Incompatible with Geometry’, Acta Pyschologica 7 (1950), 365–87; and ‘Figure and Ground’, in Readings in Perception, ed. D. C. Beardslee and M. Wertheimer (Princeton, NJ, 1958), pp. 194–203. See also J. M. Kennedy, A Psychology of Picture Perception (San Francisco, 1974); N. Wade, The Art and Science of Visual Illusions (London and Boston, 1982). See J. Hawkes, ‘Figuring Salvation: An Excursus into the Iconography of the Iona Crosses’, in Able Minds and Practised Hands: Scotland’s Early Medieval Sculpture in the 21st Century, ed. S. Foster and M. Cross (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 259‒75, at 269‒71; ‘Design and Decoration’, pp. 215‒20; and ‘East Meets West in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture’, in England, Ireland, and the Insular World: Textual and Material Connections in the Early Middle Ages, ed. M. Clayton, A. Jorgensen, and J. Mullins (Tempe, AZ, 2018), pp. 41‒61, at 58‒60.

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Globalizing Anglo-Saxon Art

Figure 2.8 Rubin Profiles/Vase (Public Domain).

Furthermore, in keeping with such manipulations of vision and viewing, colour was also exploited.41 In modern scholarship, discussion of the effect of colour has concentrated on the absorption of light by material substances and the different ways in which these affect the perception of light by the eye. The visual impact of ‘yellow’ vs ‘blue’ hues in visual design, for instance, has been shown to depend on the relative lightness and saturation of the hues, meaning that when colours are chosen based on definition by light mixture, they are not the same as the so-called primary colours: chromium red pigments, for example, can appear orange, and then yellow, as the concentration is reduced. The contrasts between red-orange and greenish-blue thus produce varying perceptual and psychological effects, with so-called warm (‘red’) colours seeming to advance or appear more active while cool (‘blue’) colours tend to recede. As already noted, this phenomenon was commonly manipulated in the early metalwork, where gold (yellow), silver (white), niello (black), garnet (red) and millefiori inlay (blue in the case of the Sutton Hoo shoulder 41

A. Garau, Color Harmonies (Chicago, 1993); F. Mahnke, Color, Environment and Human Response (New York, 1996); K. E. Burchett, ‘Color harmony’, Color Research and Application 27 (2002), 28–31; J. Albers, Interaction of Color, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT, 2006).

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Jane Hawkes clasps) were used to great effect to offset, define and disguise patterns,42 and the same principles continued to be used in Christian art to highlight and hide the shapes and forms being created in the layout of the patterns. Thus, the varying shades of blues, reds and yellows interspersed across the knots of plain interlace, framing and forming the central cross of the carpet page to Mark in the Lindisfarne Gospel manuscript, reveal and disguise numerous subsidiary cross-shapes across the folio (Fig. 2.9).43 Rather than focusing on the ways in which the overall layout of the page might imitate the layout of early Anglo-Saxon name stones,44 or the ways in which the central medallion of the cross might recall millefiori designs (which is not to deny these associations), it is clear that colour has been used in this instance to present a page filled with the leitmotif of the cross, the central symbol of salvation. Resolving these shapes in the mind’s eye performs the act of contemplation, necessary to acquire a fuller understanding of the means of salvation through that cross. Together, pattern and colour work to full effect to ‘captivate the viewer’s mind’.45

Summary Viewed in this way, in its own terms, it seems that Anglo-Saxon art is indeed a visual tradition that does not conform to the classical in the way that that tradition has been customized and canonized; nor was it intended to be categorized and taxonomized according to the dominant modes of articulating such art in modern western scholarship – articulations which were themselves inspired by understandings of the classical. On the contrary, in keeping with much of the art produced outside the classical tradition and considered as art in its own right (as opposed to archaeological data), it involved the deliberate display of variegated surfaces and textures, both complementary and opposing. It capitalized on pattern as a means of disguise and, at the same time, revelation; it exploited visual ambiguity, riddling and paradox;46 it was an art of expectation 42

43 44 45 46

Millefiori (lit. ‘a thousand flowers’), refers in this case to thin sticks of contrasting coloured glass that were fused together in a single cane that was then sliced horizontally to reveal the pattern created by the collective contrasting sticks of glass, and inset into a piece of metalwork. It was used widely in late antiquity and is preserved in early medieval Irish and Anglo-Saxon jewellery and as beads. For an account, see S. Youngs, ed., The Work of Angels: Masterpieces of Celtic Metalwork, 6th–9th Centuries AD (London, 1989). London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D. IV, fol. 94v. For most recent discussion of this association, see C. Maddern, Raising the Dead: Early Medieval Names Stones in Northumbria (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 234‒51. Gell, Art and Agency, p. 80. Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives’; Webster, ‘Encrypted Visions’; Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 23–6.

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Figure 2.9 Lindisfarne Gospels Carpet Page (Mark), late seventh/early eighth century (Photo: © British Library Board: Cotton MS Nero D. IV, fol. 94v), by permission.

and complexity – and it was these aspects that continued to be exploited throughout the period. Seeing and not seeing, but once seen, never again invisible: once explored, the resolution remains forever there, hiding perhaps but never completely out of focus, always lurking at the edge of the visual memory. As Gell put it: ‘We experience this as a kind of pleasurable frustration; we are drawn into the pattern and held inside it […] This pattern is a mind-trap […], we are hooked, and this causes us to relate in a certain way to the artefact which the pattern embellishes’.47 This, in effect, is the function of such patterned art – across most of the globe, including early medieval England – and viewing Anglo-Saxon art in the light of these wider parameters and the scholarship pertaining to it provides clear 47

Gell, Art and Agency, p. 80

51

Jane Hawkes insight into its complexity and sophistication. Considering Anglo-Saxon art as an example of the ‘non-classical’ arts of the modern world might well offer a way forward in coming to terms with and re-thinking this particular (historic) visual tradition. To paraphrase Gell once again in closing: the art of the Anglo-Saxons captivates the viewer’s mind by means of its complex patterns. The modern distinction between ‘“mere” decoration and [symbolic] function is unwarranted’ – the decoration is the point: ‘its presence would be [otherwise] inexplicable’.48

48

Ibid. See also Geertz, ‘Thick Description’.

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Chapter 3 Minding the Gaps: Early Medieval Elite Sites in England and the Perimeters of Current Knowledge Carol Neuman de Vegvar

A

ttempts to take a global perspective on early medieval England rapidly reveal that current knowledge of daily life in that era is an archipelago of isolated islets of information. Like traditional Pacific Island mariners navigating what Epeli Hau‘ofa has evocatively called a ‘sea of islands’, scholars of early medieval England sail skilfully and purposefully across the often vast distances between fragments of information that arise into contemporary view above the surface of time.1 However, unlike such mariners, who acknowledged the sea itself as having its own deeply perceived and respected identity, we imagine perhaps overconfidently that our ability to connect scattered bits of information by simultaneously deploying both logic and imagination will allow us to make connections across the depths of the metaphoric oceans of the world we study, without truly acknowledging the existence of those oceans themselves. Those of us who work in the material culture of early medieval England are particularly interested in connection via comparison, between different sites and objects, and between such physical evidence and the broad array of primary-source texts that survive from the context we study. However, these threads of connectivity are built on discrete fragments of information, some closer to one or more of the lived realities of the past, others more obviously projections of cultural ideals, and all interpreted through eyes and minds of our own time, with our own agendas and at a millennium’s historical distance from the time period we study. However carefully we proceed, it may be wise to model our perception of our degree of understanding of the deep past more consciously on modern oceanographers’ frank admission of the fragmentary and incomplete state of their knowledge of the world’s seas; in effect, we should mind the gaps. A case in point is the state of knowledge concerning elite residential sites in early medieval England.2 The knowns are well known: the older 1

2

E. Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. E. Waddell, V. Naidu, and E. Hau‘ofa (Suva, 1993), pp. 2–16; see also Scott, this volume, pp. 190–216. Here and elsewhere in this essay I have used the phrase ‘early medieval

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Carol Neuman de Vegvar excavations at Yeavering, Cowdery’s Down, and Cheddar, the new sites at Lyminge, Rendlesham, and Frogmore, and the inevitable literary parallels: Heorot and other hall-life references in the Old English poetic record, and Bede’s parable of the sparrow.3 But the lacunae become glaringly obvious in considering the sensory experience of the early medieval hall in England, a process which reveals both how much we think we know and how small a fraction of the lived experience of these places we actually know well. Modern thinkers about early medieval halls in England can scarcely be faulted for overestimating their knowledge. Popular culture provides an endless stream of ersatz Heorots, from nineteenth- and early twentieth-­ century illustrators’ romantic or rambunctious visions of hall life (Fig. 3.1), to J. R. R. Tolkien’s envisioning of Edoras in The Lord of the Rings, to its reconstruction for Peter Jackson’s 2001–3 film versions of the Tolkien trilogy on Mount Sunday in the Rangitata River Valley in New Zealand, and similar filmic inventions in The 13th Warrior (1999) and the 2007 Beowulf. We think we know such places well, and we don’t think a great deal about what may be missing from the picture. As scholars, we carp at the ‘off’ details in the imaginary versions of the hall in popular culture, but in doing so we are filling in the gaps from Beowulf, without remembering that the poem too is fiction. For me this project began on the 2009 ISAS post-conference excursion to L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, where after visiting the site we had dinner in a replica Norse hall.4 In the often-lampooned phrase from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel, Paul

3

4

England’ and variants thereof to denote the cultural context heretofore widely referred to as ‘Anglo-Saxon England’. I acknowledge that this choice of alternative phrasing is both overly generalized and problematic in itself, but the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ carries historically rooted connotations of racial superiority, as recently brought to the collective attention of the field, and no satisfactory and concise alternative adjective exists for material culture studies. The term ‘Insular’, in current art-historical usage, includes early medieval Scotland, Ireland, and Wales as well as England and is not an accurate descriptor for the selection of sites considered here, all located in the emergent and later the established kingdoms of the Angles and Saxons. See Daniel, lines 691–752, in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition vol. 1: The Junius Manuscript, ed. G. P. Krapp (New York and London, 1931), pp. 130–2; Judith, lines 7–34 and The Battle of Maldon, lines 212–15, in Poems and Prose from the Old English, ed. B. Raffel and A. H. Olsen (New Haven and London, 1998), pp. 24–5 and 48–9; and The Exeter Book Riddles, nos 14 and 20, in The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, vol. 1, Texts, ed. B. J. Muir (Exeter, 1994), pp. 297 and 301–3. And see also, in Old English Shorter Poems, vol. 2, Wisdom and Lyric, ed. R. E. Bjork (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2014): The Ruin, lines 21–37, pp. 120–1; The Wanderer, passim, pp. 2–11; The Fortunes of Mortals, lines 48–57 and 72–84, pp. 58–63; The Gifts of Mortals, lines 44–8, 49–52, 68–9, 73–5, pp. 14–7; Maxims I B, lines 84–92, pp. 72–3; and Vainglory, lines 7–44, pp. 38–43. The International Society for Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) is now known as the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME).

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Figure 3.1 The Yule Feast, engraving based on a painting by Knut Ekwall and used as an illustration in Esaias Tegnér, Frithiof’s Saga: A Legend of Ancient Norway, trans. Clement B. Shaw (Rock Island: Augustana book concern, 1908); p. 248. Culver Pix Inc., by permission.

Clifford, it was a dark and stormy night, and as we sat on the benches listening to a performance of Old English verse, I looked around at the fire-lit faces of my colleagues and realized that the shared experience was something of a homecoming, based in a collective imagining of the past we study. But it can be useful to take inventory of what one doesn’t know; the present essay is intended to point out the missing bits in the assumed knowledge of the reality of the hall in early medieval England. 55

Carol Neuman de Vegvar

Concerning Chronology of Halls and the Dating of Beowulf The halls under consideration in this paper have for the most part been dated on typological or external evidence to the seventh and eighth centuries, with the example from Cheddar as an outlier in the ninth or early tenth; more specifics will be provided as each site is introduced. It is not my intention here to discuss at length the precise chronology of each site: I have for the most part accepted the dating provided by excavation publications and subsequent scholarship. Nor is the necessarily imprecise dating of these halls, often by century rather than by years or decades, problematic here, since this paper concerns the lacunae in current knowledge, looking at the unknowns rather than the knowns. In the discussion to follow, I will also be adducing references to particulars of description of the spaces, furnishings, and experiences of hall life in Beowulf. In the current scholarly environment, such an integration of a literary work into a discussion of material culture requires clarification of method. At present, there are two ways of thinking about dates in the scholarship on Beowulf; as a historian of art rather than of language or literature, I am in no position to choose sides here but will attempt to explain the use of the poem in the present paper in ways that may be acceptable to both viewpoints. In one camp are those scholars who have been applying linguistic and metrical evolution as well as onomastics, evidence of scribal error and other precision instruments to the study of the poem’s language; these scholars have proposed an eighth-century date for the initial composition of the poem.5 If they are correct, then most of the halls adduced in this paper would have either been standing and in use, part of recounted memory across living generations, or similar enough to other halls of their era that the concept of a hall that they provide would not be out of date when the poem was composed. While Beowulf is a work of literary fiction and its descriptions of halls and hall life are necessarily to be understood as idealized, the evoked ideals cannot have deviated so far from the reality of contemporary halls as to break the narrative flow by the introduction of excessively distracting anomalies. The second persistent viewpoint on the context of Beowulf is that the date of the poem is uncertain, arguably from a later context in pre-Norman England.6 The core idea of Tolkien’s classic study, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, that Beowulf is

5

6

An overview of the arguments for an eighth-century date for the poem can be found in the assembly of essays in The Dating of Beowulf; A Reassessment, ed. L. Neidorf (Cambridge, 2014). This approach has gained much of its momentum in recent decades from the published proceedings of a conference held in Toronto in 1980: The Dating of Beowulf, ed. C. Chase (Toronto, 1981).

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Early Medieval Elite Sites in England first and foremost a work of literary fiction,7 has been taken further by several adherents of an uncertain or completely indeterminable date, who consider the poem as broadly ahistorical, albeit within pre-Conquest England.8 Uncoupling Beowulf completely from the study of material culture, as Roberta Frank has argued in her ‘Beowulf and Sutton Hoo; The Odd Couple’, suggests that the poem must be construed as exclusively inhabiting the world of art and imagination.9 However, if this view is preferred, there is then the possibility that the hall descriptions in Beowulf follow a set of literary types of which audiences across the continuing early medieval period in England may have had certain expectations, just as modern audiences of a film based on a Jane Austen novel, and set in that time period, may well have anticipatory ideas of the appearance of an early nineteenth-century drawing room, even if they have never lived in that time period or been in such a space, and would find it distracting and perhaps hilarious if Elizabeth Bennet suddenly produced a mobile phone and began tweeting about Mr Darcy’s recent behaviour. In its evocation of an imagined but not completely forgotten past, parallels between Beowulf and what we know of actual halls are worth noting.10

Acoustics of the Hall The acoustics of the hall are a continuing source of controversy among specialists on early medieval England. Walls and benches of wooden planking and a roof open to the beams and rafters would have made for an acoustically lively space.11 While most early medieval residential 7 8

9

10

11

J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936), 245–95. For discussion of this reading of Tolkien and its integration into the question of the date of the poem, see M. D. C. Drout, with E. Bowman and P. Boyd, ‘“Give the People What They Want”: Historiography and Rhetorical History of the Dating of Beowulf Controversy’, The Dating of Beowulf, ed. Neidorf, pp. 157–77. R. Frank, ‘Beowulf and Sutton Hoo; The Odd Couple’, Voyage to the Other World; The Legacy of Sutton Hoo, ed. C. B. Kendall and P. S. Wells, Medieval Studies at Minnesota 5 (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 47–64. In his 1969 essay ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. R. Howard, ed. F. Wahl (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 141–8, Roland Barthes uses the term ‘reality effect’ to speak of the use of details of setting as a rhetorical device in modern writing to assist in the representation of the real. While the evocative descriptions of halls in Beowulf may fit better with Barthes’s references in this essay to the use of types in older literature, they nonetheless would have provided medieval audiences with a generically recognizable setting in which the narrative could unfold unimpeded. Building 500, the largest hall at Sutton Courtenay, and dated to the seventh century, may have had wattle paneling between the vertical timbers, which would probably have muted the acoustics to some degree: see N. Brennan and H. Hamerow, ‘An Anglo-Saxon Great Hall Complex at Sutton Courtenay/

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Carol Neuman de Vegvar structures in England had floors of compacted earth,12 the elite space of a hall could have had a raised wooden floor, either throughout the interior, as has been reconstructed for the seventh-century Building C12 at Cowdery’s Down (Fig. 3.2),13 or with raised wooden platforms in the four corners, as reconstructed by Brian Hope-Taylor for Hall A2 at Yeavering (Fig. 3.3), which he dates to the early seventh century.14 With or without a raised floor, such a wood-enclosed space would have amplified sound, somewhat like the sound box of a large musical instrument.15 This is the

12

13

14

15

Drayton, Oxfordshire: a royal centre of Wessex?’, Archaeological Journal 172 (2015), 325–50, at 338; and S. James, A. Marshall, and M. Millett, ‘An Early Medieval Building Tradition’, Archaeological Journal 141 (1984), 182–215, at 194–5, 198, and 201. By contrast, Building A at Foxley, Wiltshire (sixth- to seventh-century) is thought to have had a continuous wooden wall, but may have been a church rather than a hall: see J. Hinchliffe, ‘An Early Medieval Settlement at Cowage Farm, Foxley, near Malmesbury’, Archaeological Journal 143 (1986), 240–59, at 243 and 251. G. Thomas, ‘Mead-Halls of the Oiscingas: A New Kentish Perspective on the Anglo-Saxon Great Hall Complex Phenomenon’, Medieval Archaeology 62 (2018), 262–303, discusses the presence of opus signinum floors in Buildings B and C at Lyminge (late 6th to 7th century) and in Building S14 at Dover, dated pre-700 (279), but these seem to be limited to high-status sites in Kent and, as Thomas suggests, may relate to an intentional romanitas in the context of conversion (294). Thomas also suggests a possible link to opus signinum in the references in Beowulf to the fagne flor of Heorot (as inter alia at l. 725) but the term fagne there is imprecise and the association remains problematic, as Thomas notes. K. Leahy and M. Lewis, ‘Dwellings, Workshops and Working Buildings’, in The Material Culture of the Built Environment in the Anglo-Saxon World, The Material Culture of Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World 2, ed. M. C. Hyer and G. R. Owen-Crocker (Liverpool, 2015), pp. 50–75, fig. 3.4; and M. Millett with S. James, ‘Excavations at Cowdery’s Down; Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1978–81’, Archaeological Journal 140 (1983), 151–279, at 240–2 and fig. 70. However, James, Marshall, and Millett, ‘An Early Medieval Building Tradition’, 191 note that the raised floor in C12 may have been anomalous, and N. W. Alcock and D. Walsh, ‘Architecture at Cowdery’s Down: A Reconsideration’, Archaeological Journal 150 (1993), 403–9, have questioned this reconstruction, suggesting that if a wooden floor existed here at all, it may have rested directly on the earth; they do however allow that it may have been carried on joists, which would have had the same acoustic impact as a raised floor. B. Hope-Taylor, Yeavering; An Anglo-British Centre of early Northumbria (London, 1977), pp. 137 and 161. Some of the larger eighth-century buildings at Higham Ferrers may also have had raised floors, but the excavators consider these structures more likely to have been barns than halls. See A. Hardy, B. M. Charles, and R. J. Williams, Death and Taxes: The archaeology of a Middle Saxon estate centre at Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire (Oxford, 2007), pp. 197–8. G. Lawson, ‘Large Scale–Small Scale: Medieval Stone Buildings, Early Medieval Timber Halls and the Problem of the Lyre’, Archaeoacoustics, ed. C. Scarre and G. Lawson (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 85–94, at 87–8, has suggested that the bowed roofs and walls of Scandinavian halls had a similar purpose of amplification, beyond the symbolic value of resemblance to a ship. See also I. Johnston, ‘Indoor Acoustics’, Measured Tones: The interplay of physics and music, 2nd ed. (Bristol and Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 156–61, on reverberation and the role of

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Early Medieval Elite Sites in England

Figure 3.2 Cowdery’s Down: reconstru Figure 3.2 Cowdery’s Down: reconstruction of Building C12, from Martin Millett with Simon James, ‘Excavations at Cowdery’s Down; Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1978–81’, Archaeological Journal 140 (1983), 151–279, fig. 70. Taylor & Francis Publications, by permission.

reality behind the Beowulf poet’s description of the rowdy festivities in King Hrothgar’s hall as the primary motivation for Grendel’s attacks.16 However, the acoustics of the real halls may have been muted to a degree by rushes on the floor, and by tapestries and other soft furnishings. The references to tapestries in Beowulf are not purely poetic fantasies of the furnishings of an ideal hall.17 Wall hangings or tapestries figure as legacies in later pre-Conquest wills, but archaeological evidence also suggests

16 17

wooden walls as bass absorbers, while members of the audience are ‘ideal treble absorbers’. Beowulf, trans. R. M. Liuzza (Peterborough, Ontario, 2000), lines 86–90, pp. 55–6. Beowulf, trans. Liuzza, lines 994–5, p. 83.

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Figure 3.3 Yeavering: reconstruction of Building A2, from Brian Hope-Taylor, Yeavering: An Anglo-British centre of early Northumbria (London, HMSO: 1977), fig 59. p. 126. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/ open-government-licence/version/3/.

their earlier use.18 In her work on archaeological remains of early medieval textiles from England, Elizabeth Coatsworth has catalogued several fragments of what may be wall hangings among grave goods of much earlier date, along with the occasional remains of feather-filled cushions.19 The latter may offer a material parallel to the bedding used in the hall by Hrothgar’s retainers in Beowulf.20 Even so, a wooden hall filled with intoxicated and rowdy retainers must have been quite an earful. 18 19

20

R. Fleming, ‘The New Wealth, the New Rich and the New Political Style in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Norman Studies 23 (2001), 1–22 at 11, and n. 66. E. Coatsworth, ‘Soft furnishings and textiles: ante-1100’, in Encyclopedia of Dress and Textiles in the British Isles c. 450–1450, ed. G. R. Owen-Crocker, E. Coatsworth, and M. Hayward (Leiden, 2012), pp. 526–30, at 526–8. Beowulf, trans. Liuzza, lines 1239–40, p. 91.

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Early Medieval Elite Sites in England Given so noisy an environment, how would a scop or bard make himself heard over the general din? The hall performers of the period of the earlier halls are generally thought to have played a lyre-like instrument. Examples have been reconstructed from the princely burials at Taplow and Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo (Fig. 3.4);21 the same type of lyre is also seen in the hands of King David as psalmist in the Durham manuscript of Cassiodorus’ Commentary on the Psalms (Durham, Cathedral Library B. II. 30, fol. 81v), from the second quarter of the eighth century, and in the Vespasian Psalter (London, British Library Cotton Vespasian A1, fol. 30 v), a mid-eighth-century Canterbury manuscript.22 The body of such a lyre is a hollow sound box that provides amplification, although the evidence suggests that early medieval lyres lacked the additional advantage of a sound hole.23 In the case of the Sutton Hoo lyre, the arms were also hollow to extend the interior space of the sound box.24 Typically such early medieval lyres also had bridges and tailpieces that would have enhanced audibility even in a noisy hall: modern reconstructions of such lyres are quite audible.25 However, even with these refinements, and regardless of the purpose modern scholars may ascribe to the opening ‘Hwæt’ of Beowulf, a scop would probably have needed to use his voice to open a performance with a sound sufficiently audible to garner attention above the general din of the hall.26 Thereafter the unfolding narrative of his tale, along with the supporting sounds of the lyre, would hopefully hold his audience in thrall.

Illumination The illumination of the interior of the hall is equally problematic. While window glass is known from Roman sites in Britain and is also a feature of early medieval churches in England, there is no mention of windows in halls in the Old English poetic record, and it is possible that seventh- and 21

22 23 24 25 26

R. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, 3 vols (London, 1975–83), vol. 3, part 2, ed. A. C. Evans, pp. 611–731. See also G. Lawson, ‘The lyre remains from Grave 32’, in W. Filmer-Sankey and T. Pestell, Snape Anglo-Saxon Cemetery; Excavations and Surveys 1824–1991, East Anglian Archaeology Report 95 (Ipswich, 2001), pp. 215–23; and Lawson, ‘Large Scale–Small Scale’, pp. 87–9. J. J. G. Alexander, Insular Manuscripts; 6th to the 9th Century (London, 1978), cat. no. 17, p. 46, ill. 74; and cat no. 29, pp. 55–6, ill. 146. Bruce-Mitford, Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, vol. 3, part 2, pp. 700–1. Bruce-Mitford, Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, vol. 3, part 2, pp. 682, fig. 496. Bruce-Mitford, Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, vol. 3, part 2, pp. 693–701 discusses a range of instruments from across the period of the early halls. G. Walkden, ‘The status of hwæt in Old English’, English Language and Linguistics 17 (2013), 465–88, provides an overview of the issues surrounding hwæt and a reinterpretation of its role at the beginning of Beowulf.

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Figure 3.4 Lyre from the Mound 1 ship burial, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. Reconstruction by Dolmetsch Workshops. Maple wood, metal, bone, gut. Height: 745 mm, width: 210 mm. London, British Museum. ©Trustees of the British Museum, and The Dolmetsch Foundation Inc., by permission.

Early Medieval Elite Sites in England eighth-century halls lacked glazing entirely.27 If the early halls had windows, the latter would probably have been small, given a rainy and often chill environment, and the openings may have been closable with shutters28 or perhaps fitted with a translucent medium such as vellum that would have kept wind and rain out and allowed only a filtered and dim light to enter. Otherwise the interior of the hall may have received natural light though a smoke vent in the roof above the centrally placed hearth, although Kevin Leahy and Michael Lewis have suggested that, since such vents do not appear in early medieval images of halls, it is equally probable that the smoke may either have been allowed to pass via openings in the gable ends or simply left to escape under the eaves.29 Occasionally daylight may also have entered through a temporarily open door, although in colder or wetter weather these would have been closed, and even in warmer weather, with the doors open, if the sky was overcast the interior of a hall would have required artificial illumination even at midday. The open central firepit would have added smoke to the general interior dimness, although a lime coating on wall daub or on floors may have served to augment available light.30 In the general gloom, the light of the central fire, along with rushlights and beeswax lamps, like the lamp 27

28 29

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Window glass does appear at later hall sites. Fragments of glass and lead caming found in a ninth-century midden at Flixborough may either have come from high-status residences or from a church. See Leahy and Lewis, ‘Dwellings, Workshops and Working Buildings’, p. 69, n. 76, referencing R. Cramp, ‘The Window Glass and Lead Cames’, in Life and Economy at Early Medieval Flixborough, C. AD 600–1000, ed. D. H. Evans and C. Loveluck (Oxford, 2009), pp. 159–62. G. Beresford, in Goltho: the development of an early medieval manor c 850–1150, ed. Jane Geddes, English Heritage Archaeological Report 4 (London, 1987), p. 49, argued for window openings cut through the wallboards in the mid-ninth-century hall at Goltho on the model of Scandinavian stave churches, but material evidence does not survive. D. B. Harden, in ‘AngloSaxon and Later Medieval Glass in Britain: Some Recent Developments’, Medieval Archaeology 22 (1978), 1–24, at 7, refers to fragments of window glass at several secular sites, but only one fragment known to him at that date, from Southampton, was possibly pre-ninth-century. By contrast, in the context of the emerging thegnly elite in the tenth and eleventh centuries, secular structures had glazed windows; see Fleming, ‘The New Wealth’, p. 15 and n. 101. Leahy and Lewis, ‘Dwellings, Workshops and Working Buildings’, p. 69. Leahy and Lewis, ‘Dwellings, Workshops and Working Buildings’, p. 69. Recent work at the University College Dublin Centre for Experimental Archaeology has demonstrated that smoke drifts easily through the heather thatch roof on a replica hut based on structures at the early medieval settlement at Dooey, Co. Donegal (B. O’Neill and A. O’Sullivan, ‘Experimental Archaeology: Making, Understanding, Storytelling’, presented for The Ohio State University Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Lecture Series on November 13, 2020); wooden rafters would probably have been more of an obstacle. Brennan and Hamerow, ‘An Anglo-Saxon Great Hall Complex’, 338, have suggested that the white lime plaster found in the upper backfill of foundation trenches at Sutton Courtenay Building 500 and at Lyminge may reflect such practices.

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Carol Neuman de Vegvar found in Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, would have generated glimmering reflections from anything made of metal. In a sensory world of the quiet colours of grey-skied England, of wooden buildings and furniture and of clothing mostly softly tinted with the muted vegetable textile dyes available in early medieval England, personal metalwork ornaments such as brooches, belt buckles and other garment fasteners, as well as necklaces and rings, would have glistened on the bodies of the elite, ranking them by the quantity and variation of sparkle; the more so in the flickering fire-generated illumination of the dim interior of a hall.31 Similarly, outerwear, weapons, drinking horns and other metalwork-fitted gear may well have been hung on pegs along the external walls, and these too would have glimmered in the half-lit interior of the hall. Cloaks were fastened with brooches and armour glinted of its own accord, while swords had their bright hilts, scabbards and sword belts, and pre-Conquest drinking horns often had suspension chains that permitted wall-mounted display. As darkness fell, and exterior light vanished, the interior of the hall would be lit only by firelight, and as a feast commenced the circulating cup, perhaps in the form of a drinking horn with a metalwork rim mount and terminal, would also be conspicuous in its motion in the hands of the cupbearer who passed from drinker to drinker through the ranks of the hall (Fig. 3.5).32 The combination of dimness, the central hearth providing both light and warmth, and the circulation of the bright cup or horn would have helped to create and maintain a sense of community among the feasters in the hall that was essential to the unity and loyalty of a lord’s retinue, linking sensory experience to cultural ideals. Retainers were also rewarded for their loyalty by the distribution of valuables in the hall; the motion of the shining object passed from hand to hand in the dim interior would have made the act of presentation visible and significant to all present. The poetic record most probably builds upon but exaggerates lived experience to project an envisioned ideal of hall life.33 The high 31

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M. Herman, ‘All that Glitters: The Role of Pattern, Reflection, and Visual Perception in Early Anglo-Saxon Art’, in Sensory Perception in the Medieval West, ed. S. C. Thomson and M. D. J. Bintley, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 34 (Turnhout, 2016), pp. 159–80; G. Owen-Crocker, ‘Furnishing Heorot’, in Crossing Boundaries; Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Art, Material Culture, Language and Literature of the Early Medieval World, ed. E. Cambridge and J. Hawkes (Oxford and Philadelphia, 2017), pp. 232–42, at 239; and see also J. Hawkes, this volume, at pp. 31–52. C. Neuman de Vegvar, ‘The Sutton Hoo Horns as Regalia’, in Sutton Hoo: Fifty Years After, ed. R. T. Farrell and C. Neuman de Vegvar (Oxford, OH, 1992), pp. 63–74; Neuman de Vegvar, ‘Inhumation 18: Horn cup or drinking horn’, in Filmer-Sankey and Pestell, Snape Anglo-Saxon Cemetery, p. 57. As noted above, while Beowulf is a work of fiction set in Scandinavia, the description of the hall, its ornamentation and its furnishings in the poem must have correlated sufficiently to its initial audiences’ expectations based on lived experience so as not to distract from the poem’s narrative momentum.

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Early Medieval Elite Sites in England frequency of references to gold in Beowulf ’s hall imagery, not only on the exterior of the structure but also on the interior walls and benches, as well as in the wall hangings, the cups and personal ornaments visible in the hall and the gifts dispensed and received there,34 relates directly to the role of gold as a cultural signifier of high status and particularly as a marker of the prestige and generosity appropriate to leadership in early medieval England. Beowulf’s gilded walls and furniture are probably to some degree poetic license, although neither the walls of halls nor their furniture survive and some gilded metalwork fittings on the doors and other salient fixtures of such structures and on more important pieces of furniture, such as a lord’s gifstol (the chair in a lord’s hall where he customarily sat to hand out gifts), are possible. Wall hangings may also have been embroidered, edged or even woven with gold.35 As a whole, however, the Beowulf poet refers so often to gold on the interior of the hall as a signifier of status that the poet could assume it would be readily apparent to an early medieval audience in England, an evocation of brightness and generosity appropriate to an idealized setting for kings and heroes. Such an ideal was no doubt founded to a degree in the sensory impression of actual halls, but the poet undoubtedly embellished actual experience for impact.

Provisioning: Food and Water However unresolved the refinements of elite life, most of the unknowns of early medieval hall life in England concern the basics of day-to-day existence. Archaeologists have identified possible cooking places at some hall sites, and the osteological evidence at hall sites and in elite graves provides a presumably partial view of diet.36 Some food was no doubt 34

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Beowulf, trans. Liuzza, line 308, p. 62; line 495, p. 68; line 614, p. 72; line 640, p. 72; line 715, p. 75; line 777, p. 77; line 927, p. 81; line 994, p. 83; line 1021, p. 84; line 1028, p. 85; line 1054, p. 85; lines 1091–2, p. 87; line 1163, p. 89; line 1171, p. 89; line 1193, p. 90; line 1253, p. 92; line 1382, p. 95; line 1476, p. 98; line 1484, p. 98; line 1639, p. 103; line 1800, p. 107; line 2025, p. 114; line 2083, p. 116; line 2102, p. 117. These lines refer specifically to gold displayed and dispensed in hall contexts; not to generic rings or valuables of unknown medium dispensed in halls, nor to gold displayed, given, hoarded or stolen in other contexts in the poem. Beowulf, trans. Liuzza, lines 994–5, p. 83. Owen-Crocker, ‘Furnishing Heorot’, pp. 232–4, notes the evidence for early medieval tablet-woven edging bands with gold brocading, and the suggestion that the scraps of silk interwoven with gold found between the roof joists of the Gokstad ship were tapestry fragments. While Owen-Crocker rightly notes that the inclusion of gold in real tapestries in early medieval England is ‘not implausible’, an element of hyperbole here as elsewhere in the Beowulf poet’s descriptions would certainly befit his overall presentation of an idealized Heorot. R. Fleming has explored how the elite diet changed over time; later thegnly sites show a much richer array of foodstuffs, to some degree reliant on trade

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Figure 3.5 Drinking horn rim mount, sixth–seventh century, from the princely grave at Taplow, Buckinghamshire. Gilded silver, repoussé and niello. Diameter: 11.9 cm; height: 7.7 cm. London British Museum. ©Trustees of the British Museum, by permission.

produced on or near site, and hunting may have also extended the menu, albeit to a small degree, as bone evidence of game is rare, even at the ninth- and tenth-century royal villa at Cheddar, which is known to have served as a hunting centre.37 But regional food supply networks, cycles of ingathering of food rents, and the correlation of these patterns to the perhaps seasonal use of the sites, were the invisible threads of support without which these centres could not have been fully provisioned. The legal requirements of feorm or food-renders have been extensively examined, as have their analogues in Ireland and elsewhere, but such studies

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and an emerging moneyed economy (Fleming, ‘The New Wealth’, pp. 4–9; see also R. Fleming, ‘Lords and Labour’, in From the Vikings to the Normans, ed. W. Davies (Oxford, 2003), pp. 107–37, at 126–32. C. Lee, Feasting the Dead: Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon Burial Rituals (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 20; H. Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements: the archaeology of rural communities in North-West Europe 400–900 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 126–7; C. J. Bond, ‘Hunting’, in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge et al. (Oxford, 1999), pp. 244–5.

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Early Medieval Elite Sites in England do not reveal the practical realities of the system for individual sites.38 Colm O’Brien has brought this area of inquiry forward considerably by working out the extent of the shires or large terrain estates that may have supported the seventh-century centre at Yeavering, and Mark Wood’s place-name analysis has substantiated O’Brien’s map of Anglian assertion of control around Yeavering.39 But this meta-picture does not yet provide on-the-ground information on quantities, distances, routes of ingathering, and, even more precisely, what foodstuffs were gathered when and how, and to what extent an elite site such as Yeavering was dependent on such food rents and to what degree it was a self-sustaining farm as well as a royal centre of power and prestige. Some of these elements may have fluctuated over time, adding to the complexity of the question.40 Water supply at most hall sites is equally problematic. Pits lined with wattle or barrels may have served as wells in such urban centres as ninth-century Portchester and tenth-century York, and two baskets were used as well liners at Odell, Bedfordshire.41 Early medieval wells have also been found at settlement sites, as at Barton Court Farm (Abingdon, Oxfordshire; possibly fifth-century), Pennyland (Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire; seventh- to ninth-century), and Berinsfield Mount Farm (Oxfordshire; seventh century).42 However, wells have only rarely 38

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Lee, Feasting the Dead, pp. 39–47; R. Faith, ‘Feorm (renders in kind)’, in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 181–2; C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 320–3. C. O’Brien, ‘The Early Medieval Shires of Yeavering, Bremish and Bamburgh’, Archaeologia Aeliana 5th ser., 30 (2002), 53–73; M. Wood, ‘Bernician Transitions: Place-Names and Archaeology’, in Early Medieval Northumbria: Kingdoms and Communities, AD 450–1100, ed. D. Petts and S. Turner, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 24 (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 35–70. The excavators of the eighth-century enclosure complex at Higham Ferrers suggest that it may have served as an administrative centre for the assembly of food renders, both crops and livestock, in connection with the royal site of Irthlingborough across the River Nene (Hardy, Charles, and Williams, Death and Taxes, pp. 201–4). See also D. Hall, ‘The Late Saxon Countryside: Villages and their Fields’, in Anglo-Saxon Settlements, ed. D. Hooke (Oxford, 1988), pp. 99–122, at 113–15; and Banham, this volume, pp. 19–33. Leahy and Lewis, ‘Dwellings, Workshops and Working Buildings’, p. 71. See also C. A. Morris, Wood and Woodworking in Anglo-Scandinavian and Medieval York, The Archaeology of York: The Small Finds 17/37: Craft, Industry and Everyday Life (York, 2000), p. 2271. Archaeology at Barton Court Farm, Abingdon, Oxon, ed. D. Miles, Oxford Archaeological Unit Report 3, Council for British Archaeology Research Reports 50 (London and Oxford, 1986), pp. 18, 36, fig. 13 and fiche 4: B2–B3 (this site includes wells of both Romano-British and early Saxon date); R. J. Williams, Pennyland and Hartigans: Two Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon sites in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society Monograph Series 4 (Milton Keynes, 1993), pp. 86–9; G. Lambrick, Neolithic to Saxon social and environmental change at Mount Farm, Berinsfield, Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxford Archaeology Occasional Papers 19 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 86–7, figs. 59–60, pl. 10.

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Carol Neuman de Vegvar been found at the earlier hall sites, although one has been identified at Sutton Courtenay, and two were found at the Middle Saxon phase of the ecclesiastical centre at North Elmham (Norfolk).43 Drainage ditches, such as the large one adjacent to the Long Hall of Period 1 Cheddar, are likely to have served, at most, as intermittent sources of water for livestock. Each hall site is distinct in what is known or unknown about its water supply. The hall complex at Lyminge was sited adjacent to the spring that gives rise to the River Nailbourne, which would have provided the occupants with access to and to some degree control over a primary source of fresh water.44 By contrast, for Yeavering, sited on a low hill overlooking the River Glen, the thought has generally been that water was obtained from the river and carried up the hill to the site, an assumption that disregards the daily labour of carrying all necessary water up from the riverbank to the hilltop site, and the question as to how clear water was obtained from the marshy edges of the Glen. Further, Yeavering is in the hilly hinterlands between Newcastle and Edinburgh, where shallow streams such as the Glen may be expected to freeze in the winter: did the royal residence at Yeavering have access to water only in the warmer months of the year, and does that imply that the site was occupied seasonally?45 Cowdery’s Down presents similar problems. The excavation, conducted ahead of road and housing construction, did not clear the entire site; wells and rainwater catchment cisterns may have been missed.46 But if, like Yeavering, Cowdery’s Down lacked water resources at its elevated location, all water used at the site would have had to have been retrieved from the River Loddon, about a half-mile walk uphill with a vertical rise of fifty feet.47

Waste Disposal and Hygiene Often missing from hall sites, along with the wells, are the latrines and cesspits, although like the wells these too have been found in urban settings, notably at Viking York. For many of the known hall sites, procedures for 43

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H. Hamerow, C. Hayden, and G. Hey, ‘Anglo-Saxon and Earlier Settlement near Drayton Road, Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire’, Archaeological Journal 164 (2007), 109–96, at 185; P. Wade-Martins, Excavations in North Elmham Park, 1967–1972, East Anglian Archaeology Report 9 (Gressenhall, 1980), pp. 74–118. G. Thomas, ‘Life before the Minster: The social dynamics of monastic foundation at Anglo-Saxon Lyminge, Kent’, The Antiquaries Journal 91 (2013), 109–145, at 120. Lee, Feasting the Dead, p. 41, notes that the lack of settlement debris at Yeavering also implies that the site may have been used seasonally, ‘for the king’s circuit’, rather than as a permanent residence. Millett with James, ‘Excavations at Cowdery’s Down’, 151–4 and 196–7. Millett with James, ‘Excavations at Cowdery’s Down’, 152, fig. 1.

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Early Medieval Elite Sites in England the disposal of human waste remain unclear in the archaeological record. For early excavations of hall sites, as at Yeavering and Cowdery’s Down, cesspits are not mentioned in the site reports, although for Cowdery’s Down domestic waste may have been collected for agricultural use.48 Cesspits have been discovered in the recent excavations at Lyminge, but these may significantly postdate the period of the Tayne Field hall.49 At Sutton Courtenay, a large and deep pit was found to contain phosphatic nodules commonly found in cesspits and latrines, but has been understood, perhaps because of its scale, as a fouled watering hole, possibly for animals.50 Enclosed latrines seemed to develop later in the history of high-status sites in England, at the ninth- and tenth-century hall site of North Elmham, the episcopal centre of the see of East Anglia,51 and at the royal site at Cheddar, which remained in use until quite late in the pre-Conquest period, with a stone palace ultimately replacing the earlier wooden hall.52 But even for sites where the locations of such amenities are known, there is no record of how often, if at all, they were emptied or treated with soil, sawdust, wood ash or lime for odour abatement, and their impact on the olfactory landscape in the vicinity of a hall probably varied considerably. For other aspects of personal cleanliness, the information is even sparser. It is frequently assumed that the occupants of early halls in England were not accustomed to frequent bathing or clean clothing, although the situation was probably more complex than this assumption suggests. Whereas, if the literary topos is a reliable indicator, the opportunity for guests to bathe or wash was an expected feature of aristocratic hospitality in early medieval Ireland, this form of elite etiquette is not paralleled in Old English literature.53 This does not mean that such offers were rare or never 48

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Millett with James, ‘Excavations at Cowdery’s Down’, 261. The cesspits sometimes found at lower-status rural settlement sites, as at Catholme, may have functioned similarly as collection points. See S. Losco-Bradley and G. Kinsley, Catholme: An Anglo-Saxon Settlement on the Trent Gravels in Staffordshire, Nottingham Studies in Archaeology 3 (Nottingham, 2002), pp. 36–40. Thomas, ‘Life before the Minster’, 129. The Lyminge site became a monastery in the eighth and ninth centuries; the cesspits were found in and are probably synchronous with the outer domestic zone of the later monastic settlement. Hamerow, Hayden, and Gill, ‘Anglo-Saxon and Earlier Settlement near Drayton Road’, 154–8. Wade-Martins, Excavations in North Elmham Park, pp. 125–36 and 142–6. At Goltho (Lincs.), G. Beresford, (Goltho, pp. 68 and 79), noted latrine or ‘garderobe’ structures attached to tenth- and eleventh-century bowers, an arrangement unparalleled in earlier pre-Conquest sites. See also Fleming, ‘The New Wealth’, p. 11, where elaborate latrine arrangements are seen as symptomatic luxuries of late pre-Conquest high-status sites. C. M. O’Sullivan, Hospitality in medieval Ireland; 900–1500 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 213–18; A. T. Lucas, ‘Washing and Bathing in Ancient Ireland’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 95 (1965), 65–114.

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Carol Neuman de Vegvar happened in reality, but it does imply that they were not so consistently a component of aristocratic politesse in early medieval England as to require a role among the Old English poetic formulae for describing scenes of welcome. Reading other texts as implying bathing as a social norm would in most cases be overreaching: just because Paulinus baptized the inhabitants of Yeavering in the River Glen does not imply that the same occupants of the site resorted to it for more quotidian bathing, either recreationally or for hygienic or aesthetic reasons.54 Furthermore, no obvious physical venues or equipment of personal cleanliness are recognized as such in surviving early medieval material culture in England; they are as invisible to archaeology as they are in the extant texts.55 None of the archaeologically known hall sites features anything remotely resembling a Roman bath. Cauldrons and the bronze or iron bands from wooden tubs and buckets are not uncommon finds in assemblages in elite graves, but these seem more likely to have been used for cooking or brewing, and thus to have been included in the burials as signifiers of elite hospitality, rather than for heating water for bathing or for laundry, for which they are generally too small.56 Household textiles such as bedding may have been taken out of residential buildings for airing and perhaps cleansing: Beowulf describes wall hangings being installed in the hall before a feast,57 which suggests that they were normally taken down after a feast and perhaps washed or beaten like carpets before being stored away or being reinstalled. Cookhouses may have doubled as laundries, but there is no evidence to substantiate this possibility. In other words, the degree of 54

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Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, II.14, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 187–9. My thanks to the anonymous reader who pointed me in the direction of the bathing habits of St Wilfrid. See The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), Chapter 21, pp. 44–5. Wilfrid is described in Eddius’ vita as having undertaken regular washing in both summer and winter as both penance and purification, using ‘blessed and holy water’ (‘aqua benedicta et sanctificata’) and to have made a point of telling his followers about this practice until urged by Pope John VI to stop for his health’s sake. This story is not a reflection of a cultural norm of ordinary bathing; if anything, it suggests the opposite: bathing for Wilfrid is an ascetic practice, undertaken daily even at the risk of his health, taking advantage of his privileged access to sanctified water, and considered worthy of public mention by both Wilfrid and his biographer as a demonstration of anomalous purity and piety. A possible exception may be found in Old English Riddle 12. See S. L. Higley, ‘The Wanton Hand: Reading and Reaching into Grammars and Bodies in Old English Riddle 12’, in Naked Before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. B. C. Withers and J. Wilcox (Morgantown, 2003), pp. 29–59. I thank Professor Higley for this reference. A. C. Evans, ‘The Bronze Cauldrons’, in Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo ShipBurial, vol. 3, part 2, pp. 480–510, at 507–10; K. East, ‘The Tubs and Buckets’, in Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, vol. 3, part 2, pp. 554–94. Beowulf, trans. Liuzza, lines 991–6, p. 83.

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Early Medieval Elite Sites in England cleanliness of the elite and their central places of power in early medieval England is simply unknown, and exaggerations of the possibilities of either extreme, the idealized or the abysmal, are equally unfounded.

Pests In the worst-case scenario, the close proximity of so many potentially unwashed human bodies wearing unwashed clothing, along with dogs, cats and transient rodents, in a relatively compact and warm space provided with bedding and textiles of other sorts, would seem likely to lead to infestations of vermin. However, the residents of hall sites knew several methods to drive out such pests. To kill or expel fleas, the Old English Herbarium suggests sprinkling the house with a decoction of land caltrop or tribulus (Tribulus terrestris L., OE gorst),58 or fumigating the house with fleabane (Conyza squarrosa) or spikenard (Inula pulicaria L.).59 Lice appear to have been treated on the sufferer’s body rather than by treating the house.60 The smoke from the central hearth would also have helped to suppress insect life, but these remedies suggest that insect pests may have made hall life uncomfortable.61 The aging of the hall itself would have exacerbated the general level of discomfort. Built of wood and probably roofed in some cases with thatch, halls were impermanent structures. Decomposing thatch requires intermittent replacement, but over time such maintenance would have been inadequate to assure the continuing integrity of the structure in the face of progressive biodegradation. Wooden walls set in trenches in the earth, however massively thick the planks, would gradually have rotted from the ground up, rendering them likely to warp and separate or split and consequently be less weather resistant. Archaeology has repeatedly shown that old halls were often burned and their walls trimmed back close to the ground before they were replaced with a new hall on the same 58

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A. Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine (New York and London, 2002) no. 142, pp. 211–12. Van Arsdall’s identification of this plant disagrees with both O. Cockagne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, Rolls Series 35 (London, 1865; repr. Wiesbaden, 1965), CXLII.6, vol. 1, pp. 262–5, and H. J. de Vriend, The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus, EETS o.s. 286 (London, 1984), CXLII.6, pp. 184–5 and 320, who both identify this plant as gorse (Ulex europaeus L.). Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies, no. 143, p. 212; de Vriend, Old English Herbarium, CXLIII.1, pp. 184–7 and 320; Cockagne, Leechdoms, CXLIII.1, vol. 1, pp. 264–7. Cockagne, Leechdoms: Lacnunga no. 77, vol. 3, pp. 54–5; Bald’s Leechbook no. lii, vol. 2, pp. 124–5. Leahy and Lewis, ‘Dwellings, Workshops and Working Buildings’, p. 70.

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Carol Neuman de Vegvar site.62 Some such conflagrations have been hypothetically identified as acts of war in known historical circumstances, providing an end date for a particular phase of a hall, although accidental causes of hall fires are equally plausible. However, it is worth considering whether some such fires may have been deliberately set when a hall became too draughty, leaky, or verminous to be tolerated and when clearing the site for a new hall became the obvious next step.63 A ritual element is not difficult to envision in the construction, demolition, and replacement or abandonment of halls, responding to patterns or breaks in patterns in the succession of magnates, terrestrial or celestial cycles, or other external prompts.64 But a pragmatic desire to replace an old, draughty, odorous and perhaps verminous hall with a new, initially cleaner and more weather-resistant structure, which could serve better as a bearer and focal point of cultural ideals, may have been a factor, or in some cases the primary factor, in the pattern observed by archaeologists of the destruction of halls by fire.

Conclusions It may be useful to include a full range of potential sources of information, literary as well as archaeological, in a broader conversation about what is known and unknown about halls in early medieval England, as long as the nature and inherent limitations of the source types are borne in 62

63

64

At Cowdery’s Down, Buildings C8, C12, C14 and B/C15 were all burned; see Millett with James, ‘Excavations at Cowdery’s Down’, 37, 51–2, and 61. At Yeavering, A1(a) and A3(a) were destroyed by fire, A2 was razed by peaceful demolition, and A3(b) was abandoned to decay in situ; see Hope-Taylor, Yeavering, pp. 50, 53, and 55. At Frogmore (Atcham, Shropshire), both seventh- to eighth-­ century halls were burned; see (accessed 15 July 2018); (accessed 15 July 2018); and J. Young, ‘Anglo-Saxon halls at Frogmore, Shropshire’, British Archaeology 160 (May–June 2018), 51. At Sutton Courtenay, Building 500, the largest hall, was left to decay in situ, like Yeavering A3(b) (Hamerow, Hayden and Gill, ‘Anglo-Saxon and Earlier Settlement near Drayton Road’, 165), with a timber post placed to block the doorway (Brennan and Hamerow, ‘An AngloSaxon Great Hall Complex’, 337). See also H. Hamerow, ‘Herrenhöfe in AngloSaxon England’, Siedlungs-und Küstenforschung im südlichen Nordseegebiet 33 (2010), 275–83. J. D. Niles, Beowulf and Lejre (Tempe, AZ, 2007), pp. 196–7 proposes a similar hypothesis for the successive replacement of halls at Lejre in eastern Zealand (Denmark). Ritual destruction of buildings was also suggested by C. Sofield in ‘Funerals for buildings? Comparing the Archaeological Evidence from Anglo-Saxon England and the Native American Southwest’, presented at the Eighteenth Biennial meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (now ISSEME), Honolulu, July 31–August 4, 2017.

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Early Medieval Elite Sites in England mind. However, broad-ranging global comparisons to the gathering halls and central places of spatially and chronologically distant cultures, while helpful in considering such subjects as the variety of social discourse inherent in feasting and gift exchange, are of limited use in understanding the on-the-ground practicalities of hall life in early medieval England. The consideration of parallel structures in cognate cultures in Scandinavia and elsewhere on the western European continent in the same general time period may be apposite, although understanding of these sites often suffers from similar if not identical fissures, bridged by parallel hypotheses.65 The remaining broad gaps in the archaeological record of the early medieval hall in England must be forthrightly acknowledged, with the understanding that there is still much work to be done and that only some of the current lacunae in our knowledge may eventually be filled. As with any other work in progress, a few cautionary signs may usefully be posted as a warning to travellers to mind the gaps.

65

See above, note 63.

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Part II

CROSSING BORDERS

Chapter 4 Imagination at the Edge of the World: Luxuriating Women in Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience Jonathan Wilcox

W

hy bother with sexist, hierarchical, doctrinally self-satisfied texts from the past? The recent discussions about the racist underpinnings of early medieval English studies perhaps provide a good moment to consider why to engage with material from that period that presents an ideological position abhorrent to those who study it. Homilies, which make up a good proportion of the surviving corpus of Old English writing, are a good subject for such inquiry since they often work to shore up existing order and reinforce repressive ideologies. And yet I want to suggest that there is a potential both for insight and for pleasure in unpacking those ideologies. In this essay, I will consider as a case study a small part of a single homily, Vercelli VII, which explicitly presents horrible misogyny. I will suggest that the misogynist diatribe reveals an underlying construction of gendered roles that sees gender as a construction of nurture in a way that might be surprising. The consequence of this construction points to the performative nature of identity and thereby makes resistance possible. That insight will encourage me to explore the evidence for practices of everyday life that can illuminate the exhortations of the homiletic voice. The resulting dissonance between the exhortations of the homiletic voice and the probable lived realities of those addressed will allow me to dramatize the construction of a resistant audience and, at the same time, to suggest the pleasures of interpretation through scholarship examining early medieval England. Vercelli VII, a homily condemning the sins of softness and of gluttony, is of considerable interest to a modern audience not only for its unusual images and wealth of biblical allusions, not only because it incorporates explicit address to women as well as men, but also for its revelation of aspects of everyday life as the homilist spells out bodily practices of hygiene and care in surprising detail.1 The homily can open a window

1

On early English homilies generally, see The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation, ed. A. J. Kleist (Turnhout, 2007); and M. Clayton, ‘Preaching and Teaching’, in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. C. A. Lees (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 159–79. Vercelli VII is edited

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Jonathan Wilcox into the imaginative thought-world of an early English audience, even as it depicts a Mediterranean lifestyle rather than the ways of the English congregation to whom it was recited.2 Even though it is the homilist’s clear intention to condemn the indulgences he describes, I want to ponder whether audiences could have taken the chaff and ignored the fruit, namely resisted the moral of the exhortation against luxury and instead revelled in the description they were supposed to be repelled by.3 Can the global perspective offered by source study and by postcolonial theory help to posit a richer reading of an exhortatory text than is apparent on the surface? Unpacking the likely effect of the exhortation in this homily calls for engaging with early England’s imaginative place in a global context. This essay focuses on one short passage from a single sermon but raises some larger issues in the process. What were early English attitudes to Rome and the Mediterranean? Can a commentary on Mediterranean practices provide insight into early English attitudes towards women, the body, and bodily practices? Can a misogynist diatribe be read against the grain? What were the material conditions of an audience who would have listened to homilies preached in tenth-century Kent? Can we posit a resistant as well as a co-opted audience for hortatory works? By tackling these questions, I hope to suggest that even material that seems unpromising, work that appears univocally monologic, can be read dialogically to open up the complexity and diversity of early medieval culture.4 Vercelli VII is an untitled homily uniquely surviving in the Vercelli Book (Vercelli MS, Biblioteca Capitolare, CXVII, fols 56r–59r). In this work, the homilist praises the value of experience and adversity, opposes

2

3

4

by D. G. Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, EETS o.s. 300 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 133–42, and presented beside its source in S. Zacher, ‘The Source of Vercelli VII: An Address to Women’, in New Readings in the Vercelli Book, ed. S. Zacher and A. Orchard (Toronto, 2009), pp. 98–149. I would like to thank Denise Filios and Stacy Klein for helpful comments on drafts of this essay, the editors of this volume, and the audience at ISAS Hawaii for helpful feedback on specific points, particularly Martha Bayless, Claire Breay, Carol Neuman de Vegvar, Jack Niles, and Christine Rauer. On the style of the Vercelli Homilies, see P. E. Szarmach, ‘The Vercelli Homilies: Style and Structure’, in The Old English Homily and Its Backgrounds, ed. P. E. Szarmach and B. Huppé (Albany, 1978), pp. 241–67, and S. Zacher, Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies (Toronto, 2009). Cf. ‘The Nuns’ Priest’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, VII, 3443; on homiletic audiences, see M. Clayton, ‘Homiliaries and Preaching in Anglo-Saxon England’, Peritia 4 (1985), 207–42; C. D. Wright, ‘Vercelli Homilies XI–XIII and the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine Reform: Tailored Sources and Implied Audiences’, in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Muessig (Leiden, 2002), pp. 203–27; and M. Swan, ‘Constructing Preacher and Audience in Old English Homilies’, in Constructing the Medieval Sermon, ed. R. Andersson (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 177–88. On monologic and dialogic modes, see M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. M. Holquist (Austin, 1981).

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Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience softness (a form of indulgence towards the body, as will be explained further throughout this essay) and the worldly delights of sexual temptation and luxury, and condemns gluttony. It is presented in the manuscript as complete but has perhaps lost something in transmission in view of its abrupt opening. The manuscript witness was written in the middle of the second half of the tenth century, almost certainly in Kent, probably at Canterbury.5 While the prose and poetry gathered together in the Vercelli Book probably served as devotional reading and contemplation for a high-ranking secular cleric,6 I take it as axiomatic that any extant homily would have been used in multiple preaching contexts, most of which will not have left a record.7 The Canterbury associations of the Vercelli Book suggest that Vercelli VII (like the other Vercelli homilies) would have been preached in many different contexts in Kent, as will be explored later in this essay. The homily presents the case for the moral value of adversity through multiple biblical examples as it condemns over-indulgence. After observing how many men fell into hell through gazing upon beautiful women, the homilist imagines feminine excess in bathing and bodily preparation. The homilist thus builds on a traditional early medieval condemnation of the body – evident, for example, in the frequent soul and body dialogues, and one which leads later in the homily to associating the body with the privy into which it voids – but gives this a particular twist through the emphasis on the sensory pleasures of the female body.8 In doing so, the homilist makes a logically necessary but telling concession: 5

6

7

8

D. G. Scragg, ‘The Vercelli Homilies and Kent’, in Intertexts: Studies in AngloSaxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach, ed. V. Blanton and H. Scheck (Tempe, AZ, 2008), pp. 369–80; see also his Vercelli Homilies introduction. Scholarship on the likely use of the Vercelli Book compilation is considerable; in addition to the studies cited above, see É. Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the ‘Dream of the Rood’ Tradition (London, 2005); E. Treharne, ‘The Form and Function of the Vercelli Book’, in Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Its Insular Context in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin, ed. A.Minnis and J. Roberts (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 253–66; F. Leneghan, ‘Teaching the Teachers: The Vercelli Book and the Mixed Life’, English Studies 94 (2013), 627–58. See further my ‘Ælfric in Dorset and the Landscape of Pastoral Care’, in Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England, ed. F. Tinti (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 52–62, and ‘The Use of Ælfric’s Homilies: MSS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85 and 86 in the Field’, in A Companion to Ælfric, ed. H. Magennis and M. Swan (Leiden, 2009), pp. 345–68. For the fraught status of female bodies in early English religious discourse, see C. A. Lees, ‘Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997), 17–45; C. A. Lees and G. R. Overing, ‘Before History, before Difference: Bodies, Metaphor, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon England’, Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1998), 315–34; and R. R. Trilling, ‘Heavenly Bodies: Paradoxes of Female Martyrdom in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints’, in Writing Women Saints in AngloSaxon England, ed. P. E. Szarmach (Toronto, 2013), pp. 249–73. On associations

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Jonathan Wilcox For ðan ic lære þæt we flion þa liðnesse 7 flion [þa olehtunge] þysse worulde, ac hie synt swiðe swete. (Scragg, Vercelli VII, lines 82–3; Zacher §49)9 (‘Therefore I teach that we should flee those softnesses and flee [those indulgences] of this world, even though they are very sweet’.)

Even as the homilist condemns softness (‘liðnesse’) and indulgence (‘olehtunge’), he concedes that these are, indeed, highly appealing (‘swiðe swete’). The specific softnesses and indulgences are laid out slightly earlier: Eawla, wif, to hwan wenest ðu þines lichoman hæle [geican] mid smyringe 7 oftþweale 7 oðrum liðnessum? (Scragg, Vercelli VII, lines 73–5, Zacher §41) (‘Alas, woman, why do you expect to increase the health of your body with anointing, and frequent bathing, and other softnesses?’)

Even though this is more misogynist diatribe than any true question, the rhetorical device of addressing this to a woman (‘Eawla, wif’) suggests an imagined audience incorporating both sexes. The brief list of practices that earn the preacher’s scorn is given in somewhat fuller form earlier: For hwon wene ge þæt wif swa sioce syn of hyra gecynde? Ac hit is swa: of hira liðan life hie bioð swa tyddre, for þan þe hie symle inne bioð 7 noht hefies ne wyrceaþ 7 hie oft baðiað 7 mid wyrtgemangum smyriað 7 symle on hnescum beddum hy r[e]stað. (Scragg, Vercelli VII, lines 56–9, Zacher §§30–1) (‘Why do you think that women are so sick on account of their nature? But it is so: they are so weak on account of their soft lifestyle, because they are always inside, and they do not perform heavy work, and they bathe frequently, and anoint themselves with unguents, and they always lie on soft beds’.)

This time the homilist is addressing his full audience (‘ge’) about women (‘wif’) with a rhetorical question that explicitly focuses on the nature of gender. It is apparently to be taken for granted by the audience that women are sickly (‘swa sioce’), even as the homilist is going to reject the anticipated answer that this is an essentialist attribute (‘hyra gecynde’). The underlying thread of misogyny is, alas, all too predictable, as others have written about well, but this example is of particular interest because the homilist so explicitly rejects an essentialist construction of gender

9

of the body with the privy, see M. Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine (New York, 2012). Text is drawn from Scragg’s edition (as n. 1), with his emendations in square brackets, with added reference to Zacher’s edition (as note 1), with her emendations in angle brackets. Translations are from Zacher’s edition, slightly adapted.

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Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience in favour of social practice (‘hira liðan life’).10 Such a move is grist for a preacher’s mill since it enables moral condemnation of conduct rather than providing a commentary on perceived essential nature. Even as the gender critique itself is predictable and disheartening, the specific social practices listed here are, I think, fascinating: always inside, not performing heavy work, bathing frequently, anointing with unguents, and lying on soft beds. It is hard to see those as the standard bodily practices for most women in the homilist’s audience. Why these particular items, and what effect would their recitation have had? For the first question, it is useful to turn to the source of the homily, identified by Samantha Zacher in 2009. She has shown how Vercelli VII is a translation of the second half of Homily XXIX by John Chrysostom, composed in Greek at Constantinople in 403/404, centring on the Epistle to the Hebrews 12: 4–7.11 That Greek homily was translated into Latin by Mutianus Scholasticus at the instigation of Cassiodorus at Vivarium, most likely around 537, and the Old English presumably translates the Latin rather than the Greek. While that Latin translation was aimed at a community of monks, the original was one of a sequence of homilies preached by Chrysostom to a broad audience in Constantinople in the early fifth century. With an awareness of that source, the account of softness and indulgence can be identified as more reflective of a late-antique Mediterranean milieu than of anything happening in early medieval England. While exaggerated for polemical effect, the particular practices sound at least conceivable for fifth-century Constantinople in a way that they do not for tenth-century Kent. To support that sense, it may be useful to consider each of the bodily practices in turn.

Always Inside and Do Not Perform Heavy Work The assertion that women are always inside suggests a society with extreme segregation of the sexes – perhaps credible for both late-antique Byzantium and early England – and one in which women are confined to indoor spaces and not subject to the public gaze. This may resonate with the case of Modthryth (or Thryth or Fremu) in Beowulf, but she seems to be marked as an exception rather than the norm.12 Indeed, while expectations 10

11 12

For an analysis of such gender dynamics in other Old English texts, see, inter alia, S. S. Klein, ‘Gender’, in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, ed. J. Stodnick and R. R. Trilling (Oxford, 2012), pp. 39–54; and the various studies cited in note 8. Zacher, ‘The Source of Vercelli VII’ (as note 1). The imperious queen is contrasted with Hygd at Beowulf, lines 1931b–43. She has been variously called Modthryth, Thryth, or Fremu, depending on editors’ understanding of the passage, but the understanding of her imperious nature,

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Jonathan Wilcox must have varied by status and urban versus rural location, the idea of not performing heavy work – outdoors at times – seems an unlikely fantasy for most denizens of Kent, women or men. There is little evidence for the gender division of labour on early medieval farms, as Banham and Faith have recently reiterated, but it is likely that women were productive labourers for many agriculture activities.13 The Harley Psalter shows women outdoors by a farming scene at fol. 54v.14 Milking of livestock is specifically if casually seen as women’s work in a prohibition in one of the Sunday Letter homilies.15 The strongly gendered identification of weaving and cloth-making suggests an area of female labour that was surely not always light work.16 It seems likely that most audiences in early medieval England, women and men, rural and urban, religious and lay, would have found the homilist’s assertion here untrue of their experience. Indeed, the Vercelli VII homilist undercuts this very assertion by then imagining the counter-case: Þenc eac be ðam wifum þe cyrliscu wiorc 7 hefegu on symbel wyceaþ. Þonne cnawest ðu þæt hio bioð halran 7 cafran þonne þa weras þe on idelnesse lifiað. (Scragg, lines 64–6; Zacher §34–5) (‘Think also about those women who always perform rustic and heavy work. Then you may know that they are healthier and stronger than those men who live in idleness’.)

Once again, gender is seen on a continuum and shaped by environmental rather than essentialist factors and so it is possible to imagine

13 14

15

16

ordering the death of those who gaze upon her, has been more stable than her name; see, most lately, Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th Edition, ed. R. D. Fulk, R. E. Bjork, and J. D. Niles (Toronto, 2009), notes to lines 1931b–62, and 1931b. See D. Banham and R. Faith, Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming (Oxford, 2014), pp. 60–3, and passim. BL, Harley 603, fol. 54v, depicting Psalm 106; high-quality digital facsimile freely available in the Digitised Manuscripts of the British Library [accessed 3 June 2021]. Illustrations of the psalms are not, of course, straightforward depictions of life; see, further, W. Noel, The Harley Psalter (Cambridge, 1995). Napier 45, p. 227, lines 10–11, in Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit, ed. A. Napier (1883; repr. with a bibliog. suppl. by K. Ostheeren, Dublin, 1967); Homily B in Sunday Observance and the Sunday Letter in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. and trans. D. Haines, AngloSaxon Texts (Cambridge, 2010), lines 20–1. See, inter alia, C. Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1984), esp. Chapter 2, ‘Daily Life’. S. Crawford, Anglo-Saxon Texts: 400–790, Shire Living Histories (Oxford, 2016), pp. 29–30 observes ‘[i]n the early Anglo-Saxon period, most women were probably involved in the production of textiles, which would have taken up a large percentage of their time. By the mid-Saxon period, however, rural estates had weaving workshops where low-status women produced textiles for the estate’s dependents’.

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Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience those women who undertake ‘cyrliscu wiorc 7 hefegu’ and place them on the more masculine side of an axis represented by ‘halran 7 cafran.’ In Chrysostom, the contrast is between women who live their lives in the fields and men who are brought up in cities, and is used to berate urban men for a lack of masculinity.17 The Old English does not mount an explicit critique of men and so, instead, plays up again the lability of gender identity. Having constructed such lability, the claim that women are always inside and never perform heavy labour is fallacious within the logic of the homily as well as false to the experience of the audience. It might, though, sound rather appealing, particularly to the women in the audience being thus interpellated.

Bathe Often and Anoint with Unguents Next comes the claim that women bathe often and anoint themselves with unguents. Bathing norms from the past are notoriously hard to establish, as Carol Neuman de Vegvar shows, but there are some hints as to likely practice.18 Bathing was probably a communal experience in late-antique Byzantium, involving a visit to a bath complex, most familiar as Roman baths, some versions of which were common throughout Mediterranean cultures. The practice in early England is not so clear. The rich redolence of nostalgia in The Ruin suggests that, even if the poem is describing the ruined Roman complex of heated pools at Bath, the poet did not imagine such steamy and sensuous pleasures in the current world.19 Elsewhere in the literary imagination, Apollonius of Tyre engages the pleasure of the communal baths, but with a telling translation error that suggests the translator cannot conceive what people actually did in such a place. The Latin account of Apollonius anointing and massaging the king after the games with such skill that the king feels himself restored to his youth becomes in Old English the more puzzling scene of Apollonius whipping a top with such speed that the king feels he is transformed to his youth.20 17 18 19

20

See Zacher’s analysis, ‘The Source of Vercelli VII’. See Neuman de Vegvar, this volume. On The Ruin, see, inter alia, A. Orchard, ‘Reconstructing The Ruin’, in Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach, ed. V. Blanton and H. Scheck (Tempe, AZ, 2009), pp. 45–68. The seventh-century monastery was probably on the site of the contemporary Bath Abbey, adjacent to (or possibly incorporating) the Roman bath complex and in some way appropriating it to Christian practice. The Old English ‘Apollonius of Tyre’, ed. P. Goolden (Oxford, 1958), Chapter 20, where Goolden provides a composite Latin source text beside the original. See D. Townsend, ‘The Naked Truth of the King’s Affection in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004), 173–95; for a different understanding of the translation error, see W. Sayers, ‘Þoder and

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Jonathan Wilcox How did a tenth-century Kentish audience, or any early medieval English audience, imagine bathing? What was a regular bathing regime and what would have constituted bathing oft? Jewish and Islamic rituals prescribe bathing, but Christianity is silent on the practice outside the ceremony of baptism. The Old Testament provides a picture of sensuous bathing from the remote past, but it is not clear how an early English audience imagined Bathsheba at her toilette as viewed by King David (2 Samuel 11:2), or Susanna as viewed by those two elders (Daniel 13). Ascetics take cold baths, as reflected in a famous story about Cuthbert praying in the cold sea by Lindisfarne and subsequently being warmed by the breath of otters;21 a pious abbess eschews hot water except for three times a year;22 while overly-hot baths feature in martyr torture scenes;23 but what was the norm that these exceptional folks were varying from? That some form of bathing was seen as an essential element of human dignity is suggested by the repetition of a charitable obligation to bathe the poor.24 A curative bath features in a number of medical recipes, and association relics are sometimes imagined as providing a curative bath, suggesting appreciation for the power of bathing.25 Bathing, then, seems to be broadly appreciated in the sources that mention it, which fits with the homily, where the condemnation suggests a fear of over-indulgence in an appealing practice. Hints at frequency of

21

22

23

24

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Top in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, Notes and Queries n.s. 56 (March, 2009), 12–14. The scene is illustrated in the late twelfth-century MS BL Yates Thompson 26, fol. 24: [accessed 3 June 2021]. As explained in the account of St Æthelthryth in The Old English Martyrology, 23 June; The Old English Martyrology, ed. and trans. C. Rauer, Anglo-Saxon Texts (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 122–3: ‘and she rarely bathed in hot water except before Easter, and before the fiftieth day [i.e. Pentecost], and before the day of Christ’s baptism [i.e. Epiphany]’; with thanks to Christine Rauer for bringing this reference to my attention. Such as St Cecilia in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints XXXIV or the torture of John in Ælfric’s Letter to Sigeweard line 1029. The Forty Soldiers martyred in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints XI are tortured through immersion in a freezing lake with a pleasant warm bath nearby as a temptation if any will recant, lines 149–52. ‘Utan gyfon [Godes þearfan] […] bedd and bæð, gyf him þearf sy’ [‘Let us give [to God’s needy] […] bed and bath, if they have need of it’], Wulfstan, ‘De ecclesiasticis gradibus’, §50 (ed. Karl Jost, Die ‘Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical’ (Bern, 1959), p. 241; ‘baþige and beddige’ in an appendix to Wulfstan’s Canons of Edgar in MS CUL Ii. 1. 33, fols 219v–22r. Anointing within a curative bath is mentioned, for example, in a remedy for aching limbs in the Old English Herbarium, but the form of the bathing is not specified in detail: The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus, ed. H. Jan de Vriend, EETS o.s. 286 (London, 1984), XCIV.13, p. 140, lines 11–14; see also p. 98, line 4, p. 124, line 22, p. 164, line 21, and p. 216, line 6. On medicinal anointing, see the discussion of medical practices in M. L. Cameron, AngloSaxon Medicine (Cambridge, 1993).

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Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience bathing are harder to come by. A prohibition on Sunday bathing (and is that because it is too much work or too much bodily pleasure on the Lord’s Day?) might suggest a daily cleansing regime not to be followed on the Sabbath;26 whereas John of Wallingford’s critique that those raffish Vikings bathed every Saturday suggests that weekly bathing would appear excessive to a thirteenth-century monastic chronicler.27 Anointing with unguents (‘7 mid wyrtgemangum smyriað’) has a biblical point of reference, conjuring up Mary Magdalene (if she be the Mary involved) and her anointing of Christ’s feet (in John 12:1–8) or head (in Matthew 26:7 and Mark 14:3).28 Liturgical anointing adds a further point of reference, with wyrtgemang a possible translation of biblical myrrh. In the context of the homily, though, it seems more of a sensual process, applied to one’s self for the appealing scent or to soothe chapped skin. Esther is anointed for six months and perfumed for another six months before appearing before the king in bodily practices that seem to be hinted at here.29 Excavations on the South Bank of London turned up what has been identified as a jar of Roman skin lotion.30 It is hard to know the scope of early medieval English cosmetic or medicinal anointing practices, but it is easy to see how the homilist’s condemnation might incite desire for what presents itself as an appealing possibility.

Beds And then there are those soft beds (‘7 symle on hnescum beddum hy r[e] stað’). The homilist’s suggestion of too much time lying down returns to the first charge, suggesting idleness in women, but also raises the question of what would constitute a soft bed. Evidence for bedding materials is more plentiful than baths and ointments. Bed burials, such as that excavated at Trumpington in 2011, give access to a seventh-century high-status woman’s bed, made of wood.31 Many pictures of beds feature 26

27 28 29 30 31

The Old English Canons of Theodore, ed. R. D. Fulk and S. Jurasinski, EETS s.s. 25 (Oxford, 2012), A. 5, p. 3; Sunday Letter Homilies (ed. Haines) E, line 165; F, line 199. The Chronicle Attributed to John of Wallingford, ed. R. Vaughan, Camden Third Series 90 (London, 1958). See The Old English Version of the Gospels, I: Text and Introduction, ed. R. M. Liuzza, EETS o.s. 304, 314 (Oxford, 1994, 2000), John 12:1–8 (I, 183–4). Book of Esther, Chapter 2, discussed further below. See R. P. Evershed et al., ‘Formulation of a Roman Cosmetic’, Nature 432 (November 2004), 35–6. For the reproduction of a seventh-century bed burial excavated at the Street House Anglo-Saxon cemetery, North Yorkshire, now at Kirkleatham Museum, Redcar, see [accessed 3 June 2021].

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Jonathan Wilcox in illustrations of people sleeping.32 Literary references to beds abound, including the beds and bolsters laid out on the floor of the hall Heorot for the warriors at night in Beowulf (line 1239). Occasional reference to bed-straw (bedd-streaw) gives a clue to the likely common stuffing of mattresses. A couple of glosses suggest the idea of a feather-bed (feþer-bedd). St Vincent is taken from torture to a soft bed, while St Martin explicitly rejects the offer of one, wishing instead to lie on the dust to which he will be returned.33 Soft beds are easy to imagine, then, but surely not what most people experienced most of the time. As with the other items in the list, the comment that women always lie on a soft bed would have seemed jarringly unlikely to the homilist’s audience, but not unappealing.

Imagination in the Field Indeed, I am arguing that the homilist lays out a set of bodily practices that are so radically at odds with the experience of the listeners, and yet so intriguing and desirable, that they probably triggered the imagination of a real-world audience in a way contrary to the homilist’s intention. Such a proposition is best considered by imagining Vercelli VII’s use in the field. Mindful of the tenth-century Kentish origin of the manuscript’s compilation, I will consider the homily’s performance in those contexts where it was probably preached. One likely but special performance venue is the great cathedral church of Christ Church, Canterbury. Here it would have been delivered to a large congregation comprising both ecclesiastical and lay audience members, with layfolk drawn from the range of society domiciled in Canterbury – women and men of high rank, free women and men, servants and slaves – in a capacious setting within a grand building whose nave stretched some 300 x 100 feet.34 While cathedrals throughout England would be one site for the performance of homilies in cities, more modest settings would have been far more common. At the edge of Canterbury, another good place for imagining this homily in action is the church of St Martin, which has a claim to being the longest-standing parish church in England, since 32

33 34

For examples, see, among many others, The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, [accessed 3 June 2021], fol. 27v, middle image (Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah in bed); Harley Psalter [accessed 3 June 2021], fol. 3v (Psalmist in bed). Old English Homilies From MS Bodley 343, ed. S. Irvine, EETS o.s. 302 (Oxford, 1993), Homily IV, line 224; Ælfric, Lives of Saints XXXI, lines 1352–6. See N. Brooks, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cathedral Community, 597–1070’, in A History of Canterbury Cathedral, ed. P. Collinson, N. Ramsay, and M. Sparks (Oxford, 1995), pp. 1–37.

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Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience it was built for Bertha, wife of King Æthelberht, before the arrival of St Augustine in Canterbury and remains standing today. By the tenth century, this would have been a small, two-cell structure, with a nave of approximately 38 x 25 feet.35 Squeezed into this space, the men and women of the local area, elite, common, and slave, would have stood in close proximity, listening to a homily with more or less attention each Sunday. Such a small structure would have been more common still in the countryside, where the largest part of the population lived. TattonBrown demonstrates the existence of some 300 parish churches within the Canterbury diocese by the late eleventh century, relating to some dozen minster churches.36 Many of these, like the church at Lyminge, rebuilt by Dunstan in c. 965 for parochial needs, probably match in size and significance the small church at Raunds, Northamptonshire, which has been so well excavated as to provide valuable specific details. In the tenth century, this constituted a single-cell church, some 10 x 8 feet in area, a small space where ‘up to twenty people, standing and rather crowded, could have heard mass’, in the evocative account of John Blair.37 In any of these settings, the intended audience would include the young, the mature, and the old, men and women, of low status and high, given the general call for everyone to attend church made in Sunday Letter homilies and in the canons of the period. It was surely a somatically rich environment as these people gathered together, ‘standing and rather crowded’. Smells would have abounded, with every likelihood of bodily odours of various kinds, probably mixing with the smell of incense and candles. Taste would be triggered during the eucharistic partaking of the bread and wine. The chance of inadvertent touch due to the extreme proximity to neighbours was surely high, while physical contact would be expected during the kiss of peace. Those senses would complement the rich sounds and sights experienced by the group crowded together, listening, and watching the events of the mass. If the parishioners heeded injunctions for Sunday rest, they would be at their least physically exhausted; nevertheless, the labour undertaken on the other six days would have left bodies aching, even on their day of rest, and marked by sweat and sores, chafed skin and ingrained dirt, and other bodily discomfort.38 And an English climate offers a likelihood of cold within churches for much of the year, except on those occasions when it might, instead, have felt too hot. 35

36 37 38

T. Tatton-Brown, ‘The Churches of Canterbury Diocese in the Eleventh Century’, in Minster and Parish Churches: the Local Church in Transition, 950–1200, ed. J. Blair (Oxford, 1988), pp. 105–18. Tatton-Brown, ‘The Churches of Canterbury Diocese’. J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), p. 391. The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, ed. H. Hamerow, D. A. Hinton, and S. Crawford (Oxford, 2011), pp. 625–723, provides a valuable overview of ‘The Body and Life Course’ in early medieval England.

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Jonathan Wilcox Within this crowded pack of bodies, it is likely that the parishioners were segregated by gender and rank. Evidence is lacking from early medieval England but Carol Neuman de Vegvar has demonstrated how a seventh-century Irish monastic church followed the practice of some Roman churches with a low wall in the middle to divide women (here on the south side) from men (on the north side) in the congregation.39 Margaret Aston demonstrates that gender segregation was an antique practice of the church, probably in place widely throughout the Middle Ages, generally with women on the north side, men on the south, and the most high ranking at the front, although with many variations.40 It seems likely some such grouping took place in early medieval English churches, although prescribed details of ritual must have butted up against the practicalities of country or city life, with local variations reflecting local conditions and constraints.41 This somatic state of an audience for the homily is worth considering as a context for imagining that audience’s reaction to the description of bodily pampering. The passage on women’s luxury is antifeminist polemic. Many of Chrysostom’s sermons include such hostility towards women, and this thread has been well discussed in contemporary criticism.42 Even as it is built on underlying misogyny, I want to investigate whether there is some more heartening way of reading the mismatch between exhortation and lived bodily reality. Postcolonial theory is often concerned with possibilities of resistance through appropriation and Bhabha’s theory of ambivalence points to the split created by a colonizing discourse of an always belated past which opens up a desire for both

39

40 41

42

C. Neuman de Vegvar, ‘“Romanitas and Realpolitik in Cogitosus” Description of the Church of St Brigit, Kildare’, in The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300, ed. M. Carver (York, 2003), pp. 153–70. My warm thanks to Carol Neuman de Vegvar for alerting me to this and the following reference. M. Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, in Women in the Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (Oxford, 1990), pp. 237–94. Wulfstan famously makes the concession to allow ordination of priests who are only part-learned, provided they vouch to continue learning: ‘And swaþeahhwæðere, gyf man for neode scyle gehadian samlæredne, þe ealles to lytel cann, þonne do man þæt, gyf mycel neod sy, þæs costes, ðe he him þæs borh finde, þæt he swa georne æfter ðam leornian wylle, swa he æfre geornost mæge […] Be gehadedum mannum’ §16 (Jost, Institutes of Polity 221) (‘And if, for necessity, one must ordain a part-learned man who knows all too little, do so, if there is great need, on the condition that he find for himself surety that he will afterwards learn as eagerly as he is most able to’). At the time of the expanding parish system, analogous allowances for tempering requirements with achievable realities must surely have been common in all aspects of church and liturgy. See D. C. Ford, Women and Men in the Early Church: The Full Views of St John Chrysostom (South Canaan, PA, 1996).

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Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience mastery and displacement.43 Vercelli VII is hegemonic as it speaks for church authority in the admonitory voice of the homiletic genre, where a male priest suggests bodily control to a mixed-gender secular audience. Women were, of course, the lower in a power imbalance between the genders in early England (with due acknowledgement for the exceptions of class and the complex structures in various periods of early medieval English society), just as the secular congregation was the lower in a power imbalance in relation to the clerical preacher. Can engagement with the imaginative distance of place and time – between the humble real-world space of preaching in the field and the luxurious imagined space of the distant and remote past – uncover resistance in the reception of even such a hegemonic work? Could that crowded and shivering, smelling and snivelling, embodied and enmired audience turn the sermon around by revelling in what is swiðe swete? Ælfric certainly thought it could. Some of these female bodily practices are features of biblical narratives that he translates. Esther, for example, establishes her hold over King Assuerus through her beauty. She comes to the king’s bed, in the Vulgate telling, as one of a sequence of virgins set off to advantage, anointed for half a year with oil of myrrh and for another half with perfumes and sweet spices (Esther 2:12). The sober Ælfric’s response to such parading of sexual allure is predictable: he omits just about all the sexual arrangements, thus saving his audience from the temptation of imaginatively engaging in such sensuous pleasures, even as his omissions make motivations for the action in this story strikingly hard to understand.44 The only sense appealed to in Ælfric’s retelling is sight, and even that involves a carefully, almost comically, controlled direction of gaze: And he hi sceawode and him sona gelicode hire fægra nebwlite and lufode hi swiðe ofer ealle þa oðre, þe he ær gesceawode. (Assmann VIII, lines 88–90) (‘And he gazed upon her and immediately was pleased by her beautiful countenance and loved her greatly, beyond all the others who he had gazed upon’.)

43 44

H. K. Bhabha, The Displacement of Culture (London, 1994). On Ælfric, see A Companion to Ælfric, ed. H. Magennis and M. Swan (Leiden, 2009). Esther is edited by B. Assmann, Angelsächsische Homilien und Heiligenleben, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa 3 (Kassel, 1889); repr. with a bibliographical supplement by P. Clemoes, (Darmstadt, 1964), Homily VIII (pp. 92–101), and S. D. Lee, Ælfric’s Homilies on Judith, Esther and the Maccabees (1999, online publication at users.ox.ac.uk/~stuart/kings/main.htm). Ælfric observes in his Letter to Sigeweard that he abbreviates this work, which he says he translated sceortlice. H. Magennis, ‘“No Sex Please, We’re Anglo-Saxons?” Attitudes to Sexuality in Old English Prose and Poetry’, Leeds Studies in English 26 (1995), 1–26, at 9, points to the omission of the sensuality here.

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Jonathan Wilcox In this version, unlike in the Vulgate, there is no sex with a succession of virgins to decide upon the next favoured royal wife. Instead, the king decides to marry Esther based upon emotion (‘gelicode […] lufode’) triggered by his gazing, the verb that opens and closes this sentence (‘sceawode […] gesceawode’). In the Vulgate the king is captivated by more of her body than ‘hire fægra nebwlite’ (‘her beautiful countenance’). Ælfric carefully controls just where the king, and hence his audience, looks, painstakingly excising sensuality from a story that seems to be premised upon it.45 Jezebel needs no such censoring omission. Rather than a story that depends upon sensuality and bodily display for the success of God’s chosen people, this time the sensuous woman is dispatched within the story with a gruesome end. In the Vulgate, Jezebel prepares for the approach of Jehu by applying cosmetics to her eyes and adorning her head (2/4 Kings 30), ‘depinxit oculos suos stibio et ornavit caput suum’. Ælfric retains the effect: ænlice gecglencged. and gehiwode hire eagan and hire neb mid rude togeanes hieu. (LS XVIII, lines 341–3) 46 (‘magnificently adorned and had painted her eyes and her face with red to meet Jehu’.)

Ælfric retains and even expands upon the adornment here, presumably because Jezebel immediately sees her comeuppance: thrown from the window and trampled under Jehu’s horses, then eaten by wild dogs (2/4 Kings 9:30–7), which is also translated in full by Ælfric (LS XVIII, lines 343–56).47 The gruesome end serves a narrative purpose by bringing to fruition a prophecy of Elijah, and yet it also graphically contains and punishes the potential of the displayed female body. 45

46 47

S. S. Klein, Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Notre Dame, 2006), Chapter 5, demonstrates how Ælfric downplays Esther’s sexuality and associates her beauty with her virtue and her faith. M. Clayton, ‘Ælfric’s Esther: a Speculum Reginae?’ in Text and Gloss: Studies in Insular Learning and Literature Presented to Joseph Donovan Pheifer, ed. H. C. O’Brian, A. M. D’Arcy, and J. Scattergood (Dublin, 1999), pp. 89–101, points to the challenges of this biblical story for Ælfric and suggests he chose to translate it to express disapproval of ethnic slaughter, made relevant by the St Brice’s Day massacre of 1002 undertaken under King Æthelred’s orders. Ælfric translates the Book of Kings selectively in Lives of Saints XVIII, ed. and trans. Skeat I, pp. 384–413. Klein, Ruling Women, Chapter 4, shows how Ælfric’s translation retains the details of Jezebel while compressing details around her. Klein suggests that Jezebel is presented as a critique of bad counsel to the king.

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Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience Ælfric’s very omission of what might misleadingly tempt unless severely and explicitly contained suggests a fear of the power of the imagination of what is swiðe swete. Ælfric’s participation in supersessionist discourse has been well studied of late, and Ælfric’s theological containment of Jewish faith might be seen as a clash between Mediterranean and Germanic practices on the edge of the world.48 In the process, Ælfric works to retain control of his audience’s imagination and does not allow anything like the effect seen in Vercelli VII. In contrast with Ælfric’s careful control, the Vercelli VII homilist parades what is so swiðe swete. For some in the audience, such parading of women’s bodily practices would seem to be part of a constructed male gaze, risking a fantasy of sexual arousal that would neatly play into the homily’s earlier condemnation of such desire. For others, the picture of pampering, bathing, and anointing might well be appropriated into a less moralistic fantasy as aching and sweat-stained, shivering and pain-wracked, tired and dirty bodies imaginatively entered into a world of softness of touch and sweetness of smell, of pristine cleanliness and freedom from the sores of labour. Put in such terms, it is easy to see how such homiletic strictures encourage a resistant reading, and how admonitions of denial might be turned to imaginative delight. For an audience on the edge of the world, Mediterranean polemic might more likely open windows of the imagination than enforce a disciplinary regime.

Conclusion Teasing out such complexity of response and the potential for resistance matters because it discourages a sense of early England as a monologic construct that can serve simplistic political sloganeering. In a world where the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has been appropriated by the extreme right as code for a white, Christian, masculinist, heterosexist culture, it is probably worthwhile to push back against the extreme over-simplification that such appropriation depends upon. This essay has suggested how even a text that purports to be admonitory in ways that appropriately alarm us moderns – sexist, hierarchical, and evangelically sure of itself – can be read against the grain as revealing competing desires and being open to multiple understandings. While, on the one hand, it is undeniable that early English society featured structures of power that embedded inequality and misogyny and were hugely weighted towards masculine privilege, on the 48

See A. P. Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Ann Arbor, 2004); K. Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Ithaca, 2016); Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture, ed. S. Zacher (Toronto, 2016).

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Jonathan Wilcox other hand, even some egregiously explicit moments of anti-feminism can be opened to resistance with enough sensitivity to context. There is irony in playing up resistance in the reading of a homily. While there has been much exciting recent work on homilies, interpretation of this large surviving corpus is still relatively rare, with many modern readers surely put off by the apparently hegemonic form and the predictability of the content and ideology, yet Old English homilies don’t have to be read as straightforward support for the status quo. Homilies can be deeply revealing, even of issues incidental to their explicit message. The present essay suggests how such a text can cast light upon areas that are otherwise hard to explore, such as the understanding of gender roles and everyday practices of the embodied life. Careful scholarship can uncover surprising insights even in such hortatory works. If we want to encourage more people to engage with the material and thought world of pre-Conquest England – as those of us who work in the fields brought together by the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England assuredly do – it is probably wise to make explicit the pleasures of such work. Working to uncover the lived reality of women, as I have in this essay, may sound like a quaintly old-fashioned endeavour, reminiscent of first-wave feminism, yet posing such basic questions allows a kind of imaginative touching of the past in the spirit of Carolyn Dinshaw’s call for empathetic engagement with the Middle Ages.49 Relating the literary to the historical and the historical to the literary, which has been a long-standing virtue of medieval studies, is a methodology that still carries the potential to generate fruitful insights, as I hope the present essay has shown. The quest has drawn on source studies, archaeology, art history, church history, manuscript, and literary studies, with a nod to feminist approaches, history of the body, work on space and place, and recent turns to materiality and to the sensory, in all cases drawing on rich seams of contemporary scholarship. Such richness of approaches fuels the excitement of working on material from this period. Uncovering the embodied understanding of gender roles, the performative nature of identity, and the practices of everyday life opens up the quirky, complex, oftentimes bizarre pleasures of research. There is particular appropriateness in making such a point in a volume centring on early England’s place in the wider world. England was no island, at least metaphorically speaking, and early English identity was formed through a maelstrom of competing ideologies and influences, many flowing from the Mediterranean, meeting the practicalities of bodies working a living in the soil of an archipelago in northwest Europe. 49

C. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Durham, NC, 1999); How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC, 2012).

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Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience The resistant audience imagined in this essay comes about through the homily’s failed appropriation of a culture from the distant past and from a remote place, suggesting that texts have surprising effects and uncontrollable after-lives. Explicating even a tiny strand from a culture of the past can open up worlds of historical imagination.

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Chapter 5 Britain, the Byzantine Empire, and the Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’: Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s Ninth-century Arabic Description of Britain1 Caitlin R. Green

T

he focus of the following discussion is an intriguing Arabic account of early medieval Britain that appears to have its origins in the late ninth century. Despite being rarely, if ever, mentioned by historians of Britain concerned with this era, this account has a number of points of interest. In particular, it may contain the earliest reference yet encountered to the idea that there were seven ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kingdoms – a ‘Heptarchy’ – in pre-Viking southern and eastern Britain (the area conventionally termed Anglo-Saxon England), and both it and a related tenth-century Persian text imply that a potential sixth- to seventh-century sense of Britain as still in some way part of the Byzantine world continued to persist in Byzantine thinking, or was at least remembered, into the ninth century.2

1

2

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the comments and suggestions provided by Paul Cobb, John Hines, Sihong Lin, Rose Broadley, Rob Briggs, and Jon Mann; all errors and interpretations do, of course, remain my own. The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is used here in preference to ‘Early English’ and other similar terms that have been proposed, in part because the latter term seems less appropriate for the ninth century and before, with its plurality of kingdoms and identities; see further, for example, N. Brooks, ‘English identity from Bede to the millennium’, Haskins Society Journal 14 (2003), 33–51, particularly 36–7; M. Richter, ‘Bede’s Angli: Angles or English?’, Peritia 3 (1984), 99–114; W. Pohl, ‘Ethnic names and identities in the British Isles: a comparative perspective’, in The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: an Ethnographic Perspective, ed. J. Hines (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 7–40; and I. N. Wood, ‘Before and after the migration to Britain’, in The Anglo-Saxons, ed. Hines, pp. 41–64. See also G. Molyneaux’s study, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford, 2015), for an exploration of how important the later tenth and early eleventh centuries were in the consolidation of an idea of ‘England’. It should additionally be noted that the composite term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was used by King Alfred (Angulsaxonum rex), in whose reign Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā probably wrote, as well as being prefigured in earlier documents too, as J. Hines points out in this volume; see further Richter, ‘Bede’s Angli’, and Pohl, ‘Ethnic names’, pp. 20–2.

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The Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’ The author of the account under discussion here is Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā, about whom little is known beyond the fact that he was probably a native of the Levant who is usually thought to have been either a Muslim or possibly an Eastern Christian from Syria.3 Hārūn was taken prisoner by the Byzantines in Palestine at Ascalon (modern Ashkelon, Israel) probably in the 880s – perhaps a little before 886 – and was subsequently kept as a prisoner of war at Constantinople for a period, before being released and then choosing to travel westwards to Thessalonica, Venice and finally Rome.4 The accounts he left of Constantinople, Rome and north-western Europe survive in fragments preserved by the early tenth-century Persian author, ibn Rusta, a native of Isfahan (Iran), in his Kitāb al-Aʿlāḳ al-nafīsa (‘Book of Precious Records’) of c. 903–13.5 Ibn Rusta includes the following passage on Britain that is derived from Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s account: From this city (sc. Rome) you sail the sea and journey for three months, till you reach the land of the king of the Burjān (here Burgundians). You journey hence through mountains and ravines for a month, till you reach the land of the Franks. From here you go forth and journey for four months, till you reach the city (capital) of Barṭīniyah (Britain). It is a great city on the shore of the Western Ocean, ruled by seven kings. At the gate of its city (capital) is an idol (șanam). When the stranger wishes to enter it, he sleeps and cannot enter it, until the people of the city take him, to examine his intention and purpose in entering the city. They are Christians. They are the last of the lands of the Greeks, and there is no civilization beyond them.6

3

4

5

6

M. Izzedin, ‘Hārūn b. Yaḥyā’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden, 1960–2005), consulted online on 25 January 2020, http:// dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_2746; P. M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford, 2014), p. 9; A. Vasiliev, ‘Harun-ibnYahya and his description of Constantinople’, Seminarium Kondakovianum 5 (1932), 149–63. Izzedin, ‘Hārūn b. Yaḥyā’; Cobb, Race for Paradise, p. 9; N. E. Hermes, The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth–Twelfth Century AD (New York, 2012), pp. 72–3; A. Classen, ‘East meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: many untold stories about connections and contacts, understanding and misunderstanding’, in East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World, ed. A. Classen (Berlin, 2013), pp. 1–222, at 26. S. Maqbul Ahmad, ‘Ibn Rusta’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. Bearman et al., consulted online on 25 January 2020, http://dx.doi. org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_3339. Translated by D. N. Dunlop, ‘The British Isles according to medieval Arabic authors’, Islamic Quarterly 4 (1957), 11–28, at 16; my thanks are due to Paul Cobb for checking and discussing Dunlop’s translation of ibn Rusta’s text with me. For a complete text edition of ibn Rusta’s Kitāb al-Aʿlāḳ al-nafīsa, see Kitâb al-Aʿlâk al-nafîsa VII auctore Abû Alî Ahmed ibn Omar ibn Rosteh, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1892), with this section at p. 130; note, Barṭīniyah might also be rendered Barṭīniya, but Dunlop’s form is used in this discussion for the sake of clarity.

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Caitlin R. Green Although Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā never seems to have travelled beyond Rome, and so is not reporting his personal observations here,7 there are nevertheless several points of interest in this account. The first of these is his statement that ‘the city (capital) of Barṭīniyah (Britain)’ is ‘ruled by seven kings’ (Sab‘a min al-mulūk).8 With regard to Barṭīniyah, the description preserved in this section of ibn Rusta’s Kitāb al-Aʿlāḳ al-nafīsa is somewhat vague as to its exact location, perhaps reflecting the fact that the information on this place was obtained second-hand, but there is widespread agreement that Barṭīniyah is indeed Britain here, as it clearly is elsewhere in both ibn Rusta’s Kitāb al-Aʿlāḳ al-nafīsa and the works of other contemporary authors.9 For example, ibn Khurdādhbih, a high-ranking Persian functionary and courtier who wrote his Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik (‘The Book of Routes and Realms’) in the ninth century, refers to twelve islands in the ‘surrounding ocean’ called ‘the islands of Britain’ (jazā’ir Barāṭānya). Likewise, al-Battānī, who lived at Raqqa, Syria, in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, alludes in his discussion of the Encircling Ocean to ‘the islands of Barṭāniyah (Britain), twelve in number’, and ibn Rusta’s second, briefer mention of Barṭīniyah consists of a similar reference to the ‘twelve islands which are called the islands of Barṭīniyah’.10 7 8

9

10

Cobb, Race for Paradise, p. 10, and pers. comm.; Classen, ‘East meets West’, p. 26; Vasiliev, ‘Harun-ibn-Yahya’, p. 149; Hermes, The [European] Other, p. 78. Ibn Rusta, ed. de Goeje, p. 130; Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 16; D. G. König, ArabicIslamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2015), p. 109. See, for example, Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 16; Cobb, Race for Paradise, p. 10; König, Arabic-Islamic Views, pp. 108–09, 277; Vasiliev, ‘Harun-ibn-Yahya’, p. 152; Hermes, The [European] Other, pp. 78–9; Classen, ‘East meets West’, p. 26; B. Lewis and J. F. P. Hopkins, ‘Ifrand̲j’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. Bearman et al., consulted online on 25 January 2020, ; C. E. Bosworth, ‘Ebn Rosta, Abū ʿAlī Aḥmad’, in Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 8, fasc. 1 (1997), pp. 49–50, consulted online on 25 January 2020, ; D. König, ‘The Christianisation of Latin Europe as seen by medieval ArabIslamic historiographers’, The Medieval History Journal 12 (2009), 431–72, at 459; B. Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1982), p. 143. On the other early references to Barṭīniyah, see Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, pp. 16–18; ibn Rusta, ed. de Goeje, p. 85; König, Arabic-Islamic Views, p. 277; T. Zadeh, ‘Ibn Khurdādhbih’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. K. Fleet et al. (Leiden, 2018), consulted online on 26 January 2020 ; C. A. Nallino, ‘al-Battānī’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. Bearman et al., consulted online on 25 January 2020 . See also the Kitāb al-tanbīh wa-l-ishrāf (‘Book of Notification and Revision’) of al-Masʿūdī, written at Fustat, Egypt, in 955–6, which refers to the ‘Isles of Britain, twelve in number’, and the late tenth-century Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, discussed further below, which relates that ‘there are twelve islands called Briṭāniya, of which some are cultivated and some desolate’: Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, pp. 18, 19; Ch. Pellat, ‘Al-Masʿūdī’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. Bearman et al., consulted online on 25 January 2020, ; Ḥudūd

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The Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’ As to the claim that there were ‘seven kings’ there, the notion that lowland Britain/Anglo-Saxon England in the pre-Viking period through to the reign of Ecgberht of Wessex (d. 839) was divided into seven kingdoms – the ‘Heptarchy’ – is one that was common in English historiography from the sixteenth century through to the twentieth, despite it arguably never having been strictly the case, as David Dumville and others have pointed out.11 The term ‘Heptarchy’ for the pre-Viking kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England appears to have been first used by William Lambarde in the mid-sixteenth century.12 However, the historiographical idea that pre-Viking England was made up of seven kingdoms is generally believed to have arisen rather earlier than this, in the early twelfth century with Henry of Huntingdon. James Campbell, for example, says that Henry of Huntingdon ‘introduced the idea of the Heptarchy’ to English historical writing in his Historia Anglorum of 1129, with the Historia Anglorum (I.4) stating that ‘when the Saxons subjected the land to themselves, they established seven kings, and imposed names of their own choice on the kingdoms’ before going on to list these kingdoms as Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria.13 Simon Keynes likewise

11

12

13

al-‘Ālam, ‘The Regions of the World’ – A Persian Geography 372 A.H.–982 A.D., ed. and trans. V. V. Minorsky (London, 1970), Ch. 4, p. 59. Note, whilst possible, it is probably unnecessary to see the vagueness over location in the main reference to Barṭīniyah in ibn Rusta’s Kitāb al-Aʿlāḳ al-nafīsa as resulting from some sort of partial confusion of the locations of Britain and Brittany, rather than simply being vagueness on the part of Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā, but in any case all of the above commentators on this passage regard Barṭīniyah as certainly identifiable as Britain here; it is also worth noting that Samuel Ottewill-Soulsby has recently observed that ‘Brittany, and ethnographic information about Bretons in particular, seem not to have formed part of the Arabic geographical tradition’ (S. Ottewill-Soulsby, ‘Al-Bakrī and the Bretons’, Quaestio Insularis 16 [2016], 90–105, at 93), with there being very few solid Arabic references to that area. D. N. Dumville, ‘Essex, Middle Anglia and the expansion of Mercia’, in The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett (London, 1989), pp. 123–40, at 126; D. P. Kirby, The Earliest English Kings (London, 1991), pp. 4–7; S. Keynes, ‘Heptarchy’, in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge et al., 2nd ed. (Chichester, 2014), p. 238; D. N. Dumville, ‘Origins of the kingdom of the English’, in Writing, Kingship and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R. Naismith and D. A. Woodman (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 71–121, at 72, 101–2. W. Lambarde, Archaionomia, siue de priscis anglorum legibus libri (London, 1568), pp. 30–1, and also W. Lambarde, The Perambulation of Kent (London, 1576), map and pp. 1, 5; S. Keynes, ‘Rædwald the Bretwalda’, in Voyage to the Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo, ed. C. B. Kendall and P. S. Wells (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 103–23, at 122; W. Goffart, ‘The first venture in “medieval geography”: Lambarde’s map of the Saxon Heptarchy (1568)’, in Alfred the Wise, ed. J. Roberts, J. L. Nelson, and M. Godden (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 53–60; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. Heptarchy. J. Campbell, ‘Some twelfth-century views of the Anglo-Saxon past’, in J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 209–28, at 213;

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Caitlin R. Green considers that ‘the notion that political organisation in early Anglo-Saxon England could be formulated as a “Heptarchy” […] seems to have arisen in the early twelfth century (Henry of Huntingdon, Hist. Angl. I.4)’,14 and emphasises that this concept was Henry’s ‘own quite independent vision of early Anglo-Saxon history’.15 Needless to say, the account of Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā under discussion here would seem to offer a potential challenge to this consensus. Its reference to there being ‘seven kings’ ruling in Barṭīniyah (Britain) would seem to indicate that the concept, at least, of a ‘Heptarchy’ in pre-Viking Lowland Britain may have actually had a significantly earlier currency than Henry of Huntingdon and the early twelfth century. Certainly, it has been understood in exactly this way by those Arabists and Byzantinists who have studied Hārūn’s account, from Alexander Vasiliev and Douglas Dunlop onwards. It is, for example, ‘obviously a belated allusion to the already defunct Anglo-Saxon heptarchy’, according to Bernard Lewis, although this seems not to have been previously noted by those working on the history of Anglo-Saxon England.16 Indeed, Hārūn’s apparently second-hand reference to these seven kings might furthermore imply that this concept of the political situation in pre-Viking England was sufficiently well-known by the ninth century to have reached at least Rome, if not in fact Constantinople – Dunlop’s favoured solution as to where Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā obtained his information regarding Britain – in some form, which would itself be a point of some considerable interest and significance.17 Of course, we do have to be cautious here. It is not wholly impossible that Britain was somehow falsely ascribed seven kings by Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā or his source, perhaps for some symbolic reason, although there is no indication of this in the text, nor any obvious reason why Britain should be given seven symbolic kings in this manner, in contrast to other places. Moreover, the remarkable correspondence between the claim by Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā that there were seven kings in ninth-century Britain and the later-recorded, insular notion of there having been seven kingdoms – a

14 15

16

17

Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: the History of the English People, ed. and trans. D. Greenway (Oxford, 1996), I.4, pp. 16–17, and pp. lx–lxi; Simon Keynes notes that, in Henry’s scheme, ‘the several kingdoms persisted until the time of Ecgberht of Wessex’; Keynes, ‘Rædwald the Bretwalda’, p. 121, and Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Greenway, pp. 262–71. Keynes, ‘Heptarchy’, p. 238. Keynes, ‘Rædwald the Bretwalda’, pp. 113, 121. See also D. E. Greenway, ‘Henry of Huntingdon’, in Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge et al., pp. 237–8, at 238. Quotation from Lewis and Hopkins, ‘Ifrand̲j’. See also Vasiliev, ‘Harun-ibnYahya’, p. 152; Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 16; König, Arabic-Islamic Views, pp. 9, 79, 108; Bosworth, ‘Ebn Rosta’; B. Lewis, A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History (New York, 2000), p. 25. Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 16.

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The Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’ ‘Heptarchy’ – in pre-Viking England is arresting, to say the least.18 That the seven kings are all said to rule in the ‘city (capital) of Britain’, rather than England, might also give pause. However, that the text refers here to Britain, rather than England, simply reflects the normal Arabic usage, with the first appearance of the name ‘England’, instead of ‘Britain’, only coming in the mid-twelfth century – in the Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī khtirāq al-āfāq, ‘The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands’ of al-Idrīsī, composed c. 1154 (Inqalṭāra, Inkarṭāra cf. French Angleterre) – whilst the reference to the seven kings ruling in the ‘city of Britain’ might be readily understood as simply a slight confusion on Hārūn’s part deriving from a source that mentioned both the perceived political situation in pre-Viking England and a major city there.19 A matter of greater concern, perhaps, is the fact that the very existence of a ‘Heptarchy’ in pre-Viking England is questioned by historians of this period and region. So Cyril Hart declared in 1971 that it was ‘high time it was given a decent burial’, apparently based largely on his view that the thirty-five population-groups mentioned by the much-debated ‘Tribal Hidage’, often considered to be a seventh-century document, were all independent ‘kingdoms and principalities’, although this is very much a debatable proposition, as Barbara Yorke and others have pointed out.20 D. P. Kirby and David Dumville have taken a similar line, pointing to the fluid political situation in pre-Viking England and the evidence for many more than seven ‘kingdoms’ of different sizes and statuses existing 18

19

20

One might wonder if there was a link to the seven kings of the Book of Revelation, 17:9–11 from the Christian New Testament, but there is no obvious reason why Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā or his source might make such a reference, nor any indication that he is doing so, and the seven kings who are mentioned therein appear, moreover, to be sequential, not all ruling at the same time; likewise, one might speculate about a reference to the seven ‘Kings of the Jinns’, as found in the late fourteenth-century Kitāb al-Bulhān, but there is no indication of this nor any good reason to think that this might be the case or even a plausible possibility. A. F. L. Beeston, ‘Idrisi’s account of the British Isles’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13 (1950), 265–80, at 267, 273, 278, 280; König, ArabicIslamic Views, pp. 277–8. It is worth noting that pre-Viking writers from the region also on occasion refer to ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ as Britannia and similar; for example, Stephen of Rippon (Eddius Stephanus), writing in the early eighth century, uses Brittannia for the area of Bishop Wilfrid’s activity, and Alcuin of York frequently uses Britannia and similar for England in his late eighth- and early ninth-century correspondence, as Michael Richter and others have noted. See M. Richter, ‘Bede’s Angli’, pp. 106, 113; Brooks, ‘English identity’, pp. 41–3. C. Hart, ‘The Tribal Hidage’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 21 (1971), 133–57, at 133; B. Yorke, ‘Political and ethnic identity: a case study of Anglo-Saxon practice’, in Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain, ed. W. O. Frazer and A. Tyrrell (London, 2000), pp. 69–89, at 82–6; J. Blair, ‘The Tribal Hidage’, in Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge et al., pp. 473–5; C. Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650, second edition (Lincoln, 2020), pp. 163–7.

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Caitlin R. Green at various times, suggesting that ‘there probably never was a time when Anglo-Saxon territory was divided simply into seven kingdoms’ and stating that ‘no two scholars are likely to count the same kingdoms among their seven’.21 Moreover, Dumville suggests that the political situation in England from the early ninth century might be better characterised as a Pentarchy and then a Tetrarchy, rather than a Heptarchy, made up of five and subsequently four kingdoms that were still capable of independent action, before the Scandinavian conquests of 865–78 destroyed the pre-existing Anglo-Saxon polity.22 However, even allowing for all of this, the apparent existence of at least a concept of a ‘Heptarchy’ in Britain by Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā in the 880s is remarkable and must remain of considerable interest. At the very least, it raises the possibility that Henry of Huntingdon could have been reporting a pre-existing generalised or idealised notion of how pre-Viking England was organised, albeit one that until then went unrecorded in an insular context. Otherwise, it remains hard to convincingly explain Hārūn’s reference to there being ‘seven kings’ in Britain, except by positing that it was the result of an arguably somewhat bizarre and perhaps unlikely coincidence. As to whether there was ever anything like a Heptarchy in pre-Viking England that might have led to such an idealised concept, the evidence is perhaps not quite so negative as is sometimes claimed. It is worth noting, in this context, that Barbara Yorke has pointed out that of the sixteen gentes or peoples who inhabited provinciae and were ruled by kings that Bede identifies in seventh- to early eighth-century England, only eight ‘can be definitely stated to have still had royal houses in 731’,23 and one of these – the Hwicce – arguably never had the sort of long history of independence from Mercia of, say, the kings of the South Saxons and Kent, as Patrick Sims-Williams has observed.24 Interestingly, the other seven surviving royal houses identified by Yorke are those of Kent, the East Saxons, the East Angles, the West Saxons, Mercia, the South Saxons and Northumbria, which is identical to the list of seven 21 22 23

24

Kirby, Earliest English Kings, pp. 4–7 (quotation at p. 4); Dumville, ‘Expansion of Mercia’, p. 126 (quotation); Dumville, ‘Origins’, pp. 101–2. On the Pentarchy/Tetrarchy and the Scandinavian conquest, see Dumville, ‘Expansion of Mercia’, p. 126, and Dumville, Origins’, pp. 72, 102, 111. Yorke, ‘Political and ethnic identity’, p. 76; see further on Bede’s terminology in Yorke’s discussion in this piece and J. Campbell, ‘Bede’s Reges and Principes’, in J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 85–98. These are the same eight kingdoms for which we have evidence of coins and/or charters apparently being issued in the eighth century, which is noteworthy. P. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England 600–800 (Cambridge, 1990), at p. 33; although they did issue charters themselves, the kings of the Hwicce occur as sub-kings and thegns of the Mercians in charters of the seventh and eighth centuries. See, for example, S 89, S 1429, and Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, pp. 33–9.

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The Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’ pre-Viking kingdoms given by Henry of Huntingdon. As such, it might be wondered whether any idealised concept of there having been ‘seven kings’/a Heptarchy in Anglo-Saxon England might have had its roots in the mid-late eighth century, between the time of Bede’s sixteen gentes and Dumville’s ninth-century Pentarchy. If, however, both Hārūn and Henry of Huntingdon’s strikingly similar political concepts did have their roots in this era, then it would necessarily imply that Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s information was around a century out of date at the time he recorded it, which is perhaps not unexpected given that he clearly obtained it second-hand, possibly in Constantinople. Turning to the question of the identity of Hārūn’s unnamed ‘city (capital) of Britain’ (madīnat Bartīniya), this has been generally taken by Arabists as a reference to London.25 On the whole, this does not seem an unreasonable assumption. Certainly, from the perspective of Arabic accounts of Britain, London would be a plausible candidate. The name London does, for example, appear in the ninth-century Kitāb Ṣūrat al-arḍ of al-K̲h̲wārazmī (d. c. 847), an adaptation of Ptolemy’s Geography,26 and ‘the city of London’ is also mentioned by later Arabic writers including both al-Idrīsī in the twelfth century and ibn Saʿīd al-Mag̲h̲ribī in the thirteenth, the later reporting that the King of England’s capital is the ‘city of Lundras (London)’.27 An identification of the unnamed capital of Britain with London would have a good context in the urban history of the pre-Viking period too. Pam Crabtree has recently argued that the four great emporia or wics of Middle Saxon England – as determined primarily by archaeological excavation – ought to be considered truly urban settlements, with evidence of planned layouts, craft specialisation, overseas trading connections, and substantial populations.28 Of these four, Eorforwic (York) was the smallest, being probably home to around 1,000–1,500 people; Hamwic (Southampton) and Gipeswic (Ipswich) were next in size, both housing around 2,000–3,000 people; and Lundenwic (London), just upstream of 25

26

27

28

Hermes, [European] Other, pp. 78–9; Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 16; Classen, ‘East meets West’, p. 26. For text, see above and ibn Rusta, ed. de Goeje, p. 130; König, Arabic-Islamic Views, pp. 109, 277. Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 12; J. Vernet, ‘al-K̲h̲wārazmī’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. Bearman et al., consulted online on 25 January 2020, http:// dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_4209. A. F. L. Beeston, ‘Idrisi’s account of the British Isles’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13 (1950), 265–80, at 279; Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 24; König, Arabic-Islamic Views, p. 278. Note, the form Lundras and similar, like that of ‘England’ noted above, derives from medieval French; see, for example, F. H. M. Le Saux, ‘The languages of England: multilingualism in the work of Wace’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c.1100–c.1500, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al. (York, 2009), pp. 188–97, at 189–91 on the names of London. P. J. Crabtree, Early Medieval Britain: The Rebirth of Towns in the Post-Roman West (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 86–137.

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Caitlin R. Green the old Roman town, was by far the largest, perhaps having a population of around 6,000–7,000 people at its peak on current estimates.29 The significance of London in the Middle Saxon period is also apparent from the various textual references to it. Bede, writing in about 731, described London as ‘an emporium for many nations who come to it by land and sea’ (Historia ecclesiastica, II.3). Similarly, in 811 it was described as a royal town and in 839 as ‘an illustrious place […] called throughout the world the city of London’,30 although by the mid-ninth century Lundenwic itself had apparently been abandoned – perhaps in part due to the threat of Viking raids – and activity was subsequently refocused on the old Roman walled city, Lundenburh.31 In light of all this, London would certainly seem to be a very credible candidate for ‘the city (capital) of Britain’ (madīnat Bartīniya) mentioned by Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā. Furthermore, it is worth noting that London was actually sited in a marginal position to several pre-­ Viking kingdoms of the ‘Heptarchy’ and was variously under the control of the kingdoms of Mercia, Kent, Wessex, and Essex at different points between the mid-seventh and the mid-ninth centuries.32 As Rory Naismith has recently noted: the fact that it lay at the intersection of so many different kingdoms, and had relatively good river and road connections, meant that it enjoyed a kind of pan-Anglo-Saxon centrality: it was everyone’s border zone […] London was thus the fulcrum on which the cut and thrust of Anglo-Saxon politics pivoted.33

Finally, given all of this, it is perhaps worth briefly considering whether Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s specific description of the process of entering ‘the city 29

30

31 32 33

Crabtree, Rebirth of Towns, pp. 101, 111, 114, 118, 126, 130–1. On Anglo-Saxon London, see, for example, A. G. Vince, Saxon London: An Archaeological Investigation (London, 1990); L. Blackmore, ‘The origins and growth of Lundenwic, a mart of many nations’, in Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods, ed. B. Hårdh and L. Larsson (Stockholm, 2002), pp. 273–301; J. R. Maddicott, ‘London and Droitwich, c. 650–750: trade, industry and the rise of Mercia’, Anglo-Saxon England 34 (2005), 7–58; R. Cowie et al., Lundenwic: Excavations in Middle Saxon London, 1987–2000 (London, 2012); L. Blackmore, ‘London in the Not-So-Dark Ages’, lecture, 13 October 2014, consulted online on 25 January 2020, ; Crabtree, Rebirth of Towns, pp. 121–7, and 135; and R. Naismith, Citadel of the Saxons: The Rise of Early London (London, 2019). Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, II.3, trans. B. Colgrave, in Bede: the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. J. McClure and R. Collins (Oxford, 1994), p. 74; Blackmore, ‘Origins and growth’, p. 295; Naismith, Early London, p. 109. Blackmore, ‘Origins and growth of Lundenwic’, pp. 292–3; Blackmore, ‘London’, p. 8; Naismith, Early London, pp. 102–4. Naismith, Early London, pp. 58–9, 89–90; Blackmore, ‘Origins and growth’, p. 277. Naismith, Early London, p. 59.

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The Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’ (capital) of Britain’ might fit London too. In particular, the reference to an ‘idol’ being located at the gate of the city is obscure, but it is interesting to note that Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century claimed that there was an equestrian statue standing ‘high on London’s western gate’ in the seventh century.34 Whilst anything asserted by Geoffrey needs to be treated with considerable scepticism, it has been suggested that this claim might actually reflect the presence of a real Roman-era equestrian statue at London, which is an intriguing possibility.35 As to the notion that strangers must wait/sleep at the gate to the city until collected by the inhabitants (‘he sleeps and cannot enter it, until the people of the city take him, to examine his intention and purpose in entering the city’), this could simply be some sort of ‘magical’/fantastical elaboration as Dunlop suggests,36 but it is also credible that it might ultimately reflect a situation whereby some element of control was exercised over the activities of foreign traders at Lundenwic. Certainly, the wics/emporia of Middle Saxon England are believed to have provided an opportunity for Anglo-Saxon kings to ‘concentrate and tax trade’, as Crabtree puts it,37 which might fit with this, and the evidence of the pre-Viking law-codes of both Ine of Wessex and Wihtred of Kent – as well as literary texts like Beowulf – suggests that strangers and traders were indeed viewed with suspicion and had their activities controlled to some degree.38 The second point of interest in Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s account, as preserved by ibn Rusta, is his description of Britain as ‘the last of the lands of the Greeks’ (wa-hum ākhir bilād al-Rūm); that is, the most oceanward land of the Rūm or Byzantines.39 A very similar concept is also found in the Persian Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, ‘The Regions of the World’, written for a prince of Gūzgan in northern Afghanistan in around 982. This includes the following on Britain, of which the first part at least is believed to probably ultimately derive from Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s account: 34 35

36 37 38

39

Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. M. D. Reeve and trans. N. Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), 201.504–12, at pp. 276–7. J. Clark, ‘Cadwallo, King of the Britons, the bronze horseman of London’, in Collectanea Londiniensia: Studies in London Archaeology and History, ed. J. Bird, H. Chapman, and J. Clark (London, 1978), pp. 194–9; Naismith, Early London, pp. 41–2. Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 16. Crabtree, Rebirth of Towns, pp. 99, 129–30. Laws of Wihtred, 28, and Laws of Ine, 20, ed. and trans. F. L. Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 30–1, 42–3; Naismith, Early London, p. 95. Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 16; see also Cobb, Race for Paradise, p. 10, and König, Arabic-Islamic Views, p. 277, on the interpretation of this passage. My thanks to Paul Cobb for discussing this section of the passage with me; note, ‘lands’, bilād, are always plural when describing regions in vague ways like this, hence the use of ‘they’ and ‘them’ in this section of Hārūn’s account (P. Cobb, pers. comm.).

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Caitlin R. Green ‘Britannia (Bariṭīniya), the last land (shahr) of Rūm on the coast of the Ocean. It is an emporium (bārgāh) of Rūm and Spain.’40

Dunlop considered the claim that Britain was ‘the last of the lands of the Greeks’ to be a statement deriving from Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s time in Constantinople,41 and it might simply be interpreted as somehow reflecting the fact that Britain was once a part of the Roman Empire, nearly 500 years earlier – that is to say, Britain is ‘the last of the [former] lands of the Rūm’. However, this is not what it says in the extract preserved by ibn Rusta, which was written in the present tense, nor in the above section of the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, and Daniel König has recently commented that the text instead indicates that Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā and ibn Rusta believed Britain actually somehow lay ‘at the outer fringes of the Byzantine Empire’.42 In this context, and given the contention that the above claim derived from Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s time in Constantinople, it is perhaps worth recalling that Procopius, writing in Constantinople during the mid-sixth century – around a century and a half after Britain is usually considered to have ceased to be part of the Roman Empire – mentions both that the Byzantine emperor Justinian was then making large payments of subsidies to Britain (Secret History, XIX.13) and that Justinian’s leading imperial general, Belisarius, offered Britain to the Ostrogoths in exchange for Sicily (Wars, VI.vi.28).43 Whilst both suggestions could have been a fantasy or meant flippantly, it is equally possible that they may be a genuine reflection of an Early Byzantine imperial ideology that continued to consider Britain to be somehow part of Byzantium’s holdings, albeit a distant one, as a number of commentators including Eurydice Georganteli, J. O. Ward, and Ian Wood have pointed out.44 If so, then 40

41 42 43

44

Ḥudūd al-‘Ālam, ed. Minorsky, Chapter 42, p. 158, and see also C. E. Bosworth, ‘Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam’, in Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. Bearman et al., consulted online on 25 January 2020, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ islam_SIM_8627, on the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam. On the probable derivation of at least the first part of this section of the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam from Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā, perhaps via a shared source with ibn Rusta, see Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-‘Ālam, pp. xvii, 419, 425. Note, this is actually the second reference to Britain in the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; the first relates that ‘there are twelve islands called Briṭāniya, of which some are cultivated and some desolate. On them are found numerous mountains, rivers, villages, and different mines’ (Ḥudūd al-‘Ālam, ed. Minorsky, Ch.4, p. 59); Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 19. Dunlop, ‘British Isles’, p. 16. König, Arabic-Islamic Views, pp. 109, 277. Prokopios: The Secret History, ed. and trans. A. Kaldellis (Indianapolis, 2010), p. 89; Procopius: History of the Wars, Volume III: Books 5–6.15, ed. and trans. H. B. Dewing (Cambridge MA, 1916), pp. 344–5. E. S. Georganteli, ‘Byzantine coins’, in The Winchester Mint and Coins and Related Finds from the Excavations of 1961–71, Winchester Studies 8, ed. M. Biddle (Oxford, 2012), pp. 669–78, at 673; J. O. Ward, ‘Procopius’s Bellum Gothicum II.6.28: the problem of contacts between Justinian and Britain’, Byzantion 38

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The Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’

Figure 5.1 Location map of some of the key sites mentioned in the text along with the extent of the Byzantine Empire in the later ninth century. Source: drawn by Caitlin Green on a base map derived from Wikimedia Commons under their Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. Details: [Accessed 05 August 2021].

Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s ninth-century claim might be potentially considered a late echo or memory of such an ideology. Certainly, with regard to the possible existence of such an Early Byzantine concept of Britain, it has to be admitted that there is now considerable archaeological evidence for not only indirect but also direct Byzantine trade and interaction with Britain in the early medieval period (Map 1). Most notably, there have been substantial finds of fifth- to sixth-century eastern Mediterranean and North African pottery (including both fine wares and transport amphorae) from a range of sites primarily located (1968), 460–71; and I. N. Wood, ‘Before and after the migration to Britain’, in The Anglo-Saxons From the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: an Ethnographic Perspective, ed. J. Hines (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 41–64, at 48. See also, for example, P. Sarris, Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500–700 (Oxford, 2011), p. 200, and J. Campbell, ‘The impact of the Sutton Hoo discovery on the study of Anglo-Saxon history’, in J. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (Hambledon, 2000), pp. 55–83, at 76. For more sceptical views, see A. Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century (London, 1985), pp. 217–18, and C. A. Snyder, An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons, AD 400–600 (Stroud, 1998), pp. 34–5.

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Caitlin R. Green in western Britain and Ireland, with around half of the total coming from the probable royal site of Tintagel, Cornwall, and these have often been seen as evidence for direct contact between the Byzantine world and Britain, although this interpretation has been questioned.45 Increasing discoveries have also led to a reassessment of late fifth- to seventh-century Byzantine coin finds from across Britain, with this material now being seen as another potential source of evidence for long-distance trade with the Byzantine Empire at that time, rather than dismissed as it once was.46 For example, an unusual concentration of such material at the site of the East Anglian royal vill of Rendlesham, Suffolk, has been recently considered ‘indicative of direct mercantile contacts with the Mediterranean’, something that is particularly noteworthy given the presence of Byzantine silver plate, a Byzantine copper-alloy bowl, and imported bitumen from the Levant in the nearby early seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship burial, as 45

46

See, for example, M. Fulford, ‘Byzantium and Britain: a Mediterranean perspective on post-Roman Mediterranean imports in western Britain and Ireland’, Medieval Archaeology 33 (1989), 1–6; C. Thomas, ‘The context of Tintagel. A new model for the diffusion of post-Roman Mediterranean imports’, Cornish Archaeology 27 (1988), 7–25; A. Harris, Byzantium, Britain and the West: the Archaeology of Cultural Identity, AD 400–650 (Stroud, 2003); E. Campbell, Continental and Mediterranean Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, AD 400–800 (York, 2007); E. Campbell and C. Bowles, ‘Byzantine trade to the edge of the world: Mediterranean pottery imports to Atlantic Britain in the 6th century’, in Byzantine Trade, 4th–12th Centuries: The Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange, ed. M. M. Mango (Farnham, 2009), pp. 297–314; T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 222–3; R. C. Barrowman, C. E. Batey, and C. D. Morris, Excavations at Tintagel Castle, Cornwall, 1990–1999 (London, 2007); A. Harris, ‘Britain and China at opposite ends of the world? Archaeological methodology and long-distance contacts in the sixth century’, in Incipient Globalisation? Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century, ed. A. Harris (Oxford, 2007), pp. 91–104; M. Duggan, ‘Ceramic imports to Britain and the Atlantic Seaboard in the fifth century and beyond’, Internet Archaeology 41 (2016), ; and M. Duggan, Links to Late Antiquity. Ceramic Exchange and Contacts on the Atlantic Seaboard in the 5th to 7th centuries AD (Oxford, 2018). See especially Fulford, Campbell, and Duggan for differing views over the nature of these trading contacts and the extent to which they represent direct trade, although I would suggest that this question does need to be considered in the light of the other textual, archaeological, and isotopic evidence for direct contacts discussed below. See especially Georganteli, ‘Byzantine coins’, pp. 672–6, and 678; C. Morrisson, ‘Byzantine coins in early medieval Britain: a Byzantinist’s assessment’, in Early Medieval Monetary History, ed. R. Naismith, M. Allen, and E. Screen (Farnham, 2014), pp. 207–42; S. Moorhead, ‘Early Byzantine copper coins found in Britain – a review in light of new finds recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme’, in Ancient History, Numismatics and Epigraphy in the Mediterranean World, ed. O. Tekin (Istanbul, 2009), pp. 263–74; C. Scull, F. Minter, and J. Plouviez, ‘Social and economic complexity in early medieval England: a central place complex of the East Anglian kingdom at Rendlesham, Suffolk’, Antiquity 90 (2016), 1594–612; and Harris, ‘Britain and China’, pp. 91–3.

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Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience well as the discovery of a sixth-century Byzantine bucket – possibly made at Antioch – in the neighbouring parish of Bromeswell (Fig. 5.2).47 Indeed, it has been suggested that the low-value Byzantine coins found in eastern England can be ‘used as a proxy for individuals from Byzantine territory and a residue of trade in high-value goods’, and that they indicate that ‘Byzantine imports were arriving in south-east England through mercantile channels as well as socially embedded exchange’.48 Other material from Britain that might well be taken likewise as suggestive of some sort of connection and/or interaction between fifth- to seventh-century Britain and the Byzantine Empire includes a baling seal of a sixth-century Byzantine prefect, Phocas, found on the Thames shore at Putney, London, and a number of late fifth- to mid-seventh-century pilgrim flasks associated with St Menas, which derive from his pilgrimage site at Abu Mina, Egypt, and have been found at a variety of sites from the Wirral in the north-west across to Canterbury in the east (Fig. 5.3).49 If there is, therefore, a significant amount of material evidence to suggest the possibility of interaction between the Byzantine Empire and Britain through to the sixth and seventh centuries, it does not stand alone. Also of relevance is the oxygen isotope data retrieved from the dental enamel of a number of individuals buried in three cemeteries analysed in South Wales, an area that saw imports of Byzantine fine tableware and wine amphorae in the early medieval period. This isotopic data indicates that multiple people buried in this part of western Britain in the post-Roman era had probably grown up in a much warmer climate, consistent 47

48 49

C. Scull et al., ‘Rendlesham’, p. 1603; they also note the presence of coin weights marked with contemporary Byzantine denominations at Rendlesham too, p. 1604. For the Sutton Hoo finds, see R. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, Volume 3: silver, hanging-bowls, drinking-vessels, containers, musical instruments, textiles, minor objects (London, 1983), and P. Burger et al., ‘Identification, geochemical characterisation and significance of bitumen among the grave goods of the 7th century Mound 1 ship-burial at Sutton Hoo (Suffolk, UK)’, PLOS ONE 11 (2016), . For the Bromeswell bucket, see M. M. Mango et al., ‘A 6th-century Mediterranean bucket from Bromeswell Parish, Suffolk’, Antiquity 63 (1989), 295–311. Scull et al., ‘Rendlesham’, pp. 1603–4. M. Biddle, ‘A city in transition: 400–800’, in The City of London From Prehistoric Times to c.1520, ed. M. D. Lobel (Oxford, 1989), pp. 20–9, at 20–1; W. Anderson, ‘Menas flasks in the West: pilgrimage and trade at the end of antiquity’, Ancient West and East 6 (2007), 221–43; S. Bangert, ‘Menas ampullae: a case study of long-distance contacts’, in Incipient Globalization?, ed. Harris, pp. 27–33; and K. J. Fitzpatrick-Matthews, ‘Defining fifth-century ceramics in north Hertfordshire’, Internet Archaeology 41 (2016), section 7, . Note that Anna Gannon has suggested that the designs of a major sub-series of Secondary Series U sceattas, belonging to the early eighth century, may reuse the motif found on St Menas ampullae, which is a point of some considerable interest. See A. Gannon, The Iconography of Early Anglo-Saxon Coinage: Sixth to Eighth Centuries (Oxford, 2003), pp. 88–90.

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Caitlin R. Green

Figure 5.2 A Byzantine copper alloy coin of Justin II, minted Constantinople, 575–6; found at Rendlesham, Suffolk. Source: Portable Antiquities Scheme/ Suffolk County Council, PAS FASAM-A9D9BD; Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license. Details: [Accessed 05 August 2021].

with the southern Mediterranean Sea region. As the authors of the study put it, it points to a conclusion that ‘people from the Byzantine world travelled alongside the cargoes of imported pottery, and subsequently settled in western Britain, where they were eventually buried amongst the local communities’.50 Indeed, this seems to have continued into the seventh century or even possibly a little beyond, with one of these individuals being radiocarbon-dated to the late seventh century at the earliest. Although it cannot be established with certainty, this might well be seen as the burial of someone brought up during the last days of Byzantine Carthage before the Arab conquest of the city in 697/8, and the Byzantine coin evidence from the seventh-century in Britain is certainly dominated by Carthaginian issues.51 Interestingly, the individuals involved included men, women, and children, which is noteworthy, as is the fact that similar results have been recorded from eastern Britain too, from the seventh- to 50

51

K. A. Hemer et al., ‘Evidence of early medieval trade and migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea region’, Journal of Archaeological Science 40 (2013), 2352–9, at 2352. Hemer et al., ‘Early medieval trade and migration’, p. 2358. Moorhead, ‘Byzantine copper coins’, p. 265, notes that the majority of the seventh-century Byzantine coins from Britain that he surveyed were minted at Carthage and suggests that they are indicative of ‘continued maritime activity with people from the Mediterranean in the 7th century’.

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The Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’

Figure 5.3 A late fifth- to mid-seventh-century St Menas ampulla from St Menas’s pilgrimage site at Abu Mina, Egypt; now in Letchworth Museum. Source: K. J. Fitzpatrick-Matthews, ‘Defining fifth-century ceramics in north Hertfordshire’, Internet Archaeology 41 (2016), section 7 , used under their Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license. Details: [Accessed 05 August 2021].

ninth-century inhumation cemetery associated with the Northumbrian ‘royal city’ of Bamburgh and the late seventh-century inhumation cemetery associated with the East Anglian monastic site of Ely.52 The available textual evidence is similarly intriguing. We should note particularly here the seventh-century Life of St John the Almsgiver, which tells of a ship from Alexandria that visited Britain around AD 610–20 and 52

S. Lucy et al., ‘The burial of a princess? The later seventh-century cemetery at Westfield Farm, Ely’, Antiquity 89 (2009), 81–141; J. A. Evans, C. A. Chenery, and J. Montgomery, ‘A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain’, Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry 27 (2012), 754–64 and ‘Supplementary Material I’(14 pp.); and S. E. Groves et al., ‘Mobility histories of 7th–9th century AD people buried at early medieval Bamburgh, Northumberland, England’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 151 (2013), 462–76. For Bamburgh as ‘the royal city’ of Northumbria, see Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, III.6, III.12, III.16, trans. Colgrave, pp. 119, 129, 135.

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Caitlin R. Green exchanged a cargo of corn for one of tin, a tale that is suggestive as to seventh-century contacts and continued familiarity, as well as a reference to tin as ‘the Brittanic metal’ in a seventh-century Byzantine alchemical treatise by Stephanos of Alexandria.53 Even more important, from the present perspective, may be the Byzantine text of the 630s known as the Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati, as it offers a very similar concept to that found in Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s account, claiming that ‘Roman lands’ extended from Britain (βρεττανίας) to Africa in its day.54 Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is the early medieval memorial stone at Penmachno, North Wales, which dates itself with reference to a Byzantine consulship, stating that it was erected ‘in the time of the consul Justin’ (Fig. 5.4). This has often 53

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Leontius, Life of St John the Almsgiver, Chapter 10, trans. E. Dawes and N. H. Baynes, Three Byzantine Saints: Contemporary Biographies (Oxford, 1948), pp. 217–8; R. Penhallurick, Tin in Antiquity (London, 1986), pp. 10, 237, 245; Snyder, Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons, AD 400–600, p. 152; C. J. Salter, ‘Early tin extraction in the south-west of England: a resource for Mediterranean metalworkers of late antiquity’, in Byzantine Trade, ed. Mango, pp. 315–22, at p. 320; M. M. Mango, ‘Tracking Byzantine silver and copper metalware, 4th–12th centuries’, Byzantine Trade, ed. Mango, pp. 221–36, at p. 223. Note, it is usually assumed that the tin/metal trade was a major motivating factor in the export of Byzantine pottery to western Britain, and these two texts would offer some support for this. For a tentative suggestion, based on archaeometallurgical analysis, that British metal exported to Late Roman/Byzantine Carthage may subsequently have been mixed with that from elsewhere and ultimately ended up in fifth- to seventh-century Burkina Faso and Niger in sub-Saharan West Africa, see T. R. Fenn et al., ‘Contacts between West Africa and Roman North Africa: archaeometallurgical results from Kissi, northeastern Burkina Faso’, in Crossroads / Carrefour Sahel: Cultural and Technological Developments in First Millennium BC/AD West Africa, ed. S. Magnavita et al. (Frankfurt, 2009), pp. 119–46, esp. 126, 128, 138; see also R. M. Farquhar and V. Vitali, ‘Lead isotope measurements and their application to Roman lead and bronze artifacts from Carthage’, MASCA Research Papers in Science and Archaeology 6 (1989), 39–45, for the presence of British lead in third- to seventh-century artefacts from Carthage. Glass may also have been exported from Britain to the Byzantine Empire, in light of the find of a fragment from the base of a glass bowl or beaker of Anglo-Saxon/Merovingian type in a sixth- or seventh-century context at the Unguja Ukuu site, Zanzibar Island, which has also produced early Byzantine fine ware pottery made in fifth- to early sixth-century Egypt and some probable early Byzantine glass. See A. Juma, Unguja Ukuu on Zanzibar: an Archaeological Study of Early Urbanism (Uppsala, 2004), pp. 121–2, 124 (figs. 7.1.3.6–7), 126 (pl. 7.1.7–8); A. M. Juma, ‘The Swahili and the Mediterranean worlds: pottery of the late Roman period from Zanzibar’, Antiquity 70 (1996), 148–54. My thanks to Rose Broadley for discussing this find with me; Juma suggests it is from an early medieval ‘bell beaker’ (actually a ‘bag beaker’), but Rose Broadley suggests, pers. comm., that it is more probably from a bowl, perhaps like one of those found in the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Faversham, Kent. Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati, III.9; see further O. Heilo, ‘Seeing Eye to Eye: Islamic Universalism in the Roman and Byzantine Worlds, 7th to 10th Centuries’ (Unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Wein University, 2010), pp. 28–9, and D. Thomas and B. Roggema, Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, volume 1 (600–900) (Leiden, 2009), pp. 117–9.

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Figure 5.4 The sixth-century Penmachno stone from North Wales, which includes a consular dating considered to refer to the successive consulships of the Emperor Justin II, 567–79. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Llywelyn2000; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. Details: [Accessed 05 August 2021].

Caitlin R. Green been thought to refer to the consulship of Justinus in AD 540, which would itself be a point of considerable significance, but it has recently been powerfully argued by Thomas Charles-Edwards that the consul in question is actually more probably the Emperor Justin II himself, who was consul successively from 567–79. Such a situation would, of course, be extremely noteworthy in the present context, and the stone’s erection and use of consular dating has consequently been considered by Charles-Edwards to reflect ‘British loyalty to the Emperor Justin’ and an affirmation that the erectors of the stone believed that they ‘still belonged to the far-flung and loose-knit community of citizens of which he was the head’.55 Needless to say, given all of the above, the idea that Early Byzantine imperial ideology might have envisaged Britain as being still somehow part of its sphere long after the supposed end of ‘Roman Britain’ in c. AD 410, with this then underlying the statements made and recorded by Procopius in the mid-sixth century and by the Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati in the seventh century, is clearly worthy of some serious consideration. Moreover, in this light, Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s belief that Britain was ‘the last of the lands of the Greeks’ would appear to be rather more interesting than might be at first thought – indeed, it could be taken to suggest that any potential sixth- to seventh-century sense of Britain as still in some way part of the Byzantine world continued to persist in Byzantine thinking, or was at least remembered, into the ninth century, when it was encountered by Hārūn. In further support of such a contention the tenth-century Persian Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam might again be cited, where it is stated that Britain is not only ‘the last land (shahr) of Rūm on the coast of the Ocean’, but also ‘an emporium (bārgāh) of Rūm and Spain (Andalus)’.56 Whilst the first part of the statement might well be seen as derivative of Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā, this second part is not. According to V. V. Barthold it is found nowhere else, but it clearly fits with the suggestions made above, namely that, from an eastern perspective, Britain was a place that continued to have some 55

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Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, pp. 234–8, quotations pp. 235, 238; the other identification mentioned is that of V. E. Nash-Williams, The Early Christian Monuments of Wales (Cardiff, 1950), pp. 14, 93. It may be worth noting here that another, less certain although still intriguing, source of evidence is the recent suggestion that some of the apparently obscure ‘local’ saints of western Britain are not actually otherwise unknown ‘Celtic’ saints, as they were portrayed to be in much later medieval hagiographies, but rather Byzantine cults transplanted to Britain in the early medieval period whose origins were subsequently forgotten. Perhaps the most convincing instance of this is provided by St Ia of St Ives, Cornwall. Although she is claimed by very much later sources to be an otherwise unknown Irish saint, she bears a name identical to that of a martyred Greek saint, St Ia of Persia, whose important church in Constantinople – located next to the Golden Gate – was restored by the emperor Justinian in the sixth century; see K. R. Dark, Britain and the End of the Roman Empire (Stroud, 2000), p. 163. Ḥudūd al-‘Ālam, ed. Minorsky, pp. 8, 59, and 158.

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The Concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’ sort of relationship with the Byzantine Empire (Rūm).57 Furthermore, it is worth pointing out here that there is again no necessity to treat the statement that Britain ‘is an emporium of Rūm’ as a primarily historical statement transposed into the tenth century, referring perhaps to the fifth- to seventh-century activity mentioned above – there are, after all, a number of ninth- to eleventh-century Byzantine coins and seals known from Britain, not least from Winchester and London (Fig. 5.5),58 and there is also documentary evidence for both the presence of Byzantine churchmen in tenth- and eleventh-century England and the use of the Byzantine title basileus by English kings at that time, which is suggestive.59 57 58

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V. V. Barthold in Ḥudūd al-‘Ālam, ed. Minorsky, pp. 8, 41. Georganteli, ‘Byzantine coins’, pp. 676–9; J. Ayre and R. Wroe-Brown, ‘The eleventh- and twelfth-century waterfront and settlement at Queenhithe: excavations at Bull Wharf, City of London’, Archaeological Journal 172 (2015), 195–272, at 215, 216, 239; J. Naylor, ‘Byzantine copper coins found in England and Wales, c. 668–1150’, Medieval Archaeology 54 (2010), 391–3. As of early 2020, the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) records six ninth- and tenth-century Byzantine coins from elsewhere in Britain too, to which can be added an otherwise unrecorded coin of Leo VI, 886–912, found at Carbis Bay, Cornwall (my thanks to Jon Mann for sharing details of this find with me, which I have passed on to the PAS who have now recorded it as CORN-9511B2), and another from Sporle, Norfolk, on the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds (EMC), 1996.0267. Note, one of these coins, SOM-33B0A5, comes from a site that has produced other tenth- to eleventh-century material and which lies on a river crossing by the Late Saxon burh of Axbridge, close to the northern Somerset coast. J. Shepard, ‘From the Bosporus to the British Isles: the way from the Greeks to the Varangians’, Drevnejshie Gosudarstva Vostochnoi Evropy, 2009 (Moscow, 2010), pp. 15–42, at 22–38; K. N. Ciggaar, Western Travellers to Constantinople: The West and Byzantium, 962–1204 (Leiden, 1996), pp. 130–7; M. Lapidge, ‘Byzantium, Rome and England in the Early Middle Ages’, Roma fra oriente et occidente: Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi Sull’alto Medioevo 49 (Spoleto, 2002), 363–400; S. Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England (London, 2011), pp. 197, 213; L. Jones, ‘From Anglorum basileus to Norman saint: the transformation of Edward the Confessor’, Haskins Society Journal 12 (2002), 99–120; T. R. Gebhardt, ‘From Bretwalda to Basileus: imperial concepts in Late AngloSaxon England?’ in Transcultural Approaches to the Concept of Imperial Rule in the Middle Ages, ed. T. R. Gebhardt, C. Scholl and J. Clauß (Wien, 2017), pp. 157–84; P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century: Volume I, Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1999), p. 445. Wormald plausibly suggests that basileus ‘should surely be seen not as a characteristic hermeneutic Grecism, but as the known title of the heirs of Rome on the Bosphorous’, a position also supported by, for example, S. Foot (Æthelstan, pp. 197, and 213) and C. Karkov (The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England [Woodbridge, 2004], p. 55). As to the mention of Spain (Andalus) in this passage, this again suggests that the author of the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam had sources additional to those available to us and that his passage was not simply somehow derivative of the situation in the fifth to seventh centuries. The claim may refer to some sort of trading relationship between the Islamic world and Britain and Ireland in the eighth and ninth centuries, for which there is some archaeological and documentary evidence. See, for example, L. Webster and J. Backhouse, The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture, AD 600–900 (London, 1991), p. 190,

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Figure 5.5 A Byzantine copper alloy coin of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus with Zoe, minted at Constantinople in 913–19; it was found close to the Late Saxon burh of Axbridge, Somerset, with other tenth- to eleventh-century material. Source: Portable Antiquities Scheme/Somerset County Council, PAS SOM-33B0A5; Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license. Details: [Accessed 05 August 2021].

on the Offa dinar and one other imitation dinar; R. Naismith, ‘Islamic coins from early medieval England’, Numismatic Chronicle 165 (2005), 193–222, esp. 196–8, 207; EMC 2007.0235 (a genuine gold dinar dated 784–5 from Brandon, Suffolk) and PAS ESS-42E941, LEIC-94D4D2, and LVPL-920A44 (copper fulus from Essex, Leicestershire, and Cheshire); A. O’Sullivan et al., Early Medieval Ireland: Archaeological Excavations 1930–2009 – Early Medieval Archaeology Project (EMAP) Report 4.5 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 179–80, for a textual reference to trading with ninth-century Ireland; and the intriguing but contested eighth- or ninth-century Anglo-Carolingian Ballycottin Cross brooch, found in Ireland, which features a glass bead with an Arabic inscription in praise of Allah (British Museum, 1875, 1211.1). Alternatively, it may refer to Spanish–English contact in the tenth century, for which there is again some physical evidence; see S. Keynes, ‘England and Spain during the reign of King Æthelred the Unready’, SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 20 (2015), 121–66; indeed, Patricia Nightingale has suggested that the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam’s reference to Spain ‘might hint at Anglo-Saxon participation in the slave trade to the Muslim kingdoms’ in the tenth century, P. Nightingale, ‘“The London Pepperers” Guild and some twelfth-century English trading links with Spain’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 58 (1985), 123–32 at 128.

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Chapter 6 Wulfstan in Truso: Old English Text, Baltic Archaeology, and World History John Hines

The Voyage of Wulfstan and Its Context

I

t is relatively easy to identify leading examples of how (unsurprisingly) the many successive generations and changing social configurations within the population of Anglo-Saxon England were both conscious of and cared about their place within a wider known world and its history. Such evidence can be traced back in time to origin traditions that must derive from the fifth and sixth centuries AD and the connected relationships claimed and nurtured with surviving or apparently lost populations in Scandinavia and on the Continent. Bede’s learning was, of course, shaped fundamentally by Christian orthodoxy and an ecclesiastical focus, but his informed awareness of geography was not limited to the biblical,1 with the introduction of a reference to distant visitors – presumably traders – who had witnessed the midnight sun in the Arctic into his commentary on the Book of Kings.2 The violent and forceful Scandinavian raiding and colonization of the Viking Age, from the end of the eighth century onwards, created a demanding new context for such reflexive thought. Not least in light of the terminological controversy within which the origins and production of this publication have become embedded, it is pertinent to note that the adoption of the title Angulsaxonum rex for King Alfred at the very beginning of Asser’s De rebus gestis Ælfredi itself prominently embodies the adoption in the court of Wessex, as a political label, of a geo-ethnic term that had become current in learned and politically leading circles on the Continent around a century before,3 and thus in 1 2 3

G. H. Brown, A Companion to Bede (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 71–2. Brown, Companion to Bede, p. 50, with refs. W. H. Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, together with the Annals of St Neots erroneously ascribed to Asser (Oxford, 1904), 1, pp. 147–52. Paulus Diaconus, Historia Langobardorum, IV.xxii (AD 787–796) referred to the loose and large woollen clothing ‘qualia Anglisaxones habere solent’ (which the AngloSaxons are accustomed to have): Monumenta Germaniae Historicae: Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum et Italicarum saec. VI–IX, ed. L. Bethmann and G. Waitz (Hannover, 1878), p. 124. Besides the use of the compound Engelsaxo in the

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John Hines effect represents a significant stage in the repositioning of the West Saxon leadership relative both to England and to Europe. The production of an Old English translation of Orosius’ Historiae adversus paganos in the milieu of Alfred of Wessex’s court, probably in or just before the last decade of the ninth century, provided a further opportunity for that political centre to record and display the connections it had over long distances within Europe, and its knowledge of areas virtually unknown to Orosius at the end of the fourth and in the early fifth centuries.4 Paulus Orosius is thought to have been born in Iberia and is known to have travelled around the Mediterranean area, especially in North Africa, and to Palestine.5 Given the very different position of Britain and the fact that the Old English translation of his work was undertaken after a hundred years which had been marked by another wave of heathen and barbarian incursions from Scandinavia, it is scarcely surprising that substantial accounts of northern Europe were added to the geographical survey that forms the long first chapter of Orosius’ Book I.6 These accounts take the form of an initial expansion of information about the peoples of contemporary Europe, followed by reports from voyages undertaken by Ohthere and Wulfstan, the latter being linked by reference to the then Danish port of Hedeby ([æt] Hæðum), where Ohthere’s journey from the north terminated and Wulfstan’s to the east started.7 Neither of those reports, however, tells us anything about Hedeby itself, which consequently appears to function straightforwardly as a relatively well-known geographical reference point, familiar in location and importance, to which the more distant and curious areas are then related. As both destination and point of departure it serves as a pivot point for the two embedded travelogues, but the reports of Ohthere and Wulfstan are

4

5 6 7

Vita Alcuini of the 820s which Stevenson draws attention to, the formulation Anglorum Saxonia in the rubric of the report of the Synod held in England in AD 786 during the pontificate of Hadrian I, strongly supports the inference that the term emerged principally to distinguish ‘the Saxons known as “English”’ from the ‘Old Saxons’ of the Continent. The Old English Orosius, ed. J. Bately EETS s.s. 6 (Oxford, 1980), pp. lxxiii– xciii. See also I. Valtonen, The North in the Old English Orosius: A Geographical Narrative in Context (Helsinki, 2008), and F. Leneghan, ‘Translatio Imperii: the Old English Orosius and the Rise of Wessex’, Anglia 133 (2015), pp. 656–705. See Orosius, The Seven Books of History against the Pagans, trans. R. J. Deferrari (Washington DC, 1946), pp. xv–xx (hereafter Orosius, VII libri). Orosius, VII libri, pp. 7–20. The standard edition of the Latin text is Pauli Orosii Historiarum adversus Paganos Libri VII, ed. C. Zangemeister (Leipzig, 1889). Bately, OE Orosius, pp. 12–18; The Old English History of the World: An AngloSaxon Rewriting of Orosius, ed. and trans. M. R. Godden (Cambridge, MA, 2013), pp. 32–49; Ohthere’s Voyages: A late 9th-century Account of Voyages along the Coasts of Norway and Denmark and its cultural Context, ed. J. Bately and A. Englert (Roskilde, 2007); A. Englert and A. Trakadas, Wulfstan’s Voyage: The Baltic Sea Region in the Early Viking Age as seen from Shipboard (Roskilde, 2009).

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Wulfstan in Truso actually very different in both style and emphasis as passages. Ohthere, for instance, is a prominent character within his own report. Much of that is concerned with what he regularly does in the far north. He was a special individual, and rather exotic: ‘he ealra Norðmonna norþmest bude’, and ‘he wæs swyðe spedig mon’ (‘he dwelt furthest north of all the Northmen’; ‘he was a very wealthy man’).8 Wulfstan is not a subject within his report in the same way. Some textual clues nonetheless create a rather interesting profile for him. His name could certainly be that of an Englishman. Morphological features suggest that the exemplar of his report, whatever form it was received in, was in a Mercian dialect: for instance, the widespread use of uncontracted third person singular present indicative verbs (e.g. lið and tolið [with elision of intervocalic h], belimpeð, cymeð, standeð, rideð and findeð; but cf. nimð, benimð and byrð once each). The structure of the text of Wulfstan’s report, especially at the beginning, clearly reflects layers of editing from and around a first-person direct narrative report. It begins by identifying the speaker, along with three clauses in reported speech which give a basic outline of his voyage: Wulfstan sæde – þæt he gefore of Hæðum – þæt he wære on Truso on syfan dagum 7 nihtum – þæt þæt scip wæs ealne weg yrnende under segle. (‘Wulfstan said – that he travelled from Hedeby; – that he was in Truso after seven days and nights; – that the ship was running under sail all the way’.)9

Information about wider geographical coordinates is then given in two styles. Firstly Wulfstan is again referred to narratorially using the third-person pronoun: ‘Weonoðland him wæs on steorbord’ (‘Weonodland was on his starboard’), while all the islands and Skåne/Scania that were part of Denmark were on the port side.10 Then the mode jumps into direct speech, as if Wulfstan himself were speaking, referring to himself and his company with the first-person plural pronoun: ‘7 þonne Burgunda land wæs us on bæcbord’ (‘and then Bornholm was on our port side’), concluding at the mouth of the Vistula (Polish: Wisła), ‘7 Weonodland was us ealne weg on steorbord oð Wislemuðan’ (‘and Weonodland was on our starboard all the way up to the mouth of the Vistula’).11 The voice and tone then switch again into the impersonal style of an informed geographical textbook: ‘Seo Wisle is swyðe micle ea 7 heo tolið Witland 7 Weonodland 7 þæt Witland belimpeð to Estum’ (‘The Vistula is a very great river and 8 9 10 11

Bately, OE Orosius, 13/29–30 and 15/7. Specific textual references to this edition are to page/line number, following the system in the notes and glossary there. Bately, OE Orosius, 16/21–3. Bately, OE Orosius, 16/23–5. Bately, OE Orosius, 16/25–6 and 28–9.

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John Hines it lies in between Witland and Weonodland, and Witland is held by the *Este’).12 It is possible at this point that a tradition of textual scholarship explains the connection between the mouth of the Vistula, Witland and the *Este, as Jordanes had reported: ‘ad litus Oceani ubi tribus faucibus fluenta Vistulae fluminis ebibuntur Vidioarii resident, post quos ripam Oceani item Aestii tenent’ (‘by the edge of the sea, where the currents of the River Vistula are swallowed up through three branches, the Vidivarii live, beyond whom the Aestii occupy the shore of the sea’).13 It is in this third-person style that Wulfstan’s report then proceeds to the end. Archaeology is increasingly making it possible for us to compare Ohthere’s and Wulfstan’s reports, contemporary with the reign of Alfred, with informative new evidence. In the case of Ohthere’s account, for instance, much excavation and sophisticated survey work has been carried out at the site of Hedeby, just outside the city of Schleswig, now in northern Germany, particularly since the 1950s.14 In the region where Ohthere apparently had his home, the excavation at the site of Borg in Lofoten richly illustrates not only the style and wealth of an appropriately elite residence of the right date but also its back history into the seventh century and enigmatic disappearance around AD 900.15 Even more detailed work at Kaupang in Vestfold cannot shed as much light on the late ninth century, as those layers have been disturbed by ploughing, but has again revealed the origins of the site close to a much earlier assembly site, cult centre and elite hall at Skiringssalr (Old English Sciringesheal).16 The end-point of Wulfstan’s voyage is a site called Truso. As a location, this is presented in every bit as indifferent a manner, simply as stage-setting for the far more fascinating account of cultural practices amongst the *Este which is to follow, as Wulfstan is a mere bit-player as far as the text is concerned. The report was not written to inform its readers that there was a place called Truso; like Hedeby in the south-west corner of the Baltic, that is a piece of knowledge that is apparently assumed to have been common. Nor was the report written up with any discernible concern 12

13

14

15 16

Bately, OE Orosius, 16/29–31. The ethnonym *Este is not recorded in the nominative case, but I assume an i-stem noun, as is typical in Old English for proper nouns in this semantic field and consistent with the root represented in Latin Aestii. Jordanes, Getica, ed. Th. Mommsen (Berlin, 1882), V. 36; M. Wołoszyn, ‘The Migration Period in Poland in the light of literary sources’, in The Migration Period between the Oder and the Vistula, ed. A. Bursche, J. Hines, and A. Zapolska, 2 vols (Leiden, 2020), pp. 84–136, at 99–105 and 113–17. The literature on Hedeby is vast. See, for convenience, V. Hilberg, ‘Hedeby in Wulfstan’s days: a Danish emporium between East and West’, in Wulfstan’s Voyage, ed. Englert and Trakadas, pp. 79–113. G. S. Munch, Borg in Lofoten: A Chieftain’s Farm in North Norway (Trondheim, 2003). Kaupang in Skiringssal, ed. D. Skre (Aarhus, 2007).

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Wulfstan in Truso to pass on much if any information about what Truso was. Truso was important in this context because it was at the edge of the familiar world, but as such it would appear to have been a known marker-point. Besides Jordanes’ report of the peoples settled around and beyond the mouth of the Vistula, ninth-century Latin literati could have read something of the significance and range of the Vistula from Paulus Diaconus’ representation of the migrations of the Gepidae and the Gothones. Truso, however, is mentioned only in Wulfstan’s report in the Old English Orosius; nowhere else. The account of the sea-route from Hedeby to Truso very carefully specifies coasting navigation, keeping all of the islands to the north and the continental landmass to the south, off the starboard (Fig. 6.1). Here too there is a significant contrast in detail, as the northern territories, all of them part of Scandinavia, are locally differentiated by name and variously attributed politically; Weonodland, however, is simply a large and amorphous mass extending from the outskirts of Hedeby all the way to the Vistula, a river which divides Witland and Weonodland at its mouth but which flows from the south out of Weonodland.17 It would be an overstatement to suggest that Weonodland is constructed in any emphatic way in this source as a place of mystery, but it nevertheless emerges as virtually unknown except as a landmass on the horizon. Wulfstan’s sea voyage was traced ‘oð Wislemuðan’ (‘up to the mouth of the Vistula’). We now know exactly where Truso was sited. A trading site archaeologically closely comparable with the contemporary, Vikingperiod Scandinavian trading sites of Hedeby and Kaupang was discovered and identified by Polish archaeologists early in the 1980s and has been the subject of geophysical survey and professional excavations in the years 1983–4, 1987–91 and 2000–8 (Fig. 6.2). It is described in the text as standing on the shore of an unnamed mere, which is joined to the large Estmere by the River Ilfing. A probable link between the recorded name of Truso and Lake Drużno (in its modern Polish form) has long been noted.18 The root of Truso and Drużno appears to be the Baltic word for ‘salt’: druska in modern Lithuanian. The now much-reduced Jeziora Drużno is freshwater, however, as is the coastal lagoon known to Wulfstan as Estmere, which indeed is named Frisches Haff in German (this lagoon is normally called Zalew Wislany in modern Polish rather than the loan translation from German, Świeży Zalew).19 This issue has been discussed with reference to the possibility of substantial salt-trading from this coastal site, or indeed the name being of sufficient antiquity to refer to some residual salinity in the lake.20 17 18 19 20

Bately, OE Orosius, 16/30, 31 and 35. M. F. Jagodziński, Truso: Między Weonodlandem a Witlandem/Between Weonodland and Witland (Elbląg, 2010), pp. 34–46. Hereafter Jagodziński, Truso (2010). cf. Bately, OE Orosius, 197 n.16/32. Jagodziński, Truso (2010), pp. 30–1; see also B. Kontny, ‘Trade, salt and amber:

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Figure 6.1 The route of Wulfstan’s voyage to Truso, showing the locations named in the Orosius text, and other major sites referred to in this paper. Drawn by the author.

In 1977, the late Eric Stanley put forward what he himself characterized as a ‘pedantic’ interpretation of the clause ‘7 þonne benimð Wisle Ilfing hire naman’,21 arguing that, contrary to the more obvious interpretation suggested by the word order ‘and then the Vistula deprives the Ilfing of its name’, the use of the feminine pronoun hire when one would expect Ilfing to be a masculine noun (unlike Wisle, feminine) should be understood as meaning ‘and then the Ilfing deprives the Vistula of her name’.22 Quite how, then, after the Ilfing and the Vistula have flowed into the Estmere (Zalew Wislany) from which their waters then flow through a single outlet into the Baltic Sea, the latter should switch back to being known as the

21 22

the formation of late Migration Period elites in the “Balti-Kulti” area of northern Poland (the Elbląg group)’, Archaeologia Baltica 17 (2012), 60–76. Bately, OE Orosius, 16/35. E. G. Stanley, ‘How the Elbing deprives the Vistula of its name and converts it to the Elbing’s own use in “Vistula-Mouth”’, Notes & Queries 222, 2–11.

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Figure 6.2 Sketch plan of the location of Truso on the bank of Jeziora Drużno at Janów Pomorski, Woj. Warmińsko-mazurskie, Poland, in relation to the reconstructed hydrography of the ninth century. Drawn by the author after Bately and Englert, Ohthere’s Voyages.

mouth of the Vistula (‘for ðy hit mon hæt Wislemuða’23 (‘for this reason it is called the mouth of the Vistula’ – my emphasis), I cannot fathom, despite Stanley giving a little attention to the problem.24 Just possibly it is because this river-mouth leads to the long continental Vistula route, despite being known as the Ilfing for a negligibly small distance by the coast; far more likely though, I would suggest, was the need for a voyager such as Wulfstan to record details which explain why an important port 23 24

Bately, OE Orosius, 16/36–7. Stanley, ‘The Elbing’, 6.

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John Hines that lay on a lake reached via the River Ilfing was in fact to be accessed via the mouth of another river to which the Ilfing was a tributary.25 The practical answer to Stanley’s reasoning is that the feminine pronoun in the phrase hire naman was governed not by the name of the river itself but rather by the common noun ea, ‘river’, which is feminine. Elsewhere in the Old English Orosius the most regular phrasing where rivers are referred to is to use a definite construction of PROPER NAME + seo/þa/ þære ea/ie.26 The short passage here in Wulfstan’s report stands out for being quite different in this respect – plausibly, of course, because it followed Wulfstan’s own style rather than the translator’s normal practice: to begin with we have seo Wisle used twice but then just Ilfing and Wisle as the focus switches to the relationship between these two rivers and Estmere and its access to and from the sea. Stanley’s pedantic point elevates a minor grammatical incongruity to a level of significance prior to and greater than the navigational guidance that was being recorded. The Wisle also divides Weonodland and Witland, and ‘Witland belimpeð to Estum’ (‘Witland belongs to the *Este’);27 indeed Witland itself as a name is then superseded by Estland. This, then, is the springboard for the expansive review of the character and culture of that land of the *Este as a whole. The account which follows of the land and people of the *Este is more than double the length of the opening passage which gives information on exactly how one reaches Truso.28 How the information was collected is left unexplained. It is to be assumed it was brought back by Wulfstan, but there is no mention of him having travelled any further than the port and it is not unlikely that this was information which was available to anyone there who was interested in it. The focus in the passage is understandably upon phenomena that are strange, even mirabilia in the case of the extraordinary art of ‘making coldness’ (‘cyle gewyrcan’).29 We should not, meanwhile, underestimate the significance of what may appear relatively mundane details. The territory is very extensive (‘swyðe micel’) 25

26

27 28 29

Godden, OE History of the World, p. 45, translates the clause more realistically as ‘then the Elbing takes the Vistula’s name’. Stanley, ‘The Elbing’, 8, had noted such an interpretation of the construction by Daines Barrington in 1773, but idiosyncratically chose to interpret the commonplace English idiom ‘to take N’s name’ as meaning ‘to deprive N of its/his/her name’. The pattern is so clear that it would be otiose to cite every single example. See, for instance, the references to the Danai [Don]: Bately, OE Orosius, 8/19–25 and 12/8–17; the Donau [Danube]: 12/20–6, 18/3, 110/9 and 153/2; the Indus: 9/30–10/1; the Nilus [Nile]: 9/12, 11/3, 11/15 and 19/32; the Rin [Rhine]: 12/17–20 and 18/25; and the Tigris: 10/1, 10/10 and 146/16. An alternative formula (seo ea) þe mon hæt N is also recurrent although less frequent: e.g. in the case of the Thames (Temes): 126/8. Bately, OE Orosius, 16/30–1. Bately, OE Orosius, 17/1–18/2. Bately, OE Orosius, 17/34

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Wulfstan in Truso and contains many strongholds (‘swyðe manig burh’) and a multitude of rulers (‘on ælecere byrig bið cyning’ [‘in each stronghold there will be a king’]).30 Estland is thus presented in social and political terms as an oligarchy rather than a monarchy, at a time when the latter was becoming increasingly the norm in western Europe. It is rich in honey and fish,31 pointing to an economic basis in which gathering and hunting were prominent rather than agriculture. They brew no ale;32 the wealthy drink mare’s milk and it is the lower unfree orders who drink mead. While the former is still familiar in Eurasia in the form of fermented kumis (кумыс) and the common nature of a drink made from honey makes simple practical sense in a largely non-agrarian forest zone, from a contemporary AngloSaxon perspective this hierarchical access to milk and mead can only have appeared a remarkable inversion of the familiar order. Although there has been some discussion of what exactly the manig burh of Estland would have been supposed to denote, there is little reason, in the context of late ninth-century England, why the phrase should suggest extensive urbanization (although we should note that burh is quite consistently used as a term for great cities by the Orosius translator). Realistically, these byrig will have been the ring-forts and hill-forts that are so numerous from this date in the relevant area across northern and eastern Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.33 There is then no real thematic shift of focus of attention to progress to a substantial account of the funerary customs of the *Este,34 and particularly the consumption of a large part of the wealth of a rich man following his death and the competitive redistribution of the residue. The extreme strangeness of these customs bespeaks a decentralized society, with structures that prevented the heritable monopolization of wealth and power. In contemporary England, by contrast, social stratification and associated inheritance rules were becoming ever more tightly defined and controlled. Following the deliberate extravagance of the extended funeral feast, the destruction of the dead man’s weapons along with his body on the funeral pyre and the de facto meritocratic appropriation of the remainder obviated inheritance of position. The report that all the dead, irrespective of origin it would appear (‘ælces geþeodes man’ [‘a person of any nation’]), should be cremated would immediately signal the heathenism of the *Este for a European Christian readership and thus in Anglo-Saxon England. This may not 30 31 32 33 34

Bately, OE Orosius, 17/1–2. Bately, OE Orosius, 17/2. Bately, OE Orosius, 17/5: this statement sits rather awkwardly with the description of the icing of vats of ale a little further on in lines 17/36–18/2. Lietuvos TSR Archaeologijos Atlasas: II I–XIII Piliakalniai, ed. Adolfas Tautavičius (Vilnius, 1975). Bately, OE Orosius, 17/6–17/33.

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John Hines have been absolutely the rule at Truso, where some human skeletal remains, both cremated and unburnt, have been found on higher ground above the settlement, but those were disturbed and have no sure archaeological context.35 No cemetery or cemeteries associated with the port of Truso have yet been located. There is evidence of Scandinavian-style human burial in the Truso hinterland of the Elbląg (Elbing) area of the early ninth century,36 while the evidence of the small number of other major Scandinavian Viking-age ports and trading sites, at Birka (Sweden), Kaupang (Norway) and Hedeby (Denmark/now N. Germany) – and to a lesser extent Ribe in Jutland – suggests that highly diverse cemeteries were typical at such sites, with an admixture of rites which reflected the cosmopolitan, transitory trading populations present.37

The Archaeology of the Site at Janów Pomorski Although the foregoing critical re-examination of interpretations of the Wulfstan passage in the Old English Orosius has made use of both practical, navigational considerations and the topographical realities of the location of Truso, a much greater shift in perspective is needed for us to appreciate how much can be produced by combining the archaeological evidence of the site at Janów Pomorski with this, the sole contemporary documentary source that refers to it. From a combination of survey techniques, geophysical prospecting, core-sampling and excavation, it has been estimated that the trading site of Truso occupied an area of about twenty-five hectares on the north-eastern corner of Lake Drużno.38 35

36

37

38

Jagodziński, Truso (2010), pp. 54–5. M. Jagodziński (pers. comm.) has kindly advised me that ninth- and/or tenth-century pottery has been picked up from upcast soil in molehills in this area, and that further archaeological investigations are planned for the immediate future. M. F. Jagodziński, Truso: legenda Bałtiku/the legend of the Baltic Sea, Exhibition catalogue (Elbląg, 2015), pp. 37–41. Hereafter, Jagodziński, Truso (Exhibition catalogue 2015). A.-S. Gräslund, Burial Customs: A Study of the Graves on Björkö (Stockholm, 1980); H. Steuer, ‘Zur ethnischen Gliederung der Bevölkerung von Haithabu anhand der Gräberfelder’, Offa 41 (1984), 189–212; F.-A. Stylegar, ‘The Kaupang cemeteries revisited’, in Kaupang in Skiringssal, ed. Skre, pp. 65–128. Until recently, there was little funerary evidence from Ribe: Claus Feveile, ‘Ribe on the north side of the river, 8th–12th century’, in Det ældste Ribe: Udgravninger på nordsiden af Ribe Å 1984–2000 Bd. 1.1 (Aarhus, 2006), pp. 63–91. Within the last decade, evidence has been found that a cemetery by the cathedral was apparently in continuous use from the date of the visit of Ansgar c. AD 860; see M. Søvsø, ‘Tidligkristne begravelser ved Ribe Domkirke – Ansgars kirkegård?’, Arkæologi i Slesvig 13 (2010), 147–164; see also M. Søvsø, Ribe 700–1050: From Emporium to Civitas in Southern Scandinavia (Højbjerg, 2020), esp. pp. 180–200. Jagodziński, Truso (2010), p. 77.

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Wulfstan in Truso Research excavations have examined in detail just over 2,000 square metres of this area, which is less than 1% of its full estimated extent. The widest trenches were, however, judiciously placed on what would have been the water’s edge, where they revealed the remains of carefully dug docks and wharves for trading vessels (Fig. 6.3). On the landward side behind these there is evidence of buildings, in plots which were defined and maintained by repeatedly re-cut boundary ditches. Such tenement plots are a highly characteristic feature of the small number of Viking-period urban settlements/ports of neighbouring Scandinavia – at Ribe and Hedeby, Kaupang and Birka – and indeed these features are usually taken in these contexts to constitute evidence of overall town-planning by some royal authority that would profit from its support and management of such trading sites.39 In the case of Truso, however, we do not have the evidence to allow us to follow such ditches over sufficient lengths to reveal a specific town plan. Structurally, the buildings at Truso proved to have been a mixture of log-cabin type constructions – a technique known as laft in Norwegian – and post-built structures with wattle-and-daub walls. Building in the laft technique is an eastern style of building that is, for instance, strongly in evidence at Staraja Ladoga and Novgorod (Russia) and Kiev (Ukraine) from the late eighth and ninth centuries onwards.40 It spread westwards to be widely adopted in mainland Scandinavia in the post-Viking Middle Ages.41 Lighter wattle-and-daub houses are found widely as urban buildings in Scandinavian-associated towns of the Viking Period around Europe: for instance, in Dublin and York, besides the Scandinavian trading sites listed above.42 Rather a distinct feature of Truso, however, is the presence of relatively large buildings comprising several rooms. Amongst the truly exceptional features in the excavated area of Truso was an area on the shoreline where a group of at least ten boats, typically 9–11 metres in length and 2.5–3.0 metres broad, had been collected and sunk in order to fill in and reclaim an area. Traces of five more, somewhat smaller, craft were found within a few metres of this group in an arc on one side of its periphery (Fig. 6.4). The remains of ditches and of building layers which subsequently covered some parts of this de facto landfill site testify to how it came to be re-used. The profiles of the boats found and 39 40

41 42

H. Clarke and B. Ambrosiani, Towns in the Viking Age, rev. ed. (London, 1991), pp. 137–41. S. Kuz’min, ‘Ladoga, le premier centre proto-urbain russe’, in Les centres proto-urbains russes entre Scandinavie, Byzance et Orient, ed. M. Kazanski, A. Nercessian, and C. Zuckermann (Paris, 2000), pp. 124–42; The Archaeology of Novgorod, Russia, ed. M. Brisbane (Lincoln, 1992); G. Ivakin, ‘Kiev aux VIIIe–Xe siècles’, in Centres proto-urbains, ed. Kazanski et al., pp. 225–39. G. Bugge and C. Norberg-Schulz, Stav og Laft i Norge (Oslo, 1969), pp. 7–9. Clarke and Ambrosiani, Towns, pp. 141–9.

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John Hines

Figure 6.3 Areas of geophysical prospecting and research excavations at the site of Truso, Janów Pomorski. Broken lines: contours at the 0, 1- and 2-metre contours in the ninth century (in the immediate area of the settlement only); the heavier line marks the waterfront. Light grey blocks: areas subject to geophysical prospecting. Medium grey blocks: areas of modern disturbance (road and rail lines). Dark grey: the excavation trenches. Shaded area: the suggested extent of ninth- and tenth-century Truso. Drawn by the author after plans in Jagodziński, Truso (2010).

the disposition of surviving boat-nails reveal the shape of these vessels. The small and relatively shallow boats used here would have been particularly well-suited to riverine, lacustrine and coastal navigation, carrying loads around a relatively local area, or fishing offshore in the Baltic, with small crews. These are most unlikely to represent the sort of vessel that Wulfstan sailed in from Hedeby to Truso, ‘ealne weg yrnende under segle’ (‘running under sail the whole way’). Just as in the cases of Kaupang and Hedeby, the origins of Truso as a port appear to lie around the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth centuries. There is a small collection of earlier, seventh- and eighth-­ century metalwork from the site, most of it representing common types in what is locally known as ‘Vendel-period’ eastern Scandinavia, along with

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Wulfstan in Truso

Figure 6.4 Schematic plan of the wrakowisko (‘wreck-site’) at Truso and the outlines of buildings (numbered I–XI) in the immediate vicinity. Drawn by the author after Jagodziński, Truso (2010).

one Continental, Carolingian style of belt-fitting of the same date.43 Older and obsolete objects such as these could, of course, remain in use, or continue to circulate as scrap metal for some time after the period they would initially have represented. From c. AD 800 onwards, by contrast, there is not only a greater quantity of contemporary metalwork but also imported 43

Jagodziński, Truso (2010), pp. 98–9.

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John Hines pottery of a type produced in the region of Badorf on the River Rhine in modern Westphalia, which represents the active life of a fully occupied trading site. Particularly important for such a site are, of course, the coins found there. ‘Abbasid-dynasty dirhams from the Caliphate, dating from the second half of the eighth and the early ninth century, constitute the first monetary horizon regularly represented. Dirhams could remain in circulation for a long time, and indeed two earlier coins of this type have also been found. A hoard of sixteen silver coins consisting of fourteen dirhams and two Sassanid drachmae was found in one of the boats in the deliberately sunk group.44 Five further coins, meanwhile, can be attributed to origins in Scandinavian port sites: a ‘Wodan/monster’ sceatt from Ribe and four Hedeby pennies. There are also two XPISTIANA RELIGIO deniers of the Frankish king Louis the Pious, plus one coin each issued in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and Wessex (the latter in fact struck in Rochester, Kent): all four datable within the ninth century.45 The Northumbrian ‘styca’ coin in particular can only be regarded as a piece of very small change of minimal exchange value within Truso, which was probably carried and lost there heedlessly by someone who had recently been in northern England. The close Scandinavian parallels in terms of chronology, and indeed in respect of the whole material culture of the earlier phases of the functioning life of the site of Truso, are undoubtedly significant. Eastern Scandinavian involvement in and around the coastlands of the southern and eastern Baltic in the eighth century – and indeed in some areas considerably earlier – is well attested. The island of Gotland was an extraordinary centre of material wealth and influence in this period, undoubtedly through its maritime connections. At Grobiņa, another inland riverine site but nonetheless not far from the coast near the former Soviet naval base and modern port of Liepāja in Latvia, a highly Scandinavian-influenced trading site may be datable back to the seventh century.46 A very recent find from Salme on Saramaa (Estonia) is the extraordinary mass burial in two ships of forty-one men who appear to have come from the Mälar area of central Sweden.47 This is dated to the middle of the eighth century. The 44

45

46

47

M. Bogucki, ‘Coin finds in the Viking-age emporium at Janów Pomorski (Truso), and the “Prussian phenomenon”’, in Money Circulation in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times: Time, Range, Intensity, ed. Malmer et al. (Warsaw, Kraków, 2007), pp. 79–108, at 84–6. A. Bartczak, M. F. Jagodziński, and S. Suchodolski, ‘Monety z VIII i IX w. odkryte w Janowie Pomorskim, Gm. Elbląg – awnym Truso’, Wiadomości numizmatyczne 48 (2004), 21–48. B. Nerman, Grobin-Seeburg: Ausgrabungen und Funde (Stockholm, 1958); M. Bogucki, ‘Grobiņa – a sign of an early future port of trade in the Balt lands’, in Transformatio Mundi: The Transition from the Late Migration Period to the Early Viking Age in the East Baltic, ed. M. Bertašius (Kaunas, 2006), pp. 93–106. M. Konsa et al., ‘Rescue excavations of a Vendel Era boat grave in Salme,

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Wulfstan in Truso origins of the trading site at Staraja Ladoga, effectively the predecessor of Novgorod on the Ilmen’ river in north-western Russia, can also be traced back to early in the third quarter of the eighth century. There is diverse evidence of Scandinavian influence and very probably some degree of colonization and settlement in the hinterland of Truso and the area around Elbląg in the ninth century. Along with Grobiņa and an apparently comparable site at Mohovoe in the Kaliningrad Region (Моховое, Калининградская Областъ) – adjacent to the burial ground usually known by its historical Prussian name of Kaup-Wiskiauten – Truso grew, not just as a Baltic trading port open to influence from eastern Scandinavia but in a real sense as a Scandinavian trading colony: closely comparable, in fact, to Dublin, founded in the 830s in a previously non-urbanized zone. Distinctly Scandinavian material clearly continued to come to Truso and to be used there into the tenth century. The fact that the range of artefacts included such symbolically and ideologically charged pieces as Thor’s hammer pendants, apotropaic shield-shaped pendants, and small modelled female figures identified as representations of Valkyries,48 implies a component in the life and population of the port that was fully integrated into pre-Christian Viking Scandinavian culture. But that is by no means the only direction in which long-distance connections are in evidence in Truso. A decorated spur datable to the later tenth or eleventh century is of a late Carolingian or Ottonian type.49 Besides the coins noted above, from ninth-century England had come a lanceolate copper-alloy strap-end with an animal-head terminal and Carolingian-influenced plant decoration of Thomas’s Type A1 (Fig. 6.5).50 In reality, just such a dress-accessory could have been worn and left or lost in Truso by Wulfstan or one of his companions. There is also important and interesting evidence of the major productive activities at the site of Truso. Given the location of the site in the south-eastern corner of the Baltic and the demand for amber around Viking-period Scandinavia, it is no surprise at all that amber working is especially richly represented here. What will be useful will be a detailed quantitative and qualitative comparison of the evidence from Truso with that from down-the-line entrepôts in the other Scandinavian ports and ultimately also the Insular Scandinavian centres such as Dublin, Lincoln

48 49 50

Saaremaa’, Archaeological Fieldwork in Estonia (2008), pp. 53–64; T. Douglas Price et al., ‘Isotopic provenancing of the Salme ship burials in pre-Viking Age Estonia’, Antiquity 90 (2016), 1022–37. Jagodziński, Truso (2010), pp. 104–7; Jagodziński, Truso (Exhibition catalogue), pp. 85–97. Jagodziński, Truso (2010), pp. 107–8. Jagodziński, Truso (2010), p. 104; G. Thomas, ‘A Survey of Late Anglo-Saxon and Viking-age Strap-Ends from Britain’ (Unpub. PhD Thesis, University College London, 2000), pp. 84–6.

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Figure 6.5 A ninth-century Insular strap-end from Truso, Janów Pomorski. Length 37mm. Scale 2:1. Photograph kindly supplied by Muzeum w Elblągu.

and York.51 In addition to the valuable evidence provided by the abandoned and sunk boats, there is direct evidence of boatbuilding being practised here in the form of unfinished and unused rivets and roves made for boat-nails.52 In a relationship of influence reciprocal to the crucial place of the south-eastern Baltic as the source of amber, it will be informative to explore how far the craft of boatbuilding in the Baltic lands was dependent 51

52

Jagodziński, Truso (Exhibition catalogue 2015), pp, 51–60. Cf., e.g., H. G. Resi, ‘Amber and jet’, in Things from the Town, ed. D. Skre (Aarhus, 2011), pp. 107–28; K. Botfeldt and H. B. Madsen, ‘The amber’, in Ribe Excavations 1970–76, vol. 3, ed. by M. Bencard (Esbjerg, 1991), pp. 101–15; A. Mainman and N. Rogers, Craft, Industry and Everyday Life: Finds from Anglo-Scandinavian York (York, 2011), pp. 2501–18. Jagodziński, Truso (2010), pp. 115–26; Jagodziński, Truso (Exhibition catalogue 2015), pp. 41–4.

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Wulfstan in Truso on Scandinavian Viking-period or indeed pre-Viking-period influence. Ironworking is represented by the relevant tools – anvils, hammers and tongs – together with iron ingots themselves;53 again, in terms of natural resources, we can expect the area to have been able to sustain a relatively high level of bloomery iron production. Effectively unique at Truso is the evidence for the presence of a sword-maker’s – or at least a sword-finisher’s – workshop. The evidence takes the form of a series of apparently unused but ready hilt-fittings – pommel caps and hilt-guards – found in quite a concentrated area.54 The assemblage is thus quite untypical of random, casual losses, or of disturbed material that had been deliberately deposited as grave goods. Scandinavian swords were unquestionably superior to the traditional Baltic weapons down to the Early Viking Period, and they rapidly became the preferred weapons for the warrior elite of the whole area.55 The types represented in the finds from Truso are undoubtedly common and widespread forms of the Viking world, especially the pommels of Petersen’s Types H and X.56 Nonetheless Type H in particular became the typical Scandinavian-derived sword-type in use in the Baltic lands around the end of the first millennium AD. Truso thus represents one key stage in the transmission and adoption of this sword-type within this zone. Thus far, then, Truso would appear to conform quite consistently with a larger picture: perhaps not quite a Viking-period equivalent of globalization, but certainly a system of long-distance trade and exchange that could rapidly lead to consistency and assimilation of material culture over large areas. But there are other, quite different but equally substantial facets to the archaeology of Truso and thus its inferrable history. Finds of dirhams from the Caliphate at the site fall away totally after the 850s, in stark contrast to other Viking-period Scandinavian ports (Staraja Ladoga, and a site on the island of Wolin between the Baltic and Zalew Szczeciński in the far north-west of Poland (cf. Fig. 6.1)).57 One authoritative interpretation of this remarkable phenomenon is that, for some reason, Truso and indeed the whole of the surrounding Baltic-Prussian region rejected the use of silver as a precious metal which could be used as currency around the third quarter of the ninth century.58 Economically, that would be likely to involve the concurrent replacement of the precious metal with 53 54 55 56 57

58

Jagodziński, Truso (2010), pp. 146–52. Jagodziński, Truso (2010), pp. 168–74. V. Kazakevičius, X–XIII a. Baltų Kalavijai (Vilnius, 1996); A. Tomsons, Zobeni Latvijas teritorijā no 7. līdz 16. gadsimtam (Rīga, 2018), esp. pp. 45–9, 212–14. J. Petersen, Den norske vikingsverd (Bergen, 1929). M. Bogucki, ‘Monety starożytne, średnowieczne i nowożytne z osady w Janowie Pomorskim znalezione w 2007 i 2008 roku’, in Janów Pomorski Stan. 1: Wyniki ratowniczych badań w latach 2007–2008, ed. M. Bogucki and M. F. Jagodziński (Elbląg, 2012), pp. 27–63. Bogucki, ‘Coin finds’.

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John Hines some other form of ‘commodity money’.59 In itself the latter could have the advantage of being a more accessible and thus, in a sense, a more egalitarian form of currency and capital, although commodity currencies (which could be any tradable goods such as amber, iron, furs, foodstuffs) have the problems of inconvenient bulk, variable durability, and not least, the fact that as items of intrinsically practical value they are liable to be consumed. All the same, Mateusz Bogucki’s proposition that this change coincides with the ethnogenesis of the Bruzi (Prussians) out of the rather vaguely defined Aestii, and so can be interpreted directly in terms of the assertion of local cultural control over Truso, is indeed an attractive one.60 Wulfstan’s report is unambiguous. Truso stands on a lake, and the Ilfing which flows out of that lake must be flowing from Witland, which is part of a greater Estland: ‘þæt Witland belimpeð to Estum’ (‘Witland belongs to the *Este’).61 Whether he ever knew or would have cared anything about it, this latter attribution could have been both a more recent and indeed politically a more significant development than these few words convey.

Wulfstan’s Report and ‘World History’ I cannot claim any authority as a spokesperson for ‘World History’, or to be able to explain adequately how the historical and archaeological evidence relating to Truso summarized and discussed above should be evaluated and appreciated from such a perspective. There are, however, certain relatively simple aspects of the evidence and its interpretation which de facto coincide with leading examples of World History and with summary statements of its core concerns; if limiting myself to a few uncomplicated aspects in an exploratory foray unintentionally appears to trivialize the undertaking, I can only apologize. One of these aspects is to emphasize the productiveness of deliberately examining historical phenomena within as broad a perspective in geographical terms as possible.62 The 59

60

61 62

D. Skre, ‘Commodity money, silver and coinage in Viking-age Scandinavia’, in Silver Economies, Monetisation and Society in Scandinavia AD 800–1100, ed. J. Graham-Campbell, S. Sindbæk, and G. Williams (Aarhus, 2011), pp. 67–91. B. Kontny, ‘The making of the Vidivarii: Germanic and Baltic interculturation in the late 5th century’, in Migration Period between the Oder and the Vistula, ed. Bursche et al., pp. 649–88, offers especially important arguments for tracing substantial interactions between distinct cultural and linguistic groups and their significant consequences in this south Baltic coastal zone, going back considerably earlier than a focus primarily on the excavated evidence from Truso would lead to. A settlement site from the 2nd/3rd centuries AD is known at Janów Pomorski: H. Machajewski, ‘Settlements’, in Migration Period between the Oder and the Vistula, ed. Bursche et al., pp. 299–322, at 302 and 310. Above, note 22. No more do I claim to be able to offer an authoritative range of references to

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Wulfstan in Truso whole conception and significance of Orosius’ Histories – both around the beginning of the fifth century when they were written and in the late ninth when they were translated – depended upon their global range as the world was known in the Late Antique and Early Medieval Periods. The importance of long-distance connections was fundamental to the fact that Wulfstan’s report was transcribed and preserved, just as such connections were crucial to the economic success of Truso. If, at the same time, they contributed to the post-colonial rise of the Bruzi, and to the modernization of the weaponry of the oligarchical Baltic warrior elite, those too would be developments we can readily comprehend in the light of near-universal and potentially timeless models of cultural process. With contemporary curiosities and concerns, we would now like to be able to discuss the character of the trading site of Truso in minute and extensive detail. The fact that this site is effectively effaced in the Old English Orosius as a phenomenon of no interest within itself, as indeed are Sciringesheal/Kaupang in Norway and Hedeby in Ohthere’s report, perfectly encapsulates how its importance in the ninth century was fundamentally its function as a gateway on the threshold between large and strikingly different zones in Europe and Asia: primarily between Viking Scandinavia and the Muslim Caliphate, the North and South, but also interconnecting those with European Christendom in the West and not least the Baltic and Slavonic East of Europe. Wulfstan’s report – insofar as it is his; he too is effaced as the reporting subject within the text – uses that threshold as a viewpoint from which to look into a very different cultural sphere in the nature of its way of life and the experiences it offered. In terms of textual composition, the differences of the Baltic zone could be immediately presented against familiar interpretative and evaluative paradigms with such ease and obviousness that the latter could remain totally implicit. Wulfstan’s voyage from Hedeby to Truso was a direct journey from west to east, and the perspective from Alfred’s court in Winchester to the southern shore of the Baltic lies along a West–East axis. The North–South (or South–North) axis through Truso was, however, the more significant for Truso itself. Textually in the Old English composition, the North has already been dealt with in Ohthere’s travelogue, while Orosius’ own text proceeds to southern Europe, and back to Britain and Ireland, before moving further south to Africa and Asia. Archaeology meanwhile demonstrates the strong practical Scandinavian interest in the port of Truso in its foundational stage, as a link to a southern trading route; events and waves (which we might even call tsunamis on occasion) within the dirham flow in the later ninth and early tenth centuries are much debated in modern further reading. I found P. Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (London, 2003) clear and informative.

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John Hines scholarship,63 but disruption to the North–South, Scandinavia–Caliphate connection could indeed justify a particular West–East and East–West concern with the site in a late ninth-century text. Much was being constructed in the area around Truso at that time; the apparent abandonment of the site by the end of the tenth century is not a sign of failure: Birka, Hedeby and Kaupang were all superseded by other centres, broadly around the same time. Wulfstan was quite likely nowhere near as exotic and interesting a character or object in Truso as he (if indeed it was he who brought the stories back) found the *Este to be. Rather, we can assume it was as matter-of-fact an event for the occasional visitor to appear from the far end of the trading networks across northern and western Europe that Truso belonged to as it was to know, in England, that there was such a place as Truso. If the interpretation favoured by Bogucki is correct, though, this relationship, towards the end of the ninth century, would have been more than just a matter of practical fact. Rather it reflected how the local population who would thus appear to have been asserting their ‘ownership’ of Truso at that date wanted things to be. This would appear to have been a phase in their history when the Balts, having been opened up to intense contacts and influences on every side, became very much more interested in themselves: in what they would call themselves, and in how they would live. A key way in which the determinedly comprehensive character of World History adds something to the intellectually inclusive qualities of a soundly based cross-disciplinary approach, is that it is a perspective which allows the various sources that cohere around Truso to speak for themselves, and which also allows – perhaps counter-intuitively – the specific realities of one particular individual having visited a certain known site (of about twenty-five hectares in size) at a given time to speak for and through themselves as evidence of the multifaceted and significant crossroads between zones and areas which they physically and directly embodied. World History seems to demand that we give equal attention to a multiplicity of aspects. We are consequently freed from over-­ programmatic and determinative questions of the nature of ‘what does this evidence tell us about…?’ to explore the more fundamental question of ‘what does this evidence tell us?’: a situation which academic conventions 63

T. S. Noonan, ‘Ninth-century dirhem hoards from northwestern Russia and the southeastern Baltic’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 13 (1982), 220–44; S. Brather, ‘Early dirham finds in the south-east Baltic: chronological problems in the light of finds from Janów Pomorski (Truso)’, in Transformatio Mundi, pp. 133–42; C. Kilger, ‘Kaupang from afar: aspects of the interpretation of dirham finds in northern and eastern Europe between the late 8th and early 10th centuries’, in Means of Exchange: Dealing with Silver in the Viking Age, ed. D. Skre (Aarhus, 2008), pp. 199–252; cf. M. Blackburn, ‘The coin-finds’, ibid. pp. 29–74, esp. 47–56.

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Wulfstan in Truso and regulations on theory and methods over the past fifty years and more have condemned as unacceptably unstructured, undisciplined and naive. This is, of course, not the only way of doing things, nor probably is it an approach which will work in every conceivable case, but with this range of material the question proves to be a stimulating and productive one.

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Part III

ORIGINS AND COMPARISONS

Chapter 7 Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins from a Eurasian Perspective John D. Niles

O

n what assumptions are modern conceptions of the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English people based? How, in recent years, have those assumptions been challenged? And what shifts of perspective can be expected in the future?1 The present paper offers a preliminary response to these questions while directing attention to one major shift that can be anticipated in the years ahead. This has to do with widening the field of vision so that relevant developments within a broad expanse of Eurasia are taken into account, and not just those phenomena that fall within the segment of that landmass that, with some terminological audacity, we call the continent of Europe. Of course, Europe is no such thing as a continent, at least when one looks at the more northerly latitudes of the northern hemisphere.2 I have been told, though I have yet to try the experience, that one can cycle from Belgium or Jutland to Poland, from Poland to Ukraine, and from Ukraine to the shores of the Caspian Sea without the necessity of changing gears. Regardless of the validity of that claim, there are grounds for thinking that travel, with a corresponding interchange of goods, ideas, and cultural practices, has in fact been occurring for thousands of years along these northern corridors; doing so during the earlier centuries of the first millennium ad in a manner that ought to have an impact on our use of the terms ‘Germanic’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ when discussing the origins of the English. During the nineteenth century, when Anglo-Saxon studies were being consolidated into a single discipline out of a miscellany of antiquarian 1

2

In the present paper, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is used in specific reference to the history and culture of the English-speaking people of Britain in the period before the Norman Conquest, with an eye also to the northern Continental antecedents of an important subset of those people. Note Denis Sinor’s remarks in the Introduction to his edition The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (Cambridge, 1990), p. 2, on the emergence of the correlative terms ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ in Western intellectual history: ‘The slow emergence of a concept called Europe – for a long time closely associated with Christendom – brought about the gradual crystallization in European minds of the concept of Asia. The geographical delimitation of that continent is purely conventional and, even today, is subject to fluctuations’.

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John D. Niles and philological pursuits, the remarkable changes that were perceived to have taken place in Britain after the collapse of Roman rule – that is, during the fourth to seventh centuries ad – were subsumed into a discourse inflected by the pan-Germanic ideology espoused by John Mitchell Kemble (1807–57) and other leading intellectuals of his day. Anglo-Saxon England, now named as such, came to be conceptualized chiefly in terms of the Germanizing of the Roman world through invasion from across the North Sea, in a process that was thought to have strengthened the sinews of the incipient English nation.3 In the aftermath of World War II, a significant change of perspective has emerged, so that what is now said to have been chiefly at work in the making of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is not so much the impact of Germanic-speaking immigrants, but rather the Romanizing of the northern European world through its exposure to civilizing Mediterranean influences. While there are many reasons for this change of perspective, one of these, arguably, is the widespread appeal of the European Union’s underlying pan-European political ideology – an ideology that stops short of the political borders of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Turkey, however, and one in which cracks have begun to appear.4 In the years ahead, I believe, both the Germanizing and the Romanizing orientations to the historical period that used to be known as the ‘Dark Ages’ will be seen to be based on a false binarism, one that calls to mind the false ‘classical/barbaric’ dichotomy that Jane Hawkes probes in her contribution to the present volume; for at least three additional factors are involved. One of these is the principle of inertia. By this term I mean to refer to continuity in the basic tenor of life – and in the gene pool, as well – among the peoples resident in Britain from the early Celtic Iron

3

4

On Kemble’s devotion to the new science of comparative Germanic philology, see H. Momma, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 60–94. Kemble’s pan-Germanic political commitments, as well, are discussed in my study The Idea of AngloSaxon England 1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Oxford, 2015), at pp. 229–42. See further M. Oergel, ‘Germania in England: Functions of the Germanic in English Identity Constructions and British Historical Thinking’, in Germania Remembered 1500–2009: Commemorating and Inventing a Germanic Past, ed. C. and N. McLelland (Tempe, AZ, 2012), pp. 112–36. Of interest in this regard is the series of volumes, numbering twenty-two as of 2013, whose publication was made possible through an international research program sponsored by the European Science Foundation through its international research program ‘The Transformation of the Roman World’. The handsomely illustrated volume The Transformation of the Roman World AD 400–900, ed. L. Webster and M. Brown (London, 1997) is one of these that is of special value to Anglo-Saxonists. The eurocentric focus of this series is at the same time its strength and its limitation.

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Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins Age, and before that time, through to the later Middle Ages and beyond.5 Another factor, also Insular in nature, is the contribution of the Irish to the development of what we call Anglo-Saxon civilization, a topic that merits continuing judicious assessment.6 Yet a third factor in the equation, significant in its implications and yet too often overlooked, is the impact of the empire of the Huns, that great Eurasian confederacy, on the formation of what is customarily thought of as Germanic, or Scandinavian, or AngloSaxon identity. This latter topic is the subject of my paper, especially as regards developments in the island of Britain. The Hunnic empire was short-lived, for it ceased to exist within two years of the death in the year 453 of its last and greatest ruler, Attila. Nevertheless, its prior expansion westward past the Black Sea and into the Danubian basin and beyond, with forays into Gaul and Italy as well as south toward Thrace and Byzantium, is widely seen as having triggered the movements of peoples and the social disruption that are summed up in the phrase the Age of Migrations. It is to that period and its aftermath that specialists in the formation of the nations of early medieval Europe, including England, rightly trace those countries’ origins. Discussion of the impact of the Hunnic empire in the West has implications for how the field of Anglo-Saxon studies might now be rethought, a century after H. Munro Chadwick and others brought it into a precursor of its present shape, so as to align our knowledge about early Anglo-Saxon England with what is known about the early peoples of the steppes, the vast grassland-and-savannah ecosystem that stretches from present-day Bulgaria and Romania in the west (with an outpost in Hungary) through Ukraine, much of southern Russia, Kazakhstan, and lands extending eastward from there as far as the mountainous borders of present-day China. Many of the semi-nomadic peoples that inhabited the steppes of Central Asia in the early centuries of the current era were absorbed into the Hunnic empire, including groups that the Romans and Greeks had long called by the blanket term ‘Scythians’. 5

6

To cite just one example of this trend, native British contributions to AngloSaxon identity-formation are given welcome though intermittent attention in Chapter 2 (‘The Origins of England’) of N. J. Higham and M. J. Ryan’s The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven, 2013), pp. 70–125. While exciting developments in the field of archaeogenetics offer evidence for continuities in the gene pool of the early inhabitants of Britain, results in this area of research are still preliminary. One publication that contributes substantially to this discussion is AngloSaxon/Irish Relations Before the Vikings, ed. J. Graham-Campbell (Oxford, 2009), a collection of essays by specialists. Another is the collaborative volume A Companion to the Early Middle Ages: Britain and Ireland, c. 500–c. 1100, ed. P. Stafford (Chichester, 2009), which aims to integrate the historical study of Britain and Ireland in this early period rather than approaching the two islands separately, as has been the norm in the past.

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John D. Niles The present paper sketches in the contours of an argument relating aspects of the high-end culture of early Anglo-Saxon England, and by extension that of early northwest Europe more generally, to what might variously be termed the Scythian/Hunnic cultural complex, the Central Asian cultural complex, or – with somewhat greater geographical specificity – the Pontic/Danubian cultural complex. Recent discoveries in archaeology, together with current ambitions to extend the scope of Medieval Studies so as to encompass global phenomena, make such a project feasible while encouraging the conceptual shift that it entails.7 As I hope to make clear, the purpose of my study is not to replace one historical paradigm with a fresher one that is just as impervious to multiple perspectives, but rather to stimulate research into a nexus of cultural contacts and influences that is surely more intricate than we will ever know.

A Tale of Two Empires The tumultuous period customarily referred to as the Age of Migrations (or in German the Völkerwanderungenzeit)8 has also long been known as the Heroic Age of the Germanic-speaking peoples of Europe on account of the songs and stories, featuring legendary kings and heroes of this era, that captured the imagination of Europeans long after the period itself had come to an end.9 An alternative name for roughly this same period, one that directs attention to that era’s most dominant personage, is the Age of Attila.10 As this latter name implies, the factor that, more than any other, precipitated the changes that can be traced in the political geography, the social structures, the languages, the funerary practices, the material culture, the artistic styles, and the religious ideas of northwest Europe during the Age of Migrations was the westward advance of the empire of the Huns, 7

8

9 10

The Chadwicks themselves might have welcomed such a perceptual shift, given the breadth of their interests not just in Insular studies but also in Eurasian studies more broadly. See H. M. Chadwick and N. Kershaw, The Growth of Literature, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1932–40), with chapters on the literatures of Russia, the Balkans, Central Asia, and other parts of the world. Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, 2nd ed., vol. 32 (Berlin, 2006), s.v. ‘Völkerwanderung’ and ‘Völkerwanderungszeit’. For English-language perspectives on this historical period, see for example the contributions to The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume 1, c. 500–c. 700, ed. P. Fouracre (Cambridge, 2005), and the well-illustrated volume Rome and the Barbarians: The Birth of a New World, ed. J.-J. Aillagon (Milan, 2008). See H. M. Chadwick’s classic study The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1912), esp. pp. 1–161. See, in particular, The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Attila, ed. M. Maas (Cambridge, 2015), a book that covers the period from the late fourth century through the early sixth, often from the perspective of historians specializing in the late Roman period.

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Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins a people of Inner Asian origins. It did not take long for the impact of the Huns to destroy the equilibrium that Rome had previously established in its western empire, despite largely unrelated troubles of its own.11 By the mid-fifth century, the Mediterranean empire of Rome and the contiguous northern empire ruled in its final stage by Attila were the two great rival powers of their day, spanning close to a third of the Eurasian continent between them. Each empire was multilingual and multicultural to an extent that defies description.12 At the pinnacle of power in each was a royal or imperial elite whose members took pride in their ancestry, wealth, and traditions.13 These elites cultivated cosmopolitan displays, including feasts and funerals, as a means of asserting their status and influence on a wide terrestrial stage extending west to the Atlantic seaboard and north to the Baltic Sea. To be acknowledged as a participant in the inner affairs of either of these two superpowers was a means of advancement whereby confederates and hangers-on could share in the prestigious goods whose accumulation, circulation, and strategic display were the chief raison d’être of empire. This is true whether these commodities took the form of shiny Roman solidi or of gleaming jewellery fashioned from loot or from tribute extorted from subjugated peoples. 11

12

13

This triggering effect is viewed in different ways by different authorities. H. Wolfram, ‘The Hunnic Alternative’, Chapter 5 of his The Roman Empire and its Germanic Peoples (Berkeley, 1997; original German publication, 1990), offers a persuasive assessment of the Hunnic empire as the great northern rival to Rome. Taking a somewhat different approach, G. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge, 2007), has argued that the Romans’ other troubles are what made it possible for the Huns’ invasion to have such a disastrous impact as to lead to the fall of the Western Empire. See likewise Halsall, ‘The Barbarian Invasions’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, ed. Fouracre, 1: 35–55. P. S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton, 1999), argues that the inhabitants of central and northern Europe played a greater role in the formation of the societies of the Roman empire than can be known from Roman historical sources alone. Wells’s subsequent book Beyond Celts, Germans and Scythians (London, 2001) accounts for the complex and evolving ethnicities of Iron Age Europe with frequent attention to East/ West cultural interchange. The identity and deeds of the Roman elite during this period are fairly well documented. This is scarcely true of the Huns and their confederates. For the present state of historical knowledge, starting points are C. Baumer, The History of Central Asia, Volume 2: The Age of the Silk Roads (London, 2014), esp. pp. 81–112, and H. J. Kim, The Huns (Milton Park, Abingdon, 2016). I. Bóna, Les Huns: Le grand empire barbare d’Europe (IV–Ve siècles), trans. K. Escher (Paris, 2002, also available in German translation under the title Das Hunnenreich, 1991), surveys archaeology and history in an integrative manner. See also the copiously illustrated volume Attila und die Hunnen, ed. Historisches Museum der Pfalz-Speyer (Stuttgart, 2007). The role of the Huns in hastening the collapse of Rome’s western empire is emphasized by P. Heather, Empire and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe (Oxford, 2009), and by H. J. Kim, The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge, 2013).

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John D. Niles The military elites of these two rival powers consisted of men whose superbly wrought weapons were at the same time tools of death and emblems of wealth and rank. Leaving aside Rome and its auxiliaries and taking into account just Attila’s confederacy, the members of this warrior elite could have claimed any of a number of different ethnicities, each one a proud one. Among Attila’s contingents were Iranian-speaking Sarmatians and Alans from the areas north and east of the Black Sea; Goths, Gepids, Herulis, and other Germanic-speaking groups from the regions extending from Crimea to the Rhine; and, of course, at the hub of this web of allegiances, the Hunnic elite themselves.14 This is in addition to other allies, including speakers of Latin or Greek, who professed loyalty to the Hunnic court for the sake of personal advancement. Some of the leaders of this brilliantly accoutred array of warriors and courtiers were king-like themselves in stature. Among the fighting men were archers and equestrians whose skills in their specialties were second to none. As for the allegiance of these groups to one another, it was notoriously transitory, seeing that what all military alliances depend on is the recognition between at least two parties, not necessarily friends, that the benefits of partnership outweigh its possible risks or costs. As long as the Hunnic empire was expanding westward while simultaneously extorting tribute from Byzantium, the positives spectacularly outweighed the negatives.

Hunnic Influences after Attila From a modern perspective, the empire that was founded by Attila’s forebears Uldin (d. before 412) and Rua (d. 434), and that was brought to its zenith by Attila himself, was fairly ephemeral. It lasted only from the 370s, when the northern Black Sea realm of Ermanaricus (Old English Eormanric), king of the Ostrogoths, was overrun by a combined army of Huns and Alans, up to the time of Attila’s death by natural causes in the year 453. At the battle of Nedao, which took place in 454 somewhere in the Carpathian basin (in what is now Hungary), Attila’s son and potential successor Ellac was defeated and killed by a military alliance led by Ardaric, king of the Germanic-speaking Gepids. Soon thereafter the Hunnic empire broke up into multiple competing successor groups or states with shifting relations to the Roman Empire’s one firm remaining 14

What language the Huns spoke is unknown. Current scholarly opinion, based in part on onomastic evidence and in part on archaeological evidence that points to Inner Asia as the Huns’ ancestral homeland, is that their elite (in the dynasty leading up to Attila) probably spoke an Altaic language (Turkic or Mongolic) influenced by Iranian borrowings. Most members of their heterogeneous ensemble spoke languages we would classify as either Iranian or Germanic in type.

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Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins centre, Byzantium. In the West, charismatic leaders consolidated their power in such a way as to form the kernels of the modern European states that we know as France, Spain, Italy, England, and Germany.15 It would be naive, however, to think that the influences that have emanated from a great world power over the course of several generations evaporate as soon as there are changes in a region’s political geography. While ethnic Huns seem to have had only an ephemeral presence in the West, many of the groups or individuals who had played leading roles in the Hunnic confederacy did not disappear subsequent to Attila’s death, even if their movements are hard to track. Some of those people, including the Gepids in what is now Hungary and Romania, evidently remained chiefly in place, asserting their power and adjusting their loyalties in accord with emergent political conditions.16 Other groups too consolidated their status in the territories they controlled, as former allies of Attila seem to have done in Thuringia17 and as Odoacer (Flavius Odovacer, c. 433–93) did in Italy from his seat at Ravenna. Still other groups, starting well before the collapse of Attila’s empire, migrated as settlers into western regions, as groups of Alans did in Gaul and Spain.18 Archaeological evidence suggests that at least one Hunnic contingent made its way back toward the Huns’ ancestral homeland in the region of Boma, in Xinjiang, China.19 The role of former allies of the Huns in founding the Slavic15

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A portion of this large story is told by P. J. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford, 1988), though with minimal attention to the eastern factors that had a bearing on this process – a limitation that is partly rectified in Geary’s subsequent publications. W. Pohl, ‘Die Gepiden und die gentes an der mittleren Donau nach dem Zerfall des Attilareiche’, in Die Völker an der Mittleren und Unteren Donau im fünften und sechsten Jahrhundert, ed. H. Wolfram and F. Daim (Vienna: 1980), pp. 239–301. T. Huck, ‘Thüringer und Hunnen’, in Attila und die Hunnen, pp. 322–33; W. Menghin, ‘The Thuringian Kingdom’, in The Merovingian Period – Europe without Borders: Archaeology and History of the 5th to 8th Centuries, ed. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin: 2007), pp. 158–67. For general information about the Alans (seen as a branch of the Sarmatians), see T. Sulimirski, The Sarmatians (London, 1970). On the Alans’ impact in the West, note especially G. Vernadsky, ‘The Eurasian Nomads and their Impact on Medieval Europe’, Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 4 (1963), 401–34, and B. S. Bachrach, A History of the Alans in the West: From their First Appearances in the Sources of Classical Antiquity through the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 1973). W. Goffart, Barbarians and Romans A.D. 418–584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton, 1980), pp. 111–13, discusses the means by which Alans were integrated into the existing population in Gaul. A. Koch, ‘Boma – Ein Reiternomadisch-hunnischer Fundkomplex in Nordwest­ china’, in Hunnen zwischen Asien und Europa: Aktuelle Forschungen zur Archäologie und Kultur der Hunnen (Langenweissbach, 2008), pp. 57–71, documents the movement of goods – including gold-and-garnet jewellery of the Danubian mode – eastward after the fall of the Hunnic empire, confirming the presence in northwest China of people maintaining a lifestyle featuring both Mediterranean

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John D. Niles speaking states of Eastern Europe is too imponderable a matter to take up here, as is the consolidation of kingdoms in the Danish islands and elsewhere in Scandinavia, though Pontic/Danubian influences on the elites of those regions, too, can be traced in the archaeological record.20 After these factions had split off from one another and had formed new alliances, they tended to rely on both Hunnic-style and Roman-style emblems of power as means of asserting their status. Since an unknown number of warlords and statesmen of the post-Hunnic period were products of ethnic intermarriage, it is impossible to calculate the extent to which they thought of themselves as embodying a Hunnic heritage as opposed to a Roman or Gothic heritage or any other, if crisp distinctions along such lines were made. To cite one instance of this phenomenon of mixed ethnicities, Odoacer appears to have been of mixed Hunnic, Scirian, and Gothic descent, while at least one chronicler titled him rex Herulorum, ‘king of the Heruli’.21 When claiming legitimacy as the heir to Roman rule in Italy, moreover, Odoacer took care to adopt the symbols of power of Romanitas. In general, the authority of Migration-Age leaders rested on the number of prestigious connections they could claim. Significantly, when Bede, in Book 5 of his Historia ecclesiastica (finished c. 731), cites by name the most prominent of the pagan peoples who still inhabited those parts of the Continent from which the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had migrated to Britain, he names ‘Frisians, Rugians, Danes, Huns, Old Saxons, and Boructuari’ as being among them, making no distinctions between those peoples as regards their language or race.22 It is as if he were enumerating an additional six stars in a constellation in which

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and Asian elements. See likewise Koch, ‘Hunnisches in Xinjiang? Überlegungen zum europäische-asiatischen Kulturaustausch an der Wende zum Mittelalter’, in Attila und die Hunnen, pp. 134–45. See L. Jørgensen and P. Vang Petersen, Guld, Magt og Tro: Danske guldskatte fra oldtid og middelalder / Gold, Power and Belief: Danish Gold Treasures from Prehistory and the Middle Ages (Copenhagen, 1998), pp. 164–5 and 174–7, as well as the contributions to the volume Inter Ambo Maria: Contacts between Scandinavia and the Crimea in the Roman Period, ed. I. Khrapunov and F.-A. Stylegar (Kristiansund, 2011). G. Rausing, ‘Money Rules the World’, in Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions, ed. A. Andrén et al. (Lund, 2006), pp. 50–9, argues that the major part of the gold that turned up in Scandinavia at this time was taken there by Scandinavian mercenaries allied with the Huns. See R. L. Reynolds and R. S. Lopez, ‘Odoacer: German or Hun?’ American Historical Review 52 (1946), 36–53, and on the Heruli connection note W. Goffart, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia, 2006), p. 207. ‘Sunt autem Fresones, Rugini, Danai, Hunni, Antiqui Saxones, Boructuari’, Bede, Historia ecclesiastica 5: 9, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 476; cf. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1988), p. 181.

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Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins his own English-speaking people, the Angles, had the brightest place. Of course, Bede wrote with no awareness that historians writing twelve hundred years later, at a time when the concept of Germanic origins dominated the field, would recognize Frisians, Danes, and Old Saxons as Germanic-speaking peoples, hence genuine ancestors of the English, while ignoring the Huns, the Rugians (or Rugii), and the Boructuari (or Bructeri) as three groups that could be effaced from Insular prehistory since they were respectively either Asians speaking a non-Indo-European tongue, Slavic speakers, or a people of uncertain identity. When Bede writes of the Huns it is in a neutral tone. Loathing for that people, however, breathes through the pages of the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 330–400), whose influence on modern attitudes toward the Huns has been practically indelible. No stranger to hyperbole, Ammianus dwells on the Huns’ unprecedented savagery, monstrous ugliness, infinite thirst for gold, and disgusting customs.23 St Jerome, Gregory of Tours, and other early Christian writers spoke of the Huns with comparable hatred on account of that people’s devastation of Christian communities.24 All the same, the Huns’ successes on the field of war and their blatant defiance of Rome evidently inspired respect on some sides. Their afterlife in later medieval legendry was both pervasive and by no means uniformly negative in character.25 Archaeological evidence, too, points to a desire on the part of certain early medieval elites to emulate aspects of the Huns’ core culture, including their equestrianism and their lavish sponsorship of the rituals of a gift economy. The vogue of the Eastern that took hold in Europe during and after the Age of Attila took on many forms. These included (1) weapons and military strategies, including these exotic peoples’ paired use of long swords and short swords, their horses and horse trappings, and their equestrian skills; (2) funerary practices, including the building of richly furnished chamber graves, surmounted by mounds, for persons of high status; (3) aspects of dress, including silks and furs and, more easily traced in the archaeological record, the ostentatious display of polychrome goldand-garnet jewellery; (4) certain peaceful aristocratic pursuits, including 23 24

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Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 31: 2, ed. J. C. Rolfe, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1939), 3: 381–7. The early historiography of the Huns is reviewed by E. A. Thompson in his influential but negatively biased book The Huns, first published in 1948 but best consulted in its second edition, corrected by Peter Heather, with an afterword by Heather that brings the book more nearly in line with current research (Oxford, 1996). Later images of the Huns are taken up in Attila: The Man and His Image, ed. F. H. Bäuml and M. D. Birnbaum (Budapest, 1993). The author of the late Icelandic Saga of the Volsungs, for example, associates the Huns of old (the family of Sigurd the Volsung) with a tutelary deity (Odin) and with supernatural powers and affinities; in no way is Attila portrayed as ‘the scourge of God’.

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John D. Niles falconry, hunting with the aid of large staghounds, and, more speculatively, certain styles of banqueting involving music, song, and the ritual consumption of alcohol; (5) certain religious ideas and practices, including elements of shamanism; and (6) artistic styles and aesthetics, particularly as expressed in emblems of power featuring animal-style art endowed with mythological significance.26 The preceding summary alludes to the rich, hybrid civilization of the Hunnic empire in its period of florescence. The situation of more isolated groups of Huns living in semi-nomadic style in the mountains and steppes of Inner Asia would have been quite different and less luxurious, even though luxury items were prized there as well.27 As we know from the eyewitness reports of the fifth-century Greek diplomat Priscus, who spent some time at Attila’s court in the Carpathian basin,28 Attila’s courtiers resided in well-crafted timber buildings, not in tents. The wealth of the Huns was based not just on warfare and extortion but on their control of a vibrant commerce in luxury goods that linked the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea via the so-called Amber Road,29 and that linked these same regions in turn to Inner Asia via what was to become the Silk Road.30 By the time the Hunnic elite settled into the Carpathian basin, their military machine had come to resemble that of 26

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Most of these categories will be touched on in the following pages, but not falconry or the hunt. For falconry, see H. J. Epstein, ‘The Origin and Earliest History of Falconry’, Isis 34 (1943), 497–509, and note further R. S. Oggins, ‘Falconry in Anglo-Saxon England’, Mediaevalia 7 (1984 for 1981), 173–208. Bachrach, History of the Alans, p. 118, discusses the breed of staghound, now thought to be extinct, called the Alan, or medieval Latin Alanus or canis Alani, known to Chaucer as the Aloun. This breed took its name from the people who evidently introduced it to the West. J. F. So and E. C. Bunker, Traders and Raiders on China’s Northern Frontier (Washington, DC, 1995), offer much information relating to the Xiongnu, the semi-nomadic people now accepted by many specialists (after a period of doubt) to have been ancestors of the Huns who migrated westward during the third and fourth centuries ad. C. Baumer, A History of Central Asia, Volume 1: The Age of the Steppe Warriors (London, 2012), esp. pp. 165–268, likewise discusses the Xiongnu as ancestors of the Huns. For a piecing together of Priscus’s account, which exists only in fragments, see C. D. Gordon, The Age of Attila: Fifth-Century Byzantium and the Barbarians (Ann Arbor, 1960), esp. pp. 57–111, or J. Gioven, The Fragmentary History of Priscus: Attila, the Huns and the Roman Empire, AD 430–476 (Merchantville, NJ, 2014). On the amber trade and the high prestige-value of amber in the ancient world, see L. Vaitkunskien, ‘Amber in the Art and Religion of the Ancient Balts’, in Contacts across the Baltic Sea during the Late Iron Age (5th–12th Centuries), ed. B. Hårdh and B. Wyszomirska-Werbart (Lund, 1992), pp. 49–57. E. E. Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road, ed. V. H. Mair (Philadelphia, 2008), offers an informative account of the ecology and early economy of the steppes. With reference to its period of origins, what we call the Silk Road might more aptly be termed the Horse Road, given the significance of that animal both in mercantile exchange and as a means of transit.

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Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins Rome. The bone-reinforced reflex bow, for example, a weapon that the Huns had used with devastating effect on the steppes in conjunction with the horse and trilobite armour-piercing arrowheads, seems not to have been so well suited to the wetter and more densely forested ecosystem of Europe.31 Other high-end products of their civilization, however, were adopted in the West. An example is the paired use of the double-edged long sword (Latin spatha) and the single-edged short sword or long knife, the ancestor of the Anglo-Saxon military seax. The long sword of the steppes was well suited for heavy blows delivered from horseback, while the short sword was meant for either stabbing or slashing at close range.32 Gold-hilted examples of both these sword-types have been found at sites ranging geographically from western France to the Caucasus, ornamented frequently with garnets cloisonné on their hilts, scabbards, or harness, hence largely ceremonial in function. The sword from Mound 1, Sutton Hoo, with its harness, is descended from this type. Among those who were attracted to the visually stunning emblems of power prized by the Huns were members of military elites who, for reasons having to do with their own northern or eastern affiliations, wished to assert an identity that could only partially be subsumed into that of Rome. Such groups tended to be mobile, and their wealth consisted chiefly of objects that could be worn as visible displays of wealth and power.33 It is the leaders of such well-armed groups who were chiefly responsible for forming the kingdoms out of which, in the course of time, the modern political landscape of Europe emerged. Childeric, the son of the legendary Merovech and the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, can be numbered among them.34

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Fragmentary remains of Hunnic bows have been recovered, however, including gold foil from an example from Poland: see K. Godłowski, ‘Jakuszowice: A Multi-Period Settlement in Southern Poland’, Antiquity 65 (1991), 663–75. Associated with this same site are a horse burial with magnificent harness fittings, a two-edged spatha of Asian type, a Hunnic-style belt buckle and shoe buckles, and elements of female dress including a gold diadem set with semi-precious stones – a fashion of female dress, widespread among the Sarmatians and Alans, that was adopted by the Huns as well (Sulimirski, The Sarmatians, p. 196). For discussion see W. Menghin, ‘Arms and Equipment of the Germanic Aristocracy (Fifth to Seventh Century’, in Aillagon, Rome and the Barbarians, pp. 440–5. For discussion see D. Quast, ‘Communication, Migration, Mobility and Trade: Explanatory Models for Exchange Processes from the Roman Iron Age to the Viking Age’, in Foreigners in Early Medieval Europe: Thirteen International Studies on Early Medieval Mobility, ed. D. Quast (Mainz, 2009), pp. 1–26. See E. James, The Franks (Oxford, 1988), with discussion of Childeric at pp. 58–77, and the museum catalogue Die Franken: Wegbereiter Europas (Mannheim: ReissMuseum, 1996), with its chapter on Childeric at pp. 206–21.

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Putting Pressure on the Category of the Germanic Great empires tend to be agglutinative. The larger they are, the more agglutinative they tend to be – and this claim applies not just to the groups that most immediately constitute that empire, but also to those peoples’ respective heritages. From this confluence of cultures, new styles and practices readily emerge, ones that can be hard to categorize because of their hybrid character. Neither the Romans nor the Huns were exceptions to these rules. The Hunnic hegemony in northern Eurasia gave rise to burial complexes that have variously been called ‘Scythian’, ‘Hunnic’, ‘Gothic’, ‘Ostrogothic’, ‘Alano-Sarmatian’, ‘Pontic’, ‘Danubian’, ‘Pontic/ Danubian’, or ‘Germanic’ in character. If one hesitates to make distinctions among these categories, this is in part because objects of visibly different style or geographical point of origin are often included in one and the same funeral assemblage.35 Complicating this picture is that virtually any ethnic name already refers to a hybrid entity. As a result, the blanket term ‘Germanic’ often does little to improve our understanding of the cultural phenomena to which allusion is being made.36 The fourth-century Ostrogothic kingdom ruled by Ermanaric offers an example of this phenomenon. The conquest of the north Pontic steppes and the seizure of the almost completely Sarmatized Bosporan kingdom by the Germanic-speaking Goths, beginning in the early third century, had an enormous effect on Ostrogothic culture, leading to its absorption of many Sarmatian traits.37 Goths, Iranian-speaking Sarmatians, and Greek-speaking inhabitants of the earlier Bosporan kingdom centered on the Crimean city of Kerch – a kingdom that was itself a hybrid entity, though basically Hellenic in character – were all successive inhabitants of 35

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Note B. Anke, L. Révesz, and T. Vida, Reitervölker im Frühmittelalter: Hunnen– Awaren–Ungern (Stuttgart, 2008), at p. 41, on the difficulty of identifying Hunnic burials as such, given how common it was for objects of different styles or different points of origin to be conjoined in a single funerary ensemble in a region dominated politically by the Huns. This is particularly true since the Iron-Age Germanic-speaking peoples of the Continent had long been subject to influences from Celtic-speaking groups, among others, as Wells has argued (Beyond Celts, Germans and Scythians). Moreover, the defining traits of early Celtic material culture, as manifested by the Halstatt elite from the upper Rhine to the upper Danube valleys and by the later La Tène elite as well, were already influenced by the peoples of the steppe, as is discussed by B. Cunliffe, The Scythians (Oxford, 2019), at pp. 159–67. T. Sulimirski, ‘The Forgotten Sarmatians: A Once Mighty Folk Scattered among the Nations’, in Vanished Civilizations of the Ancient World, ed. E. Bacon (New York, 1963), pp. 279–98, at p. 295. Similarly, D. H. Green, Language and History in the Early Germanic World (Cambridge, 1998), p. 177, points out that Germanicspeaking peoples inhabiting southeastern Europe confronted new conditions in the steppes, to which they adjusted by learning from the semi-­nomadic peoples there; above all by adapting to the use of the horse.

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Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins the same north Pontic region, where their respective cultures coalesced in such a complex manner that one hesitates to designate the results by any one name. When the Huns and their Central Asian allies conquered this region in turn in the 370s, they added a new layer to this mix. Correspondingly, the regional styles that were asserted in northwest Europe in the aftermath of the Hunnic hegemony involved innovative processes of hybridization. Even before the Age of Attila, the Roman Empire had been subject to influences of an orientalizing kind,38 whether through the spread of Mithraism and other cults of eastern origin or through the Roman army’s increasing reliance on barbarian auxiliaries, such as the eight thousand cavalry that in ad 175 were supplied to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius by the Iazyges, a branch of the Sarmatians. Over five thousand of these, as Cassius Dio reports, were sent to Britain to defend the Empire’s northern frontiers.39 Influences from an eastern direction remained muted as long as the status of the eastern and northern barbarians remained inferior to that of the great maritime civilizations fronting the Mediterranean. With the irruption of Hunnic armies into the north Pontic region and then up the valley of the Danube, however, this situation changed. Customs, objects, and styles that were broadly Scythian in character began to take on higher prestige in the West, leading to innovations of an unprecedented kind. Crucial to these developments was a large influx of gold into the north, where that resplendent, malleable metal had never before been known in such plentiful quantities. Illustrative of this development are the gold bracteates that were produced in some numbers during the period ca. 450–570, particularly in the region of Gudme on the Danish island of Fyn.40 Individual bracteates have turned up in many parts of northwest Europe, including Anglo-Saxon England.41 While sometimes buried in hoards (Figure 7.1), they are most often found in isolation from one another, most 38

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C. Meyer, Greco-Scythian Art and the Birth of Eurasia: From Classical Antiquity to Russian Modernity (Oxford, 2013), argues that modern collectors of Greek and Roman antiquities tended to shape their collections so as to minimize the evidence for Scythianism – another example of how easily modern biases can affect our knowledge of the past. Sulimirski, ‘Forgotten Sarmatians’, 293, with reference to Cassius Dio, Historia Romana 72:16. M. Axboe, ‘Gudme and the Gold Bracteates’, in The Archaeology of Gudme and Lundeborg, ed. P. O. Nielsen, K. Randsborg, and H. Thrane (Copenhagen, 1994), pp. 68–77; Axboe, Brakteatstudier (Copenhagen, 2007), with English summary at 141–58; Jørgensen and Petersen, Gold, Power and Belief, pp. 237–62; and the Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, s.v. ‘Brakteaten’ (3: 337–401). M. Gaimster, ‘Scandinavian Gold Bracteates in Britain: Money and Media in the Dark Ages’, Medieval Archaeology 36 (1992), 1–28. C. Behr, ‘New Bracteate Finds from Early Anglo-Saxon England’, Medieval Archaeology 54 (2010), 34–82, offers a theory (debatable, I suspect, like so much else in this field) of how the traffic in bracteates reached Britain.

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Figure 7.1 Bracteate hoard, Bolbro, Fyn. AD 475–525. Danish National Museum, Copenhagen, photo © Kit Weiss.

Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins often in burials, in a manner that suggests the workings of a far-flung gift economy. Saturated with religious and political symbolism, the single-sided bracteates, which were evidently worn as pendants, are strongly expressive of non-Roman aesthetics even while manifesting a debt to the basic concept of Roman commemorative medals.42 Many seem to have been manufactured by melting down freshly minted Roman solidi that came to Scandinavia via mercenary warriors who had been in service with the Huns, who were adept at extorting huge numbers of solidi from Byzantium. The iconography of the bracteates is of special interest for its mythological content. The subtype known as C-bracteates, and perhaps other subtypes as well, is plausibly thought to feature a radically stylized representation of the shape-changing deity Odin/Woden, the high god of the early Germanic pantheon.43 Although details vary from one bracteate to another, the central idea of the C-bracteates is that a stylized head, seen in profile, appears to be ‘riding’ a horse-like mythological creature with stylized ‘antlers’ (Figure 7.2). The horse-and-rider image evidently represents the fusion of at least three different powers – human, divine, and animal – in a single form. In certain instances, the steed is endowed with a goat-like or moose-like beard and/or a set of four elongated feet that call to mind the feet of Near Eastern hybrid mythic beasts. Frequently either runes, or totemic creatures (birds, snakes), or special symbols (e.g. the swastika) are worked into the medal’s open spaces. As for the head that ‘rides’ the ‘horse’, it is typically depicted with long, braided hair that may terminate in a beak-like projection. Sometimes the head bears a diadem. The rider’s upper lip is often moustached in a manner that calls to mind Inner Asian fashions of men’s facial hair,44 while from his mouth, in some instances, there issues an arrow-like projection suggestive of his spirit-power. Sometimes it is the steed’s head itself that seems to be issuing from the rider’s mouth. To say that this iconography departs from the naturalism that is characteristic of most Roman art is an understatement. The bracteates very likely incorporate elements of Asiatic religious beliefs and practices, ones that for the most part are unparalleled in the Mediterranean tradition. Accordingly, the god Odin/Woden can justly be called a ‘northern’ deity, or perhaps a ‘hybrid’ god with a prominent 42

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Axboe, Brakteatstudier, 141. See likewise L. Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New History (Ithaca, 2012), pp. 29–30. The development of what art historians refer to as ‘Style I’ and ‘Style II’ zoomorphic art can be correlated with the evolution of bracteate imagery over a period of somewhat less than a century. Axboe, Brakteatstudier, 154, offers a synthesis of thinking about the probable Odinic iconography of the bracteates with reference to arguments made by the German specialist Karl Hauck. I discuss this distinctive style of men’s facial hair in in my study ‘Hawks, Horses, and Huns: The Impact of Peoples of the Steppe on the Folk Cultures of Northern Europe’, Western Folklore, 75 (2016), 133–64, at 152–6.

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John D. Niles role in a syncretistic religion, but not simply a ‘Germanic’ god, given the likelihood that concepts having to do with shamanistic soul-journeying, originating in the northern reaches of Eurasia,45 gained prominence in northwest Europe in conjunction with the worship of this deity. As the archaeologist Lotte Hedeager has argued, what very likely facilitated this innovation was the extension of Hunnic power and influence into the region of southern Scandinavia,46 Figure 7.2 C-bracteate, Gotland, whose peoples in turn contributed Sweden. AD 475–525. Schematic much, over successive centuries, drawing by Herbert Lange. toward the formation of what is comInterpreted as a stylized monly called Anglo-Saxon identity. It representation of the god Oðin/ is at the Danish settlement of Gudme Woden riding a mythological steed. as well, a place whose name evidently denotes ‘the home of the gods’, that we first see archaeological evidence for the building of great timbered halls by powerful northern magnates.47 Great halls like the one at Gudme, measuring forty to fifty meters or more in length and hence suitable for entertaining large numbers of guests, were subsequently built in at least half-a-dozen Scandinavian locations including Lejre on the island of Zealand, becoming a signature element of the Migration-Age culture that is called to mind in idealized form

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The volume Between Worlds: Shamanism of the Peoples of Siberia by V. M. Grusman and A. V. Konovalov (Moscow, 2006) presents articles and photographs based on the unparalleled collections of the Russian Museum of Ethnography, St Petersburg. L. Hedeager, ‘Scandinavia and the Huns: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Migration Era’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 40 (2007), 42–58; Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400–1000 (London, 2011), ‘Part V: The Making of Norse Mythology’, pp. 175–228. Syncretism in Old Norse religion is approached from multiple perspectives in the collaborative volume Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions, ed. A. Andrén, K. Jennbert, and C. Raudvere (Lund, 2006). F. Herschend, ‘The Origin of the Hall in Southern Scandinavia’, Tor 25 (1993), 175–99; Jørgensen and Petersen, Gold, Power and Belief, pp. 200–19; and L. Hedeager, ‘Asgard Reconstructed? Gudme – a “Central Place” in the North’, in Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. M. de Jong and F. Theuws (Leiden, 2001), pp. 467–507. Hedeager argues that these houses represent an architectural style and a technical knowledge that had no strong background in local Scandinavian tradition.

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Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins in Beowulf and other Old English heroic poems.48 One common runic inscription on the Scandinavian bracteates is the word ALU, meaning ‘ale’, with apparent reference to the role of that beverage in inducing good cheer and comradeship through the rituals of drink. Likewise of interest to readers of Beowulf, with its vivid portrayal of men of the warrior class sharing cups and stories in the Danish gold-hall Heorot, is that the earliest account we have of the protocols of feasting in a large timbered hall like the ones of late Iron Age Scandinavia is Priscus’s account of a banquet hosted by Attila in mid-fifth-century Pannonia at an unknown place in the Hungarian plain.49 Priscus, who was a precise observer of the scene of which he writes, tells of the activities of cupbearers, of the requirement that each guest should offer a prayer before taking a seat, of the arrangement of seats on either of the long sides of the building, of a couch being set out for Attila in the midst, and of the protocol of lefthand versus right-hand seating in relation to Attila’s person (Priscus, the Greek, was given a seat on the left, the less favoured side). Priscus likewise writes of tables being set up for the serving of food; of the alternate serving of courses of meat, served on silver platters, and of wine, poured into gold and silver goblets; and he likewise tells of the golden, gem-studded ornaments (swords, shoe buckles, bridles) that adorned either the men in attendance or their horses. Attila seems to have been sparing in his own use of such ornaments, for his manner of dress was as modest as his diet was simple. With its assembly of guests from Hunnic, Gothic, Greek, Latin, and Moorish speech communities, the feast that Priscus describes seems to have been both a cosmopolitan affair and, for the most part, a decorous one, even though Attila was displeased by the antics of one of the entertainers, while the drinking went on longer than Priscus liked. The upshot of these remarks is that there is a long history of the blanket term ‘Germanic’ being used with reference to such phenomena as the manufacture of gold bracteates, the worship of Odin/Woden, and the culture of the hall; three Migration-Age phenomena whose roots are intertwined. But what is the justification for that term, and how much thought is given to what it either entails or excludes?50 While the value of the category of the Germanic remains indubitable in historical and comparative linguistics, even there its explanatory power is too easily taken 48

49 50

For discussion from various perspectives see J. D. Niles, Beowulf and Lejre, ed. by M. Osborn and myself and with contributions by the Danish archaeologist T. Christensen (Tempe, AZ, 2007); and note also my chapter ‘On the Danish Origins of the Beowulf Story’, in Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, ed. H. Sauer and J. Story (Tempe, AZ, 2011), pp. 41–62. Gordon, The Age of Attila, pp. 94–7. Among leading historians who have been putting pressure on the term ‘Germanic’ are Goffart, Barbarian Tides, and G. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge, 2007).

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John D. Niles for granted,51 while the extension of that term from linguistics to cultural history remains an unfortunate legacy of nineteenth-century nationalism. Too often, when historians talk about the birth of the European nations, an unreflecting acceptance of the Germanic as a cultural category and of Europe as a putative geographical entity has led to the effacement of that great landmass, Eurasia.52 Similar blind spots can be detected when an archaeologist draws up a distribution map of a ‘Germanic-style’ artefact or burial practice and the map comes to an end when the modern political borders of Eastern Europe are reached.53 There is some justification, then, for discussing the origins of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in terms of the expansion of what the Silk Road historian Christopher Beckwith has called the ‘Central Eurasian Culture Complex’ into the far northwest of Europe. In Beckwith’s view, early Germanic-speaking peoples already belonged to this culture complex, which they had maintained from Proto-Indo-European times, much as the Alans and other Iranian-speaking peoples of Central Asia had done. From this perspective, ancient Germania as encountered by the Romans was culturally a part of Central Eurasia, hence easily recognized by Tacitus and other ancient Roman writers as presenting a sharp contrast to the lands fronting the Mediterranean.54 In any event, the fusion of northern cultures that characterizes the Age of Attila represents a new stage in a process of hybridization that had been going on for some few centuries, with the difference that a new set of players had come upon the scene. That new group was the Huns. As a semi-nomadic people of Inner Asian origins, the Huns brought with them in their westward movements not just certain innovative military techniques, a legendary ferocity in warfare, and a talent for large-scale political organization, but also, evidently, a supreme confidence in what Roman historians perceived to be their foreign ways. Still, it did not take long for the Huns to embrace many aspects of the cultures of the peoples they subdued. It is their indirect rather than their direct influence that is therefore most significant to take into account. 51

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See J. A. Hawkins, ‘Germanic Languages’, in The Major Languages of Western Europe, ed. B. Comrie (London, 1987), pp. 58–66. A web search for ‘Germanic substrate hypothesis’ will turn up relevant information. H. J. Hummer, ‘Franks and Alamanni: A Discontinuous Ethnogenesis’, in Franks and Alamanni in the Merovingian Period: An Ethnographic Perspective, ed. I. Wood (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 9–21, calls Patrick Geary to task (with reference to his book Before France and Germany; see n. 15 above) for his lack of attention to the Eurasian context of the making of Western nations. For example, M. Lutovsky, ‘Between Sutton Hoo and Chernaya Mogila: Barrows in Eastern and Western Early Medieval Europe’, Antiquity 70 (1996), 671–6, laments the effacement of data derived from Slavic-speaking lands in Robert Van de Noort’s prior study ‘The Context of Early Medieval Barrows’, Antiquity 67 (1993), 66–73. C. I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, 2009), at p. 81 in particular.

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The Sutton Hoo Burial Mound Complex and Its Eastern Analogues So as to anchor my remarks in a familiar site, I wish to call attention to the burial complex at Sutton Hoo, East Anglia, an icon of early Anglo-Saxon identity. In this Insular setting, as also with the more recently excavated princely burial at Prittlewell, Essex,55 elements from a prior Eurasian tradition took on salient local characteristics.56 Like other furnished chamber graves of similar date located elsewhere in Britain, the great mounds at Sutton Hoo are in a direct line of descent from princely barrow graves built on the Continent in earlier years. What defines these sites is an earthen mound heaped up over a chamber normally occupied by the remains of the deceased and furnished with highend grave-goods, including weapons, jewels, vessels, and other objects of a kind prized by the Migration-Age military elite.57 A list of princely graves of such a kind would include sites not just in Merovingian France and Vendel-era Sweden, but also in Migration-Age Thuringia, Alamannia, Old Saxony, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia. This is to name just certain of the regions where such burials have been excavated, chiefly to the north or east of the frontiers of the late Roman Empire. While the building of mounds over graves is a common enough practice world-wide, a noteworthy fact of the Insular archaeological record is that little or no continuity can be traced from the Bronze Age or early Iron Age tumuli of Britain to the richly furnished chamber graves at Sutton Hoo, Taplow, or Prittlewell.58 Continuities as regards both the concept and the typical contents of these Anglo-Saxon grave-sites can be traced, however, when one looks eastward across the 55

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On the chamber burial of the ‘Prittlewell Prince’, see S. M. Hirst’s and C. Scull’s succinct guide The Anglo-Saxon Princely Burial at Prittlewell, Southend-on-Sea (Basingstoke, 2019), as well as N. J. Higham, ‘The Prittlewell Chambered Grave’, in Higham and Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World, pp. 120–5. An indispensable guide to Mound 1 and its treasures is R. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, 3 vols in 4 (London, 1975–83), while the whole burial complex at Sutton Hoo is surveyed by M. O. H. Carver (Martin Carver) in his books Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings? (London, 1998), Sutton Hoo: A SeventhCentury Princely Burial Ground and its Context (London, 2005), and The Sutton Hoo Story: Encounters with Early England (Woodbridge, 2017). The fact that Mound 1 was a ship burial, a clear sign of Scandinavian influence, is a matter of great interest but one that is beside my present point. In this regard as well as in others, one can see evidence for the coalescence of northern traditions at Sutton Hoo. For comparative analysis see L. Webster, ‘Death’s Diplomacy: Sutton Hoo in the Light of Other Male Princely Burials’, in Sutton Hoo: Fifty Years After, ed. R. Farrell and C. Neuman de Vegvar (Oxford, Ohio, 1992), pp. 75–81. S. Pollington, Anglo-Saxon Burial Mounds: Princely Burials in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries (Swaffham, Norfolk, 2008), surveys the Insular sites.

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John D. Niles Channel to Continental Europe and Scandinavia, and when one continues to look eastward, moving back in time, toward the steppes of Central Asia. A connection has long been drawn between Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo and the passage toward the end of Beowulf where the elaborate funeral obsequies of the hero of that poem are described (lines 3156–82). That great figure is identified as king of the Geatas, a shadowy people whose place on a real-world map is left to the imagination but who are said to inhabit northern lands neighbouring the kingdom of the Danes.59 This latter literary scene, in turn, offers a provocative parallel to Jordanes’ account of the funeral of Attila, which took place in the year 453 somewhere in the Carpathian basin.60 The analogies that I wish to explore here, however, are material ones that are well documented in the archaeological record. In Rupert Bruce-Mitford’s view, the closest material analogue to Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo is the grave of Childeric, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, at Tournai in present-day Belgium.61 To dwell for a while on this parallel is by no means to dismiss such other comparanda as the spectacular Iron-Age burials at Vendel and Valsgärde, Sweden. This point is worth emphasising given the fact that, like the Swedish examples, Mound 1 is a ship burial, while certain artefacts excavated there – the helmet, in particular – have such strong Swedish affinities as to suggest that they are of Scandinavian manufacture. But it is to the royal burial at Tournai that I wish to direct attention here. Childeric’s grave, situated across the Channel from the ports of East Anglia and the valley of the Thames, is the most richly furnished one of its era in the West.62 It can be dated to c. 481, the approximate year of that king’s death, and so to no more than a generation after the death of Attila. 59 60

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For discussion see J. D. Niles, Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 39–49 and 65–7. Jordanes, De origine actibusque Getarum, Chapter 49, trans. by C. C. Mierow, Jordanes: The Origin and Deeds of the Goths (Princeton, 1908), pp. 80–1. The Latin text can readily be consulted in Klaeber’s Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, 4th edn, ed. R. D. Fulk, R. E. Bjork, and J. D. Niles (Toronto, 2008), at p. 311. For discussion from differing perspectives see F. Klaeber, ‘Attila’s and Beowulf’s Funerals’, PMLA 42 (1927), 255–67, and M. Puhvel, ‘The Ride around Beowulf’s Barrow’, Folklore 94 (1983), 108–12. Although Jordanes scarcely writes as an eyewitness, parallels to the funerary customs he describes – including the circling of Attila’s bier on horseback, the communal feasting, and the execution of the grave diggers – can be traced among the semi-nomadic peoples of the steppes, as is pointed out by Baumer, History of Central Asia, 2: 111–12. R. Bruce-Mitford, ‘A Comparison between the Sutton Hoo Burial Deposit and Childeric’s Treasure’, in Actes du Colloque international d’archéologie, Rouen, 3–4–5 Juillet 1975, volume 3: La période Mérovingienne (Rouen, 1978), pp. 366–73. There is a large literature on Childeric’s grave. For overviews with images of artefacts, see P. Périn and M. Kazanski, ‘Das Grab Childerichs I’, in Die Franken: Wegbereiter Europas, pp. 173–82; Das Gold der Barbarenfürsten: Schätze aus Prunkgräbern des 5. Jahrhunderts n. chr. zwischen Kaukasus und Gallien, ed. A. Wieczorek and P. Périn (Stuttgart, 2001), pp. 172–3 and 63, 64, 76, 77; and

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Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins When one takes account of its magnificent gold-and-garnet treasures as well as the size of its former mound, which was once twenty to forty meters across though it has since been levelled, the tomb represents a major statement on the part of Childeric’s heirs as regards that king’s wealth and cultural connections. On one hand, the tomb’s furnishings include emblems of wealth and power that are Roman in character, such as the king’s solid gold finger-ring and a large knobbed fibula, also made of gold, that served as the badge of office of a Roman official or military officer.63 On the other hand, other leading funerary symbols are of a Pontic/Danubian type, including not just the mound itself but also the king’s paired long sword and short sword with their garnet-cloisonné decoration.64 Among the polychrome jewels that were unearthed during the site’s original excavation in 1653 were a number of small mounts featuring a winged insect motif,65 sometimes called a bee motif though it is probably the cicada that is represented (Figure 7.3). This motif has a particular association with burial sites from the Danubian basin and the steppes, where the sound of the cicada is a steady summer presence (Figure 7.4).66 Although the function of the cicada mounts from Childeric’s grave is unknown, they may have been attached to a robe draped over the king’s horse, which was buried close by him.67 This was not the only horse burial at the spot, for new excavations undertaken at Tournai in the mid1980s revealed the remains of an additional twenty-one horses that were evidently sacrificed at the barrow’s periphery (Figure 7.5). The existence of a massive horse sacrifice at this site calls to mind much earlier funerary deposits from the steppes, including the celebrated princely kurgan at Kostromskaia in southern Russia, with its twenty-two horse burials (Figure 7.6). Since that burial dates from the middle of the first millennium BC, what we may be witnessing here is a funerary concept that was available to the elites of western Eurasia for a period of roughly a thousand years. Another grave-site that exemplifies the type is the Ryzhanovka kurgan by the river Dnieper in Ukraine, with its gold-hilted swords and its indications of both human and horse sacrifice. This site was excavated

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C. Colonna, ‘The Tomb of Childeric’, in Aillagon, Rome and the Barbarians, pp. 346–7. The German name for this latter object is Zwiebelkopffibel. Colour photos: Gold der Barbarenfürsten, p. 63. Colour photos: Gold der Barbarenfürsten, pp. 76–7. Black and white engravings: Die Franken: Wegbereiter Europas, p. 176. Since most of the treasures excavated from the burial site in 1653 were stolen and melted down in 1831, the number of these mounts is uncertain. Two surviving examples are on display in the treasure rooms of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; see Gold der Barbarenfürsten, p. 173 or Aillagon, Rome and the Barbarians, p. 347. For examples with discussion see Bóna, Les Huns, pp. 148–50, 219. For discussion see Périn and Kazanski, ‘Das Grab Childerichs I’.

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Figure 7.3 Cicada mount, Tournai, Belgium. Late fifth century. Gold and garnet cloisonné. © Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.

Figure 7.4 Four cicada mounts. Hunnic, fifth century. Silver, copper alloy, iron. Thaw Collection, © The Morgan Library and Museum, New York.

only recently, was found to be intact, and is dated to about 265 BC.68 Roughly coterminous with such richly furnished graves as these are the Scythian royal graves, dating most likely from the third century BC, that have been unearthed at Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, with their remarkable contents preserved by permafrost.69 The plan of Childeric’s funeral is plausibly attributed to that king’s widow, Basina, who was previously married to the king of Thuringia (to the east of the lower Rhine). The grave is of the same type as richly furnished barrow graves in Basina’s Thuringian homeland, where Childeric had lived in exile for eight years and where mound-building and horse 68

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S. Skory and J. Chochorowski, ‘The Great Ryzhanovka Barrow: An Intact Burial of a Scythian Nobleman’, in Discovery! Unearthing the New Treasures of Archaeology, ed. B. M. Fagan (New York, 2007), pp. 70–1. S. I. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, trans. M. W. Thompson (Berkeley, 1970). On the current dating of these tombs, which were formerly attributed to the fourth or fifth century BC, see Cunliffe, The Scythians, p. 190.

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Figure 7.5 Horse burials, tomb of Childeric, Tournai, Belgium. Late fifth century. Schematic drawing from Michael Müller-Wille, ‘Königtum und Adel im Spiegel der Grabfunde’, in Die Franken: Wegbereiter Europas (Mainz and Mannheim, 1996), p. 210.

burial are well attested in the late fifth and early sixth centuries AD, having very likely been introduced to that region by Germanic-speaking confederates of the Huns.70 What has captured the imagination of many generations of medievalists and French patriots, however, is not so much the plan of Childeric’s 70

See on this topic A. Wieczorek, ‘Identität und Integration – zur Bevölkerungspolitik der Merowinger nach archäologischen Quellen’, in Die Franken: Wegbereiter Europas, pp. 346–57.

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Figure 7.6 Horse burials, Kostromskaia kurgan, southern Russia. Mid-first millennium BC. Schematic drawing by M. Rostovtzeff (1922).

Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins grave-site, which has only recently been ascertained with some degree of confidence, but the extraordinary quality of the gold and garnet-cloisonné treasures that were excavated there. Certain of these treasures are of a Danubian type. Their closest analogues are treasures from the funerary complex at Apahida, near Cluj in Transylvania, Romania,71 a site that brings us close to the heartland of Attila’s empire. Like Childeric’s grave, the princely tombs at Apahida, of which two are known and a third is suspected, evidently date from a period not long after Attila’s death. Tomb I at Apahida, discovered by chance in 1889, includes among its gold and garnet-cloisonné objects at least one clear emblem of Roman power and influence, a Zwiebelkopffibel of the same kind as was interred with Childeric.72 Tomb II, discovered by chance in 1968, is of a more nearly Hunnic type. Both tombs are dated to the third quarter of the fifth century. The furnishings from Tomb II include an assortment of garnet-cloisonné buckles, shoe buckles, strap ends, horse trappings, purse-lid ornaments, and game-pieces and the like, in addition to a pair of bird-of-prey saddle mounts fashioned in an exquisite version of the gold-and-garnet polychrome style. What the Apahida site is thought to represent is the royal burial ground of Gepid kings who ruled over much of the former Roman province of Dacia as confederates of Attila during his lifetime and who later, switching allegiances, appear to have governed that region as a Roman client state. While the relationship of the two main tombs at Apahida cannot be determined with certainty, it is indicative of evolving political conditions extending from a period of Hunnic ascendancy (Tomb II) to a period, soon thereafter, when Roman influences became more pronounced (Tomb I). This line of inquiry can be extended so as to take in additional furnished Migration Age sites located in regions impacted by the Huns. Three such sites are worth mentioning here:

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• The rich ritual deposit found at Pannonhalma, slightly to the southwest of the Danube in what is now western Hungary and dating from the second quarter of the fifth century,73 is noteworthy for its fragments of a golden reflex bow, a signature artefact of the Huns and one that was of mythological

On Apahida, see Gold der Barbarenfürsten, pp. 147–61 together with 16, 55, 56, 68, 75, and 79; R. Harhoiu, ‘Hunnen und Germanen an der unteren Donau’, in Attila und die Hunnen, pp. 83–95; and ‘The Necropolis of Apahida (Romania)’, in Aillagon, Rome and the Barbarians, pp. 280–3. Colour photo: Gold der Barbarenfürsten, p. 156. Bóna, Les Huns, pp. 130–2, 206–8; Gold der Barbarenfürsten, 132, with additional photos at pp. 48, 50, and 51; ‘Ritueller Depotfund’, in Attila und die Hunnen, pp. 226–7; P. Tomka, ‘Der Hunnische Fürstenfund von Pannonhalma’, Acta Archaeologica Academiae scientiarum Hungaricae 38 (1986), 423–88; and Tomka, ‘The Site of Pannonhalma (Hungary)’, in Aillagon, Rome and the Barbarians, pp. 260–1.

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John D. Niles significance.74 Other treasures found at this site include a pair of double-edged long swords. While one of these was of practical use, the other would have been primarily ceremonial, for it is adorned with a gold hilt and with a scabbard set with gold and garnet-cloisonné fittings. The presence of an equestrian bit along with gilded cheek-pieces and harness-trappings is suggestive of at least one horse sacrifice.

• Kurgan 2 at Brut, in Ossetia in the Russian Caucasus, is an Alanic-style mound-burial with a chamber equipped with furnishings characteristic of the polychrome style of the Hunnic period.75 This burial is dated to the first third of the fifth century, so to a time somewhat earlier than the ritual deposit at Pannonhalma. Its treasures include a gold-adorned, double-edged long sword of Sarmatian character as well as a dagger whose gold-plated sheath and hilt are adorned with garnet inlays. Gold-and-garnet equestrian trappings buried close by the ceremonial sword must have been an impressive spectacle when worn on the horse that was evidently sacrificed there, as was done at Pannonhalma, Childeric’s tomb at Tournai, and Mound 17 at Sutton Hoo.



• Situated at the western extreme of the territories influenced by the Huns is the high-status burial found at Pouan, in the present-day département of Aube in north-central France.76 This grave, with its exotic contents, is dated to the third quarter of the fifth century. Among its splendid furnishings is the customary eastern-style pairing of a double-edged long sword and a single-edged short sword, both of them adorned with gold hilts and hence chiefly ceremonial in function. Both scabbards are ornamented with garnet-­ cloisonné mounts, while the upper part of the hilt of the short sword is decorated with a magnificent tapering gold-and-garnet design, the closest parallels to which are found in southern Russia and Hungary.77 Also found here was an elegant garnet-cloisonné shoe-buckle in the Hunnic mode. Although the occupant of this grave is thought by some to have been a man of Ostro-

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G. László, ‘The Significance of the Hun Golden Bow’, Acta Archaeologica 1 (1951), 91–104; J. Harmatta, ‘The Golden Bow of the Huns’, Acta Archaeologica 1 (1951), 107–49. Gold der Barbarenfürsten, pp. 124–7; T. Gabuev, ‘Ein Hunnenzeitliches Fürstengrab aus dem Kaukasusgebiet’, in Attila und die Hunnen, pp. 292–301; Gabuev, ‘A Prince-Tomb in the Necropolis of Brut’, in Aillagon, Rome and the Barbarians, pp. 262–3. M. Kazanski, ‘Deux riches tombes de l’époque des grandes invasions au nord de la Gaule (Airan et Pouan)’, Archéologie Médiévale 12 (1982), 17–33; Gold der Barbarenfürsten, pp. 72–4, 144–6; P. Riffaud-Longuespé, ‘The Treasure of Pouan (France)’, in Aillagon, Rome and the Barbarians, pp. 322–3. On richly furnished burials in Migration-Age Gaul that imply close Eurasian contacts, see Kazanski, ‘La diffusion de la mode danubienne en Gaule (fin du IVe siècle – début du Ve siècle): Essai d’intérpretation historique’, Antiquités Nationales 11 (1989), 59–73 and the contributions to the volume Attila: Les influences danubiennes dans l’ouest de l’Europe au Ve siècle, ed. J.-Y. Marin (Caen, 1990). Bóna, Les Huns, pp. 125 and 204 (figs 117, 118); Gold der Barbarenfürsten, pp. 142–3 and 147.

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Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins gothic origin,78 he might at least as plausibly have been an Alan who settled in this region while retaining his eastern-style emblems of power.

A consideration of such male furnished burials as these, together with female burials of a comparable character,79 will confirm that what is represented at Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo and comparable Anglo-Saxon princely burial sites is an Insular development of a funerary type that came into vogue in Europe in conjunction with the westward expansion of the Hunnic empire, and that was perpetuated for close to another two hundred years, after the breakup of that empire, by northern dynasties or elites wishing to make a display of their non-Roman affiliations. An overview of the sites mentioned in this chapter establishes the contours of a zone of influence, among people of wealth and status, that extended from Britain at its most northwesterly point to at least as far as the Caucasus Mountains in the east. The picture that emerges from this analysis is that of Migration-Age elites who shared a common language of custom and material culture, one that would have been mutually intelligible across a broad swathe of Eurasia. During the first half of the fifth century, the heartland of this cultural zone was the Carpathian basin, where a number of different groups coalesced under Hunnic rule. The term ‘Germanic’ is hardly applicable to the hybrid culture of this wide geographical area, even though Germanicspeaking groups had a key role in diffusing that culture to points where it was refined or elaborated upon in original ways. What we can witness in the archaeological record, then, are signposts of identification with high-status warriors and statesmen whose chief affiliations were northern and pagan, rather than Mediterranean and Christian, and whose twin pillars of authority were military power and the visible wealth that such power entailed. Three signature aspects of the material culture associated with these elites are worth special attention. These are: (1) Use of the animal style in art, a prominent feature of Central Asian textile art and metalwork as well as Migration-era jewellery, often in the form of predatory beasts or, especially, stylized birds of prey (Figures 7.7 and 7.8).80 (2) The wearing 78 79

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Gold der Barbarenfürsten, p. 144. Examples are the fourth- or early fifth-century graves of high-status women at Untersiebenbrunn in Austria; at Årslev on the Danish island of Fyn; at Hochfelden in Bas-Rhin, France; and at Airan in Calvados, France. For details see Jørgensen and Petersen, Guld, Magt og Tro / Gold, Power and Belief, pp. 176–7, and Gold der Barbarenfürsten, pp. 108–16 passim. Each of these sites can plausibly be accounted for either by theories of immigration or by theories of female exogamy involving families of high rank. A classic study of the animal style and its evolution, somewhat dated but still authoritative, is M. Rostovtzeff, The Animal Style in South Russia and China (Princeton, 1929). Among many later publications that illustrate and analyse this style see E. C. Bunker, C. B. Chatwin, and A. R. Farkas, ‘Animal

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John D. Niles and the funerary deposition of polychrome gold-and-garnet jewellery, a stunning aspect not just of Hunnic and Sarmatian ornamentation of the third to fifth centuries ad but also of Frankish, Scandinavian, and AngloSaxon metalwork of a somewhat later period, sometimes achieving its most dramatic effects in conjunction with the animal style, as exemplified by the purse lid found at Mound 1, Sutton Hoo (Figure 7.9).81 (3) Ritual horse burial, a practice that is very nearly unattested in Britain before the Age of Migrations but that has ample precedent among the ancient peoples of Central Asia, where the horse was first domesticated and where its uses and its mythology developed so decisively.82 Worth note in this connection is that the modern English word ‘horse’ (Old English hors; cf. Old Norse hross), denoting originally a breed of warhorse, has been traced to a Sarmatian origin.83 My immediate point is that the princely barrow graves of Anglo-Saxon England are late examples of a type of burial that can be traced back to the Age of Attila without a significant gap in the archaeological records. A nine-line passage drawn from the closing lines of Beowulf, with their account of the hero’s cremation funeral, brings us back in our imaginations to that same era, which was the Age of Gold in northern Europe:84

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Style’ Art from East to West (New York, 1970); Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine, ed. E. D. Reeder (New York, 1999); The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the State Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, and the Archaeological Museum, Ufa, ed. J. Aruz et al. (New York, 2000); and E. C. Bunker, Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes (New York, 2002). G. Speake, Anglo-Saxon Animal Art and its Germanic Background (Oxford, 1980), p. 14, finds ‘attractive’ the notion that the formative influence on this style as it was cultivated in Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon contexts was the legacy of the animal art of the Scythians, Sarmatians, and other Central Asian peoples. See notes 19, 62, 64, 65, 71, 73, 75, 76, and 77 for illustrations of the polychrome style, and note further B. Arrhenius, ‘Garnet Jewelry of the Fifth and Sixth Centuries’, in From Attila to Charlemagne: Arts of the Early Medieval Period in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. K. R. Brown, D. Kidd, and C. T. Little (New York, 2000), pp. 214–26; M. Kazanski and P. Périn, ‘Der polychrome Stil im 5. Jahrhundert’, in Gold der Barbarenfürsten, pp. 80–4; and N. Adams, Bright Lights in the Dark Ages: The Thaw Collection of Early Medieval Ornaments (New York, 2014), chapters 2, 3, and 4 in particular. C. Fern, ‘Early Anglo-Saxon Horse Burial of the Fifth to Seventh Centuries ad’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 14 (2007), 92–107, and Fern, ‘Horses in Mind’, in Signals of Belief in Early England: Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited, ed. M. Carver, A. Sanmark, and S. Semple (Oxford, 2010), pp. 128–57. More general information on the early history of the horse can be found in Horses and Humans: The Evolution of Human-Equine Relations, ed. S. L. Olsen et al. (Oxford, 2006), and Pferde in Asien: Geschichte, Handel und Kultur / Horses in Asia: History, Trade and Culture, ed. B. G. Fragner et al. (Vienna, 2009). Green, Language and History, pp. 78–9. Compare Old English eoh (cognate with Latin equus), the native Germanic word for ‘horse’. Beowulf lines 3134–42, from Klaeber’s Beowulf, ed. Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, 106–7, brackets and diacritics omitted; my translation.

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Figure 7.7 Raptor mount, neighborhood of Concesti, Romania (formerly Moldavia). Circa AD 400. Gold with garnet and mother-of-pearl cloisonné. © The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, photo by Vladimir Terebenin.

Figure 7.8 Raptor mount, Ossmanstedt, Thuringia. Fifth century. Gold with garnet cloisonné. Museum für Ur- und Frühgeschichte Thüringens, Weimar, © B. Stefan.

Þa wæs wunden gold  on wæn hladen, æghwæs unrim,  æþeling boren, har hilderinc  to Hrones Næsse. Him ða gegiredan  Geata leode ad on eorðan  unwaclicne, helmum behongen,  hildebordum, beorhtum byrnum,  swa he bena wæs; alegdon ða tomiddes  mærne þeoden hæleð hiofende,  hlaford leofne. (‘Then ornamental gold was loaded onto a cart, a vast quantity of each type; the grey-haired warrior, that man of noble birth, was borne out to Whale’s Ness. As he had asked, the people of the Geats then kindled a pyre on the earth, a huge one piled up with helmets and war-shields,

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John D. Niles

Figure 7.9 Purse lid with highly stylized animal-style ornamentation, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. Early seventh century. Gold with garnet cloisonné and millefiori enamel. © The British Museum, London.

with shining byrnies; deeply lamenting, the men then laid their far-famed leader, their beloved lord, in its midst’.)

The Beowulf poet’s evocation of the funerary customs of a vanished age enhances one’s understanding of the probable functions of the actual gold treasures of Mound 1, Sutton Hoo, and similar high-end Anglo-Saxon burials of pagan type; and the reverse is also true, as those same archaeological finds sharpen one’s ability to visualize the scene that the poet describes. This network of associations is enhanced by an awareness that elite Anglo-Saxon burial sites have longstanding Eurasian antecedents, not just immediate Frankish, Scandinavian, or ‘Germanic’ ones. While remaining alert to influences emanating from other directions including Ireland and the Mediterranean, we can see in the princely burial mounds of early Anglo-Saxon England the confident development of a cultural form whose lineage extends to the Danubian and Pontic regions ruled over by the Huns. At this point, the hunt for antecedents starts to dissipate in the immense landmass extending eastward. 168

Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Origins

SWED

EN

Sites

6 1 3 2

8 9 R U S S I A

7

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Sutton Hoo, UK Prittlewell, UK Taplow, UK Tournai, Belgium Pouan, France Gudme, Denmark Lejre, Denmark Vendel, Sweden Valsgärde, Sweden

10. Jakuzowice, Poland 11. Pannonhalma, Hungary 12. Apahida, Romania 13. Ryzhanovka, Ukraine 14. Kostromskaia, South Russia 15. Brut, South Russia 16. Pazyryk, Kazakhstan 17. Boma, western China

POLAND 10

4

UKRAINE

5 FRANCE

11

12

ROMANIA

16

KAZAKHSTAN

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MONGOLIA

17 14

15

TURKEY

C H I N A

Figure 7.10 Map showing location of chief archaeological sites mentioned in the text.

Toward a Conclusion: ‘Eurasia Without Boundaries’ After this look at the past, a brief look to the future might be welcome. Anglo-Saxon scholarship is approaching a crossroads. Either it will continue to be pursued in familiar channels until those channels run dry, or it will start to function within new critical paradigms that are encouraged by emergent directions of thought in the humanities and social sciences. Although these newer paradigms know no geographical restrictions, I hesitate to use the word ‘global’ with reference to them, for the influences traced in the present paper remain mappable within a finite landmass of which the British Isles constitute a peripheral region – one that is of unceasing interest, however, in part because of its very edginess. New directions in early medieval studies have been stimulated by the end of the Cold War, with its prospects, still only imperfectly realized, of cordial exchanges among scholars accustomed to working in relative isolation from one another on either side of an East/West divide. The fields of history, archaeology, art history, and comparative literary studies all stand to profit from innovative modes of international exchange and 169

John D. Niles cooperation. There is no reason why any of these fields should be confined by the contours of a modern political geography that often has little to do with the movements of people in former eras or with the channels by which those people interacted with one another, exerting reciprocal influences that are so complex as almost to defy definition. The explanatory power of early medieval studies will increase in the years ahead, I expect, to the extent that specialists in early AngloSaxon England articulate their research not just in such familiar terms as Germanization, Romanization, Celtic or pre-Celtic substrata, or influences from Ireland or from pre-Viking or Viking-Age Scandinavia, but also from a perspective summed up in the phrase ‘Eurasia without boundaries’. Only an unfenced outlook of this kind can take account of the innumerable channels by which peoples resident in the British Isles have long been in communication with peoples inhabiting other parts of the Eurasian landmass. The traditional homelands of such other groups include not just the Mediterranean rim and ‘Germania’ (to use a term that has outlived the uses to which Tacitus and others have put it), but also Central and Eastern Europe; the regions extending north of the Black Sea and into the taiga of Russia; and the lands extending eastward from there across the vast steppes, the highway of Old Eurasia. Drawing on scholarship that may or may not be familiar to all medievalists, I have argued that the fourth- and fifth-century emergence of the Hunnic empire as the great northern rival to Rome opened the floodgates to Scythian-style influences that had long been felt by the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, and their neighbours but that took on greater prominence at this time thanks to the Huns’ power, wealth, and prestige. Such eastern influences, when combined with an unprecedented circulation of gold, garnets, outstanding horses, and other high-end commodities, contributed substantially to the flashy hybrid material culture of Migration-Age elites, including the kings and princes of the early AngloSaxon kingdoms. These militarized elites provided patronage for poets, metalworkers, and other specialists so as to create the myth of a northern Heroic Age before eventually being absorbed, in Britain as elsewhere, into systems and structures of power that more nearly resemble our own. In future years, I expect that research into the making of Anglo-Saxon England will increasingly be undertaken with reference to Eurasian factors such as the ones discussed here. This is in addition to such other factors, already well explored in the scholarly literature, as the heritage of ancient Rome, the movements of Germanic-speaking populations across the North Sea to Britain, the influence of Christian missionaries arriving from both Ireland and Rome, and Viking-Age raids and settlements, not to mention the activities of ordinary men and women who counted their chickens and tilled their fields in patterns of culture that remained only partially affected by any of these developments. 170

Chapter 8 Historical Origins of a Mythical History: The Formation of the Myth Supporting Anglo-Saxonism Reconsidered Kazutomo Karasawa

A

nglo-Saxonism or ‘the sentiment of being “Anglo-Saxon” […] or English ethnologically; a belief in the superiority or claims of the “Anglo-Saxon” race’,1 is fundamentally based on the belief that the AngloSaxons constitute the major part of the ancestry of English people, the indigenous ‘Celts’ having mostly been eliminated from England in the process of Anglo-Saxon conquest, as, for instance, Andy Orchard summarizes in the following passage:2 Soon after the first wave of invasions in the mid-fifth century the British population was literally marginalized: swept off to the Celtic fringes of what is now Wales, Scotland and Cornwall by aggressive Anglo-Saxon incomers who took over the land and imposed their own perspective […] in a process that smacks uncomfortably of what is now termed ‘ethnic cleansing’.3

As we shall see below, the idea summarized here has been repeated over the centuries,4 but it is also true that some, regarding this view postulating 1 2

3

4

This definition of the word is taken from the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), s.v. Anglo-Saxonism, definition 3. For the development of racial Anglo-Saxonism in the mid-nineteenth century, see R. Horseman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850’, Journal of the History of Ideas 37.3 (1976), 387–410. In this article, I shall use the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to refer to the people of Germanic descent who began to settle in England in the fifth century, and whose primary language was Old English. Furthermore, I will use the term ‘invasion(s)’, as Orchard does in the following quotation, to refer to their coming to Britain at various stages, which ultimately led to them conquering a major part of it. The culmination of these invasions is referred to as the conquest. A. Orchard, ‘Beowulf and Other Battlers: An Introduction to Beowulf’, in Beowulf and Other Stories: A New Introduction to Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures, ed. R. North and J. Allard (Cambridge, 2007), p. 79. The fact that only a few Celtic loanwords are recorded in Old English has supported the idea of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Celtic people in England. More recently, however, various attempts have been made to show Celtic influence upon other aspects of Old and Middle English beyond vocabulary. See, for instance, The Celtic Roots of English, ed. M. Filppula, J. Klemola, and H. Pitkänen, Studies in Languages 37 (Joensuu, 2002).

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Kazutomo Karasawa a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing’ as exaggerating or oversimplifying the reality, have expressed different opinions assuming a higher rate of racial blending.5 In recent years, moreover, it has been challenged by some archaeogenetic researchers who, based on their DNA analyses, suggest that the indigenous population remained demographically predominant even after the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England.6 It is far beyond the scope of this article to uncover the actual facts or to make any assessment of the archaeogenetic research,7 but if this common belief substantially differs from reality, it is interesting to examine when and how it came into existence. Thus, in this article, I shall re-examine early medieval works on English/British history in the hope of elucidating when and how the historical myth came into existence. In the first section, I shall examine what Gildas and Bede wrote about the Anglo-Saxon invasions and how early modern historians misleadingly utilized them as records of the large-scale population turnover. In the second section, I shall trace the origin of the misleading treatment of Gildas’s and Bede’s accounts by the early modern historians back to Æthelweard’s Chronicle, while in the third section, I shall examine Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae as a very influential work endorsing and spreading (a modified version of) the myth fundamentally based on Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxonism as reflected in Æthelweard’s Chronicle. My purpose here is to trace the origins of the myth, and its subsequent developments in the modern era and beyond are outside the scope of this essay.

Gildas and Bede as the Foundations of the Myth The myth of the large-scale displacement of the Britons as summarized in the quotation above has been repeated over the centuries. It was already current at the beginning of the modern period in the first half of the 5

6

7

For instance, see T. B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, vol. 1 (London, 1849), pp. 4–18; W. S. Churchill, A History of the Englishspeaking Peoples, vol. 1 (London, 1956), p. 49; and S. J. Yeates, Myth and History: Ethnicity and Politics in the First Millennium British Isles (Oxford, 2012). See B. Sykes, Blood of the Isles (London, 2006); S. Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story: The Surprising Roots of the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh (New York, 2006); and I. Armit, et al., ‘The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe’, Nature 555 (2018), 190–6. There are also, however, scholars skeptical of the validity and/or accuracy of such archaeogenetic research. See, for instance, C. Hills, Origins of the English (London, 2003), 57–71; and B. Cunliffe, Britain Begins (Oxford, 2012), pp. 86–93. For detailed studies about the situations of the Britons in England after the Anglo-Saxon conquest, see Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. N. Higham, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (Woodbridge, 2007). Yeates summarizes and assesses recent archaeogenetic research in terms of the Anglo-Saxon conquest. See Yeates, Myth and History, pp. 32–47.

172

Historical Origins of a Mythical History sixteenth century, when interest in the Anglo-Saxon period increased under the reign of King Henry VIII.8 For instance, Polydore Vergil, who began to write his Anglica historia at the instigation of Henry VII in the early sixteenth century, states that the Britons were driven into Wales as a result of the Anglo-Saxon invasions.9 Later in the same century, Raphael Holinshed writes in his Chronicles that the Britons were ‘driuen eyther into Wales & Cornewall, or altogither out of the Islande to seeke newe inhabitations’.10 Holinshed’s younger contemporary William Camden also writes about the displacement of the Britons to Cornwall and Wales, which he regards as having taken place by the year 500.11 As we shall see below, John Milton also recognizes the large-scale displacement of the Britons in his The History of Britain, published in 1670. The two influential eighteenth-century historians, David Hume and Oliver Goldsmith, both claim that the Britons were forced to forsake the major part of England and were driven into Cornwall and Wales.12 In the nineteenth century, Francis Palgrave writes that ‘thus were the British people either banished from their own country, or reduced into vassalage. And the island, from the Pictish sea to the shore of the Channel, became the inheritance of the Anglo-Saxons’.13 Later in the same century, E. A. Freeman says that ‘generally the two nations did not mix, and there seem to have been hardly any Welshmen left in the English part of the country except those who were slaves’.14 J. R. Green even writes that ‘[n]ot a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground’.15 G. M. Trevelyan, in the first half 8

9

10 11

12

13 14 15

For the rise of interest in the Anglo-Saxon period and its subsequent developments, see, for instance, E. N. Adams, Old English Scholarship in England from 1566 to 1800, Yale Studies in English 55 (New Haven, 1917), pp. 11–41; H. A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and AngloSaxons (Montreal, 1982), pp. 31–50; and R. Horseman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism’. P. Vergil, Anglicae Historiae libri vigintisex (Ghent, 1556), p. 149. See also Polydore Vergil’s English History from an Early Translation Preserved among the MSS. of the Old Royal Library in the British Museum, ed. Henry Ellis, vol. 1 (London, 1846), p. 124. R. Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, vol. 1 (London, 1577), p. 3. W. Camden, Britannia sive florentissimorvm regnorvm, Angliæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ, et insularum adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio, 4th ed. (London, 1594), p. 57. See also W. Camden, Britain, or A Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Iland Adioyning, out of the Depth of Antiqvitie, trans. P. Holland (London, 1610), p. 113. O. Goldsmith, The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II (London, 1771), vol. 1, p. 46; and D. Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688, new ed., vol. 1 (London, 1773), p. 22. F. Palgrave, A History of England: Anglo-Saxon Period (London, 1831), p. 48. E. A. Freeman, Old-English History, new ed. (London, 1895), p. 40. J. R. Green, History of the English People, vol. 1 (London, 1877), p. 28.

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Kazutomo Karasawa of the twentieth century, speaks about ‘a general displacement of Celtic by Nordic’,16 and more recently in the present century, Nick Higham and Oppenheimer write about it using the term ‘genocide’.17 The source of the modern version of the myth is not always clear, since in many cases it is not specified by the authors of historical writing. Yet in the English translation of Camden’s Britannia, Gildas is mentioned in the margin of the passage on the potential racial displacement, when the topic is dealt with for the first time in the book.18 Camden himself, when writing about the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England, quotes extensively from Gildas’s De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, especially chapters 24 and 25.19 When dealing with the same topic, John Speed also quotes Gildas extensively in his The Historie of Great Britaine first published in 1611.20 Thus Gildas may well be one of the main sources of the myth recorded in the early modern period.21 Camden, as well as Speed, quotes the following two passages from Gildas’s De excidio, which may appear to describe a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (in the sense of purging by mass expulsion or killing of one ethnic group by another): Confovebatur namque, ultionis justæ præcedentium scelerum causa, de mari usque ad mare ignis orientalis, sacrilegorum manu exaggeratus, et finitimas quasque civitates agrosque populans, qui non quievit accensus, donec cunctam pene exurens insulæ superficiem, rubra occidentalem trucique oceanum lingua delamberet. In hoc ergo impetu, Assyrio olim in Judæam comparando, completur quoque in nobis, secundum historiam, ut dicitur: ‘Incenderunt igni sanctuarium tuum, in terra polluerunt tabernaculum nominis tui:’ et iterum dicit: ‘Deus, venerunt gentes in hæreditatem tuam; polluerunt templum sanctum tuum,’ &c.22 16 17

18

19 20

21

22

G. M. Trevelyan, History of England (London, 1926), p. 29. Oppenheimer, The Origins, p. 264; and N. Higham, ‘Britons in Anglo-Saxon England: An Introduction’, in Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. N. Higham, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies, pp. 3 and 6. Higham also uses ‘ethnic cleansing’ on p. 3. Camden, Britain, p. 107. He writes about the displacement three times in the same book. See pp. 107, 113, and 128; and also Camden, Britannia, pp. 56, 57, and 72. Camden, Britannia, 55–7; and Camden, Britain, 107–10. See J. Speed, The Historie of Great Britaine vnder the Conquvests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans: Their Originals, Manners, Habits, Warres, Coines, and Seales with the Successions, Liues, Acts, and Issues of the English Monarchs from Ivlivs Cæsar, vnto the Raigne of King Iames, of Famous Memorie, 3rd ed. (London, 1632), pp. 190–4. P. Sims-Williams writes that ‘[i]t is Gildas’s […] chapters […] that have been the foundation of all later accounts of the “Coming of the Saxons”’. P. SimsWilliams, ‘Gildas and the Anglo-Saxons’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 6 (1983), 1–30, at 17. All the quotations from Gildas’s De excidio are based on Monumenta Historica Britannica or Materials for the History of Britain from the Earliest Period, ed. H.

174

Historical Origins of a Mythical History (‘and the fire kindled East-ward, was set a flaming by these sacrilegious men from Sea to Sea, ceasing not to consume all the Cities and Countries bordering thereabout, vntill such time as burning well-neere all the In-land Soyle of the Iland, it licked (as it were) with the red tongue of the flame the very Westerne Ocean it selfe. In this violent inuasion, comparable to that of the Assyrians against the Land of Israel in old times, is historically fulfilled also in vs, that which the Prophet by way of sorrowfull lamentation vttereth: They haue set fire vpon thy holy places, and haue burned the dwelling place of thy Name, euen vnto the ground. And againe: O God the Heathen are come into thine heritage, thy holy Temple haue they defiled:’.)23 Itaque nonnulli miserarum reliquiarum in montibus deprehensi acervatim jugulabantur; alii fame confecti accedentes, manus hostibus dabant in ævum servituri, si tamen non continuo trucidarentur, quod altissimæ gratiæ stabat in loco; alii transmarinas petebant regiones, cum ululatu magno ceu celeusmatis vice, hoc modo sub velorum sinibus cantantes: ‘Dedisti nos tanquam oves escarum, et in gentibus dispersisti nos Deus:’ alii a montanis collibus, minacibus præruptis vallati, et densissimis saltibus marinisque rupibus vitam, suspecta semper mente, credentes, in patria licet trepidi perstabant.24 (‘some poore Remaines of Britaines being found in the Mountaines, were slaine by whole heapes: others pined by famine, came and yielded themselues vnto their enemies, vpon composition to serue them as Bond-slaues for euer, so they might not be slaughtered out of hand: which granted, was reputed a most high and especiall grace. Others went ouer Seas into Strange Lands, singing vnder their spread Sailes with a lamentable and mourning note, that of the Psalmist: Thou hast geuen vs, O Lord, as Sheepe to bee deuoured, and hast scattered vs among the Heathen. Yet others remained still in their owne Countrey (albeit in fearefull estate, and continually suspecting hazard) committing their liues and safetie to the high steepe Hilles, to craggy Mountaines naturally intrenched, to thick growne Woods and Forrests, yea and to the Rockes of the Sea’.)

In the first passage, it is said that the Anglo-Saxons invaded ‘de mari usque ad mare […] cunctam […] insulæ superficiem’ (‘from sea to sea […] all the surface of the island’), which gives the impression that their coming affected the whole land.25 The comparison with the Assyrian invasion of Israel (Samaria), by which, according to 2 Kings 17:5–6, the Assyrian king conquered the whole of Samaria, captured the Israelites there, and

23 24 25

Petrie and J. Sharpe, vol. 1 (London, 1848). Here, chapter 24. The text will hereafter be referred to as De excidio. Chapter numbers are indicated in parentheses. All the translations of Gildas’s De excidio are based on those given in Speed, The Historie. De excidio, chapter 25. For Gildas’s generalizing tone here and elsewhere about the ruin of Britain as a whole, see Sims-Williams, ‘Gildas and the Anglo-Saxons’.

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Kazutomo Karasawa deported them to Assyria, may well hint at the removal of the indigenous population from England. The second passage, where surviving Britons are said to have been enslaved or escaped to hide in remote and desolate places, is similar to what later historians write in their versions of the myth, though Gildas mentions neither Wales nor Cornwall. Under the influence of Gildas, Bede writes in a similar vein in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (I.15), where the Anglo-Saxons, whose invasion is compared to a fire just as in Gildas’s account, are said to have invaded ‘ab orientali mari usque ad occidentale … totamque prope insulae pereuntis superficiem’ (‘from the east sea to the western sea … almost the whole surface of the doomed island’),26 which is very similar to the corresponding passage by Gildas.27 Bede compares the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England to that of the Babylonian/Chaldean invasion of Jerusalem, as a result of which most of the Jewish people in Jerusalem were, according to 2 Kings 25:8–12, captured and deported to Babylonia. Thus, Bede’s version, though referring to a different biblical passage, may also well hint at a large-scale displacement of the indigenous people from England. However, it is reasonable to suppose that in those passages, neither Gildas nor Bede write about the result of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. In fact, they both write about an early phase of the Anglo-Saxon invasions;28 just after the above-quoted passages narrating the miserable state of the surviving Britons, both Gildas and Bede write that the AngloSaxons ‘returned home’,29 and then they also write about the Britons’ gradual recovery and their counterattacks starting under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus, culminating in their victory at the battle of Mount Badon (Gildas, 25–6; Bede, 1.16). The precise dates of these events are not known, but Gildas says that the siege of Mount Badon took place forty-four years before the time of writing (c.540) (26), while Bede writes that the siege took place about forty-four years after the arrival of the 26

27 28

29

All the quotations and their English translations are taken from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969). For Bede’s use of, and indebtedness to, Gildas, see P. Sims-Williams, ‘The Settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle’, ASE 12 (1983), 1–41. See N. J. Higham, The English Conquest: Gildas and Britain in the Fifth Century (Manchester, 1994), p. 43; and D. N. Dumville, ‘The Chronology of De excidio Britanniae, Book I’, in Gildas: New Approaches, ed. M. Lapidge and D. N. Dumville, Studies in Celtic History 5 (Woodbridge, 1984), p. 75. It is not clear what Gildas and Bede mean by domum (‘home’) in this context, but Colgrave and Mynors note that ‘Bede borrows the word from Gildas but it can hardly mean more than that the invaders returned to their headquarters on some island or islands near the coast, perhaps Thanet’. See Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, p. 52. See also J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1988), p. 25.

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Historical Origins of a Mythical History Anglo-Saxons (1.16). Thus the devastating defeat of the Britons narrated earlier is that taking place probably in the latter half of the fifth century, some decades after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, and before the battle of Mount Badon.30 But it is implausible that the ‘ethnic cleansing’, if any, had already taken place as early as the latter half of the fifth century.31 As we have just seen, both Gildas and Bede imply that they are writing about earlier stages of the invasions.32 Bede, in fact, writes that a generation after this battle and before the coming of Augustine to Britain at the end of the sixth century, there was a certain period without any Anglo-Saxon invasions, when the Britons started civil wars (1.22). Gildas himself seems to have lived in this period or a little later, as he writes that the foreign war is over but civil troubles remain, and that his generation is ignorant of the earlier troublesome time and is living in peace without Anglo-Saxon invasions (26). Thus, neither Gildas nor Bede really confirm that there was a large-scale displacement of the Britons by the Anglo-Saxons, yet they seem to have been utilized by later historians as if they were recording it. Especially, Camden clearly bases himself on Gildas as he extensively quotes him when presenting the displacement of the Britons as having taken place by the year 500. But if neither Gildas nor Bede write about such an event, why did Camden and others write about it based on them? In order to answer the question, we need to examine how the issue had been treated by medieval historians after Gildas and Bede.

30

31

32

As regards the date of the battle of Mount Badon, it is not certain but it is generally considered (based on Bede, who dates the arrival of the AngloSaxons to 449) that it took place around the year 500. See, for instance F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1947), p. 3; Sims-Williams, ‘The Settlement of England’, 15; Dumville, ‘The Chronology’, p. 83; and Cunliffe, Britain Begins, p. 402. Higham, on the other hand, dates the battle to 430–440 in The English Conquest, p. 137. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records battles taking place in the sixth century between the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, etc. under 508, 514, 519, 527, 552, 556, 571, 577, 584, etc. In all of these entries, the Anglo-Saxons are said to have defeated the Britons, and in some records, it is also stated that they captured villages and cities as a result (see, for instance, the entries under 571, 577, and 584), which implies that there were still not a few villages and cities occupied by the Britons in those days. Gildas writes nothing about war taking place after the battle of Mount Badon, and Sims-Williams writes that ‘Gildas seems not to envisage Britain, or part of Britain, becoming a “kingdom of the Saxons”’, in his ‘Gildas and the AngloSaxons’, p. 29. See also Higham, The English Conquest, p. 52. The situation is almost the same as regards Bede. See Higham, ‘Britons in Anglo-Saxon England’, p. 2.

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Æthelweard: the Earliest Record of the Myth and His Influence Upon Later Historians Neither Gildas nor Bede state at what point after the battle of Mount Badon the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England was completed or what became of the Britons living in England in the process of the conquest.33 The AngloSaxon Chronicle, though occasionally recording the defeats and flights of the Britons,34 does not say anything specific about these issues either. On the other hand, the following passage from Æthelweard’s Chronicle, written in the late tenth century, is noteworthy in that it suggests a permanent displacement of the Britons from major parts of England as a result of the Anglo-Saxon conquest: Magis stipendia poscunt; renuunt Brittanni; mouent arma; fit discordia nimis, et, ut ante præfati sumus, a finibus eos pellunt in arcta promontoria quædam, et ipsi possessores a mare ad mare usque in præsentem diem existunt.35 (1.4) (‘They [the Anglo-Saxons] made increasing demands for payments and the Britons refused; they took up arms, and there was a clash on a scale all too great. As we said above, they expelled them over their boundaries into certain narrow promontories, and they themselves are possessors from sea to sea up to this present day’.)

From near the end of Book 1 Chapter 1 to the end of Chapter 4, Æthelweard, chiefly based on Bede,36 summarizes the process of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England, from the time prior to their arrival in Britain. As the words ‘ut ante præfati sumus’ (‘as we said above’) suggest, the result of the conquest is briefly preannounced in the previous chapter, 37 but 33

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At the end of Book 1 of his Historia ecclesiastica, Bede writes of King Æthelfrith of Northumbria, that ‘Nemo enim in tribunis, nemo in regibus plures eorum terras, exterminatis uel subiugatis indigenis, aut tributaries genti Anglorum aut habitabiles fecit’ (‘no ruler or king had subjected more land to the English race or settled it, having first either exterminated or conquered the natives’), 1.34. Yet this is generally given less importance by later historians, perhaps because it is regarded as local affairs in a remote place. Æthelweard, in his Chronicle, does not mention Æthelfrith’s battles against the Britons, whereas William of Malmesbury writes that Bede gives him importance because he is a Northumbrian (1.47.1). See footnote 31. All the quotations and translations of Æthelweard’s Chronicle are based on The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. Alistair Campbell (London, 1962). Additions to the translation in square brackets are my own. For Æthelweard’s sources of this part of the Chronicle, see Campbell, ‘Content and Sources’, in The Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. xvii. Æthelweard, when writing about the Anglo-Saxon invasions, preannounces the result, saying in 1.3 that ‘[a]c bella gessere contra Brittannos, pellentes eos a finibus eorum magna cum clade, et ipsi semper uictores’ (‘They made wars

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Historical Origins of a Mythical History the quoted passage, placed at the end of Chapter 4, concludes the whole summary and shows once more the result of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. What it says is similar to what Gildas and Bede write, and especially the words a mare ad mare (‘from sea to sea’) used here are reminiscent of their words quoted above, where even the word usque (‘up to’), though functioning in a different way, is used. But what is unique about Æthelweard in this passage is that he adds the phrase usque in præsentem diem (‘up to this present day’), clearly stating that the Britons were displaced to the periphery not temporarily but permanently. Thus Æthelweard, modifying Gildas and Bede, recognizes a large-scale permanent displacement of the Britons from major parts of England. Yet at the same time, it should be noted that like Gildas and Bede, Æthelweard does not specify to where they escaped, but only says that they were expelled to ‘certain narrow promontories’. Just after the quoted passage, Æthelweard begins a new chapter, where he gives brief accounts of historic events in chronological order, paraphrasing entries of a lost version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.38 His list of events begins with the arrival of Hengest and Horsa in 449, and ends with the flight of King Ceawlin in 592 and his death in the next year. His list consists of thirty entries and twenty of them include reference to battles against the Britons (whereas most of the others concern the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms or royal successions).39 This is the last chapter of Book 1, and in Book 2 the main topics are the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons, chiefly based on Bede, and politics, royal successions, and warfare among the Anglo-Saxons based on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.40 It is true that there are occasional references to battles against the Britons even in Book 2, as in chapters 3, 6, 7, 9, 16, and 18, but all these references are brief and certainly not the main topic of each chapter. Thus, whereas Book 1 focuses on the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England, Book 2 focuses on the history of the post-conquest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In this larger context, Æthelweard, intentionally or unintentionally, establishes a framework for the history of early Anglo-Saxon England in which the conquest (with large-scale displacement of the Britons) is viewed as mostly complete by the end of the sixth century, before the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons.41

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against the Britons and cast them over their boundaries with great slaughter, and they were themselves always victors’). For Æthelweard’s sources of this part of the Chronicle, see Campbell, ‘Content and Sources’, p. xvii. The twenty entries including the reference to battles against the Britons are those for the years 449, 455, 457, 465, 473, 477, 485, 491, 494, 508, 514, 519, 527, 530, 552, 556, 571, 577, 584, and 592/593. For the sources of Book 2, see Campbell, ‘Content and Sources’, p. xvii. Bede, on the other hand, ends his Book 1 with reference to Augustine’s missionary work in England (1.23–33) and King Æthelfrith of Northumbria’s wars

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Kazutomo Karasawa When William of Malmesbury wrote the following passage in the early twelfth century, he seems to have been working in the tradition of Æthelweard:42 Britannos, qui temporibus patris et aui uel pretento deditionis umbone uel claustrorum muralium obiectu Gloecestrae et Cirecestrae et Bathoniae exitium effugerant, infesta persecutus animositate urbibus exuit et in confragosa saltuosaque loca hodieque detrusit.43 (Gesta regum Anglorum, 1.17.1) (‘The British, who in the days of his [Ceawlin’s] father [Cynric] and grandfather [Cerdic], protected either by a show of surrender or by the defence of walls, had escaped the fate of Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, he [Ceawlin] savagely pursued, expelled them from their cities, and drove them into the land of rocks and forests, where they yet remain today’.)

This is part of the account of King Ceawlin’s reign (560–93). As we have seen above, Æthelweard deals with it at the very end of Book 1 of his Chronicle, as if he regards it as the last stage of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. The ‘fate of Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath’ in this passage refers to the result of the battle that took place in 577,44 about which Hunter Blair writes that ‘[i]t forms a notable landmark in the history of the invasions, since it brought English rule to the western sea for the first time and thereby cut the land communications between the Welsh of Wales and the midlands and their kinsmen of the south-western peninsula’.45 The situation after the battle presented here reminds us of that described in the above-quoted Bede’s account, that the Anglo-Saxons ravaged cities and countryside ‘from the east sea to the western sea’. The defeat of the Britons in this battle seems to have been quite serious, with three kings being killed. William writes in the passage quoted that by this and subsequent battles King Ceawlin pursued the Britons, who had managed to survive in England during the reigns of the previous two kings (reigning from 519 to 560), and chased them to rocky lands and forests. This reminds us of what Æthelweard, based on Bede, wrote in the lines quoted above.

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against the Britons and the Irish in 603 (1.34), the latter of which Æthelweard does not mention in his Chronicle. William refers to Æthelweard in the prologue of Gesta regum Anglorum, and is said to be ‘the only medieval writer to use Æthelweard’s Chronicle’. See William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. R. M. Thomson, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1999), p. 15. All the quotations of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum and their English translations are taken from William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1998). Additions to the translation in square brackets are my own. This battle is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under 577, and Æthelweard gives a faithful Latin translation of it in his Chronicle (1.5), whereas Bede does not mention it. P. H. Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1956), p. 35.

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Historical Origins of a Mythical History It should also be noted that like Æthelweard, William does not specify to where the Britons escaped but just says that they were driven to ‘the land of rocks and forests’. In an earlier chapter William (like Æthelweard), just after writing about the victory of the Britons at the battle of Mount Badon and the subsequent gradual recovery of the Anglo-Saxons, preannounces the displacement of the Britons from major parts of England without specifying its date but vaguely writing that haec processu annorum (‘this happened in the course of time’) (1.8.3). In the passage quoted above, William, on the other hand, again just like Æthelweard, presents the largescale displacement of the Britons taking place in the late sixth century as permanent, writing that they remain in those desolate places hodieque (‘to this day’).46 The following passage from Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, written in the first half of the fourteenth century, also reflects this tradition: Cujus inconstantiam comperientes Saxones, advocaverunt regem Africanum Gurmundum de Hibernia, quam nuper sibi subjugaverat, qui junctis viribus ipsum Careticum de urbe in urbem fugaverunt, et tandem in Cirencestre obsederunt. Post hoc ipsum Careticum cum gente sua Britannica usque in Walliam ultra Sabrinum mare detruserunt, Loegriam quoque ferro et flamma vastaverunt. Atque extunc Britones monarchiam amiserunt.47 (5.6) (‘The Saxons, aware of his inconstancy, invited King Africanus Gormund from Ireland, which he had recently subjugated. He, together with people joining him, chased Keredic himself from city to city, and eventually besieged him in Cirencester. After this, they expelled Keredic himself with his British people beyond the River Severn to Wales, and devastated Loegria with swords and fire. And since that time, the Britons have given up the kingdom’.)

As the reference to King Gormund shows, Higden bases himself on Geoffrey of Monmouth, but he differs from Geoffrey as regards the date of the completion of the Anglo-Saxon conquest. In Geoffrey’s account, as we shall see in the next section, the conquest does not end here but 46

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As pointed out in Thomson’s commentary, William of Malmesbury writes about the event in a similar way in Chapter 215 of Gesta pontificum Anglorum. See William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. R. M. Thomson, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1999), p. 28. The passage is quoted from Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. J. R. Lumby, vol. 5 (London, 1874), p. 338. The translation here is my own. In some manuscripts, the last sentence reads: ‘Atque extunc Britones monarchiam nusquam recuperarunt’ (‘and since that time, the Britons never recovered the kingdom’). In the late fourteenth-century translation by John Trevisa, the corresponding part reads ‘and from þat tyme forþwarde þe Britouns loste þe hole kyngdom of Bretayne’. The Middle English text is quoted from Polychronicon, ed. J. R. Lumby, pp. 341–3.

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Kazutomo Karasawa the process continues until the latter half of the seventh century. On the other hand, Higden writes that the Britons were driven to Wales and lost the kingdom at the time of King Keredic, the mythical fifth king of Britain after Arthur, supposedly reigning in the latter half of the sixth century (but Higden’s reference to Wales as the place to which the Britons escaped reflects the influence of Geoffrey). Here Higden seems to combine Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account up to this point with the date of the Æthelweardian tradition. The Æthelweardian tradition was handed down to the early modern period, for instance, to Milton, who wrote as follows in his The History of Britain: Thus omitting Fables, we have the view of what with reason can be rely’d on for truth, don in Britain, since the Romans forsook it. Wherein we have heard the many Miseries and Desolations, brought by Divine Hand on a perverse Nation; driv’n, when nothing else would reform them, out of a fair Country, into a Mountanous and Barren Corner, by Strangers and Pagans.48

When writing this book, Milton extensively consulted both Æthelweard’s Chronicle and William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum, as his frequent reference to them in the margin shows. This passage appears just after the reference to the end of King Ceawlin’s reign, and it concludes Book 3, whose main topic is the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England.49 Writing in the early eighteenth century, Laurence Echard also follows the same tradition; just after the reference to the death of King Ceawlin, he concludes Chapter 2 of his The History of England with reference to the displacement of the Britons, ending with the above-quoted Milton’s words slightly altered.50 The next chapter deals with the history after the conquest, and it is clear that Echard follows the tradition handed down from Æthelweard (through Milton). When writing about the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England in Book 1 of his Chronicle, Æthelweard generally follows Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but he is unique in that he recognizes a large-scale permanent displacement of the Britons from major parts of England, which he suggests was mostly completed by the end of the sixth century. Though the work is often regarded as just ‘a Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon 48

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J. Milton, The History of Britain that Part Especially Now Call’d England from the First Traditional Beginning Continu’d to the Norman Conquest (London, 1670), p. 158. Book 3 of Milton’s The History of Britain (pp. 117–59) begins with the account of post-Roman Britain starting from the year 418 and then moves to issues related to the Anglo-Saxon invasions and conquest. Æthelweard and William of Malmesbury, together with Gildas and Bede, are among his sources as he frequently mentions them in the margins. L. Echard, The History of England from the First Entrance of Julius Cæsar and the Romans to the End of the Reign of King James the First (London, 1707), vol. 1, p. 44.

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Historical Origins of a Mythical History Chronicle’,51 it is an important work from the perspective of the formation of the myth of the large-scale displacement of the Britons, since it is the earliest work clearly recognizing it. Though it is not certain whether Æthelweard himself is responsible for the creation of the myth rather than just following an existing tradition (written or unwritten), his account contributed to the formation of medieval and modern versions of the myth, as influential historians such as William of Malmesbury and Milton actually consulted and followed him in their books. Thus, one of the roots of modern racial Anglo-Saxonism can be traced back to Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxonism reflected in Æthelweard’s Chronicle.52

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Adaptation of the Myth In the previous sections, I discussed, apart from Gildas’s De excidio, major works focusing on the conquering Anglo-Saxons, whereas in this section I shall examine how the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England is treated in works focusing more on the conquered. As we have seen, Gildas, writing in the sixth century, is the earliest to deal with the topic, but he writes only about early stages of the invasions and nothing about the result of the conquest. The ninth-century Historia Brittonum, traditionally ascribed to Nennius, deals with events up to the 680s, including King Arthur’s battles against the Anglo-Saxons, but does not mention anything about the large-scale displacement of the Britons as a result of the conquest. On the other hand, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s highly influential work, Historia regum Britanniae, written in the second quarter of the twelfth century, fully deals with the topic. Establishing the myth of the Trojan foundation of Britain as well as giving the first detailed account of King Arthur and his time, Historia regum Britanniae provides numerous unique details.53 As far as the dis51

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S. B. Greenfield and D. G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York, 1986), p. 26; S. Miller, ‘Æthelweard’, in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge, et al. (Oxford, 1999), p. 18; H. Magennis, The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge, 2011), p. 53; M. Tedford, ‘Æthelweard’, in The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, ed. S. Echard, et al., vol. 1 (Chichester, 2017), p. 28. Regarding Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxonism and Æthelweard, see J. D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Southern Gate, 2015), p. 5. Historia regum Britanniae has been interpreted in various ways, but how it should be understood as a whole, or what its main purpose could be, does not affect my argument here, as my main concern is that its account of the AngloSaxon conquest of Britain, though substantially different in its details, is fundamentally in line with those by earlier authors. For a summary of interpretations of the work as a whole, see, for instance, J. Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge, 2000),

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Kazutomo Karasawa placement of the Britons is concerned, however, Geoffrey is under the influence of the traditions established by Gildas, Bede, and Æthelweard, though changing and adding various details. The following passage on the battle between Gormund and Keredic, which leads to a large-scale displacement of the Britons from England, shows a clear influence of the Gildas tradition: Mox, depopulans agros, ignem cumulauit in finitimas quasque ciuitates, qui non quieuit accensus donec cunctam paene superficiem insulae a mari usque ad mare exussit ita ut cunctae coloniae crebris arietibus omnesque coloni cum sacerdotibus ecclesiae mucronibus undique micantibus ac flammis crepitantibus simul humi sternerentur. Diffugiebant ergo reliquiae, tantis cladibus affectae, quocumque tutamen ipsis cedentibus patebat.54 (11.184) (‘Then ravaging the fields, he [Gormund] heaped up against all the surrounding cities a fire which, once kindled, did not die down until it scorched almost the whole surface of the island from coast to coast, so that all the towns, along with their people and the priests of their churches, were laid in the dust by his relentless battering-rams, as blades flashed and flames crackled all around. The survivors, shocked by the catastrophe, fled to any place of safety they could find’.)

Gormund is said to be the king of the Africans conquering Ireland, allying with the Saxons and attacking Keredic, the alleged fifth king of Britain after Arthur. Though Gormund and his African troops do not appear in Gildas’s De excidio, the account representing the onslaught of the invaders as a fire reaching from coast to coast seems to be based on the Gildas tradition. The following passage on the aftermath of the battle is generally in line with that tradition: Postquam autem ut praedictum est infaustus tyrannus cum innumerabilibus Affricanorum milibus totam fere insulam uastauit, maiorem partem eius, quae Loegria uocabatur, praebuit Saxonibus, quorum proditione appli-

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pp. 19–39 and L. Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 60. See also M. A. Faletra, ‘Narrating the Matter of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Norman Colonization of Wales’, The Chaucer Review 35 (2000), 60–85; P. Dalton, ‘The Topical Concerns of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie: History, Prophecy, Peacemaking, and English Identity in the Twelfth Century’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 688–712; and John D. Niles, ‘The Wasteland of Loegria: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Reinvention of the Anglo-Saxon Past’, in Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. William F. Gentrup, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 1 (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 1–18. All references, both text and translation, to the Historia regum Britannie are taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. M. D. Reeve and trans. N. Wright, Arthurian Studies 69 (Woodbridge, 2007). Additions to the translation in square brackets are my own.

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Historical Origins of a Mythical History cuerat. Secesserunt itaque Britonum reliquiae in occidentalibus regni partibus, Cornubiam uidelicet atque Gualias, unde crebras et ferales irruptiones incessanter hostibus fecerunt. (11.186) (‘When, as I have said, that ill-omened usurper and his countless thousands of Africans had laid waste almost the entire island, he gave the largest portion of it, called Loegria, to the Saxons, through whose treachery he had landed. The remnants of the Britons had retreated to Cornwall and Wales, the western parts of the kingdom, from where they continued to launch frequent damaging incursions’.)

As Gormund and his African troops are not part of that tradition, the reference to them is unique, but the rest of the passage follows the tradition. However, it is noteworthy that Geoffrey mentions Cornwall and Wales as the places to which the Britons escaped, whereas Gildas, Bede, Æthelweard, and William of Malmesbury do not specify named places they escaped to. According to Geoffrey, Keredic succeeds the historical King Malgo or Maelgwn, who died in 547 according to the Annales Cambriae.55 Thus, Geoffrey likely viewed the battle and the subsequent displacement of the Britons as taking place in the latter half of the sixth century, which roughly agrees with the Æthelweardian tradition. In fact, Augustine’s arrival to convert the Anglo-Saxons at the end of the sixth century is treated as an event taking place in the aftermath of the battle mentioned in the quotation (11.188). From this perspective, Geoffrey follows the tradition recorded by Æthelweard rather than Gildas or Bede, who writes about a temporary displacement taking place probably in the latter half of the fifth century. However, Geoffrey’s account of the Anglo-Saxon conquest does not end here; unlike Æthelweard, he does not say that the Britons remain displaced ‘to this day’. Instead, the story continues that the Britons start to fight back again and recover the rule of Southumbria under King Cadvan (11.190); his son King Cadwallo at one point becomes so overwhelmingly powerful that he even tries to eradicate the Anglo-Saxons from Britain (11.198). Under the reign of Cadwallo’s son, Cadwallader, however, British society is devastated by civil wars, famine, and plague, and the Britons, unable to live in Britain any longer, leave for Brittany (11.203). Thus, according to Geoffrey, the Britons abandon Britain under the reign of King Cadwallader in the latter half of the seventh century and, as a result, the Anglo-Saxons begin to occupy the whole island, whereas only a small number of Britons remain in Wales (11.204). 55

The date of death of Maelgwn is not known precisely, but it is generally agreed, in accordance with the record in the Annales Cambriae, that it is in the mid-six century. Gildas mentions him as his contemporary in De excidio 33, which is traditionally dated c. 540.

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Kazutomo Karasawa Geoffrey recognizes two occasions where a large-scale displacement of the Britons occurred; one is temporary, taking place in the latter half of the sixth century, and the other is permanent, taking place in the latter half of the seventh century. When writing about the first displacement, he basically follows the Gildas tradition, mentioning a fire spreading from coast to coast and regarding it as temporary, but he is in line with the Æthelweardian tradition about its date. As to the second, permanent displacement, Geoffrey’s account, including the recovery of the British kingdom and the final abandonment of it, is unique, whereas when dealing with the final result, that is, the permanent displacement of the Britons and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon domination, he is again in line with the Æthelweardian tradition. Thus Geoffrey, making many alterations and additions, postpones the completion of the Anglo-Saxon conquest to the latter half of the seventh century, but he shares the same conclusion with Æthelweard by recognizing a large-scale permanent displacement of the Britons. Geoffrey’s Historia was highly influential throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, and its endorsement of the existence of a large-scale permanent displacement of the Britons must have exerted a significant influence upon later historians, which may well be perceived in their frequent reference to Cornwall and/or Wales as places to which the Britons escaped. Laȝamon’s Brut, a translation of Wace’s Roman de Brut, which is derived from Geoffrey’s Historia, deals with the topic at the end of the work, where the Britons, having lost major parts of Britain after King Cadwallader had left for Brittany, are said to gather together in Wales, and live there permanently (16082–93).56 The late-thirteenth-century historian Robert of Gloucester also follows Geoffrey quite faithfully, and writes that after the Britons left, the Anglo-Saxons found Britain desolate from Cornwall to Northumberland, with some miserable Britons living in Wales (5074–83).57 In the first half of the sixteenth century, Polydore Vergil writes about two large-scale displacements of the Britons, who are said to have left England permanently under the reign of Cadwallader.58 Richard Baker, also following Geoffrey, regards the displacement of the Britons as taking place under the same king’s reign, writing, in his A Chronicle of the Kings of 56 57 58

Laȝamon: Brut, ed. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, vol. 2, EETS o.s. 277 (Oxford, 1978), p. 838. The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, ed. W. A. Wright, vol. 1 (London, 1887), pp. 369–70. See Vergil, Anglica historia, pp. 138–9 and 148–9; Polydore Vergil’s English History, pp. 116 and 124. As regards the dates of the two displacements, however, Vergil differs from Geoffrey; he follows Gildas as regards the first, temporary displacement, dating it before the battle of Mount Badon, whereas, though following Geoffrey’s account, he dates the second, permanent displacement to the year 600, a date more or less in line with the Æthelweardian tradition. Thus, Vergil mixes up the Gildas, Æthelweard, and Geoffrey traditions.

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Historical Origins of a Mythical History England, that ‘the Saxons taking advantage of his [Cadwallader’s] absence, came over in swarms, and dispossessed the forlorn Britains of all they had, and divided the Land amongst themselves […] So that Britain now was no longer Britain, but a Colony of the Saxons’.59 Similarly, after writing about Cadwallader’s abandonment of Britain, the author of The History of the Principality of Wales also writes that ‘[t]he Britains being thus outed of their Country by the Conquering Saxons, retired beyond the River Severn, and therein fortified themselves which Country thereupon came to be called Wales and the People Walsh or Welchmen’.60 As an epoch-making work establishing a unique literary/historical tradition, Geoffrey’s Historia was highly influential and it must have greatly reinforced the myth of the large-scale permanent displacement of the Britons. His influence upon later historians may well be reflected in their frequent reference to Cornwall and/or Wales as the places to which the Britons are said to have escaped, as earlier historians do not specify where they were driven. Geoffrey’s account, though giving a different date and details, is in line with the Æthelweardian tradition in that it recognizes a large-scale permanent displacement of the Britons from major parts of England. His endorsement reflects that the myth had been so widely diffused by the first half of the twelfth century that Geoffrey, though introducing substantial additions and alterations, could not help but follow the very basic ‘fact’ of Anglo-Saxon elimination of the Britons from England.

Conclusion Although Gildas writes only about the earlier stages of the Anglo-Saxon invasions of England and nothing about its result, later historians, directly or indirectly based on Gildas, often write about the Anglo-Saxon conquest resulting in a large-scale permanent displacement of the Britons. As far as I can find, this tradition can be traced back to the late tenth-century Æthelweard, who first recorded a modified version of the account by Gildas/Bede, recognizing the permanent displacement of the Britons.61 59 60 61

R. Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England from the Time of the Romans Government unto the Death of King James (1643; repr. London, 1670), pp. 4–5. R. B., The History of the Principality of Wales (London, 1695), p. 26. R. B. stands for Robert Burton, a pseudonym used by Nathaniel Crouch (c. 1640–1725). In her detailed study on Anglo-Saxon studies in the sixteenth century, Brackmann writes that ‘if we are to understand the origin of “Anglo-Saxon England”, we must not only look at what it was that Nowell and Lambarde found in their manuscripts, but what they were looking for when they opened them’. This could also be applied to Æthelweard, when he wrote the abbreviated version of the history of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England based on the Gildas/Bede tradition. See Rebecca Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention

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Kazutomo Karasawa He suggests that the conquest and subsequent displacement of the Britons was mostly completed by the end of the sixth century. William of Malmesbury seems to follow him in his Gesta regum Anglorum, while Milton, consulting both Æthelweard and William of Malmesbury, passed on the tradition to the early modern period. Geoffrey of Monmouth, though establishing a unique variant of the myth from the perspective of the conquered, also seems to be under the influence of this tradition regarding the date of the first displacement of the Britons and the result of the Anglo-Saxon conquest; Geoffrey disagrees with Æthelweard with regard to the date of the permanent displacement and the process leading up to it, but he shares the conclusion, recognizing the eventual elimination of the Britons from England. Geoffrey’s version of the myth was inherited by Laȝamon, Robert of Gloucester and many other medieval and early modern historians. Thus the myth of the permanent displacement of the Britons is endorsed not only by historians writing from the perspective of the conquerors but also by those writing from the perspective of the conquered. As seen in the case of Higden’s Polychronicon, these two traditions were occasionally mixed and developed into minor variants. As the myth based on a modified version of Gildas had been repeated by major medieval historians, early modern historians (such as Camden) began to inaccurately regard Gildas’s account itself as a record of the conquest and date its completion around 500. These and other variants are occasionally intermingled and developed into still more minor variants as in the case of Vergil, where the accounts of Gildas and Geoffrey of Monmouth merge, while the date adopted is in line with the Æthelweardian tradition. The versions of the myth of the displacement of the Britons vary substantially over the supposed date, and the process that led up to it. Clearly the myth has been established on very flimsy foundations. In fact, the earliest version, the account by Æthelweard, is a simplified and modified version of Gildas/Bede, but there is nothing to justify his small but significant modification. Though flimsy from the historiographical point of view, the myth seems to have already been established by the first half of the twelfth century, when it was recognized and followed by both William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth. Thus, it is most likely that the tradition had been nurtured in the Anglo-Saxon period, as Æthelweard actually attests, and was inherited and reinforced by post-Anglo-Saxon medieval historians including such an influential figure as Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote about the full evacuation of the Britons from England. Repeated use of the myth by medieval historians secured its firm position in British history, and as a result, Holinshed, Camden, Speed, and other major early modern historians duly followed the tradition. The of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English, Studies in Renaissance Literature 30 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 224.

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Historical Origins of a Mythical History myth provided a ‘historical’ basis to Anglo-Saxonism with racial emphases when it began to flourish and spread by the mid-nineteenth century.62 Thus, the ultimate origin of the myth supporting modern racial AngloSaxonism can be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon period, and in that sense, Anglo-Saxon racial Anglo-Saxonism lies at the root of modern racial Anglo-Saxonism.

62

Regarding the rise of racial Anglo-Saxonism, see Horseman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism’.

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Chapter 9 Boniface and Bede in the Pacific: Exploring Anamorphic Comparisons between the Hiberno-Saxon Missions and the Anglican Melanesian Mission1 Michael W. Scott Portal to the Pacific

V

isitors to the Cathedral Church of St Peter at Exeter may not know it, but as they proceed along the nave, going deeper and deeper into this forest-like space, they are approaching an opening – a passageway between the Wessex of Kings Ine and Æthelheard and the southwest Pacific island of Nukapu in the days of Chiefs Moto and Taula. This transglobal and trans-temporal portal stands on the north side of the nave and is known as the Martyrs’ Pulpit. To casual tourists, it shows no signs of being a link between two hemispheres; it is well disguised as a fine example of Victorian Gothic Revival. But a few facts about the relations that went into the making of this object cause it to appear differently. It is the visual epitome of a grand comparison, a network of associations that, in the mid nineteenth century, opened mutually generating channels of communication between Northern Europe and the Pacific. 1

An earlier version of this chapter was given as the opening keynote lecture at the 2017 meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (now known as the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. I thank the society’s board – and especially the conference organizer, Karen Jolly – for inviting me to address the meeting. As a visitant from anthropology to the field of early medieval studies, I am grateful for the warm collegiality with which I was received and the responses my keynote elicited. I acknowledge Uluwehi Hopkins’s welcome to me and the other participants as we visited her ancestral places on the island of Oahu. This chapter has benefitted from engaged discussions with Krista Ovist, Sharon Rowley, Haruko ‘Hal’ Momma, Kathleen Davis, Jane Hawkes, Alex Golub, several anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this volume, Karen Jolly and Britton Brooks. I am also grateful to the Rt Revd James Mason, former Bishop of Hanuato‘o, and his family who shared their decolonizing Solomon Islands perspectives on so-called ‘reverse mission’ when my wife and I were guests of his family, at Plympton, Devon, in 2007 – a research visit funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant No: RES-000-23-1170). This chapter is made freely available under the OA licence CC BY 4.0.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific Designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the Martyrs’ Pulpit was erected in 1877. It is decorated with images of six men honoured by Christians as having died for the sake of the gospel (Fig. 9.1). Three corner niches depict biblical martyrs: St John the Baptist, St Stephen, and St Paul. Three lateral reliefs portray scenes in the lives of three British martyrs. On one side, St Alban prays as the executioner raises his sword. On the opposite side, St Boniface sails from Britain to preach on the Continent, where he will die at the hands of the Frisians in 754. But the front of the pulpit bears the main tableau (Fig. 9.2). Here, by European reckoning, it is 20 September 1871 on Nukapu, a small island roughly fourteen hundred miles northeast of Australia. In a composition evocative of the descent from the cross, three Nukapuans lower the body of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson, wrapped in a palm leaf mat, into a canoe. Soon, crew from the mission vessel – the Southern Cross, represented in the distance under sail – will send the ship’s boat to collect their murdered leader. Clearly, this object is staging many simultaneous comparisons, not only among the six martyrs depicted but also pointing back to Christ and encompassing all martyrs, past and future; carved around the base of the reliefs are the words of the Te Deum, ‘[t]he noble army of martyrs praise Thee’. Two figures, nevertheless, stand out: Bishop Patteson and St Boniface. Patteson is salient because his death occasioned the making of the pulpit and he is thus the driving figure behind the associations that compose its iconography. But, among those associations, his links with Boniface are strongest. Like Alban, both men were British martyrs, but both furthermore became bishops while engaged in mission work, and – as emphasized by the presence of a ship in each of their tableaux – both sailed overseas and died abroad. More than any aesthetic detail on the pulpit itself, however, the pulpit’s location is what marks these figures as the primary terms of comparison. As elaborated below, both Boniface and Patteson are closely tied to Exeter. Boniface – originally known as Winfrith – lived in the late seventh and early eighth centuries.2 Popular tradition identifies Crediton, near Exeter, as his birthplace. According to his earliest biographer, St Willibald, he entered a monastery at Exeter in his youth and was educated there by Abbot Wulfhard. Inspired by the work of St Willibrord, who was then a missionary in what are now the Low Countries, Winfrith joined him around 716. After initial setbacks, he travelled to Rome, where Pope Gregory II renamed him Boniface and made him a bishop, sending him beyond the Low Countries into Germania.

2

For a review of Bonifatian scholarship, including editions and translations of primary and secondary sources, see J.-H. Clay, In the Shadow of Death: Saint Boniface and the Conversion of Hessia, 721–54 (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 19–31.

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Michael W. Scott

Figure 9.1 The Martyrs’ Pulpit, Exeter Cathedral, by George Gilbert Scott, installed 1877 (Andrew Dickson White Architectural Photograph Collection, #15-5-3090. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library), public domain.

John Coleridge Patteson was born in London in 1827, but had family connections to Devonshire.3 His mother, Francis Duke Coleridge, was a niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and sent her son to be educated, like the poet, at The King’s School, Ottery St Mary, east of Exeter. Later, the family relocated to Devonshire, and after attending Eton and Oxford, Patteson returned to the area to take up his first positions in the Church 3

On Patteson, see C. M. Yonge, Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands, 2 vols (London, 1874).

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Figure 9.2 The Martyrs’ Pulpit, Exeter Cathedral, detail depicting the death of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson (Andrew Dickson White Architectural Photograph Collection, #15-5-3090. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library), public domain.

Michael W. Scott of England. It was in Exeter Cathedral, therefore, that he was ordained, first to the diaconate in 1853, and then to the priesthood in 1854. Inspired by the work being done in New Zealand by George Augustus Selwyn, the first bishop appointed through the Colonial Bishoprics Fund in 1841, Patteson left England in 1855 to serve as Selwyn’s chaplain. Selwyn’s missionary see initially comprised not only New Zealand but also other parts of Polynesia and much of Melanesia. As this was too much territory to cover, Selwyn soon ceded interest in the greater part of Polynesia beyond New Zealand to other missionary organizations. But even this reduced area, which still included parts of present-day Solomon Islands and northern Vanuatu, proved unwieldy, necessitating a further split. Almost from the beginning, Selwyn’s New Zealand-based outreach to these island groups had been referred to as ‘the Melanesian Mission’. In 1861 this term became synonymous with a new missionary see, and Patteson became its first bishop, consecrated with the title ‘Missionary Bishop among the Western Islands of the Pacific Ocean’. This new see stretched from the central Solomon Islands to the Banks and Torres Islands and into the northern New Hebrides (now part of Vanuatu), with the Santa Cruz and Reef Islands – where Nukapu lies – situated in between.4 These perceived parallels between the lives of Boniface and Patteson form the core comparison around which the Martyrs’ Pulpit was built. As they inhere in the pulpit today, these parallels are not hidden, but neither are they self-evident; it takes a certain historically informed perspective to bring them into view. This, I suggest, gives the pulpit a kind of anamorphic quality. In Western art, the classic example of an anamorphic image is The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, completed in 1533.5 When viewing this painting head-on, one sees an unidentifiable object in the centre foreground. If, however, when passing the canvas on one’s left, one glances back from an acute angle, this object appears as a skull, a memento mori. In the case of the Martyrs’ Pulpit, what appears in the moment of anamorphic shift in perspective is a co-constituting link, an ongoing relationship through which North Atlantic pasts shape Pacific histories, and vice-versa.

4

5

R. M. Ross, ‘Evolution of the Melanesian Bishopric’, New Zealand Journal of History 16, no. 2 (1982), 122–45. The classic general work on the early Anglican mission in this region is D. Hilliard, God’s Gentlemen: A History of the Melanesian Mission, 1849–1942 (St Lucia, Queensland, 1978). See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/hans-holbein-the-youngerthe-ambassadors.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific

Anamorphic Comparison For several decades, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have been wary of comparison for reasons the Martyrs’ Pulpit seems to justify. As my analysis of the anamorphic dynamics of the pulpit suggests, comparisons construct – even invent – rather than discover the terms they compare. They privilege fortuitous similarities to the neglect of dissimilarities and follow chains of endless association without isolating anything useful. This potential for comparison to become a never-ending quest after perpetually transforming and elusive objects of study reveals that there are no autonomously given and fixed categories or units from which to begin comparing. And, without such categories and units, comparisons, it seems, can yield no generalizations, no constants in relation to variables. Comparisons are subjectively – rather than objectively – generated and, as such, are more art than science.6 This is not to mention yet another problem the Martyrs’ Pulpit makes obvious: comparisons often construct their terms in ways that cooperate with projects of domination and erasure. The pulpit was part of what historian Steven S. Maughan describes as ‘[t]he saccharine furor that surrounded Patteson’s death’.7 A narrative quickly arose according to which the attack on Patteson was the result of violent plantation labour recruitment practices in the southwest Pacific during the 1860s and 70s. At that time, these practices included the kidnapping of Islanders, and it was widely believed that Patteson was targeted in retaliation for the abduction of five Nukapuans.8 The response, both within the mission and in Britain, was to cast Patteson as the victim more of the labour recruiters than of the Nukapuans, leading to the reform of recruitment practices but also to the promotion of paternalistic imperialism in the western Pacific. Ironically, this ‘furor’ of moral outrage on behalf of Pacific Islanders produced a monument that all but overlooks the death of another man now recognized by the Anglican Church of Melanesia as its first Solomon Islands martyr. Also fatally wounded on the day Patteson died was Stephen Taroaniara, a young Solomon Islander from the area now known as Arosi on the island of Makira (formerly San Cristoval), who had accepted baptism and confirmation from Patteson in the late 1860s.9 An inscription on the 6

7 8 9

See, for example, the chapters in Practicing Comparison: Logics, Relations, Collaborations, ed. J. Deville, M. Guggenheim, and Z. Hrdličková (Manchester, 2016). For anthropologists, a watershed intervention on comparison has been M. Strathern, Partial Connections (Oxford, 2004). S. S. Maughan, Mighty England Do Good: Culture, Faith, Empire, and World in the Foreign Missions of the Church of England, 1850–1915 (Cambridge, 2014), p. 131. But see T. Kolshus and E. Hovdhaugen, ‘Reassessing the Death of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson’, Journal of Pacific History 45 (2010), 331–55. Arosi has been my base for field research in Solomon Islands on and off since

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Michael W. Scott pulpit simultaneously preserves and obscures his memory with a passing reference to ‘two fellow-workers for our Lord’ who died in connection with the attack on Patteson.10 A number of theorists today are trying to address the problems posed by comparison, working against them by working with them. This move requires inhabiting a methodological perspective in which entities and relations are two ways of seeing the same complexities. Here I am thinking especially of the work of anthropologists such as Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern – both of whom are Oceanists – but also that of Bruno Latour, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Matei Candea, Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Marisol de la Cadena among others.11 These scholars have contributed to the development of post-Cartesian methodological premises that strive to obviate subject/object dualism and locate all entities and relations within a flat ontology of complex nonlinear causality.12 Comparison, it should be noted, has been the chief means as well as an end served by these developments. The shift in anthropological thinking away from Cartesian epistemology and towards relations as the fluid composands of everything has proceeded via multiple cross-fertilizing comparisons between indigenous non-Western ways of being and knowing and recent trends in Western philosophy, especially invocations of the Deleuzian concepts of multiplicity, flux, and open-ended becoming-other.13 Accordingly, the methodological relationism now informing new agendas for comparative practices in academia is itself a relational phenomenon, co-composed by scholars in Western-rooted disciplines and their diverse non-Western interlocutors.14 Ethnographic engagement with

10 11 12

13

14

1992. I am grateful to the many Arosi with whom I have lived who have drawn me into the history of the Melanesian Mission as their history and taught me to appreciate the many ways in which they, and their forebears, have transformatively reproduced Anglican Christianity. On Taroaniara, see ‘Stephen Taroaniara, The First Communicant Martyr’, Southern Cross Log (Auckland, 15 August 1898), pp. 1–5. The other fellow-worker was Revd Joseph Atkin, a New Zealander of settler descent. See, for example, ‘Comparative Relativism’, ed. C. B. Jensen, M. A. Pedersen, and B. R. Winthereik, special issue of Common Knowledge 17 (2011). For a more detailed explication of this post-Cartesian or nondualist ontology, see M. W. Scott, ‘To be a Wonder: Anthropology, Cosmology, and Alterity’, in Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, ed. A. Abramson and M. Holbraad (Manchester, 2014), pp. 31–54. See, for example, E. Viveiros de Castro, ‘Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance’, in Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology, ed. C. Bruun and K. Rödje (Oxford, 2010), pp. 219–53. In anthropology, as in other disciplines, Deleuze’s most influential work has been G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (London, 2004). In anthropology, this process of co-composition has occurred primarily between ethnographers and the diversely situated indigenous people, outside

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific indigenous people, particularly those of Melanesia, Amazonia, and the circumpolar north, has translated, transformed, and enfolded non-Western perspectives within these agendas.15 Are these agendas therefore sites of ongoing Western imperialism, reproduced as academic appropriation of indigenous knowledge, or are they sites of academic decolonization, understood as self-abeyant openness to radical reconfiguration by alterity?16 Perhaps, in a relationally composed world, the patient reception and active appropriation of alterity can never be wholly separated. In any case, indigenous perspectives have influenced – flowed into – current academic approaches to comparison in ways that have challenged the premises of Cartesian essentialism. These indigenous perspectives differ significantly from one another; yet, they have all been found to differ similarly from Cartesianism: they all take it for granted that a thing can be itself and something else at the same time. One particularly clear formulation of the premises of methodological relationism is Latour’s tripartite principle of ‘irreduction’: ‘Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else’.17 The only given, in other words, is irreducible complexity at every scale. Importantly, moreover, this irreducible complexity is not the same complexity at every scale. Everything may entail partial connections to everything else, but no two things are ever identical. There is no underlying identity of being – no monism – that should cause us to wonder at difference; neither is there any radical pluralism that should cause us to wonder at similarity. Difference and similarity are no longer problems to be accounted for; they are simply the texture of complexity. Donna Haraway has put it this way: ‘one is too few, but two are too many’.18 And, drawing widely on

15

16

17 18

academia, who have hosted them for periods of long-term field research. That said, a number of Pacific Islander academics have responded, both constructively and critically, to this ongoing theorization of non-Cartesian ontologies. See, for example, A. Moutu, Names are Thicker Than Blood: Kinship and Ownership Amongst the Iatmul (Oxford, 2013). For a critique of such translations and transformations as distorting abstractions of ‘indigenous place-thought and agency’, see V. Watts, ‘Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European World Tour!)’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 2 (2013), 20–34. On the under-recognition of North American indigenous scholars and their unacknowledged contribution to the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, see Z. Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: “Ontology” is Just Another Word for Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (2016), 4–22. B. Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (London, 1988), p. 163. D. J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991), p. 177.

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Michael W. Scott Melanesianist ethnography, Strathern characterizes this turn to complexity as ‘a post-plural perception of the world’.19 According to this methodological vision of complex nonlinear causality, things perpetually decompose into relations, and relations perpetually aggregate into things. Every kind of thing – a pulpit, St Boniface, an island, the concept of martyrdom, a Christian mission, an experience of divine grace – is composed of and inheres in shifting compositional relations, some with greater and some with lesser coherence and stability over time. Everything is a trajectory that persists as and through relations with others. Relations are indispensable to continuity and are, in fact, constitutive of continuity as discontinuity – as intersection with other equally discontinuous continuities. To persist as any kind of entity, therefore, is to associate, to make connections, to relate, to compare.20 It is to be continually sustained by being anamorphically remade – now in one way, now in another – through conjunction with others.21 But if comparison is everywhere, if it is what everything does to survive, how can it survive as a deliberate critical strategy? Latour’s principle of irreduction means not only that anything can be compared to anything but also that anything can anamorphically transform anything. The recognition of irreducible complexity lets us accept, rather than struggle to overcome, the fact that comparison is onto-generative, that it brings new realities into being by transformatively reproducing their previous configurations. But it also highlights what makes comparison such a powerful political tool. Comparison can be used to sustain one thing at the expense of another, to cause one thing to appear in rich detail while causing others to appear diminished or even to disappear completely. The challenge, therefore, is to choose comparisons carefully and stage them well, enabling the things we compare to cause each other to appear in mutually revealing, augmenting, and sustaining ways. This does not mean muting the capacity of the things we compare to evaluate one another critically; it means striving to render the critical processes of anamorphic comparison reciprocal and mutually beneficial. We cannot opt out of comparison; we can only choose better or worse comparisons. To borrow a phrase from philosopher Isabelle Stengers, we can ‘“slow down” reasoning’ about comparison; we can hesitate before making any comparative leap and

19 20 21

Strathern, Partial Connections, p. xvi. B. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (London, 2013), pp. 27–46. In the present volume, Hawkes’s chapter offers powerful examples of this anamorphic dynamic. Hawkes juxtaposes objects from early medieval England and Island Melanesia in ways that enable all to appear partially connected by a non-representational impulse to manifest the dazzling animacy of complexity itself.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific question ourselves: What are we trying to cause to appear here and why?22 At the same time, by pausing in this way, we may learn to attend less to the comparisons that occur to us and more to the comparisons that have occurred to the people we study – whether they be Victorian missionaries, the inhabitants of Bede’s England, Pacific Islanders, or any other others. We may, in other words, learn to decolonize our comparative practices by making them more other-oriented: more other-instigated, other-guided, and other-disclosing. Two recommendations for research have emerged from these ways of rethinking comparison. First, rather than stage comparisons that deploy naturalized entities, categories, or even processes, we should study the comparisons of others, analysing what these comparisons generate, how they do it, and why. Second, we should compare such comparisons. Instantly, the problem of preconceived units of comparison seems to vanish. Comparison itself appears as the perfect universal relative: everything – human and non-human alike – does it in some way, but it remains an infinitely variable constant. My aim in this chapter is to develop both of these recommendations. I have already initiated the first kind of exercise through my discussion of the comparison between Boniface and Patteson condensed in the Martyrs’ Pulpit. This pulpit was only one expression, however, of a broader comparison between missions to and from Britain in the early medieval period and those of the later Anglican Melanesian Mission – a comparison that antedated Patteson’s death and flourished well into the twentieth century. Accordingly, I will continue my study of this comparison, which I will refer to as the ‘island-missions-comparison’, showing how each mission came to serve as a prototype for the other. This will segue into the second kind of exercise, a comparison of comparisons. Selecting from each of these two mission contexts an example of a historically documented comparison, I will bring these comparisons together and allow them to comment on each other. This will lead me back to Exeter Cathedral, to which Anglicans from the Pacific now make regular visits in the context of UK tours they refer to as ‘missions’. In conclusion, I reflect on what the perspectives of these Pacific missionaries may teach us about how to compare well.

The Island-Missions-Comparison In 1888 Leonard Robin, a young Englishman living in Auckland, joined the Melanesian Mission. After working as a lay teacher in the Torres Islands, he went to England to study for ordination at St Aidan’s College, 22

I. Stengers, ‘A Cosmopolitical Proposal’, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. B. Latour and P. Weibel (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 994–1003, at 994.

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Michael W. Scott Birkenhead. When he returned to the Torres Islands, he oversaw the building of two churches: St Aidan’s on Loh and St Cuthbert’s on Tegua.23 Robin’s translocation of the names of these two saints from the North Atlantic to the Pacific was part of a long-running comparison between the island missions to and from early medieval Britain, which peaked between the sixth and eighth centuries, and the island missions to and from New Zealand, which began with George Augustus Selwyn in 1841. This comparison contributed greatly to the co-generation of at least two things: High Church interpretations of the Hiberno-Saxon missions and the Melanesian Mission as a form of High Church Anglicanism in the Pacific. While touring his new missionary diocese in the Pacific, Selwyn wrote these words to a friend in 1849: It has been the concurrent feeling of many wise and pious men, and even of Gibbon, that New Zealand would become the Britain of the Southern hemisphere. Setting aside all other points of similarity involved in the prediction, I fix my thoughts steadily upon one, and pray for God’s grace to make my diocese the great missionary centre of the Southern Ocean.24

The ‘concurrent feeling’ to which Selwyn referred consisted in a pro-colonial discourse that cast New Zealand as a twin-like antipodean Britain in which British history might be recapitulated, only better this time. Sidelining much of that discourse, Selwyn envisioned recapitulating one specific aspect of British history, namely its history as a great mission centre. Subsequent developments indicate that the history he had in mind was that of the Hiberno-Saxon missions of Iona and Lindisfarne.25 Informed by these precedents, Selwyn developed a quasi-monastic and scholastic missionary method that became the hallmark of the Melanesian Mission. In the beginning, the base of the Melanesian Mission was always a school that was also a predominantly masculine community. Working from this base, European missionaries recruited youths from throughout the missionary see, brought them back to the school for periods of catechism and practical education, and then returned them to their villages in the hope that they would become evangelists to their home islands. Although the main school was relocated several times, and smaller regional schools were added, this system remained stable for over half a century. Patteson points to Selwyn as the architect of this system, but he himself may have initiated the tradition of explicitly likening the mission’s 23 24

25

C. E. Fox, Lord of the Southern Isles: Being the Story of the Anglican Mission in Melanesia 1849–1949 (London, 1958), p. 147. Selwyn to ‘a friend’, Anaiteum, New Hebrides, 12 August 1849, quoted in H. W. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of George Augustus Selwyn, D.D., 2 vols (London 1879), vol. 1, pp. 286–7. Cf. Hilliard, Gentlemen, p. 9.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific pedagogical methods and communities to those of the Hiberno-Saxon missions. An account of mission activities in the mid 1860s, probably written by Patteson, describes the mission’s second main school – St Andrew’s College at Kohimarama (near Auckland) – in the following terms: A feature of the Melanesian Mission […] was the establishment of the Mission School at Kohimarama, as not merely a place of moral and religious instruction, but also as a thoroughly efficient industrial institution […] Those who have read that most interesting book, Mr. Maclear’s History of Christian Missions in the Middle Ages, will see how the same difficulty was met in the conversion of the Teutonic tribes … Wilfrid and Boniface, Eligius and Columba, had their industrial institutions in their monasteries, to which they brought their converts for a temporary sojourn wherein to acquire some ideas of the practical working out of the principles of Christianity.26

When the mission relocated its main school to Norfolk Island, the comparison moved with it and grew. Between 1867 and 1919, the school on Norfolk Island – known as St Barnabas’ College – became the mission’s Iona, Northumbria, Lindisfarne, Utrecht, and Fulda, all rolled into one. As the college was preparing to open, the first headmaster, Robert Henry Codrington, wrote a letter to his aunt in which he compared the mission community at Norfolk Island to ‘those ancient monasteries in the N[orth] of England or in Germany you may read of where there is a good deal of education going on side by side of labour, and two kinds of education viz. the Christian civilizing of savages & the learning of divinity by advanced students’.27 Over time, the romance of this island-missions-comparison generalized to other islands identified with mission schools. The island of Gela (or Nggela) in the central Solomons became the site of St Luke’s School, which was intended to be ‘a junior Norfolk Island of the Solomons’.28 Having visited Gela in the mid 1890s, early on in his tenure as Bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson wrote of it: It was a strange thing to have a Christian island in the midst of others which were virulently heathen. I pictured it sending out its missionaries to the darker lands as Britain and Ireland used to send their Aidans and Columbas and Bonifaces to Picts and Scots and English and Germans in old days.29

At the same time that these Anglican missionaries were causing their schools and methods to appear through anamorphic analogy with those 26 27

28 29

The Island Mission (London, 1869), p. 239. Codrington to his aunt, Norfolk Island, August 1867, quoted in A. K. Davidson, ‘The Legacy of Robert Henry Codrington’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 27 (2003), 171–6, at 172. Hilliard, Gentlemen, p. 131. C. Wilson, The Wake of the Southern Cross (London, 1932), p. 167.

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Michael W. Scott of the Hiberno-Saxon missionaries, Anglican scholars and popular writers were doing the inverse. William Bright, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, elucidated the missionary practices of St Aidan by comparing them to those of Selwyn and Patteson. In his reworking of the details of Bede’s passages on Aidan, published in 1878, he wrote: [Aidan] obtained fellow-workers from his old country, whose spirit was as his spirit: he formed a school of English boys, twelve in number, who were trained up in holy ways under his own eye, that they might in due time preach to their own countrymen.30

A footnote to this sentence observes: ‘It is needless to refer to the practice of Bishops Selwyn and Patteson’.31 By bringing Selwyn and Patteson to bear on his representations of Aidan, Bright renders the island-missions-comparison a fully dynamical network of communications between the two antipodes. Through this network, accounts of the two missions reduce and supplement each other, causing the Hiberno-Saxon missions to appear anamorphically in light of the Melanesian Mission as much as the other way around. This exchange of nuances was not isolated. Drawing on Bright, the antiquarian Alfred C. Fryer invoked the names of Selwyn and Patteson to vivify his non-academic retelling of the life of Aidan, published in 1902.32 Elizabeth Rundel Charles, a Victorian novelist and inspirational writer, worked the comparison from both directions. When narrating the life of Boniface, she compared him to Patteson and, when narrating the life of Patteson, she compared him to Boniface, thus achieving with words what the Martyrs’ Pulpit accomplishes with images.33 This network of associations may have contributed, moreover, to the more theologically significant anamorphic appearance of so-called ‘missionary bishops’ in the age of Bede. In the nineteenth century, missionary work in colonial holdings stimulated debates in the Church of England over the role of the episcopacy in church growth. High Church and Anglo-Catholic leaders argued for a model according to which a missionary bishop was one whose consecration to a new see could and should precede evangelization in newly accessible territories. Evangelical leaders argued for a model according to which a missionary bishop was one whose consecration to a new see should crown the establishment of an already well-advanced Christian 30 31 32 33

W. Bright, Chapters of Early English Church History (Oxford, 1878), p. 140. Ibid., p. 140, n. 7. A. C. Fryer, Aidan: The Apostle of England (London, 1902), p. 36. E. R. Charles, Three Martyrs of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1885), pp. 295, 324–5, 341–2, 378; idem, Early Christian Missions of Ireland, Scotland, and England (London, 1893), pp. 314–15, 334.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific community.34 As Maughan suggests, however, after the passing of the Colonial Bishoprics Act of 1841, in practice, the High Church model prevailed and effectively co-opted the term ‘missionary bishop’. It was in this milieu that Selwyn, the first to be appointed under this act, and his protégé Patteson became icons of the missionary bishop as heroic ‘vanguard […] of church extension’.35 This debate, which began to heat up in the 1830s, raises a question. Anglo-Catholics had long been romanticizing the Hiberno-Saxon missionary saints as the bearers of a pure apostolic tradition. Yet I find no advocates of the High Church model of the ‘missionary bishop’ – prior to the appointment of Selwyn – citing these medieval figures as precedents in support of their position. Neither do I find the term ‘missionary bishop’ attached to these figures in earlier scholarship. What I do find are diverse examples of religious and scholarly writings, from the decades following the appointment of Selwyn, in which not only Aidan and Boniface but also Cedd, Wilfrid, Willibrord, Augustine of Kent, Paulinus, and many lesser known figures as well, are all designated ‘missionary bishops’.36 So readily does this label seem to have become affixed to these figures, in fact, that when Selwyn died in 1878, his long-time friend and fellow bishop, Edward Harold Browne, pronounced him ‘the greatest English missionary bishop since St Boniface’.37 Given the anamorphic perspective afforded by the island-missions-comparison, might it also be true that St Boniface was the greatest English ‘missionary bishop’ since Selwyn?

Comparing Comparisons ‘Everything may be allied to everything else’, according to Latour.38 Nevertheless, fortuitously similar complexities are likely to be composed of smaller-scale complexities that are likewise similar and therefore readily allied.39 Because the island-missions-comparison brought together two fortuitously similar complexities, associating them into a larger 34

35 36

37 38 39

T. Yates, ‘The Idea of a “Missionary Bishop” in the Spread of the Anglican Communion in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Anglican Studies 2 (2004), 52–61. Maughan, Mighty England, p. 69. See also Ross, ‘Evolution’. Bright, Chapters, pp. 94, 138, 375; Charles, Three Martyrs, pp. 295, 390; J. B. Lightfoot, Leaders in the Northern Church (London, 1890), pp. 13, 63; G. F. Maclear, A History of Christian Missions during the Middle Ages (London, 1863), pp. 110, 130. G. W. Kitchin, Edward Harold Browne, D.D. (London, 1895), p. 27. Latour, Pasteurization of France, p. 163. Compare the comparative strategies in M. Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago, 2004) and M. W. Scott, ‘The Matter of Makira: Colonialism, Competition, and the Production of

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Michael W. Scott compound complexity, it remains a likely site of similar smaller-scale complexities, including similar comparisons. The island-missions-comparison is thus a rich source of material for the comparison of comparisons, the second methodological recommendation I have derived from the work of theorists who approach comparison with a presumption of irreducible complexity. As an exploration of this recommendation, I proceed now to compare two comparisons: one, evident in the Melanesian Mission sources, between a Solomon Islander named Ini Kopuria and St Francis of Assisi, and a second, implicit in Bede’s Historia, between and the poet Cædmon and a wealth of biblical antecedents. Thus juxtaposed, these comparisons begin, I suggest, to cause something to appear that may be generalizable beyond these mission contexts. This comparison of comparisons not only brings Kopuria and Cædmon into relief as figures who successfully innovated vernacular forms of Christianity that reproduced it differently; it reveals that they did so by means of comparison. What comes into view anamorphically is how the signs of divine grace favourable for such innovations are generated through collaborative acts of comparison. Ini Kopuria was born around 1900 near Maravovo, a village on the island of Guadalcanal, where the Melanesian Mission had a station. Sometime between 1907 and 1909, he, along with his parents and brothers, was baptized by a recently arrived English priest named Frank Bollen. Bollen, a graduate of St Boniface Missionary College at Warminster, gave Kopuria the Christian name of Ini, after the West Saxon king noted for his law code.40 This naming constitutes a comparison in its own right. By likening themselves to the Hiberno-Saxon missionaries, the Europeans in the Melanesian Mission were implicitly – and in this case, explicitly – likening their Pacific Islands proselytes to converted barbarians.41 Inevitably, the island-missions-­comparison tended to maintain Pacific Islanders in this subordinate position. Even as they came to compose an increasingly

40

41

Gendered Peoples in Contemporary Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain’, History and Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2012), 115–48. J. M. Steward, The Brothers (Auckland, 1928), p. 1. Why Bollen chose this name is an open question. Bollen’s background is not well documented and, although St Boniface College was located within what had been Ine’s Wessex domain, it is not known whether Bollen had special connections to this area. There is no evidence of hereditary chiefship in northwest Guadalcanal, and none of the sources contemporary with Kopuria indicates that, already at the time of his baptism, he was expected to become a leader. Another baptism that occasioned expression of this implicit comparison was that of Chief Soga of Santa Isabel (Solomon Islands). In the mission’s report for 1889, Soga’s conversion was noted with the following commentary: ‘it is hoped […] that by God’s grace […] Soga may hereafter become a second Ethelbert to his people’. Quoted in Hilliard, Gentlemen, p. 88.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific indigenized clergy, Islanders remained the recipients of an exogenous tradition. With the help of a second comparison, however, Kopuria came to occupy a dual position, situated both as receptive convert and inspired instigator of Christian growth. The available sources do not tell us who first drew this second comparison. What they suggest is that, in dialogue with European mentors in the Melanesian Mission, Kopuria occasioned his own repositioning via references to St Francis of Assisi, a figure of Christian innovation. This later comparison with Francis did not cancel out the implications of the earlier comparison with Ine; the associations invoked by these two comparisons became allied. And it was this alliance of contrasting associations, I suggest, that enabled Kopuria to become recognized as the founder of the Melanesian Brotherhood, a religious order now renowned within the global Anglican Communion and described by Atkin Zaku, a former principal of Bishop Patteson Theological College on Guadalcanal, as ‘one of the best examples of a Melanesian agent embedded in the Catholic faith but clothed in Melanesian form’.42 The fullest expression of the Ini-Francis-comparison is Margaret Lycett’s booklet, Brothers. Published just ten years after the founding of the Brotherhood in 1925, this piece of inspirational writing crystallized the already emergent Franciscan character of Kopuria and the Brotherhood. ‘In many respects,’ Lycett writes, ‘the Brotherhood reminds one of the Franciscan movement of thirteenth century Europe. Like that, it began with the great change which dedication to God makes in the life of one man, followed by the gathering round him of a group of men similarly bound.’43 This observation is then elaborated by a sequence of parallels between the activities of the early Franciscans and those of the Brothers. A brief biography of Kopuria follows, filled with implicit allusions to the life of Francis. Lycett describes Kopuria’s education at St Barnabas’ College on Norfolk Island as indicative of a ‘privileged position’ and portrays him as an at once pious, popular, and directionless youth ‘who could not settle’.44 His brief career in the Native Armed Constabulary, she hints, is analogous to Francis’ abortive military ventures. Then, like Francis, he suffered the crisis of an illness. This last element in Kopuria’s life has been central to the Ini-Franciscomparison, marking Kopuria as a figure who, like Francis, underwent 42

43

44

A. Zaku, ‘The Roles of Melanesians in the Development of the Church in Melanesia 1925–1975’ (Unpub. Ph.D. diss., Australian Catholic University, 2013), p. 94. M. Lycett, Brothers: The Story of the Native Brotherhood of Melanesia (London, 1935), pp. 7–8. Compare B. Macdonald-Milne, The True Way of Service: The Pacific Story of the Melanesian Brotherhood, 1925–2000 (Leicester, 2003), pp. 34, 38 n. 12. Lycett, Brothers, pp. 9, 12.

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Michael W. Scott a process of self-examination involving visions and/or the hearing of a voice. By all accounts, during a prolonged hospital stay, Kopuria engaged in intense retrospection and resolved to dedicate himself to God. After recovering, he wrote a letter to the incumbent Bishop of Melanesia, John Manwaring Steward, expressing this intention. This letter – one of the few surviving sources in Kopuria’s voice – was written in the language of the island of Mota (in present-day Vanuatu), an Austronesian language used as a lingua franca in the mission schools between the mid 1860s and early 1930s.45 In it Kopuria states: ‘in my pain and sickness God has shewn me that I should see clearly that it is not (my duty to live) as a Policeman, but to declare the Kingdom of God among the heathen. He made me remember, “Your life is Mine, and God can do as He wishes with His own”.’46 Although Kopuria makes no explicit reference in this letter to any visionary experience, the mission priest Charles Elliot Fox later reported: ‘Afterwards he told me that during that illness our Lord appeared to him and told him he was not doing the work he was meant for.’47 In the text quoted below, Steward’s representation of what Kopuria said to him is more equivocal; nevertheless, subsequent authorities have stated indicatively that Kopuria ‘heard a voice’ or ‘had a vision’.48 Steward, who died in 1937, left an undated account of the origin of the Brotherhood among his posthumously published papers. The following excerpt reveals, I suggest, the uncertain nature of Kopuria’s experience, to himself as well as others, and the process through which he and Steward came to recognize it as providential: As he lay in bed, thinking, it seemed to him that he had not made much of a success of life … It occurred to him to think how he had obtained … schooling … Who had paid for his food; his clothes, his teaching, his games, all those years …? And he seemed almost to hear a voice saying, ‘I gave you all this, what have you given Me, in return?’ … As soon as he came out of the hospital, he came to me and told me his story. We had a long talk and decided that the best thing would be for him to come with me, on the [mission ship the] Southern Cross and see if, among his friends and contemporaries at Norfolk Island, there were any of the 45

46

47 48

As well as Mota, Kopuria would have spoken one or more of the local languages of northwest Guadalcanal. It is likely that, having served in the Native Armed Constabulary, he also spoke Solomon Islands Pijin. Ini Kopuria to Bishop John Manwaring Steward, n.d., ed. and trans. in J. M. Steward, The Brothers (Auckland, 1928), p. 2. It is not clear whether Kopuria wrote this letter before or after his conversations with Arthur Hopkins about monasticism (see discussion of Hopkins below). C. E. Fox, The Melanesian Brotherhood (Oxford, n.d.), p. 6. See, for example, A. R. Tippett, Solomon Islands Christianity (London, 1967), p. 50; D. Whiteman, Melanesians and Missionaries (Pasadena, CA, 1983), p. 194; Zaku, ‘Roles of Melanesians’, at 96.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific same mind as himself. He found five others, and together we returned to my home … to discuss the matter thoroughly. After much discussion, we determined to found a Brotherhood of young men, all of whom should promise to remain unmarried, to receive no payment, and to go wherever the head of the Brotherhood, who was always to be the Bishop, should decide to send them.49

It seems clear that the matrix of the Ini-Francis-comparison lies here, in this interval of extended deliberation. It is impossible to know who first made the connection between Francis and Kopuria and their respective brotherhoods. Steward had long hoped to start a religious order for priests, both Islander and European, who would establish a monastery on the island of Malaita and evangelize by Christian example among unconverted populations there.50 The idea of a new order was thus already on Steward’s mind when Kopuria approached him. Kopuria’s sense of vocation ‘to declare the Kingdom of God among the heathen’ afforded the opportunity to rethink this idea in terms of a lay mission. Evidence that, very early on, Francis and his followers became key points of reference in this process comes from a document, written by Steward and published in 1926, announcing the consecration of the first seven Brothers in May of that year. In this document, Steward describes a ‘dream’ he and Kopuria and their six recruits had come to share for the Brotherhood, a dream in which they seemed ‘to see the little flowers of S. Francis blossoming in the desert places of the Islands’.51 In preparation for this consecration, Steward, Kopuria, and the other future Brothers drew up a list of rules. More than any other feature of the Brotherhood, these rules have given the order a felicitously medial identity, enabling it to emerge as an institution celebrated by Europeans and Melanesians alike as ‘inspired by classical Christian models yet profoundly rooted in the life and culture of the islands’.52 The rules of the Brotherhood have been described as ‘similar in essentials to the Franciscan’ rule, but they were first written in the Mota language and gave the order its Mota name, Ira Retatasiu, the Company of Brothers.53 They mandate the threefold vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but they prescribe 49 50 51 52

53

J. Steward, John Steward’s Memoirs: Papers Written by the Late Bishop Steward of Melanesia, ed. M. R. Newbolt (Chester, 1939), pp. 111–12. C. E. Fox, ‘Ini Kopuria’, Southern Cross Log (Sydney, 1 June 1946), pp. 21–4, at pp. 21–2. J. M. Steward, ‘The Brothers’, Southern Cross Log (London, 1 October 1926), pp. 8–12, at p. 12. R. Williams, ‘Preface’, in In Search of the Lost: The Death and Life of Seven Peacemakers of the Melanesian Mission by R. A. Carter (Norwich, 2006), p. vii; cf. Zaku, ‘Roles of Melanesians’, 94. M. R. Newbolt, ‘John Manwaring Steward’, in Steward, Memoirs, pp. 5–22, at p. 17; for the original rules of the Melanesian Brotherhood in Mota, see Melanesian Mission, Ra Retatasiu ta Melanesia (Hautabu, British Solomon Islands, 1927).

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Michael W. Scott short-term renewable rather than life-long periods of commitment as the norm, a move widely credited with making the religious life tenable for Pacific Islanders. They place the order under direct episcopal authority, but leave the Brothers otherwise self-governed, organized into a minimal hierarchy of Islanders elected by and overseeing other Islanders. The founding purpose of the Brotherhood, as stated in the very first rule, is ‘to preach Jesus among the Heathen’.54 To this end, rule ten bids the Brothers go out ‘two by two’, following Christ’s instructions to his disciples in the New Testament.55 In practice, therefore, these rules have made the Brotherhood an evangelical outreach to Islanders, by Islanders, carried out in Islander terms. Owing to reports of their abilities to heal the sick and combat malevolent forces, for example, the Brothers have acquired a reputation as the bearers of the efficacious power many Pacific Islanders call mana.56 Arguably, there is little uniquely Franciscan in any of this, yet emphasizing once again the association with Francis, Zaku sums up the pivotal position of the Brotherhood in these terms: ‘Though many of its rules of life were imported from external religious communities such as the community of St Francis of Assisi, much of it was also locally adapted.’57 This transformative reproduction of Christianity in Melanesia has been facilitated, in other words, by ongoing processes of Franciscanization first set in motion with Kopuria. Franciscanization helped mediate Kopuria’s transition from Christian newborn to mature bearer – and enhancer – of Christian tradition to others. By becoming associated with Francis, a figure temporally and geographically distinct from the island-missions-comparison, Kopuria became integrated within global Christianity as a site of new growth that differently, yet consistently, unfolded from the old. At the same time, however, he remained Ini. He remained within the fold of the European-initiated mission whose goal it had always been to incubate this very transition. The Ini-Francis-comparison has tended, in fact, to obscure the ways in which the Brotherhood also stands in continuity with the Hiberno-Saxon monastic missions that first inspired Selwyn and Patteson. In part, this continuity is a function of the island-missions-comparison itself as broadly constitutive of the context that gave rise to the Brotherhood, but there is also evidence that Kopuria was influenced by Hiberno-Saxon models. Several sources indicate that another mission priest and teacher, Arthur Innes Hopkins, helped to steer Kopuria’s vocation toward the religious life. In a tribute published soon after Kopuria’s death in 1945, Fox wrote: 54 55 56 57

Steward, ‘The Brothers’, p. 9. This source contains a full English translation of the original rules. Ibid., p. 10. R. A. Carter, In Search of the Lost: The Death and Life of Seven Peacemakers of the Melanesian Mission (Norwich, 2006), pp. 22–7. Zaku, ‘Roles of Melanesians’, at 99.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific After this [i.e., Kopuria’s illness] Ini went for a time to Marovovo [sic] College with A. I. Hopkins … Hopkins told me they had long talks about monastic orders and brotherhoods in the early church. Without doubt it was those talks with Hopkins that brought Ini to the decisions as to what he should do, and he went to John Steward now Bishop, and always his spiritual father, and proposed the founding of a native brotherhood.58

According to Hopkins himself, his interactions with Kopuria appear to have included formal lessons about the Hiberno-Saxon missions to the Continent. In some of my Church history lessons I dwelt upon the topic of those early monks to whom Germany, for example, owe [sic] the founding of Christianity, especially those who came from England to the wild tribes in the bush in Germany. I explained the threefold vow of poverty, chastity and obedience under which they worked. One boy, a remarkably able one sensitive to any new things and keen to try it listened eagerly. He went to Bishop Steward and asked him if it would not be possible for him and some of his fellows to do the same in heathen Melanesia.59

Fox too may have been responsible for bringing precedents from the Hiberno-Saxon missions to Kopuria’s attention. While serving as District Priest on the island of Makira, Fox had formed the St Aidan’s Brotherhood, a small band of ‘bush brothers’ sent out two by two on foot with minimal provisions to evangelize the upland villages.60 Fox asserts that, although Kopuria was not involved in this project, he attended the school at Pamua near the brothers’ headquarters and knew their leader, Ellison Kokou, who was also from the Maravovo area. Certainly, the original methods of the Melanesian Brotherhood were virtually identical to those of this earlier short-lived band (c. 1916–c. 1921), and the methods of the ‘bush brothers’ clearly emulated not only those of the Apostles but also of St Aidan as described by Bede.61 Fox, who did not hesitate in his various writings to position his experiment with monasticism on Makira as a 58 59

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Fox, ‘Ini Kopuria’, p. 21. A. I. Hopkins, ‘The “Brothers”’, Southern Cross Log (Sydney, 1 July 1940), p. 20. Hilliard reads Hopkins’s recollections as pertaining to Kopuria’s earlier school days on Norfolk Island. See Hilliard, Gentlemen, p. 227; but compare Steward, ‘The Brothers’, p. 3. C. E. Fox, ‘The San Cristoval District in 1917’, Southern Cross Log (Auckland, 1 June 1918), pp. 3–4. This brotherhood may have acquired more than one name, but its earliest participants referred to themselves in Mota as ‘ira S. Aidan’, the Company of St Aidan. See W. Warite and S. Warumu, ‘San Cristoval’, O Sala Ususur (September 1918), pp. 17–18, at 17; but see also Macdonald-Milne, True Way, pp. 31, 38 n. 7. Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, V.5, trans. B. Colgrave, R. A. B. Mynors, and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People; The Greater Chronicle; Bede’s Letter to Egbert, ed. J. McClure and R. Collins (Oxford, 2008), pp. 116–18.

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Michael W. Scott prototype for Kopuria’s order, joined the latter in 1932. This move, as he liked to point out, made the Melanesian Brotherhood the site of a rare political reversal within the Melanesian Mission: it meant that he, a white man, lived under the authority of Ini Kopuria and later under other Melanesian Head Brothers.62 Something happened here, something traditionally known as ‘divine intervention’. But it was not an unmediated bolt from the blue. Even if Kopuria did experience a voice or vision, such experiences neither occur nor acquire authority in a vacuum. It took not only the right figure from a remote antecedent tradition – St Francis of Assisi – but also a set of proximate human helpers, themselves hopeful and expectant, to guide Kopuria’s sense of vocation by making that figure present for him. It took conspiration as much as inspiration, in other words, to compose and interpret the signs of divine grace. Readers of Bede’s Historia may already discern the many details that an anamorphic comparison between the Ini-Francis-comparison and comparisons intrinsic to the Cædmon story can cause to appear. In Bede’s account, Cædmon, the humble keeper of cattle, has a dream in which he is called by name and commanded to sing. ‘I cannot sing,’ he replies. ‘Nevertheless you must sing to me,’ his dream visitant insists.63 In the dream, Cædmon is then spontaneously able to sing, and upon waking remembers and adds more to the dream verses – which, as Bede notes, he composes in his own vernacular, ‘English’. He then willingly subjects himself to examination by religious authorities, who test his new poetic gift and decide that it is truly God-given. His chief mentor, the abbess of the monastery at Whitby, persuades him to join her community, where she and others would instruct him in sacred history. Bede tells us that the result was this: He learned all he could by listening to them and then, memorizing it and ruminating over it, like some clean animal chewing the cud, he turned it into the most melodious verse: and it sounded so sweet as he recited it that his teachers became in turn his audience.64

Sharon M. Rowley has analysed the Cædmon episode for what it reveals about what miracles signify for Bede. She argues that, for Bede, ‘[m]iracles connect the specific history of England to the universal history of the Roman Church and Christian eternity. But England also contributes 62

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C. E. Fox, Kakamora (London, 1962), pp. 67–70. Fox, in fact, came to assert a Melanesian identity, see M. W. Scott, ‘How the Missionary got his Mana: Charles Elliot Fox and the Power of Name-Exchange in Solomon Islands’, Oceania 91, no. 1 (2021), 106–27. Bede, Ecclesiastical History, IV.24, p. 215. Ibid., p. 216.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific to universal history as it becomes a part of it.’65 In many ways, the analysis I will offer here underscores this insight, but does so by approaching Bede’s account somewhat differently. Rather than compare the Cædmon episode to other miracle accounts in Bede’s Historia, I will compare a set of comparisons internal to that episode to the comparisons I have shown to be operative in the founding of the Melanesian Brotherhood. The anamorphic comparison of comparisons I stage here is between the overt Ini-Francis-comparison I have just discussed and the more subtle comparisons, implicit in Bede’s telling of Cædmon’s dream, between Cædmon himself and a plurality of biblical figures. Peter S. Hawkins has identified these latter comparisons exactly: [W]hat is this but a version of Moses stammering before [God] about being ‘slow of speech and of tongue’? Or Isaiah claiming unclean lips, and Jeremiah his youth and inexperience, as sufficient reason for saying no to God’s call? Or the terrified disciples provoking Jesus to tell them not to take thought for what they would say in public […] Bede presents him [Cædmon] as a type that runs throughout the Old Testament and the New.66

Having unpacked these comparisons from the dream, Hawkins goes on to crystallize what they achieve. ‘What we see here,’ he continues, is the power of the Bible to incorporate other stories into its larger and ongoing narrative […] What is more, if Bede’s Caedmon gains by being incorporated into the context of Scripture, so too does he enrich it by his personal reenactment of it, by re-presenting its typology in his own time and place.67

I would rephrase this slightly: by being incorporated into the context of existing Christian tradition, Cædmon is empowered to enrich that tradition by re-voicing it, in his own language, for his own time and place. The comparison between Cædmon and a variety of biblical figures does for Cædmon what the Ini-Francis-comparison does for Kopuria. Being compared to sacred figures, distant from but also pre-linked to their immediate conversion contexts, gives these men the authority to reproduce Christianity as a discontinuous continuity. It can even weaken political asymmetries by generating inversions, turning pupil into teacher and teacher into pupil. Beyond these parallel socio-political processes, however, what this anamorphic comparison of comparisons brings into view is how the signs of grace are skilfully welcomed into being by those who await them. 65 66 67

S. M. Rowley, ‘Reassessing Exegetical Interpretations of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum’, Literature and Theology, 17 (2003), 227–43, at 230. P. S. Hawkins, The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch (New York, 2004), p. 7. Ibid.

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Michael W. Scott Something traditionally described as ‘divine intervention’ happened with Cædmon too. When juxtaposed with the sources for what happened with Kopuria, therefore, Cædmon’s experience begins to appear differently than when approached through Bede’s text alone. Daniel Paul O’Donnell has argued that ‘in as much as he [Bede] does not claim to have been an eyewitness to Cædmon’s career or inspiration, there is no point attempting to sift his account for clues as to what “really” went on’.68 But the virtue of anamorphic comparison is that it mitigates the need for sifting by causing otherwise unobtrusive details to surface. Set beside Bede’s account of Cædmon, the careful collaborative composing of Ini Kopuria as a latter-day St Francis highlights the likelihood that it likewise took deliberate consensual cultivation – and time – to make Cædmon’s prophecy-like gift germinate overnight. It happened in conversation. ‘After much discussion’, as Bishop Steward put it, it was decided that Kopuria’s vocation was to found a missionary brotherhood much like that of St Francis. The comparison was essential to the discovery of grace. So also, Bede tells us, after much discussion – among the abbess and the learned men and Cædmon – ‘it seemed clear to all of them that the Lord had granted him heavenly grace’.69 O’Donnell makes no mention of the many biblical comparisons condensed in Bede’s summary of Cædmon’s dream, and he contends that neither Bede nor the figures of religious authority in this story are especially interested in how the cowherd acquired his remarkable abilities.70 Yet, set beside the Ini-Francis-comparison, these biblical comparisons come to the fore, and the content of a lost dialogue becomes partially audible in the words, ‘[h]e was then bidden to describe his dream in the presence of a number of the more learned men and also to recite his song so that they might all examine him and decide upon the nature and origin of the gift of which he spoke’.71 Almost certainly, comparisons with the call narratives of biblical figures were part of this examination and were crucial to its positive verdict, perhaps even to the point of shaping subsequent narrations of Cædmon’s dream. This is not to say, cynically, that grace happens by committee; it happens by collusive desire for it to happen – by questioning, recollecting, selectively forgetting, and by the suggesting of comparisons. Even to first-hand observers and participants, one suspects, the elicitation of grace retains an unreconstructible and irreducible complexity.

68 69 70 71

D. P. O’Donnell, Cædmon’s Hymn: A Multimedia Study, Archive and Edition (Cambridge, 2005), p. 28. Bede, Ecclesiastical History, IV.24, p. 216. O’Donnell, Cædmon’s Hymn, pp. 1–8. Bede, Ecclesiastical History, IV.24, p. 216.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific

Decolonizing Missions, Decolonizing Comparisons One of my objectives in this chapter has been to tell a little-known story, the story of how medieval monks and kings from islands in the North Atlantic travelled to islands in the southwest Pacific via the imaginations of Victorian Anglican missionaries. In telling this story, I have also made it a pretext for exploring two strategies for the renewal of comparison: the strategy of analysing the comparisons of others and the strategy of comparing such comparisons. Taking it for granted that comparisons reconfigure and redefine the terms they compare – a phenomenon I have described as the anamorphic power of comparison – these strategies attempt to shift agency in the making of comparisons away from the academic researcher, focusing instead on the agencies and anamorphic processes discernible in comparisons made by others. These strategies are designed, in other words, to decolonize comparisons – to decentre the culturally particular categories that often motivate academic comparisons, to cede the pursuit of anamor­ phic agendas in the making of comparisons to others, and to interrogate the who, what, where, and why of those agendas. The goal is to make comparison a unit as much as a mode of analysis; or, more accurately, to recognize that every unit of analysis is composed by and of comparisons, making every comparison already a comparison of comparisons. With these aims in view, I have shown how the island-missions-comparison transformed a variety of early medieval missionaries to and from Britain into ‘missionary bishops’ and caused the schools established by the Melanesian Mission to appear as the Ionas, Lindisfarnes, and Fuldas of the Pacific. And I have suggested, through my comparison of the comparisons that caused Ini Kopuria and the poet Cædmon to appear as divinely inspired Christian innovators, that comparison in this mode may yet yield general knowledge. If two separate comparisons have caused the same kind of phenomenon to appear – such as an event recognized as a sign of divine grace – then the comparison of those comparisons may reveal something about the ontology of that phenomenon, something about its compositional make-up and the kinds of comparisons that bring it into being. But the story of the long reach of figures such as Aidan, Boniface, and Bede in the Pacific is not yet finished. It continues to unfold as the Anglican Church of Melanesia (ACoM), an independent province within global Anglicanism, sends self-identified and recognized ‘missionaries’ to the rest of the world. Religious orders, especially the Melanesian Brotherhood, have been central to this agenda and have brought the trajectory of Anglican missions full circle, from the Pacific back to Britain. Since the founding of the Brotherhood, three other Anglican communities 213

Michael W. Scott have come to or developed in ACoM: the Society of St Francis, the Sisters of the Church, and the Sisters of Melanesia. For over two decades now, teams of Melanesian Brothers, along with representatives of these other orders, have been visiting the United Kingdom, offering a ministry of renewal to Anglican congregations and other host organizations.72 I end my narration, therefore, with this most recent chapter in the story, which opens a unique aperture of analytical access onto Pacific Islander perspectives on the myriad comparisons these UK missions impose upon and afford their participants. To call oneself or be regarded as a Christian ‘missionary’ is to become situated in a complex web of associations with past missionaries and missions, going back to the Apostles. Inevitably, to answer to the description ‘missionary’ is to appear as the supposed bearer of a spiritual advantage vis-à-vis others who are presumed to need but lack it. Since the height of European colonialism, especially, ‘missionary’ has implied a paradigm of hierarchical relations between empowered emissaries of God and their benighted would-be converts. This paradigm can generalize even to missionaries whose forbears accepted Christianity under European colonial regimes. When cast as agents of ‘reverse mission’, missionaries from postcolonial churches can appear merely to invert and reproduce the asymmetry, chauvinism, and will to power ascribed to many mission projects of the colonial past.73 Faced with these associations, many missionaries, including the Melanesian Brothers and other ACoM religious orders who come to the UK, deploy additional counter-comparisons to decolonize their missions. They strive to temper the hierarchy of spiritual ‘haves’ versus ‘have-nots’ that can dominate images of mission by associating their work with alternative terms and practices that convey equality and reciprocity. Thus, rather than presume to compare himself and his companions to Patteson, one Melanesian Brother on a UK mission in 2005 explained that the purpose of the mission was to show the ‘fruits’ of Patteson’s labours.74 With this trope he caused a balanced image of mission to appear: the ‘fruits’ of a past mission can never be unidirectional; they are always medial between a parent tree and new growth. To this same end, a novice Brother in this 2005 contingent represented the mission as a kind of gift exchange. ‘It was your ancestors who brought us the gospel of peace,’ he told parishioners at a host church, ‘and now we have returned to thank you.’75

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73 74 75

R. Catto, ‘Reverse Mission: From the Global South to Mainline Churches’, in Church Growth in Britain: 1980 to the Present, ed. D. Goodhew (Farnham, 2012), pp. 91–103, at 93; Carter, Search of the Lost, pp. 211–34. Catto, ‘Reverse Mission’. Ibid., 94. Carter, Search of the Lost, p. 218.

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Boniface and Bede in the Pacific Another means by which these Pacific proselytizers decolonize what it means to be missionaries is by engaging in activities that position them also as pilgrims. Co-organized with UK-based facilitators, ACoM missions to Britain are multi-city tours through which missionary teams bring liturgical drama, music and dance, education, and fellowship to churches, schools, and prisons. But those involved, both visitors and facilitators, also co-compose these tours as pilgrimages through which Pacific Islanders bring the gospel back to the holy sites associated with their spiritual grandfathers.76 Prominent on the itinerary, therefore, is Exeter Diocese where mission delegates connect with the tangible traces of the life of Patteson: his childhood home at Feniton Court, the Patteson Cross in Ottery St Mary, the church at Alfington where he served his first curacy, and Exeter Cathedral where the Martyrs’ Pulpit stands ready to become the centrepiece of group photos. Another regular destination is the tomb of Selwyn at Lichfield Cathedral. Some missionaries from Melanesia have even made the crossing to Lindisfarne.77 By looking and acting like pilgrims, these missionaries also make missionaries look and act like people sent to be inspired as much as to inspire. This comparison-rich practice anamorphically configures missionaries as people on a journey of spiritual renewal through encounter with others, past and present. Like the tropes of fruit and gift exchange, the act of pilgrimage asserts symmetry, continuity, and coevalness among these missionaries, their predecessors, and the recipients of their efforts. These Islanders thus work to negotiate mutually conditioning comparisons and counter-comparisons that not only cause them to appear as missionaries but also modulate how missionaries appear to others. This brief study of how Pacific Islanders use comparisons to decolonize missions speaks as well to the problem of how to decolonize comparisons. The study highlights the ubiquity and complexity of comparison. No comparison is an isolate; all comparisons are dialogic, responsive to and working together with other intersecting comparisons to shape the way things appear. We need, therefore, to learn to recognize and attend to these dynamics when analysing the comparisons of others. But the study furthermore compels us to acknowledge that, if an act as simple as describing 76

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On Patteson as a ‘grandfather’, see the chapter by Solomon Islander B. Wate, ‘Bishop Patteson Relics, Solomon Islands’, in Trophies, Relics and Curios? Missionary Heritage from Africa and the Pacific, ed. K. Jacobs, C. Knowles, and C. Wingfield (Leiden, 2015), pp. 111–13. Macdonald-Milne, True Way, p. 314. Karen Jolly’s account, in the present volume, of another group of people who have brought Pacific perspectives to Britain in the twenty-first century presents a marked contrast. Unlike the ACoM missionaries, those University of Hawai‘i students about whom Jolly writes who identify with Hawaiian or other Pacific Islands heritages seem to view early medieval and present-day English objects and places as ‘other’ and as belonging to others.

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Michael W. Scott someone as a missionary entangles that person in a web of associations, then we can never limit ourselves to analysing the comparisons of others. We cannot not compare. When staging our own comparisons, therefore, we need to let others (including non-human others) revise, re-nuance, or reject the anamorphic implications of the comparisons in which we situate them. The Pacific perspectives glimpsed through the missionary endeavours of the heirs to the island-missions-comparison appear to urge this wisdom: to compare well is to give others the last word, action, or relation that situates them and causes them to appear otherwise through counter-comparisons of their own.

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Chapter 10 Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit: Displaying the Sacred Karen Louise Jolly

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his essay represents reflections on what the conceptual field of ‘AngloSaxon’ looks like through different eyes, specifically views from Oceania. It is based in part on observing my University of Hawai‘i undergraduates in the fall of 2018 interact with the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibit at the British Library and react to their visits to early medieval sites and museums, in comparison to their reactions to exhibitions of Oceania and other, primarily Asian, cultures more familiar to them from the Pacific. The aim of such a study is to re-imagine early medieval histories with an eye to how they might speak back into the present moment, that is, help us rethink ourselves as scholars and teachers who live in contested spaces. In particular, this study draws on Indigenous studies to argue that modern western secularism has devalued and marginalized the ‘sacred’ both in colonized spaces and in colonizing its own medieval past. Despite the differences between Oceania and England, comparing these two frameworks allows us to question both the integrity of the ‘AngloSaxon’ narrative and the fragmentation of other people’s narratives of themselves. Both stories bear the marks of nineteenth-century philological assumptions of ethnicity. Therefore, the decolonizing operations of deconstructing the story told of English origins and the restoration of PanOceanic narratives are inter-dependent. Colonialism is not something that happened in the past and is therefore unchangeable. It is an evolving set of relationships between peoples with entangled histories necessitating an ongoing conversation about people and places, artefacts and stories.

Historiography and Methodology As a historian I serve as a mediator between the living and the dead, listening to the voices of the past and retelling their stories. My main obligation is to primary sources from the past, that is, to the voices of people who lived before. G. K. Chesterton calls this ‘the democracy of the dead’, the voices of ancestors western modernity is increasingly deaf to.1 Consequently, I 1

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1908), Chapter

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Karen Louise Jolly am committed to the idea of historical empathy with regards to voices from the past, particularly those less heard or suppressed. But listening to the past also entails an obligation to speak into the present, to the living. I developed this approach in the context of teaching a first-year course in pre-modern world history by combining western philosophies of history with Hawaiian historiography. R. G. Collingwood defines history as inquiry into human actions of the past by interpreting evidence for the purpose of human self-knowledge, while E. H. Carr describes history as an unending dialogue between past and present, between the historian and facts.2 Hawaiian mo‘olelo (‘story’) turns past and future around: ka wā ma mua is the time in front (before, e.g., the past) and ka wā ma hope as the time behind (after, e.g., the future).3 Students of mo‘olelo are encouraged to nānā i ke kumu, look to the source, with the understanding that the past is kaona, a mystery to be unwrapped, with layers of meanings in words.4 In this present moment, I firmly believe that the practice and teaching of historical empathy, this dialogue between past and present, and between colonized and colonizer, has inestimable value for creating a better understanding of our common humanity in all its diversity. Therefore, I would like to begin by acknowledging the communities of the living and the dead to whom I am indebted. First, mahalo nui loa (‘greatest thanks’) to the peoples of the kingdom of Hawai‘i on whose (un)ceded lands I live and work, and from whom I have learned how to think in new ways. This essay evolved during a dynamic period in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement to decolonize the islands and recover the sacredness of the land, as kia‘i (protectors) blocked the building of yet another, taller observatory on Mauna a Wākea, sponsored by a consortium

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4 ‘The Ethics of Elfland’, Project Gutenberg (2005) [accessed 31 May 2021]: ‘Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death’. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1993), pp. 9–10; E. H. Carr, ‘What is History?’, in The Nature of Historical Inquiry, ed. L. M. Marsak (New York, 1970), p. 102. ‘The future is guided by the past’ is one translation of ka wā ma mua, ka wā ma hope (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of History ‘About Us’ (http:// manoa.hawaii.edu/history/about/who-we-are/) [accessed 1 January 2022]. See N. Arista, The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States (Honolulu, 2019), p. 238; N. K. Silva, G. M. Joseph, and E. S. Rosenberg, Aloha Betrayed Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, 2004), p. 8; L. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires (Honolulu, 1992), p. 19; and Kanaka ʻŌiwi Methodologies: Moʻolelo and Metaphor, ed. K.-A. R. Kapāʻanaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira and E. Kahunawaikaʻala Wright (Honolulu, 2016), particularly K. Lipe, ‘Mo‘olelo for Transformative Leadership: Lessons from Engaged Practice’, pp. 53–71.

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Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit that includes the University of Hawai‘i.5 The conversations in the community and in the classroom about what ‘sacred’ means had a profound effect on the ways this essay develops concepts from Indigenous studies and post-secular theories. Second, I acknowledge the influence of that community of the living and the dead within our field of study: both the peoples who lived in or travelled around early medieval Britain and Ireland, and the long line of scholars since then.6 For sheer inspiration, I credit the British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, and War exhibit, and its curators and editors, Claire Breay and Joanna Story, as well as the many scholars who contributed to the exhibit, the exhibition volume, and the conference. 7 What follows is not a critique of the exhibit, which constituted a brilliant exposition of the cultural artefacts that are the material basis for our scholarship. Rather, this essay offers some thoughts on the ways that ‘AngloSaxon’ appeared to those who visited, including fellow scholars, students, and colleagues from other disciplines. Together, these communities of the living and dead shape my thinking. In particular, new understandings of early medieval people groups emerge from placing them in a larger North Atlantic context and from increasingly more global and Indigenous perspectives. As with all such acknowledgements of indebtedness, any errors in what follows remain my own. In the fall of 2018, I took a group of 18 students from the University of Hawai‘i to London for a semester study abroad program, purposely 5

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See the kia‘i (protectors) of Mauna a Wākea at Pu‘uhonua o Pu‘uhuluhulu [accessed 31 may 2021]; L.No‘eau Peralto, ‘Portrait. Mauna a Wākea: Hānau Ka Mauna, The Piko of our Ea’, in A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, ed. N. Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, I. Hussey, and E. Kahunawaika‘ala Wright (Durham, 2014), pp. 233–43; and I. Caumbal-Salazar, ‘Where are Your Sacred Temples?: Notes on the Struggle for Mauna a Wākea’, in Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i, ed. H. K. Aikau and V. V. Gonzalez (Durham, 2019), pp. 200–10. The University of Hawai‘i has established a ‘sense of place’ value system rooted in Hawaiian cultural traditions, but these values seem to have little impact on the western colonialist and capitalist neo-liberal university model based on the material profitability of STEM. At this writing, the University has not disavowed the TMT construction on Mauna a Wākea, although they have recently established a Native Hawaiian Place of Learning Advancement Office [accessed 31 May 2021]. Even though it risks implying a later colonialist sense that England = Britain in ways that historically have marginalized Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, the early medieval geographic sense of Britain as an island is preferable to the use of ‘England’ as a polity that in reality emerged from a West Saxon domination of much of the island and the subsequent rise of a nationalist myth of English origins (see Introduction, pp. 5–9 and Karasawa’s essay in this volume). British Library, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, [accessed 31 May 2021]; and Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, ed. C. Breay and J. Story (London: British Library, 2018).

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Karen Louise Jolly coinciding with the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibit (hereafter abbreviated ASK). Usually, I am teaching students at a geographic, temporal, and cultural distance from early medieval Europe. Taking students to the region of study triggered several questions for me as a teacher: What happens when students from a place outside our geographic field of study actually study it in that place? What happens if we close the geographic gap, and have greater contact with the material culture and landscape? Does that change their understanding of or response to the temporal and cultural gap? What enriched this analysis for comparative purposes was the opportunity to observe the students’ responses to representations of non-European societies, particularly Oceanic ones, at the British Museum and elsewhere. This essay thus serves as a counterpart to Michael Scott’s essay in this volume on ‘Boniface and Bede in the Pacific’ by moving into the twenty-first century and taking the Pacific to Bede. 8 The small sample of students I led is fairly representative of the undergraduate population at the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa campus: mostly in-state students, predominantly of mixed heritages combining various Asian, Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, and Euro-American backgrounds. The demographic information is self-reported.9 For the purposes of this study, age, major, gender identity and orientation did not play a role, so I use the plural pronoun ‘they’. The only two pieces of relevant information were in two questions on the consent form: 1 ) Ethnic or cultural heritages by which you choose to identify yourself; and 2 ) Living experience or residency in Hawai‘i, other Pacific Islands, and/or elsewhere. 8

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In some ways, this essay is also a reversal of the ISAS 2017 meeting which brought ‘Anglo-Saxonists’ to Hawai‘i; the next year, I took students from Oceania to England to study England, with similar kinds of conversations ensuing about decolonization. As a matter of record, I filed for an Institutional Review Board (IRB) exemption for human subjects research and used an approved consent form. Of the 18, 11 signed allowing use of direct quotes from their academic work; otherwise, I am summarizing. Of those 11: two self-identified as having Pacific Islander heritage (one Hawaiʻi, one Papua New Guinea), plus two others who indicated strong identification with Hawaiian culture; six identified themselves as various Asian American combinations (four with Filipino; two with Japanese heritage; one Vietnamese and Chinese; one as generic Asian American); three identified themselves with a Euro-American label (Caucasian Hawai‘i resident, white American, and Jewish/Serbian who has lived half their life in Hawai‘i). Of these 11 respondents, five were born and raised in Hawai‘i (including those of Asian American, Caucasian, Filipino, Vietnamese/Chinese, and native Hawaiian background); the other six came to Hawai‘i as young adults (two recent transfers, but most were resident between 3–12 years, with one older student resident for 18 years). Of the seven who did not respond to the consent form but who self-identified in other ways, I can estimate that three were local with some combination of Asian, Pacific, or Euro-American backgrounds; at least three Euro-American (one speaking of Jewish heritage), and one unknown.

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Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit To give an example of how complex the answers to these questions might be in regards to ethnic identity and a sense of place: one very articulate student whose advocacy for Pacific Islander views led me to assume they were native Hawaiian actually self-identified as ‘biracial (white/Filipino), Hawaiian culture’, then went on to explain in question 2 that they were born and raised in southern California, but travelled frequently to Hawai‘i because of family from the island of Moloka‘i, and had only lived on Oahu four years for college.10 This fluidity of identity combined with a deep commitment to a sense of place offers insights on how we might better understand ethnic identities in early medieval Britain. Of the 18 students, two had relatives in the UK, including one student from Papua New Guinea, and another with Scots heritage. For the rest, England was terra incognito. Many had never travelled abroad, and most had not been to Europe. And for virtually all of them, the medieval European past consisted of the usual medievalisms found in pop culture representations, a form of temporal disjunction. Moreover, as will be evident in some of the comments, students experienced the expected phases of culture shock while engaging with views of the local and the global that challenged their Pacific/American centricities. The students took one of two courses with me (one student took both): a history of early medieval Europe, with a focus on the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ through the ASK exhibit (six students); and a comparative course on pre-modern world history through the eyes of the British Museum utilizing the ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ museum website (thirteen students).11 We began the semester with a Sutton Hoo experience: first a tour of the British Museum Room 41 exhibit, where curator Sue Brunning gave an hour-long tour, and later that week a visit to Sutton Hoo itself.12 10

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For more insights on demographics and ethnic identity in Hawai‘i, see M. Velasquez-Manoff, ‘Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii’, New York Times Opinion, June 28, 2019, [accessed 31 May 2021]. N. MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London, 2010). British Museum and BBC archived website: [accessed 31 May 2021]. Students made presentations on individual artefacts and at the end of the course teams of students docented a gallery in the British Museum. We began the course by reading about the history of the museum and issues in museum studies, for example: Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience, ed. S. Longair and J. McAleer (Manchester, 2016), and National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, ed. S. J. Knell et. al. (London, 2010). These students were primed by my framing of the course but also by their own Pacific orientation to question why artefacts came to be owned by the British Museum and how they chose to display them, both the moai with which I advertised the course and the classic case of the Elgin marbles. The Sutton Hoo site and museum closed for renovation shortly after our visit, so all descriptions and reactions here are to the old exhibit.

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Figure 10.1 Hoa Hakananai‘a, British Museum (London) Oc1869,1005.1. Provenance: Orongo, Rapa Nui, eleventh–twelfth century. ©The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

Figure 10.2 Spong Chairperson, Norfolk Castle Museum 1994.192.1. Provenance: Spong Hill, fifth century. Copyright Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery Photo R7J4748, by permission.

Karen Louise Jolly In October, we went on a Northumbrian excursion to Lindisfarne, Jarrow, Durham, and York. All told, the majority of the students saw museum representations of ‘Anglo-Saxon history’ six times. While these excursions were planned in advance, as an added bonus students went to see other exhibitions and travel sites on their own, in particular the Oceania exhibit at the Royal Academy and a Captain Cook exhibit at the British Museum, both marking the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage, which provide a basis for comparison in what follows.13 My personal observations also include the British Library Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms conference in December, during which I toured the exhibit with other specialists in the field, as well as visiting this and other exhibits with colleagues and friends. The word that came to mind on exiting the ASK exhibit after my first visit was ‘interconnections’, which became the basis for my explorations of cross-cultural encounters in museum spaces. My comparative analysis begins with two striking images, which serve as touchstones throughout the essay. On the left (Fig. 10.1) is Hoa Hakananai‘a, an eleventh–twelfth century moai from the ceremonial centre Orongo on the Pacific island of Rapa Nui. The statue is prominently displayed in the British Museum Wellcome Trust themed gallery ‘Living and Dying’.14 I used the moai as an advertisement for the British Museum course, as a provocation to attract students in Hawai‘i with the question ‘[w]hy is this Rapa Nui moai in the British Museum in London and how did it get there?’, followed by ‘and for that matter, where is Oceania in the British Museum?’ On the right (Fig. 10.2) is ‘Spong Chairperson’, or ‘Man’, although the gender of the figure is uninterpretable, who sits atop a fifth century ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cremation urn lid from a Spong Hill Norfolk cemetery.15 Unlike the moai, Spong Chairperson is housed closer to home, at Norwich Castle Museum, but was also on prominent display greeting 13

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‘Oceania’, Royal Academy of Arts (London), 29 September–10 December 2018; Oceania, ed. P. Brunt and N. Thomas (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2018); ‘Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives,’ British Museum Exhibition Nov. 29, 2018–August 4, 2019; and J. Adams, Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives (London: British Museum, 2019). BM Oc1869,1005.1. The name Hoa Hakananai‘a may mean lost, hidden, or stolen friend, which is the way the British Museum translates it. BM Room 24 Wellcome Trust Gallery [ accessed 9 January 2021]. See J. Van Tilburg, Remote Possibilities: Hoa Hakananai‘a and HMS Topaze on Rapa Nui, British Museum Research Papers 158 (London: British Museum Press, 2006). I choose the neutral ‘chairperson’ that some art historians use to label this figure, since its gender is unknown or irrelevant. Throughout the paper, I refer to the artefact as ‘it’, but to the persons represented by the figure and/ or the cremated remains as ‘chairperson,’ or ‘they/them’. See C. Hills, ‘Spong Man in Context’, in Landscapes and Artefacts: Studies in East Anglian Archaeology Presented to Andrew Rogerson, ed. S. Ashley and A. Marsden (Oxford, 2014), pp. 79–88. See also, Breay and Story, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, pp. 66–7.

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Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit visitors to the ASK exhibit. The differences between Hoa Hakananai‘a and Spong Chairperson in size, date, culture, manufacture, and purpose, not to mention provenance and acquisition, are extensive. Nonetheless, these two commanding figures ‘speak’ into the present something about our common humanity, as well as about divergent histories, altered senses of place, and power differentials. In this paradoxical encounter, time and place collapse: how does Hoa Hakananai‘a help us think about Spong Chairperson, and vice versa? How and why viewers feel a sense of connection or of disconnection in response to an exhibition of artefacts has both temporal and spatial dimensions. Connections across time are built out of narratives linking the past artefact to the present, a story the viewers either identify with or find alien, or a mix of both. But these objects and their stories are also intertwined with a sense of place, where things ‘belong’ or are felt to be out of place. Museums may invite the living into communion with the dead, but they cannot fully script the ways visitors interact with the artefacts or even maintain the artificial boundary between the living and the dead. The encounter is determined both by where the visitors come from and what histories they bring to the exhibit, as well as by the spatial placement of the exhibit itself. Globalization, the ways in which artefacts and not just people move back and forth through time and space, complicates these encounters, as do the power differentials engendered by conquest and colonialism. The thrust of this essay’s argument is the need for historians to take into account the affective and intangible aspects of these encounters between past and present – the ways in which a sense of connection or disconnection is deeply spiritual. The first section begins with a physical sense of place or of displacement, while the second examines a verbal sense of narrative coherence attached to a place, versus fragmentation and silenced voices. The final section turns to spiritual power in relation to sacred objects and places, amid the desacralizing and disempowering effects of western scientific objectivity and modern secularism.

Sense of Place and (Dis)Location Kama‘āina The Hawaiian term kama‘āina, meaning ‘familiar or at ease’, literally refers to one who is a child of the land and the sustenance it provides, but is used today in the islands to refer to local residents who are not of native Hawaiian ancestry (kānaka maoli or ‘ōiwi), that is, settlers and descendants of settler colonialists.16 Kama‘āina implies a sense of connection between 16

For a succinct definition of settler colonialism and decolonization, see Aikau

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Karen Louise Jolly land and people, of ‘belonging’.17 On the other hand, an adopted homeland can evoke a feeling of dislocation, of being out of place in a place, and even of trespass on lands held sacred. Such discomfort makes explicit the entangled histories of migration and colonization. Similarly, encountering familiar artefacts in a foreign setting can be jarring, raising questions about identity tied to place, and about sacred meanings attached to places of origin. Study abroad experiences, and museums specifically, provide opportunities to ponder the histories that lie behind these mixed feelings of belonging and of not belonging, of origins and ownership. Whenever I entered the British Museum Living and Dying Gallery and saw the Rapanuian moai, I stopped in my tracks, as do most visitors, but perhaps for different reasons. Because of its dislocation and isolation in time and place, Hoa Hakananai‘a’s faraway gaze across remote horizons looked accusing, while Spong Chairperson’s pensive gaze struck me as inwardly reflective. On entering the ASK exhibit, I was mesmerized by the Spong figure, as were many of our colleagues: those who had not seen it before were intrigued by this mute testimony to the peoples we study in subsequent eras, and also by its contrast to the warlike and bejewelled Sutton Hoo objects that usually represent the arrival of Angles and Saxons. The humanity of the figure in its enigmatic posture seems to speak across time, bridging the fifth century and the present. Similarly, a sense of place offered by the landscape had an impact on students’ understanding of and engagement with ‘Englishness’, a foreign culture they came to study. A student of Japanese and Filipino heritage living in Hawai‘i since 2007, with a keen interest in medieval European history, noted: Reading about these sites and experiencing them firsthand are two completely different experiences. It is hard to imagine the environments of Bede and St. Cuthbert while sitting in a 21st century academic classroom. Travelling to these locations provided a deeper context to the history of their lives and gave more meaning to what they accomplished.

Likewise, a student of native Hawaiian ancestry said: ‘I was able to build more of a connection with the places, making the things I had read more “grounded” in some visual place and not just something from a book or a plaque’. Others echoed the same sentiment, preferring on-site or local museums to national museums as making the visitor feel more involved, in part because the artefacts were close to their place of origin, in contrast to 17

and Gonzalez, ‘Introduction’, in Detours, pp. 4–5. See Arista, The Kingdom and the Republic, pp. 4, 17. As someone who self-­ identifies as kama‘āina, I acknowledge that I may at times have committed forms of cultural appropriation without ill intent, but also admit that a far worse sin would be to fail to reflect on and see the world through Hawaiian cultural values after having lived in Hawai‘i for thirty years.

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Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit ‘stolen’ objects placed in an (inter-)national museum ‘of humanity’, as the British Museum has relabelled itself.18 Lindisfarne in particular brought the early medieval period closer, perhaps because of its remoteness and relative lack of modern overlays, but also its familiar, if colder, island environment. Other students put the on-site exhibits into a broader world context, noting how Sutton Hoo seems very important to the English but is just a blip in the context of world history. At the same time, most of the students experienced the culture shock of displacement, of being foreigners, both in their interactions with people they met, and in their visits to exhibits of Oceania and Asia where familiar cultural objects were placed in an unfamiliar context. In part, this is because globalization looks different in other places. Students rooted in a Pacific-oriented globalism and an American culture-based sense of the world had to find new ways to explain their ethnic identities in relation to the places from which they had come. On arrival, they noted varied ways that people reacted to their appearance and supposed ethnicity when they found out where they came from. Some students were told they didn’t ‘look like’ they came from Hawai‘i, while others were assumed to be native Hawaiian based on their appearance, when they were not; the fact that they spoke English surprised a few people. In one of the first encounters, students expressed dismay about the narrative offered on a boat tour to Greenwich soon after our arrival.19 As one native Hawaiian described it: the fact that ‘Honolulu’ was spelt wrong on the Meridian Line says how much […] they care about accuracy. Also, the tour guide […] spoke as though Westerners were the ones to figure out long-distance travel, ignoring Oceania narratives entirely. 20

None of them said anything to the tour guide. In some sense, they were startled to find ignorance of what they took to be normative knowledge. While these undergraduates were in London primarily as visitors to learn 18

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Although many artefacts were acquired through trade or gift, sometimes purpose-made for trading and gifting, such objects may still be sought for repatriation because of subsequent devastating cultural losses in their homelands. See N. Thomas et al., ‘Museums, Collections, Colonialism and the Gift: A Dialogue’, in Oceania, pp. 64–71. See also H. Furness, ‘UK museums task staff with identifying “stolen” colonial collections’, The Telegraph, 1 January 2019 [accessed 31 May 2021]. I was not with them. They also added: ‘And this sort of ignorance was also reflected in the National Maritime Museum. In the Pacific gallery, most of what was on display told of Westerners exploring the area, and the objects that did focus on the indigenous people were given no context or meaning, and typically fell into the trap of romanticizing and eroticizing the people. It was more of a narration of the colonizer’s history’.

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Karen Louise Jolly about this foreign place, they then also found themselves called upon to be cultural experts and ambassadors, similar to many Indigenous visitors to and residents in London since the sixteenth century, as Coll Thrush has pointed out.21 As at Greenwich, the Hawai‘i students’ sense of dislocation was most prominent in exhibits featuring non-European cultures with which they identified or felt knowledgeable. One Vietnamese/Chinese-American student from Hawai‘i commented, primarily positively, on the British Museum’s short-term Captain Cook exhibit, but noted that ‘[l]ike most (if not all) the people in this class, the exhibit almost [made] me feel out of place’. In the Royal Academy Oceania exhibit, one student of Hawaiian culture compared reactions with a Samoan visitor, who thought the exhibit ‘lacked substance’, and who speculated that a lot of the visitors did not know where the islands were, such that this exhibit may be ‘all they will ever see’. In most cases, the students’ critical responses to representations of Oceania cannot be easily separated from their own sense of dislocation as visitors in a foreign country. In their class presentations on British Museum artefacts from around the world, students frequently raised questions about colonialism and cultural appropriation, which was unsurprising given their exposure to these issues in Hawai‘i. For example, in a presentation on the Chinese ceramics known as the David Vases, a student of Hawaiian culture questioned why they were named after their English collector rather than the Chinese names inscribed on the vases themselves, asking ‘is this cultural appropriation?’22 Another, native Hawaiian, student, examining the Taíno duho, a seat of power on which Columbus sat, asked more than once ‘how can we redeem colonialism?’23 These were critical questions they brought from Hawai‘i to London. But it was the Royal Academy’s Oceania exhibit that stirred the most visceral reactions, in ways probably not found in visitors to the AngloSaxon exhibits. The ‘biracial (white/Filipino), Hawaiian culture’ student was ‘visibly upset’ upon entering the small Hawai‘i section: ‘I became increasingly aware of my own race and ethnicity, and the way other people must view me. It was the first time since being here in London that I felt out of place, like I didn’t belong here, just like these objects’. In

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C. Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven, 2016). The David Vases, BM PDF, B.613, B.614; MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects #64 [accessed 31 May 2021]. The Taíno ritual seat, BM Am1949,22.118; MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects #65 [accessed 31 May 2021].

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Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit identifying their feelings with the objects’ displacement, the student felt on display and exoticized by the gaze of other visitors. In many ways for these students, the European visitors’ gaze appeared in stark contrast to the experience of Pacific Island visitors to the Oceania exhibit. Some students noted that including art from throughout the Pacific Islands grouped thematically might have undercut the differences between the distinct island cultures.24 So while the student from Papua New Guinea was pleased to see a preponderance of artefacts from their home, and with better interpretation of meaning than an artefact they analysed at the British Museum, several students noted the comparative underrepresentation of Hawai‘i and other Pacific Islands. Others appreciated that the thematic arrangement supported the Pan-Oceania movement for ‘our sea of islands’ as a cultural unity.25 This conceptual conundrum and tension between a shared cultural matrix and a specific regional identity is instructive for our efforts to place Britain and its distinctive cultures into a larger North Atlantic, and not just continental or Mediterranean, set of interconnections. Despite the best efforts of the Royal Academy curators to rely on Indigenous experts and to ‘deliberately avoid[s] showing Oceania through European eyes’, its reception has been controversial among Pacific Islanders.26 To be fair, the Royal Academy is an art gallery rather than a museum, so its aims are somewhat different from the British Museum’s representations of world cultures and their histories: the Oceania exhibit sought to display Indigenous artistic productions, historic and contemporary, from throughout the Pacific, without much in the way of a narrative thread or historical context, and with an unpredictable variety of audience responses. Nonetheless, the British Museum similarly struggles to overcome its colonial legacies, as it self-consciously moves from being the ‘first national public museum’, to an international ‘museum of humanity’.27 Its 24

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The exhibit’s themed galleries included ‘Voyaging and Navigation’; ‘Making Place’; ‘The Spirit of the Gift’; ‘Performance and Ceremony’; ‘Encounter and Empire’; and ‘Memory’, Oceania, pp. 280–311. E. Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in We are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu, 2008), pp. 27–40. Oceania, p. 12. ‘The British Museum Story’ [accessed 31 May 2021]. This evolution is, of course, partial and constrained by the materials in its collection. The BM is making a concerted effort to address this sense of displacement under its branding as an international museum of humanity. For example, the Fall 2018 ‘I Am Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria’ exhibit [accessed 31 May 2021], which glorified the violent conquests of the Assyrians, ended with a gratifying explanation of the Iraq scheme, a partnership between the BM and Iraqi archaeologists – all of them women in the video – to recover and preserve ancient artefacts in situ,

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Karen Louise Jolly vast labyrinth of galleries reflects different eras and principles of curation. Some galleries trace a chronology of ‘western civilization’ from its premodern past, highlighting both continuity and cultural interactions. For example, Room 41, like the ASK exhibit, presents the temporal and geographic aspects of early medieval Britain as multicultural and interconnected, with the Sutton Hoo artefacts placed at the literal and cultural intersection of galleries. But other geographic parts of the world are lumped together seemingly as non-western and atemporal. The British Museum’s single Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas combines these three vast geographic zones but with a cultural constraint of focusing on ‘Indigenous’ peoples of these regions.28 But it is easy to see how ‘Indigenous’ in the current narrative simply substitutes for an older notion of ‘primitive’ or traditional preliterate non-western societies as essentialized and reified by the western anthropological gaze. Africa and the Americas each have their own galleries, with artefacts both traditional and more contemporary to indicate Indigenous agency and continuity as ‘living’ cultures with both a past and a present. However, there is no Oceania gallery. Instead, the Rapa Nui moai is the most prominent item as visitors enter the ‘living and dying’ gallery of artefacts, mostly from Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, representing their views of life, death, and the ancestors, along with some oddly placed western counterparts as foils, highlighting modern medicalization of life and death.29 Some visitors may enter this gallery and see Hoa Hakananai‘a as a foreign object and read the plaque with curiosity, but others, like the dislocated student and others from Oceania, see themselves standing alone, bereft of culture and people, mute and without a story – a bit like Spong Chairperson’s silence at the entry to the ASK exhibit, but lacking a narrative or genealogy to follow thereafter. This brings me to the second point: silenced voices and fragmented narratives.

(Fragmented) Narratives and (Silenced) Voices Ho‘olohe Pono In Hawaiian culture, ho‘olohe pono means to ‘listen rightly’. In a 2015 video of a Rapanuian family’s efforts to visit and recover Hoa Hakananai‘a at

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by bringing their specialists to the BM to acquire the latest tools and techniques

[accessed 31 May 2021]. [accessed 9 January 2020]. [accessed 9 January 2020]. This page is frequently modified with different images, not always Hoa Hakananai‘a.

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Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit the British Museum, the elder tells his young granddaughter to ‘learn to listen, learn to tell’.30 What the ASK exhibit did well was tell a story, which the Royal Academy Oceania exhibit and the British Museum Living and Dying gallery struggle to do for Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands, whose histories and systems of communication have been disrupted or suppressed.31 In the ASK exhibit, Spong Chairperson served as an intriguing invitation to enter a story of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’.32 Not so the moai Hoa Hakananai‘a: he is not telling his own story or that of his people, but is made to represent some universal humanity responding to life and death, ancient views recoverable apparently through surviving Indigenous cultural artefacts. To the Rapanuians, Hoa Hakananai‘a is not an enigmatic representation of our common humanity but is an integral part of their living cultural practices, now interrupted.33 So the irony is that Spong 30

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Te Kuhane o te Tupuna, filmmakers Leonardo Pakarati and Paula Rossetti (2015), Pacific Islanders in Communications [accessed 31 May 2021]. For those who might ask about the lack of written narratives for preliterate societies (who therefore belong to the discipline of anthropology rather than history), this western-based query could be reframed: did Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, as well as Indigenous cultures of Africa and the Americas, have communications systems for transmitting knowledge and stories from one generation to the next? Yes, although disrupted by colonialism and suppression of their languages, artefacts of this knowledge survive. For example, Hawaiians acquired western style written literacy within a generation of contact and began recording their stories and knowledge (see Arista, Kingdom and the Republic, p. 13, and the digitized Hawaiian language newspapers and other sources at the Papakilo database at [accessed 31 May 2021]). Hawaiian scholars are incredibly busy recovering information and rewriting the history of the islands from Hawaiian language archival materials hitherto ignored by those writing history only from English and other European language sources. These Hawaiian language sources have a considerable amount of material translated from or commenting on European, and specifically English, histories; moreover, ‘Iolani Palace contains artefacts gathered by Hawaiian royals and others who travelled; the Palace received visitors from around the globe, particularly from European courts who recognized the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Recovering how Hawaiians in the nineteenth century understood Anglo-Saxon history and culture will help us come to terms with what happened in our field of study in that crucial century of its colonial formation. Nugent and Williams speculate Spong Chairperson is watching and listening, and discuss visual riddling. R. Nugent and H. Williams, ‘Sighted Surfaces: Ocular Agency in Early Anglo-Saxon Cremation Burials’, in Encountering Imagery. Materialities, Perceptions, Relations, ed. I.-M. Back Danielsson, F. Fahlander, and Y. Sjöstrand (Stockholm, 57, 2012), pp. 187–208, at 201. See Van Tilburg, Remote Possibilities. For more on the moai and how they were, in accordance with Rapanuian traditions, walked into place (contrary to Jared Diamond’s arguments), see T. Hunt and C. Lipo, The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island (New York, 2011); H. Bloch, ‘If They Could Only Talk’, National Geographic (July 2012), available at [accessed 31 May 2021]; and K. Romey, ‘Easter Islanders’ Weapons Were Deliberately Not Lethal’, National Geographic, February 22, 2016 at [accessed 31 May 2021]. Indeed, the local media reaction wondered whether the exhibit was an antiBrexit statement because of the continental connections emphasized. See reviews: J. Jones, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms review – barbaric splendour and fierce vision’, The Guardian, Oct 21, 2018 at [accessed 31 May 2021]; E.Frankel, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms review’, Time Out at [accessed 31 May 2021]; and K. H. Thomas, blog post, ‘Making connections in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: British Library exhibition review’, For the Wynn, Dec. 18, 2018 at [accessed 31 May 2021]. One student wrote an extensive blog analysis comparing the Last Kingdom to what she saw on our excursions: J. Hedstrom, ‘The Last Kingdom/Book Review + Travel Blog’, Silmariljess: Sharing Stories & Spreading Happiness, at [accessed 31 May 2021]. See also K. Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones (Cambridge, 2019).

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Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit the religious dimensions on the Northumbrian excursions in contrast to the Sutton Hoo war emblems. Stories and belief systems privileged in these gold and bejewelled book artefacts rivalled the warrior artefacts in defining ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture for them, as the British Library’s curators presumably intended. The same narrative coherence cannot be said for Oceania exhibits built around themes, where open galleries offer no clear pathways and often lack a chronological frame of reference or stories of cultural identities in formation. This lack of narrative framing is particularly disheartening for Pacific Island cultures with a strong reliance on genealogical storytelling. Admittedly the scale and timeframe comparing the two exhibits are different. ASK tells a single narrative of a hybrid people group, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and uses that chronological framework to show the complexity of their interactions in a larger geographic context of the North Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. In reverse, Oceania designates the larger geographic space inhabited by a wide array of interrelated Pacific Island peoples, but the complex stories of their interactions and commonalities are episodic in the London museum galleries. Temporally, the ASK narrative is set in a remote past only tenuously connected to the present, a ‘back then’ pre-modern era, carefully curated to defy popular conceptions about the ‘dark ages’. By comparison, the Royal Academy’s thematically organized exhibit on Oceania displayed an atemporal ‘Other’: presented without much chronology, as an art installation it included contemporary Pacific artists reflecting on their traditions and disruptions to it, similar to the British Museum’s Africa and Americas galleries. Modern artistic reflections have not traditionally been a part of scholarly museum exhibits, like the rather staid Anglo-Saxon exhibit in the BM Room 41, although there are movements to bring the past ‘alive’ through visitor engagement and local school partnerships.36 Meanwhile, more popular museum and re-creation sites like Sutton Hoo offer visitor activities, such as dressing up as a warrior and artwork from local children. Similarly, museum gift shops and other vendors sell replicas and medievalistic art and jewellery – usually Viking and Celtic labelled items, since ‘Anglo-Saxon’ appears less marketable.37 Unfortunately, these popular 36

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For a recent movement to develop artistic responses to the ancient and medieval past in Scotland, see: D. Archibald, M. Clark, and C. Connolly, ‘Govan Young (with English captions)’, a 2018 documentary [accessed 31 May 2021] showing local schoolchildren learning about the Viking invasion of central Scotland; and ‘Future Thinking on Carved Stones in Scotland’, ed. S. Foster et al., Scottish Archaeological Research Framework (SCARF) at [accessed 31 May 2021]. The BM room 41 exhibit is often taken over by hordes of school children filling out worksheets and drawing pictures. In the British Library’s ASK exhibit gift area, almost all the material items like Christmas ornaments were Vikings or Normans. When asked about it, I was

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Karen Louise Jolly sites and replicas attract not only re-enactors but also white supremacists who appropriate these symbols and encode them with racist meaning.38 This cultural appropriation presents a conundrum for those trying to tell a more complex and diverse story of early medieval Britain. The various Anglo-Saxon narratives found in UK museum sites raise several questions. At the ASK exhibit, in what sense is Spong Chairperson an ancestor of the ‘English?’ Are the persons on, or in, the cremation urn English because they were buried in what later becomes, for their various descendants, England, or because they spoke an ancestral version of an English language? At the Sutton Hoo site museum, the video introduction relied on that nineteenth-century homology of race, language, and culture: King Rædwald, as they chose to call the buried man, spoke an early form of the language ‘we’ still speak, referring either to local English people visiting the museum, or perhaps to any English-speaking visitor listening to the video in that language. This seamless linguistic narrative ignores ‘Englishes’, multiple variants, and those linguistically colonized who come to such exhibits. The students did not pick up on this linguistic connection in the Sutton Hoo exhibit: they seemed unaware of, or were indifferent to, the problematic racism of ‘Anglo-Saxon’, probably because they did not connect it to their own varied experiences of racism and colonialism.39 On the other hand, those familiar with the Hawaiian renaissances generally do subscribe to the homology of language, culture, and genealogical identity in the recovery of Pacific Island traditions and sovereignties, seeing language as the key to cultural continuity and survival of colonized peoples.40

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told that they were unable to commission specific items, like Spong Man, and carried only what was already in production. See essays in Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-used Past, ed. A. Albin et al. (New York, 2019), particularly M. M. Williams, ‘“Celtic” Crosses and the Myth of Whiteness’, pp. 220–32; and W. Cerbone, ‘Real Men of the Viking Age’, pp. 243–55. See extensive discussion of appropriations on Medieval in the Middle, such as S. Lomuto, ‘White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies’, In the Middle, December 5, 2016 at [accessed 31 May 2021]; A. Miyashiro, ‘Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics’, Literature Compass (2019) [accessed 3 June 2021]; and ‘Medievalists Respond to Charlottesville, The Medieval Academy Blog, August 18, 2017 at [accessed 31 May 2021]. This is also true for most of the students in my medieval history survey courses at the University of Hawai‘i. Two possible explanations are first, on the positive side, they have never been subjected to or engaged in the racist ethnic label; and second, on the negative side, their education has left them ignorant of the long history and contemporary use of WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant). See S. Harris, ‘Race and Ethnicity’, in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, pp. 165–79, at p. 166 on the homology between race, language, and culture in nineteenth-century philological constructions of the field. Indigenous scholars

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Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit Moreover, colonial extinction narratives play a role in these representations. The Anglo-Saxon past defined as a pre-modern temporal era is long dead and gone, but made alive as the origin for contemporary English for those who speak it, who may or may not be ‘Anglo-Saxons’, whatever that means, but are linguistically colonized. Meanwhile, the extinction of Pacific peoples as traditional/not modern was prophesied by the first Euro-American colonizers, but their dying traditions were ‘rescued’ from extinction in the colonizers’ museums. Despite the best efforts of contemporary galleries to restore Indigenous voices, these exhibits designed primarily for non-Indigenous visitors often underestimate the feelings of dislocation these temporally and geographically displaced artefacts have for those who identify with the culture on display, particularly at the level of voices. So, for example, the student who was visibly upset at the Oceania exhibit noted that hearing voices on the audio guide that they recognized by tone and vocabulary as being from Hawai‘i ‘made me so homesick. It made me miss the vernacular and intonation of the way the locals speak, the way Hawaiian words are naturally used in their sentences’. This reaction points to the other ‘Englishes’ that visitors bring to an exhibit, and that could be heard on the audio guide for those attuned to it and sensitive to colonialism in their homeland. But it also highlights how the lingering colonial frame of reference in the museum display dominates and subdues Indigenous voices. One way to mediate these diverse encounters between the living and the dead is to use multiple narratives, so no one voice has sole custody of a story. Similar to ASK, the British Museum special exhibit ‘Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives’ had a clear, chronological path, but with multiple narratives tracing his voyages not just from his own records, but equally from the various island peoples with whom he interacted and who guided his voyages.41 For example, Tupaia, the high-ranking

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draw on this homology to take back their histories from outsiders, whereas those who control the field of early medieval Britain need to allow others into their field in order to see how the past was colonized in the nineteenth century. Arista, Kingdom and Republic, p. 7, also warns about the dangers of binarisms in settler colonialist historiography, such as subject versus object, even in the case of native voices using the western notion of ‘agency’ to push back against the objectification of the ‘passive’ native. The exhibit included a rare display of a Tahitian mourning costume, as well as images from Lisa Reihana’s artwork found at the Royal Academy Oceania installation (Adams, Reimagining Captain Cook, pp. 25–9). See M. Pullam, ‘Reimagining a Tahitian Mourning Costume’, British Museum Blog, May 31, 2019 at [accessed 31 May 2021] and for images online, see ‘Exhibition Review –Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives at the British Museum from 29 November 2018 to 4 August 2019’, London Visitors at [accessed 31 May 2021]. Some local reviews focused on the newly acquired Hawaiian ‘aloha’ shirt: J. Breen, ‘Garish Hawaiian shirt forms part of exhibition on Captain Cook, who was born in Middlesbrough’, Northern Echo, Nov. 29, 2018 at [accessed 31 May 2021]; ‘Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives – British Museum’,