Report: Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community

Sarah Waidler, a doctoral student in ASNC, writes:

On 2^nd March, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic hosted a seminar entitled ‘Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community’. Held in St John’s College, this lively and intellectually stimulating event focused on the related topics of medieval commerce and the economy within this geographical area. The seminar also touched on many other forms of exchange, including cultural, intellectual, familial and political ties between the lands joined together by the North Atlantic waters. Ranging from the actual process of trade and use of currency to how crafts and ideas travelled, to the memory of specific events and preservation of literary and historical traditions, this day presented much food for thought and presented many useful insights, while at the same time highlighting how much work still needs to be done in these areas.

The event was divided into two parts. In the morning, four speakers gave 45-minute talks on different aspects of contacts in this region. The day kicked off with a presentation by Andy Woods, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, on ‘An economy of scale? Considering the volume and use of coinage in Ireland c. 995 -1170’. Andy presented his work on coinage in Ireland and demonstrated how it was possible to make fruitful comparisons between Dublin and many other commercial centres in the North Atlantic world in the medieval period. As well as showing the considerable variation in Ireland’s use of coinage both regionally and chronologically, this paper answered old queries and raised new questions on the nature of currency in Ireland. Dr Colmán Etchingham of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, was the next speaker of the morning and presented a paper entitled ‘The myth of the Irish monastic town’, in which he revisited a topic which he has discussed in other publications, including in his Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture at Cambridge in 2010.  Dr. Etchingham provided further evidence in support of his argument that ecclesiastical centres in medieval Ireland did not function as commercial hubs. This included a very worthwhile investigation into the semantics of terms such as ‘óenach’ and ‘marggad’, which took account of the sources in which they appear.

The Lewis Chessmen, image © Trustees of the British Museum

After a short tea break, the third speaker of the morning, Dr Alex Woolf of the University of St Andrews, discussed ‘The bishops in the Lewis chess sets’ and looked in particular at the question of provenance of these famous pieces. This paper also considered the identity of the craftsman who made such pieces as well as other high-quality goods and how the basic materials for manufacture were obtained. The morning was rounded off with a lecture by Professor Helgi Þorláksson, from the University of Iceland, on ‘Between Oddi and the Orkneys: on Icelandic Orcadian connections, c. 1180-1240’. Professor Þorláksson examined the complex relationships between families in these areas and how much insight could be gained from the extant sources regarding their relationships.

In the afternoon, a text seminar was held to investigate three primary texts which had been circulated prior to the seminar. This discussion was led by Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe of the Department of ASNC and Dr Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir of the University of Iceland. Dr Rowe introduced a text entitled ‘Gísls þáttr Illugasonar’ in which an Icelander, Gísl, comes to the court of the Irish king Muirchertach as a hostage. Dr Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr Óskarsdóttir presented the Irish text ‘Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh’ and the Icelandic text ‘Njáls saga’ and examined how these texts represented the battle of Clontarf. These two sessions proved how bringing together experts from multiple disciplines to examine textual traditions can provide new insights into the material and help elucidate difficult textual quandaries. The discussion covered a range of topics, including the way in which the Irish language was portrayed in ‘Gísls þáttr Illugasonar’ and the transmission of material about specific events and wider culture phenomena between Ireland and the Norse-speaking world.

This seminar was attended by many of the members of the Faculty from the Department of ASNC, several distinguished speakers and visiting academics, as well as post-graduates and students.  This event was an excellent example of how interdisciplinary approaches can hugely benefit research and present new findings. I’m sure that much of what was discussed at this seminar will go on to influence many of the attendees’ work and it is hoped that the many fruitful discourses that began at this seminar will continue for some time to come!

A Dark Age Life? Alex Woolf on Æthelstan, the First King of England

Alex Woolf writes:

English history before the Norman Conquest of 1066 has something of the flavour of a back-story. Like those early parts of a Harry Potter novel that occur before Harry returns to Hogwarts, it is necessary for understanding what follows but it is not really part of the story. English kings are only numbered from the Conquest (though this is a strange coincidence, the first king to be numbered thus was Edward III) and the proverbial assertion of  ancestral antiquity is that one’s forebears ‘came over with the conqueror’. Before this comes the Anglo-Saxon period which is a curious in-between time, traditionally known as the Dark Ages, that separates the Roman period from the Middle Ages proper. Over the last generation or so there has been a concerted effort by scholars working in the field to bring it in from the dark and terms such as Late Antiquity, covering the period up to about 650, and the Early Middle Ages, more vaguely defined, have gained wider currency. Beyond the core of specialists, however, even amongst other academic historians, surprise is still sometimes expressed that we who work on the period before the middle of the eleventh century regard ourselves as medievalists; the Middle Ages, surely, was a world of knights in armour, castles, cathedrals and crusades?

While the Norman Conquest has always provided an easy hook upon which to hang the changes of the eleventh century in England, these changes were not confined to one country alone but affected all of western Europe to a greater or lesser degree. The Feudal Revolution, which saw serfdom replace slavery and the rise of manorial estates, provided the economic basis for a greater degree of professional specialisation reflected in the rebirth of towns and the appearance of merchants and craftsmen who had their own households quite distinct from the farming communities where the bulk of the population still lived. Historians debate how rapid these changes were. One school, led by French scholars such as Georges Duby, Pierre Bonnassie and Guy Bois, speak of la mutation de l’an mil, arguing that the change was rapid, occurring within a generation in each part of Europe it reached. Perhaps this reflects the French tradition of revolution? Others, including most Anglophone historians, imagine a more gradual almost imperceptible transformation taking place over, perhaps, as much as two hundred years. Again, this may reflect our recent experience of constitutional change. The world before the Feudal Revolution was a world of lords and peasants. Most land was held by free farmers who owned riding-horses and weapons and who supplemented the labour of their families with that of slaves. Serfdom existed but was largely confined to the greatest estates, in most areas only those belonging to the King or the Church. Elsewhere in the land lords wanted not rents and renders from their men, for there were as yet no towns and few opportunities to spend surplus income, but their support in legal and military activities. They had no need for craven and malnourished subjects they could rackrent, but for men who would ride with them to court and battle.

One of the by-products of the Feudal Revolution, when it came, was an explosion in the production of texts. Initially an education that included reading and writing was still largely provided by the Church and most writers were in Holy Orders of some sort but the increasingly complex economic world with which the clergy were now engaged led to a much greater degree of integration with secular society. Secular interests thus began to impact more on literary production. Complex theology continued to attract much attention from some writers but others produced works on history, administration and even texts written largely for entertainment. One of the new genres which took off in the course of eleventh and twelfth century was the secular biography. Prior to this the vast majority of lives were written as hagiographical exercises to promote the cult of a man or woman considered to be a saint. In the eleventh century several German kings and William the Conqueror were the subjects of such secular biographies and in the early years of the twelfth century we see lives appearing for Louis VI of France and Roderigo de Vivar, El Cid, amongst others. In the same period the terse annalistic chronicles of the earlier period which recount little more than the deaths of kings and prelates and the occasional battle (sometimes without even giving the result) are replaced by complex reflective histories in which the authors are not afraid to voice their scepticism for some of their source material.

This transformation of the textual record is, to a great extent, what separates the Dark Ages from the later period. The paucity and terseness of the earlier source material makes it very difficult to get a sense of distinct personalities or indeed the balance of individual contribution as against Zeitgeist in historical process. The decline of the ‘Dark Ages’ as a paradigm in modern scholarship largely reflects the shift away from ascribing historical change to individual agents and instead to focussing on underlying tensions in society and long term process. So long as one eschews interest in the contribution of individuals in anything other than theological debate then one can shed light on the Early Middle Ages. Sarah Foot, the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford, has thus set herself a Herculean task in attempting to write a 250 page biography of an Anglo-Saxon king whose fifteen-year reign is recounted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our best narrative source for the period, in only 84 lines of the printed edition, 73 of which comprise a single poem dealing with a battle which lasted a single day. At the outset Foot describes Æthelstan, the First King of England as ‘a biographical treatment’ ‘rather than an examination of Æthelstan’s life in the context of his times’ (p.3). There can be no doubt that Foot’s subject, Æethelstan, who reigned from 924 until 939, is a worthy one. It is common now to identify him as ‘the grandson of Alfred the Great’ but for much of the middle ages he was at least as well regarded, perhaps even more highly, than his grandfather who attained his title of ‘the Great’ only in the thirteenth century. Alfred has benefitted since the late sixteenth century from the rediscovery and wide dissemination of a contemporary life written at his court while he still lived, by Asser, the Welsh Bishop of Sherborne. Asser’s Life of Alfred is unique as a secular biography from England before the mid-eleventh century and seems to have been inspired by, and to some extent modelled upon, one of its few rivals from the whole of Europe, Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, written some seventy years earlier. Anglo-Saxonists have long been aware that but for Asser’s book Æthelstan, rather than his grandfather, might well have been the stand out pre-Conquest king. While Alfred’s direct rule never penetrated far north of the Thames, Æthelstan extended his realm as far as the Firth of Forth in 927, becoming the first King to rule all the English.