Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain

Essays in honour of Rosemary Cramp

Helena Hamerow, Arthur MacGregor

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785704666
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe médiévale

Rosemary Cramp's influence on the archaeology of early Medieval Britain is nowhere more apparent than in these essays in her honor by her former students. Monastic sites, Lindisfarne and Whithorn, are the inspiration for Deirdre O'Sullivan's and Peter Hill's papers; Chris Loveluck discusses the implications of the findings from the newly-discovered settlement at Flixborough in Lincolnshire; Nancy Edwards describes the early monumental sculpture from St David's in South Wales; Martin Carver reviews the politics of monumental sculpture and monumentality; and Catherine Hills reassesses the significance of imported ivory found in graves. Richard Bailey, Christopher Morris and Derek Craig top and tail the book with tributes to Rosemary Cramp and a bibliography of her work.

1

Why that? Why there? Why then? The Politics of Early Medieval Monumentality

Martin Carver

The hypothesis presented in this paper has already appeared in various fragmentary forms (Carver 1986,1993,1998b), but has not hitherto been drawn together, so it is fitting that I should try to do this in honour of my best teacher and most telling critic. After all, it would not do for Professor Cramp's Festschrift to be too burdened by flattering emulation; it should contain something exasperating as well. So I look forward to her leafing through these pages with growing despair, culminating in the tart response familiar from my carefree student days: 'really Mr Carver, I have no idea what you are talking about', meaning: 'actually, I know perfectly well; you on the other hand...'

In brief, the hypothesis concerns the history of the early medieval period in north-west Europe and our ability to read it from archaeology, or more specifically from its major investments such as burial mounds, churches, illuminated manuscripts and sculpture: the word 'monumentality' of my title is intended as shorthand for all these things. Confidence in the idea that monuments had (and have) a meaning beyond some vague celebration of an individual or propitiation of an unseen omnipotence has been growing among prehistorians (e.g. Bradley 1993), and is an accepted feature of the historic period. We know that monuments are more than passive memorials because written commentaries, poetry and inscriptions declare their active purposes for us. Monuments comprise the vocabulary of a political language, fossilized versions of arguments that were continuous and may have related more to what was desired than what had occurred (Carver 1993). At the same time, we need not suppose that the expression is necessarily so subtle, sceptical or to use a fashionable word, ironical, as to lose all hope of making equations between a society and its ideas. That architecture, sculpture, burial mounds and brooches have messages beyond the functional which are dependant on their social, economic and above all their ideological context was never an issue: to understand their real meaning is the goal and the aim of each generation that studies them. It is very likely that the motives I attach to the construction of the monuments to be discussed are equally inadequate characterizations of the profound stresses that motivated and were concealed by their makers. That said, the monuments are what survive, and our story must temporarily keep the candle burning until their story can be told.

Some assumptions

The argument requires a number of assumptions to be declared. First, all archaeologists are obliged to acknowledge that whereas their efforts have the advantage of generating new evidence, there is never a good moment to argue from it; even newer evidence can quickly take the shine off too detailed a model. Reasoning from documents has the disadvantage that so few survive, but the advantage that no new sources are likely to appear suddenly in the midst of the six-year-long composition of a major synthesis. Archaeological reasoning and historical reasoning have naturally different rhythms, and the world is a more interesting place because of it. But, in order to offer a historically acceptable model, the archaeologist is obliged to assume that it is legitimate to argue from the material culture we have; to assert that in certain matters, such as the occurrence of churches and burial mounds, the distribution will not now alter markedly: that what we have is not exactly what there was, but is an acceptable representation of what there was. Having declared this assumption, the archaeologist should be permitted to develop a model on evidence that is partial; the documentary evidence is partial too, but it is legitimate to attempt to write history from it.

A second assumption is that the repertoire of material culture at our disposal is heterogeneous and cannot be interpreted through a single theoretical exegesis. Not every object or site has an equal claim to be treated as intentionally expressive. If the Sutton Hoo mound 1 burial or the Lindisfarne Gospels can be seen as having agency, representing material culture in its active voice, there is no need to impute the same intentions to a spade or a spindle whorl. The old definition of a 'culture', pulled this way and that since Gordon Childe used it the preface to The Danube in Prehistory (1929), can be seen as neither all cultural, nor always seeking identity, status or affiliation, but multi-purposed, a set of different statements addressing different audiences or none. If economic information is incorporated in the layers of midden heap, political meaning is most likely to be embedded in sites and objects of high investment and public access. In our period, the prominent candidates are burial mounds, jewellery, churches, illuminated manuscripts and sculpture. These appear not only in a single place at successive times, but at the same time in different places. If assumption number 1 is tenable this variation has a meaning and was intended to have one.

If the choice of the vehicle of expression is intentional, how far is it sui generis and how far is it owed to the emulation of the neighbours? This depends firstly on whether the neighbours are visible, and the third assumption I make is that in early medieval northern Europe they were. The Anglo-Saxons knew about the Romans, the Irish, the Piets, the British, the Franks, the Swedes, the Danes and the Norwegians at both a general and a personal level, and we can infer this both from books (Bede) and from graves (see, for example, Hines 1984). It is these contacts and the transmissions between them that allow us to suppose that the commissioners of seventh-century monuments could fish in a large reservoir of ideas. George Henderson invokes the broad range of stimuli available to the composers of the Book of Durrow in AD 680: 'Discrete national traits, in design, technique and the selection of motifs, came into conjunction in the peculiar, small-scale, packed circumstances of the British Isles, with its ever-changing political scene, under the constant cohesive influence of the internationally active Christian church, writing and speaking Latin to all ears' (Henderson 1999, 53). But to these same people, the local traits of Scandinavia and Saxony were also visible or at least were known - the patterns on cremation urns, the wrist clasps and square-headed brooches which had been worn by East Anglian nobles. The bracteates or guldgubbe made in Fyn are sources for Insular Art potentially no more obscure than Coptic bowls or stamped Mediterranean pottery. So why were their ideas not recycled on the pages of the gospel books? The animals of the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps and purse lid and of the Durrow carpet pages are links in the same technician's chain. But a great deal more of the Sutton Hoo menagerie, on helmet, sceptre, and sword was not adopted by the Christian artisans. Eastern Christian figurative art was known to the kings of East Anglia, as can be seen from a sixth-century bucket found in a field a few hundred metres north of Sutton Hoo (Mango et ah 1989). But it was not incorporated into the Sutton Hoo jewellery. The point is an obvious one. The Anglo-Saxons were not 'eclectic' in the sense of taking motifs at random from some workshop floor or exotic street scene. They were not indiscriminately 'influenced' by things they had seen in the halls of Danish relatives or on trips to Rome. They were creative and selective, not eclectic, but choosy. There was, potentially, a broad range of accessible options and since the different options were equally available, the choice which was actually made must have a meaning.

The next assumption is that the repertoire of possible choices does not need to be contemporary; in other words the maker of expressive artefacts and monuments can also fish in the pool of the past. The metal-smiths of later Celtic Britain and Ireland can revive La Τèηе styles after an interval of 500 years, just as Roman motifs, lettering, ornament and pottery are reintroduced in seventh-century Northumbria, the courts of Offa and Charlemagne, the burns of Alfred, and in numerous subsequent renaissances (Carver 1993). It was recently argued that the notched shield seen on the St Andrews Sarcophagus derived from something last seen (so far as we are aware) in the Iron Age of southern Britain (Carver 1999a). There are two ways in which this transmission can be achieved, the most easily acknowledged being survival of the object or site itself. Bailey (1992) suggests a 'conservatism' to account for the gap between Sutton Hoo and Durrow (see below), while Henderson prefers to see the transmission occurring via surviving pattern books (Henderson 1999, 50). Roman things no doubt turned up or were dug up from time to time, certainly when former Roman sites were being redeveloped from the tenth-century onwards; this easily explains why the form of late Saxon pottery was drawn from Roman, not Frankish models (Carver 1999b, 42). The argument has been extended to sites; former prehistoric ceremonial centres being commandeered by later authorities for their own legitimation (Bradley 1988), and it is likely that the Anglo-Saxons had quite a sophisticated knowledge of 'landscape archaeology'. Bronze Age burial mounds were suitable places for the emulation of Pagan status, while Christian missionaries should be assigned old Roman forts like Burgh Castle (Johnson 1988).

It is more difficult to use the 'survival' argument to explain the readoption of certain other practices such as ship burial, arguably seen previously in that form neither in Scandinavia nor Britain when it was practised at seventh-century Sutton Hoo and Snape. Here the assumption required is that the idea of ship-burial was present in the previous century and perhaps long before, but not then practised. The archaeologist cannot excavate these ethereal images, which are transmitted through unrecorded space like children's rituals in the playground (Opie and Opie 1977). Unless we suppose an early archaeological expedition to the Pyramid city at Gizeh, the idea of ship-burial came out of the heads of people and became archaeologically visible only when it was reified in some moment of exceptional stress. Ship-burial is therefore not a custom but a statement in context, and our interest in it is not so much in the innate meaning of the ritual as the meaning it had for seventh-century East Anglia: why that, why there, why then? (Carver 1995).

The contextual explanation may be thought to deserve precedence over the cultural. For example, there were burial mounds in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries in Britain, but this is not simply a 'burial custom' that evolves or endures. The style and location of seventh-century mounds is different from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors, being larger and more solitary (Shephard 1979). In any case, the burial mound does not have to carry exactly the same significance in the seventh century as in the sixth: it depends what else was happening. At Sutton Hoo the use of burial mounds can be deemed 'expressive' or even polemical on two counts: first they represent a higher level of investment than the mounds of previous centuries, and second, they are constructed at a time at which quite different monuments are being constructed in adjacent lands, for example in Kent. By contrast, Kent, rich in burial mounds in the sixth century, is investing in a new repertoire in the seventh - the apsidal churches of Canterbury.

If this is merely to say that monuments have political meaning, and the choice of monument reflects a political agenda, that is already a great deal for some to accept. But it is axiomatic for what follows. I want to propose that early medieval investments, prestige buildings and artefacts, can be used to write political as well as cultural history, and that if this is acceptable, we can paint a picture of confronted polities pursuing different agendas during the fifth to the eighth centuries both within the island of Britain and beyond.

Fig. 1.1. Monumental mound-burial in Britain in the sixth and seventh centuries AD (Carver 1986, after Shephard 1979).

Reactionary mound-building

The conflated version of Shephard's map (Fig. 1.1; Carver 1986) shows a trend: cemeteries with numerous small burial mounds are present in sixth-centur...