Everyday Life in Viking-Age Towns

Social Approaches to Towns in England and Ireland, c. 800-1100

Letty ten Harkel, D. M. Hadley, D. M. Hadley

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781782970095
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of early medieval towns has frequently concentrated on urban beginnings, the search for broadly applicable definitions of urban characteristics and the chronological development of towns. Far less attention has been paid to the experience of living in towns.The thirteen chapters in this book bring together the current state of knowledge about Viking-Age towns (c. 800–1100) from both sides of the Irish Sea, focusing on everyday life in and around these emerging settlements. What was it really like to grow up, live, and die in these towns? What did people eat, what did they wear, and how did they make a living for themselves? Although historical sources are addressed, the emphasis of the volume is overwhelmingly archaeological, paying homage to the wealth of new material that has become available since the advent of urban archaeology in the 1960s.

1

LIVING IN VIKING-AGE TOWNS

David Griffiths

As outlined in the preface to this volume, early medieval urban studies are now progressing well beyond the traditional empirical themes that have dominated them until recently: a search for definition, and an emphasis on physical topography and stratigraphy. These represent essential preoccupations in the progression of research into early towns, but their predominance in the debate on urban origins can now be seen, in retrospect, as expressions of the academic and practical concerns of their own time, and particularly of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Objectifying ‘The Town’ was accompanied by an objectification of the archaeological process, and reporting style stuck closely and cautiously to identification and description of separate categories of site data. Delving further into the lives of individuals and communities, and the challenges and opportunities they faced whilst inhabiting early towns, were seen until recently as belonging to an unseen and untapped realm of hyper-interpretation, somewhat beyond the responsibility of those writing up excavations on stretched post-excavation resources. By the 1990s, academic discourse in early medieval urban studies could justifiably have been accused of presenting a dehumanised picture. Process, development and physical structure had all but eclipsed the potential for approaching individual human experience in early towns. Yet for the general public, excavation-based reconstructions and re-enactments such as the ‘Jorvik Viking Centre’ and ‘Dublinia’ have prompted a popular appetite for engagement with past lives, which demands a broader academic response. In academic circles, the rise of post-processual thinking in the 1990s and 2000s has emphasised the role of human agency and ideology as a counter to broad-brush notions of environmental determinism and social and economic evolution. Research bridging the formerly restrictive urban-rural divide has proliferated (e.g. the various papers in Giles and Dyer 2007). A renewed interest has arisen in ethnicity and acculturation in the Viking Age (e.g. Hadley 2011), in domestic cultures and the social construction of space (Davies et al. 2006; Astill 2006; 2009), in gender and childhood (e.g. Stoodley 2011; Hadley and Hemer 2011; Lucy 2011) and in the body and the life-course (Crawford 2011).

A re-interrogation of the vast and rich archives of raw and semi-raw data from urban excavations has until recently been overdue. A new generation of university-based doctoral and post-doctoral researchers has begun to produce creative syntheses, with greater theoretical and anthropological content, which is reflected in the work of contributors to this volume. The human dimension has returned to centre stage, giving new force to some basic questions. What was it like to live in a Viking-Age town? What was it like to be a child, elderly, sick, unfree or excluded? How did warmth, privacy, play, work and leisure function in these crowded environments? How did people deal with the effects of crime, security, fires, epidemics, refuse, dirt, noise, smells and social nuisances? How distinct was the feeling of difference between town-dwellers and country-dwellers? Some of these questions may yet be some time in the answering, but it is worth asking them nevertheless as a prompt to yet more creative ways forward. As demonstrated in this volume, the long-awaited synthesis of primary site data into a stimulating series of interpretive and humane themes is now substantially under way.

Definitions

The widespread rise of ‘rescue’ urban excavation from the 1960s onwards coincided with an increased willingness on the part of historians, historical and human geographers, and archaeologists, to question the traditional basis of urban definitions. Defences, street plans, churches, bridges, harbours, place-names and street-names are the physical representations of urbanism, but hitherto a town was only acceptably defined as such in historical terms if it met certain institutional or legal criteria, such as having a borough or market charter. This created a potential nonsense whereby a town or city could only be said to have existed by dint of its legal or ecclesiastical definition, even if it was a failed enterprise with few or no residents, whereas a place with many or all the physical attributes of urbanism may not qualify as such if it lacked confirmation of institutional status. By the 1970s, as the influential definitions of Martin Biddle (1976a) and Susan Reynolds (1977) demonstrate (see also Hadley and Ten Harkel, this volume), there was a widespread move away from rigid classificatory historicism towards a more nuanced and multi-dimensional picture, based largely on social and economic process rather than political status, for which Biddle’s ‘menu’ of urban characteristics was devised. These definitions were in many ways expressions of the evolutionary and processual thinking, which defined ‘New Archaeology’ at that time (for a retrospective study of this era, see Gerrard 2003, 172–80).

One important aspect of urban discovery from the 1960s to 1980s, which gave rise to new debates about trade, coinage and early political systems, was the discovery of the pre-Viking ‘wics’ or emporia at Hamwic (Southampton, Hampshire), Gipeswic (Ipswich, Suffolk) and Eoforwic (York), later joined by Aldwych/Lundenwic (London) in the 1990s (Hill and Cowie 2001). These open or poorly-defended trading sites, located away from the former Roman cities, with regularly laid-out building forms and extensive evidence of ceramic production and imports, closely paralleled a group of riverine or estuarial sites on the near Continent such as Dorestad in the Netherlands and Quentovic in Normandy. Richard Hodges’s influential book Dark Age Economics (1982) revitalised interest in urban origins, and sought to create a taxonomy of ‘gateway communities’ as places of secular/royal patronage which may have given rise to incipient urbanism. Among archaeologists, trade, and trading networks, rose in importance and perception, eclipsing the institutional status of early towns as a factor in their rise. Yet, Hodges’s argument was criticised as overly normative and prescriptive, and it took perceptive critiques such as those by Grenville Astill (1991; 2000) to balance Hodges’s predilection for core/periphery models of state formation and systems theory, with themes of locality, agricultural context, and diversity of political and religious impetus. Accompanying this diversification of approach was an increased interest in ‘proto-urbanism’, where informal beach markets, monasteries and minsters were variously argued to be responsible for generating urban momentum (e.g. Blair 2001; Griffiths 2003). The search for common urban origins produced a wealth of comparative studies, including an important collection of papers edited by Howard Clarke and Anngret Simms (1985). This sought to bring together the early histories of towns in non-Roman Europe, implying a commonality of urban experience outside the legacy of the Roman Empire. Dark Age Economics came as a revitalising contribution to a debate on European trade and the legacy of the Roman Empire, which dated back to Henri Pirenne’s Medieval Cities (1927) and Mohammed and Charlemagne (published posthumously in French in 1937 and in English in 1939). The critical debate that these seminal contributions provoked had considerable influence on academic thinking about the Viking Age. Excavations in Ribe (Denmark), Hedeby/Haithabu (Germany), Kaupang (Norway) and Birka (Sweden) extended the focus on North Sea trading networks to cover the rise of Scandinavian kingdoms in the late Iron Age and Viking periods. The 1991 book by Helen Clarke and Björn Ambrosiani, Towns in the Viking Age, sought to draw together common threads across Europe, but came a little too early to capture the full richness of the evidence from former communist countries in Eastern Europe.

A significant problem with evolutionary notions of proto-urbanism is that few of the trading sites that showed significant signs of urbanism in the 8th or 9th centuries went on to become fully-fledged towns in the 10th or 11th centuries. The North Sea emporia, with one or two exceptions, failed in the mid-9th century, becoming derelict and abandoned, and later urban activity took place on different (if in some cases nearby) sites. In England, the sites of Hamwic, Eoforwic and Lundenwic all lapsed into disuse, and only Gipeswic survived in situ, by the narrowest thread of continuity through the 9th century. This decline was, ironically, blamed by historical commentators such as Peter Sawyer (1982) on the effects of North Sea Viking raids, although Hodges and others preferred to point to systems collapse due to changing emphases in early state formation, and the decline of the Carolingian Empire. The longphort settlements of Ireland (see Harrison, this volume) are another case largely of discontinuity. Until recently the location of the settlement of 9th-century Dublin was a mystery, indicated only indirectly by the rich pagan cemeteries of Kilmainham/Islandbridge and smaller clusters of furnished graves elsewhere along the lower River Liffey. The townscape of Dublin was commonly accepted to have begun to develop after the interruption of Scandinavian rule between 902 and 917, as demonstrated most extensively by Wallace’s excavations at Wood Quay/Fishamble Street (Wallace 1992; 2001; 2008). Excavations at Temple Bar West in the 1990s revealed 9th-century domestic occupation for the first time (Simpson 2000), and even some relatively limited evidence for continuity of use into the 10th century, suggesting that some inhabitants stayed on after their rulers were expelled by native Irish forces in 902. The early Scandinavian presence around the former Dubh Linn (‘black pool’) on the River Poddle near its entrance to the Liffey is confirmed by a series of warrior burials on its south side (Simpson 2005). But attributes of the other longphort sites such as defences, hoards, trade objects such as merchant weights, and early metalworking, are still lacking from Dublin’s 9th-century phase. Elsewhere in Ireland, considerable doubt remains about the relationships between longphort sites and later towns, such as that between Woodstown and Waterford, and historically-recorded 9th-century Viking camps at Cork and Limerick with the 11th- and 12th-century towns that arose there. Outwardly very similar 9th-century sites in Britain, such as the riverside camps at Repton (Derbyshire) and Torksey (Lincolnshire), have only very distant and qualified developmental relationships with the ‘Five Boroughs’ of the North and East midlands (see Williams, this volume).

It is clear that discontinuity, change and localism are as powerful factors in the story of early towns as a broad-brush notion of urban evolution. What might be termed the ‘processual phase’ of urban studies was long-lasting and pervasive, but itself is now subject to critique and revision. An emphasis on urban origins has given way to a stronger interest in the nature of urban life itself. A ‘town’ is no longer seen as a site-type and therefore an interpretive end in itself, but as a shorthand term for a concentration of spatial, social and economic complexity which is perhaps more interesting in its variations than its conformity. Indeed the question ‘what is a town?’, for example, is seen as looking jaded or ‘hackneyed and old fashioned’ (Giles and Dyer 2007, 2). The emphasis on urban definitions has also produced something of a false dichotomy between town and countryside. Perceptive historians and archaeologists had always recognised the interconnections and interdependencies between cities, suburbs, and their rural hinterlands (Dyer and Lilley 2012). Yet the divergences of approach between urban and rural archaeology conspired against breaking down the town-country divide. This led to long-running debates on urban origins, and on the formation of early medieval villages and field systems in the rural landscape, taking place virtually in isolation from each other. This was a major opportunity missed, as the chronological and regional similarities between intensified urbanism and the growth of urban markets in the 10th and 11th centuries, and the move towards village nucleation in large swaths of England, are too close and interesting to be overlooked any longer (Griffiths 2011). The shiring of later Anglo-Saxon England, based on hides and hundreds, local assemblies, and comparable developments in the Danelaw (Hadley 2000) are evidence that local governance and institutions were developing around a pattern of social and economic urban-rural dependencies. Civil defence in later Anglo-Saxon England depended on co-organisation of town defences and roads, settlements, beacons and look-outs across the rural landscape (Baker et al. in press).

It is clear by the later 11th century that some aspects of town life were beginning to develop a sense of separateness from the countryside (Reynolds 1977), but that rural connections and interdependencies were still extremely strong. Major Viking-Age towns such as Dublin, Chester, Lincoln and York had hinterlands consisting of rural estates, rivers, coastlines and uplands, which supplied them with timber, wool, fish, livestock and cereal production. Dublin’s shire, the Dyflinarskíri, was extensive (although by no means dominated by Scandinavian settlers), and the later Hiberno-Norse towns at Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Limerick, all had ‘home territories’ which can be traced in medieval sources (Bradley 1988). Many elite citizens had both rural and urban residences, and these personal connections and power structures gave dynamism to the redistribution of rural productive surpluses via urban markets. It is probable that many lower-ranking individuals and families, and itinerant smiths, metalworkers and boneworkers (see Ashby, this volume), passed between town and country on a regular, perhaps seasonal basis. Hunting and animal husbandry in the countryside and in forests, the gathering and picking of herbs and wild nuts and fruit, the exploitation of shorelines and marshlands, wildfowling and fishing, and the geography of droving, carting, exchange and supply, are all vital to understanding the patterns of consumption and diet revealed by botanical and animal bone assemblages from urban excavations (see Poole, this volume). When medieval documentary sources begin to show more detail of urban-rural social dependencies and links in later centuries, the extent of their complexity and quirkiness becomes clear. An extreme example of these comes in the form of the rights of certain powerful merchants in Bristol and Chester to grain production in Ireland following the Anglo-Norman Conquest of 1171 (Thacker 2003, 29–30), which led to primary foodstuffs being imported over great distances of sea. Simple core-periphery models, and neatly exclusive catchment analyses borrowed from human geography, generally are misleading. Contacts between town and country depended on familial connections, institutional rights and traditions, which operated sometimes over great distances. Despite less documentary evidence, there is good reason to assume that in the Viking Age, particular and sometimes surprising urban-rural dependencies and geographical imbalances probably also occurred. This may help to explain regionally biased distributions of pottery and metalwork types (see Blinkhorn, this volume; Ten Harkel, this volume).

The legacy of urban excavation

Prior to the mid-1960s, medieval urban studies were almost exclusively a historical domain. Medieval deposits in towns were only subject to archaeological attention by happenstance, as had occurred on a partial basis, for instance, during the construction of the New Bodleian underground bookstore in Oxford in the later 1930s (Bruce-Mitford 1939). In the Victorian era and the early 20th century, the emphasis in excavation technique was on exposing masonry structures. In some English towns such as Chester, where the Roman-enthusiast Robert Newstead held sway over city excavations in the period 1910–1940, post-Roman layers were considered to be of little academic interest, and were liable to be removed by workmen or by machine before ‘archaeological excavation’ started, although some of the more eye-catching medieval finds of this excavation era were kept. Attitudes improved after the Second World War. Excavation durin...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Locations of places referred to in the volume drawn by Letty ten Harkel
• Preface D. M. Hadley and Letty ten Harkel
• Section 1: Introductions
• Section 2: Constructing and experiencing urban landscapes
• Section 3: Urban trades and activities