CHAPTER 6 Presumed

Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/39136 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation Author: Porck, Thijs Title: Growing old among the Anglo-Saxons : the cultural conceptualisation of old age in Early Medieval England Issue Date: 2016-04-26 6 hare hilderincas : Old warriors in Anglo-Saxon England “Of what use is an old man in battle?”, Alfred J. Wyatt asked long ago, as he argued against the standard interpretation of the phrase “unorne ceorl” in line 256 of The Battle of Maldon as ‘an old churl’. 1 Rather than ‘old’, Dunnere, the character referred to, should be seen as being ‘plain, humble’, Wyatt maintained. Oliver Emerson confirmed Wyatt’s translation and added that assigning the meaning ‘old’ to the word unorne is “a sad libel upon the valiant Dunnere”. 2 While their semantic analysis of unorne is now generally accepted, 3 Wyatt and Emerson’s reasoning strikes as odd, given that Dunnere belonged to the same group of warriors as the “eald geneat” [old companion] Byrhtwold, led by the “har hilderinc” [grey-haired warrior] Byrhtnoth. 4 Moreover, their comments seem to reflect a modern prejudice with respect to the aptness of old men for military activities. Judging the past in modern terms is problematic; the Middle Ages in particular were a time when elderly men could make themselves useful on the battlefield. The history of the Crusades, for instance, provides numerous examples of active participants of an advanced age: Raymond of St. Gilles (1041/1042–1105), Raynald of Châtillon (1125–1187) and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (1122– 1190) all died in the Holy Land, well into their sixties. 5 Perhaps the most impressive elderly warrior of the Middle Ages was Enrico Dandolo (1107–1205), the Doge of Venice and leader of the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204). When the Crusade started, Dandolo was over 90 years old and blind. Despite his age and visual impairment, he participated actively in various battles. At the siege of Constantinople in 1203, to give a striking example, Dandolo sensed that his Venetian troops were hesitant to advance on the city walls and he gave orders to bring him ashore. He ran towards the enemy walls, carrying the Venetian banner; “as Dandolo had calculated, the Venetians were shamed by the old man’s bravery; they could not abandon their venerable leader and rushed to join him”. 6 Dandolo’s charismatic leadership paid off: the people of Constantinople were surprised by the attack and suffered defeat. Dandolo participated in several other battles before he died in 1205, at the blessed age of 98. These examples reveal that elderly warriors, even those with severe physical disabilities, were a more common sight on the medieval battlefield than Wyatt and Emerson 1 A. J. Wyatt, An Anglo-Saxon Reader (Cambridge, 1919), 282. 2 O. Emerson, ‘Notes on Old English’, Modern Language Review 14 (1919), 207. 3 E.g., English and Norse Documents: Relating to the Reign of Ethelred the Unready , ed. and trans. M. Ashdown (Cambridge, 1930), 87–8; The Battle of Maldon , ed. E. V. Gordon, with a supplement by D.G. Scragg (Manchester, 1976), 57, n. 256; M. A. L. Locherbie-Cameron, ‘The Men Named in the Poem’, in The Battle of Maldon. AD 991 , ed. D. G. Scragg (Oxford, 1991), 243–4. For a lexicological analysis of unorne , see Appendix, s.v. unorne . 4 Battle of Maldon , ll. 169a, 310a. 5 Minois, History of Old Age , 193–4. 6 J. Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (London, 2004), 174–5. 147 CHAPTER 6 presumed. 7 Accordingly, Dunnere in The Battle of Maldon is not unimaginable as an old man and his aged comrades Byrhtwold and Byrhtnoth may not be as fantastical as the dragon fought by the grey-haired warrior Beowulf in the eponymous epic. This chapter first establishes whether the presence of old warriors in The Battle of Maldon is grounded in historical reality, by surveying the evidence in archaeological, pictorial and documentary sources. Next, Old English heroic poetry is analysed in order to speculate about what roles were assigned to old men at arms, thus answering Wyatt’s rhetorical question ‘of what use is an old man in battle?’. The (s)word from the grave: Archaeological evidence Archaeological research into the grave furnishings of buried individuals in Anglo- Saxon cemeteries dating back to the fifth to eighth centuries has revealed that at least one in four men belonging to the oldest age group were inhumed with weapons. Crawford, for instance, has noted that 19% of the oldest age group in her sample of 1600 excavated skeletons were buried with spears. 8 Taking into account all weapon types, Nick Stoodley calculated that weapons were found in 28% of the graves of elderly individuals included in his study of 1230 undisturbed burials from Anglo- Saxon cemeteries. 9 An analysis of five further early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries from Hampshire and Oxfordshire, finally, suggests that 33% to 100% of the elderly males were consigned to the grave with weapons. 10 Archaeologists have furthermore observed some distinct features of the weapon burials of elderly men. In his discussion of Anglo-Saxon warrior graves, Heinrich Härke has noted a positive correlation between the age of the interred and the size of spearheads: the older the individual buried, the longer the spearhead that accompanied him. 11 This correlation has been confirmed by later studies and even extended to include the length of the whole spear and that of the knife. 12 In addition to the presence of more sizable weapons, Stoodley has discovered that, on average, more elderly were interred with three or more weapons than younger adults were. 13 Finally, two particular arms, axes and seaxes, have only been found in the graves of the oldest 7 Another extraordinary elderly warrior that comes to mind is the English knight William Marshal (1146/1147–1219), who personally led the English army in the Battle of Lincoln (1217) at the age of 70. S. Painter, William Marshal: Knight-Errant, Baron and Regent of England (Baltimore, 1933), 214–20. 8 Crawford, 57. 9 N. Stoodley, ‘From the Cradle to the Grave: Age Organization and the Early Anglo-Saxon Burial Rite’, World Archaeology 31 (2000), 462. Notably, Stoodley defines the oldest group as people aged over 40. 10 R. Gowland, ‘Ageing the Past: Examining Age Identity from Funerary Evidence’, in Social Archaeology of Funerary Remains , ed. R. Gowland and C. Knüsel (Oxford, 2006), 151–2. 11 H. Härke, ‘Warrior Graves? The Background of the Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite’, Past and Present 126 (1990), 22–43. 12 Idem , ‘Changing Symbols in a Changing Society: The Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite in the Seventh Century’, in The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe , ed. M. O. H. Carver (Woodbridge, 1992), 158; S. Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, 1999), 72; Crawford, 58; Stoodley, ‘From the Cradle’, 467. 13 N. Stoodley, ‘Childhood to Old Age’, in Oxford Handbook , ed. Hamerow, Hinton and Crawford, 649, 663; Idem , ‘From the Cradle’, 462. 148 HARE HILDERINCAS : OLD WARRIORS IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND individuals. 14 Whereas no explanation has yet been offered for the connection between these two particular weapons and the elderly, 15 the presence of longer and more numerous weapons in the weapon burials of elderly individuals has been explained as reflecting a special, higher status of the deceased. 16 Although the presence of weapons in a grave unproblematically seems to signal an active warrior function at time of death, Härke, in particular, has argued against this assumption. One of his main arguments was the age range of the burials containing weapons: “mature individuals too old to be effective fighters were accompanied by weapons, as were children too young to be warriors”. 17 Rather than reflecting an active military career, “the Anglo-Saxon weapon burial rite was a ‘symbolic act’ … the ritual expression of an ethnically, socially and perhaps ideologically based ‘warrior status’”. 18 Although it is not unthinkable that the inhumation with weapons may have had a symbolic background, Härke’s underlying assumption that children and elderly were unfit for warfare merely on account of their age is not supported by other evidence. Härke’s conclusion with respect to children has not gone unchallenged. In her study on Anglo-Saxon childhood, Crawford has convincingly argued that youngsters could in fact be martially active. Historical examples, in particular, such as the Anglo- Saxon saints Wilfrid, Guthlac and Cuthbert, who all started their fighting careers in their teens, support her argument. 19 Additionally, Crawford makes a more general point by referring to the use of child warriors in various present-day war situations: whereas prohibiting boys from fighting on the battlefield may fit modern Western ideals, this disposition is by no means a universal mentality. 20 Supporting Crawford’s disposition that boys could and would fight among men in the Middle Ages, an Old Frisian law text, dating back to thirteenth century but possibly reflecting even older traditions, describes an army as including “thrintera mare and … twelfwintera maga” [three-year old horses and twelve-year-old youths].21 Those Anglo-Saxon youths that were buried with weapons, then, may have actually used them, either in combat or on the training grounds. Crawford’s refutation of Härke can be extended to argue in favour of the likelihood of elderly warriors. While modern notions may rule out old people for warfare, medieval history, as noted above, offers numerous instances of active, grey- haired warriors. Moreover, archaeological finds of later periods also demonstrate the reality of elderly warriors: the bodies of three old men killed in battle were found at the site of the Battle of Towton (1461).

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