500 – 1066 EARLY MEDIEVAL

DARK AGE BRITAIN After the end of Roman Britain, the land became a melting pot of Britons, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings – all of whom variously shaped the character of our countryside, says Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough

he period once known as the Dark Ages – from 500 to 1066 –is where we find the origins of a surprising number of our place names, villages and counties, particularly in England. T This was an age of migration and invasion, of religious and political upheaval, and its traces can still be read in the landscape today. By 500 AD, Germanic tribes from Northern Europe had arrived from across the sea. The Anglo-Saxons, as they are now known, lived in the shadow of the past. The stone cities, bridges and roads of the Romans stood empty in the landscape, crumbling over time but still imposing – the ‘work of giants’ as the Anglo- Saxons called them. Other man-made OFFA’S DYKE structures were far older: earthworks from Iron Age hillforts to Neolithic standing stones. Built by the king of Mercia in the late 8th century, Offa’s Dyke is a defensive earthwork that runs for 150 miles near the Anglo-Welsh Anglo-Saxon impressions of this multi- border. A statement of power and control, the dyke is still imposing layered landscape are preserved in many of today, and can be walked as part of a long-distance footpath. For a their Old English place names, and these are shorter walk (7 miles) try the Devil’s Dyke in Cambridgeshire, part the names we still use today. ‘Chester’ derives of a series of defensive earthworks built in the late 6th century on from the Old English ceaster, which the Anglo-

the boundaries between the kingdoms of East Anglia and Mercia. Saxons borrowed from the Latin castrum, Getty

meaning ‘military camp’. From Manchester Photos:

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to Chichester, from Colchester to Worcester, the Anglo-Saxons were marking out these places as the remnants of a bygone age. The Anglo-Saxons weren’t the only inhabitants of Britain at this time. The oldest layers of place names – often connected to prominent features such as rivers and mountains – kept their Brittonic names, given to them by those who were already living there when the Anglo-Saxons arrived. The multiple River Avons dotted across England and Scotland come from the Brittonic word abona, simply meaning ‘river’. Other place names hint at a multicultural landscape, with Anglo-Saxons and Britons living close to each other: from the Old English word wealh ‘foreigner’ we get Walsall and Modern place names bring us closest to the ABOVE An Anglo-Saxon Walton, as well as the Brittonic territories and Anglo-Saxon countryside, since many of them farmstead protected by a kingdoms of Cornwall and Wales. A Brittonic originated in this period. Through them we can wooden pallisade and a lullaby, possibly from Cumbria, provides a construct a mental map of the world as the ditch. Typically such a snapshot of the countryside as a hunting Anglo-Saxons would have seen it, with its settlement would have housed two or three resource. As baby Dinogad lies snugly wrapped natural features, its resources, the people who families. The Anglo-Saxons in pine marten furs, his mother sings, “when lived there and the activities that took place. mostly built using wood – your father used to go to the mountain, he Chiswick in London was once a ‘cheese farm’, they avoided the existing would bring back a roebuck, a wild pig, a stag, a Berwick on the borders was a ‘barley farm’, Roman stone settlements speckled grouse from the mountain, a fish from while Beoley in Worcestershire, meaning ‘bee as they didn’t have the the waterfall”. wood’, must have been a good place for honey. knowledge to repair the The Anglo-Saxons inherited a farmed and The word ‘shire’ comes from the Old English buildings managed countryside. This was an open word scir, a division of land governed by landscape, not a system of regularly spaced someone called the ‘shire reeve’, or, as the word WEST STOW villages, but timber buildings dotted through later became, ‘sheriff’. Now an archaeological site the countryside with infields for growing crops and open-air museum in such as barley and oats. Beyond these fields SPECTRES AND DRAGONS Suffolk, West Stow was home Other place names can tell us to an Anglo-Saxon village about the Anglo-Saxons’ from the 5th to 7th centuries. FACTFILE “Some place names tell us imaginative landscape – the Many of the reconstructed supernatural creatures they houses are ‘sunken-featured believed to inhabit the groves • Estimates from the buildings’, partly dug into the about supernatural creatures and valleys. Just outside Domesday Book ground and covered with a suggest that the Durham there is a village roof. Visit the village to see believed to inhabit the area” population of how early Anglo-Saxons lived called Shincliffe, which England was around and worked – and even meet means ‘slope of the spectre 2.25 million by 1086. old breeds of livestock. £6. were meadows for grazing cattle and other or demon’ in Old English. Those living near Open daily. IP28 6HG. 01284 livestock, while woodlands provided fuel, Wanborough (Wiltshire) and Wodneslawe • Up to around 950 AD, 728718, weststow.org building materials, and land where pigs could (Bedfordshire) should keep a close eye out for almost 100% of be put out to pannage. the heathen god Woden, since his name is Anglo-Saxon society Beyond the farmed lands were different associated with these places, while residents of was rural, and what terrains: moorlands, chalk downs, coasts, fens. Drakelow (Derbyshire) should beware of towns there were As seen through Anglo-Saxon eyes, some were dragons. And in Anglo-Saxon charters setting functioned as more attractive than others. When St Guthlac out land boundaries, natural and supernatural specialist sites for production and trade. founded Crowland Abbey in the Lincolnshire landscapes merge, with goblins, giants and badlands, it was in a “hideous fen of huge devils lurking in the hedges and barrows. • After 950 AD, more bigness”, where he lived in an ancient burial These beings were used to explain mysterious towns started to mound and was apparently assaulted by prehistoric earthworks. spring up, but for demons. Even so, the fens provided fish, Once the Anglo-Saxons had been newcomers, the majority of waterfowl, peat and rushes, and many of the pushing back the Britons and taking their people, life was still

: Alamy, Getty great monastic houses sprung up there, lands. Soon it would be their turn to be invaded. lived on the land.

Photos including Ely (which means ‘Eel Island’). Viking raids had begun at the end of the 8th

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century, and in 865 a Scandinavian force swept through England, toppling kingdoms. They came as invaders, but they stayed as settlers with families and farms. In the year 876, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the land of the Northumbrians was shared out between the Nordic newcomers, who “proceeded to plough and support themselves”. After King Alfred beat back the invaders, the peace treaty he drew up with the Viking leader Guthrum is so clearly embedded in the landscape that it can still be traced today. It begins with the boundaries agreed between Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian territories: “They shall run up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, and then up the Ouse to Watling Street”. North of this line, in areas heavily settled by the Scandinavians – East Anglia, the East Midlands and Yorkshire – modern place names once given by the Norse settlers tell us how they viewed the land and its resources. The easiest TOP Despite later medieval pastures and meadows, common land for way to tell there was once a Scandinavian additions, All Saints’ grazing, woodland for fuel and fences. Tracts of farming the land is to look for place names Church, Brixworth, in wooded and non-wooded land were being Northamptonshire is the ending in ‘-by’, the Old Norse word for placed under ‘Forest Law’ and set aside so the largest and most complete ‘farmstead’ or ‘village’. So Grimsby was once a Anglo-Saxon church in king and his nobles could hunt venison. Further farm belonging to someone called Grim, England. Its earliest parts north, during William’s decade-long campaign Wetherby was a sheep farm, and Selby was a date from the 7th century to bring the country to heel, cattle and crops farm with willow trees. and the distinctive star had been burnt, famine ravaged the land, and turret was added in the the Domesday Book lists estate after estate EMERGENCE OF VILLAGES 10th century reduced to wasteland. From the middle of the 10th century, the ABOVE LEFT An Compared to the Romans and the Normans landscape of England began to change, as the exceptional work of with their great stone buildings and population grew and the distinction between Anglo-Saxon goldsmithing, infrastructure, early medieval culture lay urban and rural areas became clearer. Villages the Alfred Jewel was lightly on the land. But its legacy is far more discovered in Somerset in of the sort we might recognise today – evenly present than we might realise, shaping how we the 17th century. It bears spaced houses with strips of cultivated fields the words “Alfred ordered understand its boundaries and divisions, its beyond – started to appear, often centred me made” field systems, its deep history. And more often around a manor or church. ABOVE RIGHT than we realise, when we speak the place names After the Normans arrived in 1066, this St Laurence’s Church in that surround us, we are conjuring the former process accelerated, shaping the countryside Bradford on Avon dates inhabitants of the countryside who lived there into an even more recognisable form. New from the 10th or 11th over a thousand years ago, whether Anglo- stone structures sprung up, visible across the century and has been Saxons, Scandinavians or Britons. CF landscape: motte and bailey castles and little altered since Romanesque cathedrals. Written two decades Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is Associate after William the Conqueror came to power, the Professor in Medieval History at Durham University,

Domesday Book gives us a sense of the English and author of Beyond the Northlands: Viking Alamy

countryside as a worked landscape of fields, Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas (OUP, 2016). Photos:

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1. Wansdyke Wiltshire and Somerset 2. Gosforth Cross Cumbria 3. Sutton Hoo Suffolk Its name associated with the pagan god Woden Dating to the 900s, the Gosforth Cross stands in The most famous Anglo-Saxon site of all: a (Woden’s Dyke), sections of this earthwork St Mary’s churchyard. It blends Christian imagery sumptuous 6th-century ship burial mound. The stretch for 35 miles through the West Country. In – such as the crucifixion of Christ – with images powerful King Rædwald of East Anglia is thought some places the bank is 13 feet high and the ditch of pagan Norse gods: Loki bound and tortured, to be the occupant. Finds here include the over eight feet deep, and it may have been built Thor wrestling the Midgard Serpent, Vidar forcing famous Sutton Hoo helmet (British Museum). both to defend territory and control trade and apart the jaws of the monstrous wolf Fenrir. Open £9.80. Open daily. Woodbridge, IP12 3DJ. transport in the region. daily. Gosforth, CA20 1AZ. 01394389700, nationaltrust.org.uk/sutton-hoo

4. Jorvik Viking Centre Yorkshire 7. Lindisfarne Priory Northumberland 6. Hall Northumberland Following the discovery of timber buildings, The priory on the tidal island of Lindisfarne was Discover the life of 7th-century monk and workshops, privies, pits, pottery, metalwork and an important Celtic Christian centre from the 6th chronicler, , who lived at Jarrow monastery. bones from Viking Age York, the Jorvik Viking century, home to the Lindisfarne Gospels. In 793 Here you can walk around the reconstructed Centre was established 1984. Travel back in time AD It saw the first major Viking raid, sending village and farm, visit the rare-breed animals, and to experience the sights, smells and sounds of the shockwaves through Europe. £6.80. Open daily. explore the nearby ruins of the Anglo-Saxon town. £11. Open daily. York, YO1 9WT TD15 2RX. 01289 389200, english-heritage. monastery. £5, Open Tues to Sun. Jarrow NE32 01904 615 505, jorvikvikingcentre.co.uk org.uk/visit/places/lindisfarne-priory 3DY. 0191 424 1585, jarrowhall.org.uk

8. Maldon Essex 10. St Gregory’s Minster Yorkshire 11. Alfred the Great’s Walls, Wareham Down on the Blackwater Estuary, this is the site of This late Anglo-Saxon church has a sundial with Dorset a famous battle fought between the Anglo- an inscription that begins “Orm, son of Gamal, During King Alfred’s struggles against the Vikings Saxons and Vikings in 991 AD, commemorated in bought St Gregory’s Minster when it was all in the late 9th century, Wareham became one of the Old English poem, The Battle of Maldon. The ruined and collapsed…” ‘Orm’ and ‘Gamal’ are his fortified towns, surrounded by defensive Anglo-Saxons lost, but the poem is embedded in Norse names, although the inscription is written earthworks that can still be seen (and walked

the physical landscape, and clearly written by in Old English, suggesting they assimilated into along) today. Fortified towns were key to Alfred’s : Alamy, Getty, NT Images

someone who knew the area and its inhabitants. the local culture. Kirkdale, YO62 7HF ultimate success. Photos

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