The following post offers a brief look at the evolution of the coastline of north-eastern Lincolnshire and Spurn Head from the Mesolithic through until the start of the Roman era, a period that saw dramatic changes as an inland forested region was gradually flooded by the rising tide to become the new coastal zone. Included below are a series of palaeogeographic maps that offer reconstructions of the coastline at various points in prehistory, along with some brief commentary on the changes and developments that each map shows.

The extent of Doggerland in around 10,000 BC, towards the end of the last glacial era, along with suggested reindeer migration routes in that period (drawn by C. R. Green for Origins of Louth, based on Barton, 2005 and Shennan et al, 2000, with permission). Ahrensburgian tanged points, or arrow tips, of this period have been found in north Lincolnshire, which are identical to finds associated with reindeer hunting in northern Germany then.

The Mesolithic landscape of Doggerland, now the floor of the North Sea, as revealed by 3D seismic data collected by the North Sea oil and gas industry (image source: Vincent Gaffney).

The landscape and outlook of the present-day Lincolnshire coast was dramatically different in the Mesolithic period (9600 BC onwards). The formation of massive ice sheets during the last 'Ice Age' led to global sea-levels dropping to -120 metres OD, with the bottom of the North Sea consequently becoming dry land as far north as Shetland. Although this exposed landscape, known as Doggerland, began to be submerged once more as the ice melted and sea-levels rose, this process took millennia. As a result, the modern Lincolnshire coast was covered by a mixed deciduous forest that extended out over what is now the floor of the North Sea for much of the Mesolithic, with the actual coastline lying 50 km or more to the north-east at the start of this period and eastern Lincolnshire representing part of an upland district rather than a coastal zone. Such a situation appears to have persisted throughout the earlier Mesolithic, with the coastal zone still lying well outside this region in c. 7000 BC:

A reconstruction of the Mesolithic coastline as it existed around 7000 BC, with Louth in eastern Lincolnshire marked to aid with location (image drawn by C. R. Green, based on data from Shennan et al, 2000).

The landscape of north-eastern Lincolnshire and south-eastern Holderness in around 6500 BC; at this point in the Mesolithic, the coastline still lay outside the region under consideration in the present post (image drawn by C. R. Green, after Berridge & Pattison, 1994). Note, the present-day coastline from approximately Saltfleet in Lincolnshire to Easington in the East Riding of Yorkshire is shown in grey.

From about 8,000 years ago, this situation began to change. Sometime around 6200 BC, the land bridge connecting Britain to the continent was severed, perhaps being finally destroyed by the Storegga Slide tsunami, and by approximately 6000 BC the flooding of what remained of Doggerland had advanced sufficiently that the coastline probably lay just to the east of edge of our study area. The next 500 years saw continued flooding, with the result that the coastal zone moved decisively into this region, as can be seen in the following maps:

A reconstruction of the Mesolithic coastline as it existed sometime around 6000–5500 BC, with Louth in eastern Lincolnshire marked to aid with location (image drawn by C. R. Green, based on data from Shennan et al, 2000). Note, the marine flooding created offshore islands from former higher ground to the east and north of the modern Lincolnshire and Norfolk coastlines; these islands are thought to have persisted until the later thirteenth century AD, before they were finally destroyed by storms and flooding.

The coastline of north-eastern Lincolnshire and south-eastern Holderness sometime around 5000 BC (image drawn by C. R. Green, based on underlying till-surface contour data reported in Berridge & Pattison, 1994, with additions and modifications). As before, the present-day coastline from approximately Saltfleet in Lincolnshire to Easington in the East Riding of Yorkshire is shown in grey. By this point, the coastal zone lay well within our region, with the Lincolnshire coast being protected by offshore islands; the sand body that underlies the North Somercotes–Saltfleet storm beach appears to have first formed in this period too, based on borehole records, and a very notional representation of this is included above.

This flooding had a dramatic effect on the vegetation of the region, with the mature mixed deciduous forest that had once stretched out onto the North Sea plain being replaced by wetlands and a coastal landscape. The tree stumps and trunks that are revealed at very low tides and in excavations all along the Lincolnshire coast from Immingham to Ingoldmells have their origins in this lost prehistoric forest, which was first subject to waterlogging as the water-table rose and was then submerged by the rising tide. The date of this death and submersion varies from site to site depending on the elevation of the land on which the forest grew, but at Immingham and Theddlethorpe the waterlogging and resultant death of the forest has been dated to 5772–5346 BC (recalibrated) and 6174–5961 BC respectively.

With regard to the resultant Late Mesolithic coastal landscape of northern Lincolnshire and Holderness, several features need noting. First, a comparison of both of the above maps with the preceding pair show that it was in this period that the peninsula of Holderness began to take on a recognizable form, although its south-eastern tip had a rather different profile to that which it has today. Second, the higher ground that had previously lain to the east and north of the present-day coastlines of Lincolnshire and Norfolk is thought to have been gradually surrounded by the rising tide, becoming coastal barrier islands that seem to have persisted through until their final destruction by the sea in the late thirteenth century AD. Initially, at least, this high ground off the Lincolnshire coast may have become a single island, and it is shown as such on the above reconstruction, before later splitting into a number of smaller islands as the sea-level continued to climb. Third and finally, a cross-section of the Lincolnshire Outmarsh running east–west through Marshchapel and Donna Nook (North Somercotes) created from borehole records indicates that the coastal sand body that underlies the current storm beach on the Lincolnshire coast from Donna Nook to Saltfleet formed directly on top of the Mesolithic land surface and must have been in existence from the first arrival of the sea in this area; as such, a notional representation of it is included on the above map.

A very small, partially polished Neolithic axe, found at Grainthorpe, Lincolnshire (image: PAS).

The coastline of north-eastern Lincolnshire and south-eastern Holderness in the Neolithic era, sometime around 3000 BC (image drawn by C. R. Green, based on underlying till-surface contour data reported in Berridge & Pattison, 1994, with additions and modifications). As before, the present-day coastline from approximately Saltfleet in Lincolnshire to Easington in the East Riding of Yorkshire is shown in grey.

The coastline of north-eastern Lincolnshire and south-eastern Holderness in the Early Bronze Age, sometime around 2000 BC (image drawn by C. R. Green, after a map in Berridge & Pattison, 1994, with some modifications). As before, the present-day coastline from approximately Saltfleet in Lincolnshire to Easington in the East Riding of Yorkshire is shown in grey.

The next two maps offer possible reconstructions of the coastline of north-eastern Lincolnshire and south-eastern Holderness in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. Continued—albeit now significantly slower—sea-level rise is thought to have a led to further coastal areas being submerged by the rising tide, with the result that by around 2000 BC or so the Lincolnshire coastline lay significantly inland of its current position. It is also possible that the offshore coastal barrier had been divided up into several smaller islands by this point. Whether these offshore islands were inhabited or visited by people in this era is entirely unclear due to their subsequent destruction by the sea in the medieval period, although it seems inherently likely that they were. Certainly there may well have been some activity within the coastal zone on areas of dryer land closer to shore, such as the small island of glacial till that was probably surrounded by coastal marshes visible on the Neolithic map at Grainthorpe. For example, not only is a Mesolithic axe or pick known from Grainthorpe, testifying to an earlier human presence, but there are also a number of Neolithic flint objects (including a knife and a possible votive axe) from the area of this island, and beaker sherds have been found from a spot to the north that have been seen as indicative of the presence of a Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age barrow here in the coastal zone.

Other features of note on these maps include the continued development and definition of the south-eastern tip of Holderness, although as yet there was nothing approximating Spurn Head, with the profile of the peninsula still instead following the lines first set down by the Mesolithic course of the River Humber as it flowed north-eastwards across Doggerland. Also significant is the development of a second major sand body/sand bank off the coast of Lincolnshire, running from the peninsula of glacial till at Cleethorpes down to the Marshchapel/Grainthorpe area, as evidenced once again in borehole records from this region. This sand bank seems to have developed sometime around 3000 BC (perhaps above an earlier Late Mesolithic/Early Neolithic coastline and after a period of marine flooding, to judge from the borehole data and underlying till surface contours), with tidal flat or lagoonal conditions on its landward side. It is likely that similar conditions now prevailed on the landward side of the North Somercotes–Saltfleet sand body and bank too, with the former dry land to its west having been submerged by the rising sea-level and becoming coastal marshes or the like whilst the sand body itself continued to persist and build up. Another less well-evidenced sand body on the southern coast of Holderness may similarly have its origins in this era, running south-eastwards from the islands of glacial till and gravels near Paull (not mapped).

In terms of the vegetation of the region, the continued sea-level rise led to further water-logging and submersion of the coastal woodland on sites that had been too elevated to be affected by this during the Later Mesolithic, with the drowned trees preserved at Cleethorpes and Chapel St Leonards dying off sometime around 2950–2250 BC and 3370–3020 BC respectively. The Mesolithic forest inland of the coastal zone also saw significant losses in this era. These losses appear to have begun on the high ground of the Lincolnshire Wolds, with the Mesolithic deciduous oak and hazel woodland of the Wolds cleared at Skendleby by c. 3500 BC and an open grassy landscape with indications of at least local arable agriculture having developed at Swinhope by c. 3900–3650 BC. On the lower ground, just inland of the coastal zone, the wooded landscape may well have survived a little longer, but it too was eventually lost. For example, at Butterbump (Willoughby), on the eastern edge of the dry Lincolnshire Middle Marsh, the available pollen cores indicate that the Mesolithic forest there survived the Early Neolithic through until perhaps 2900 BC, but was apparently largely cleared in the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age, with subsequent eras then having low levels of tree and shrub pollens and high levels of herb and cereal. Similarly, in Holderness a degree of sustained clearance began around 3600 BC, but the landscape of this area similarly wasn't properly opened up until the end of the Neolithic (c. 2500 BC), and only from the end of the Bronze Age (around 800 BC) did agricultural land start to dominate.

Sherds of Roman Nene Valley colour-coated pottery and imported Samian ware, found at Grainthorpe, Lincolnshire (image: PAS).

The coastline of north-eastern Lincolnshire and south-eastern Holderness at the start of the first century AD (image drawn by C. R. Green, after a map in Berridge & Pattison, 1994, with some modifications). As before, the present-day coastline from approximately Saltfleet in Lincolnshire to Easington in the East Riding of Yorkshire is shown in grey. Note, all of these maps show the approximate position of the coastline in this period; however, there would also have been an extensive zone of coastal marshes, inter-tidal flats and the like too on the seaward side of this coastline; these are not mapped here, but they clearly saw a significant degree activity in the Roman period.

The final map offers a suggested reconstruction of the coastline of this region at the start of the first century AD. As before, there are several features and points worth noting with regard to the coastal landscape in this era. First, a degree of marine regression by the Early Roman period probably led to the coastal zone moving back eastwards from its earlier westward maximum extension in the Lincolnshire Marshes area. Second, the coastal marshes that continued to lie behind and close to the two major sand bodies in north-eastern Lincolnshire—despite the marine regression—saw a significant degree of activity in this era. Quantities of Roman material have been found from the Roman-era coastal marshes and margins at, for example, Marshchapel, Grainthorpe, South Cockerington, Scupholme (South Somercotes) and Saltfleetby St Peter, with some of the finds including imported pottery and box-flue tiles. With regard to the nature of this activity, the relatively substantial structure indicated by finds of pottery and building materials at Marshchapel has been interpreted as one situated within the coastal zone, perhaps on the saltmarsh itself, and probably involved in the end-stage processing and transportation of salt produced at nearby salterns.

With regard to other aspects of the first-century AD landscape, the development of the south-eastern tip of the Holderness peninsula had probably by now continued to the point where it was finally starting to take on something approaching its modern form and with a proto-Spurn Head starting to form, although the coast of Holderness and the tip of the peninsula still lay well to the east of their current position, which is the result of a further 2,000 years of coastal erosion by the North Sea. Similarly, the peninsula of glacial till at Cleethorpes that extended out into the Humber estuary had by now started to be seriously eroded away back towards its modern position, although it too continued to extend out some way beyond the current coastline. It has been suggested that this peninsula and its low cliffs were home to a Roman-era signal station or fort that stood on some of the subsequently lost land here, although it has to be admitted that the evidence is uncertain and weak—a more convincing candidate for a Late Roman fortification in this part of Lincolnshire is perhaps to be had from the area of the former Toote Hill, Grimsby.

The later evolution of the coastline of Lincolnshire after the Early Roman era largely lies beyond the scope of this post, being discussed and mapped in two previous pieces on this site, one dealing with the Late Roman and pre-Viking coastline and the other with the situation in the medieval era. Two points are worth noting here, however. The first is that the fourth- to sixth-centuries AD appear to have seen a significant marine transgression in the Lincoln region. This led to Romano-British sites on the Lincolnshire Outmarsh being submerged and subsequently buried under several metres of marine alluvium—for example, the Romano-British site at Scupholme, mentioned above, was found beneath more than three metres of alluvium deposited by the sea, whilst Romano-British salterns at Ingoldmells to the south were smothered by two to three metres of silt. This Late/post-Roman marine transgression also seems to have largely swamped the prehistoric Cleethorpes–Marshchapel sand body and covered it over with a thin layer of marine silt (around a metre thick at North Cotes and rather less than this at Marshchapel), to judge from borehole records, with only a few sections of the former sand bank probably being left exposed to the east of Marshchapel. The second is that the North Somercotes–Saltfleet sand body seems to have survived and remained above this marine transgression, although it too appears to have been subsequently partly buried, in this case by storm beach deposits that are often thought to have their origin in debris thrown up on the coastline by the destruction of theoffshore coastal barrier islands in the thirteenth century AD.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2015, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following post offers a little idle speculation to help pass the time on the question of whether there was any Hunnic influence on fifth-century Britain and whether the 'Anglo-Saxons' were, in part, descended from Huns. Needless to say, at first glance the idea seems ludicrous! After all, in Book I, chapter 15, of his Historia Ecclesiastica of 731, Bede famously wrote of the mid-fifth century that:

At that time the race of the Angles or Saxons, invited by Vortigern, came to Britain... They came from three very powerful Germanic tribes, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes.(1)

There are, of course, no Huns mentioned here. Instead, the Germanic immigrants to post-Roman Britain are identified as having come from three pre-existing tribes who seem to have lived in northern Germany and Denmark, with Bede going on to identify the people of Kent, the Isle of Wight and parts of modern Hampshire in his day as Jutes; those of the kingdoms of Essex, Sussex and Wessex as Saxons; and those of East Anglia, Middle Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria as Angles. However, whilst Bede's account has undoubtedly proven influential and may well, in part, have a significant basis in reality, caution is also needed. Indeed, with specific regards to the potential continental origins of the post-Roman immigrants to Britain, it is likely that things were somewhat more complicated in the immediate post-Roman era than the above passage might indicate, with Bede's insular Anglian and Saxon identities now often thought to have resulted, to some degree, from a blending and reconstruction of immigrant material cultures and identities in the early Anglo-Saxon period, most especially the sixth century.(2)

One example of this potential complexity can be had from the archaeology of 'Anglian' Britain. Whilst John Hines has rightly observed that 'the core of the Germanic culture that appears in East Anglia', forming the basis of the Anglo-Saxon material culture there, points towards 'the Anglian homelands... primarily in what is now Schleswig-Holstein', he also argues that the archaeology of this region exhibits additional strong cultural links with western Scandinavia right up to Sogn og Fjordan, Norway, which are most credibly explained via a degree of immigration from that area too in the post-Roman period.(3) Equally, Vera Evison once made the case for a significant Frankish element in the archaeology of post-Roman Britain south of the Thames, and whilst this is no longer accepted in its entirety, there does seem to be sufficient material to suggest at least some Frankish immigration to this region in the 'early Anglo-Saxon' period. Less certainly, other archaeological material has also been cited as possible evidence for the presence of small numbers of Thuringians and even potentially Visigoths in post-Roman southern Britain.(4)

A probable late fifth- or early sixth-century buckle tongue, which has its best parallels in finds from Norway and Estonia; found Thimbleby, Lincolnshire (image: PAS)

Other, non-archaeological evidence similarly hints at the presence of ethnic groups in early Anglo-Saxon England that were not mentioned by Bede in HE I.15. For example, not only has it been suggested that the East Anglian royal Wuffingas were potentially either of Swedish/Geatish origin or claimed to be so, but Barbara Yorke has also observed that the Kentish ruling dynasty, the Oiscingas, appears to have claimed Gothic descent for themselves. So, the name of their dynastic progenitor, Oisc, would seem to be cognate with that of the Ostrogothic demigods, the Ansis; the father of King Æthelberht of Kent, Irminric/Eormenric, bore the name of one of the most renowned early Gothic heroes; and Asser in the ninth-century seems to be aware that the Jutes claimed a Gothic identity when identifying King Alfred's maternal grandfather, who was apparently of the Jutish royal line of the Isle of Wight, as 'a Goth by race'.(5) Likewise, the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius reported that Britain was inhabited by Britons, Angles and Frisians—rather than Saxons or Jutes—when he wrote in the 550s, a statement that continues to be the source of some controversy.(6)

Finally, there are a variety of early English place-names that are thought to make reference to the presence of continental tribal-groups and identities in pre-Viking Britain other than those Bede lists. So, the Swaffhams in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire appear to be early names that mean 'the estate of the Suebi or Swabians' (an ethnonym that is incidentally also found in Suebdæg, a personal name that occurs in the royal genealogy of the Anglian kings of Deira). Similarly, Elm in Cambridgeshire might potentially reflect a settlement of the continental Elvecones and Tealby in Lincolnshire is now generally agreed to have originally indicated a settlement of a group of Taifali, a continental tribal-grouping that has been variously identified as East Germanic—linked to the Goths—or even Asiatic in origin. Moreover, yet other place-names have been thought to be indicative of the presence of Burgundians, Danes and Thuringians in England during the early Anglo-Saxon period.(7)

In sum, whilst Bede's account in HE I.15 of Angles and Saxons in eastern Britain may well have a significant basis in reality—as Hines, Williamson and others suggest—the situation in the fifth and earlier sixth centuries was nonetheless clearly rather more complex than Bede's account implies. 'Migration Period' Britain also appears to have included individuals and groups drawn from continental tribes and confederations that Bede omits to mention in that chapter, including potentially some of East Germanic origin, and the recorded insular Anglian and Saxon identities are thought, in part, to have resulted from a post-migration blending and reconstruction of cultures and identities. In such a light, it seems clear that the absence of Huns from the famous account of the post-Roman continental immigrants in Historia Ecclesiastica I.15 cannot be actively used to disprove the notion that there were Huns present in fifth-century Britain. However, this is by no means the same as saying that they were definitely here then! So the question becomes, is there any actual positive evidence which might support the idea that there was a degree of Hunnic presence in and/or influence on post-Roman eastern Britain?

A late fifth- or early sixth-century Visigothic iron bow-brooch, found Springhead, Kent (image: Wessex Archaeology, used under their CC BY-NC 3.0 license).

Perhaps surprisingly, the most important potential piece of evidence in favour of a Hunnic presence in early Anglo-Saxon England comes, once again, from Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, in this case Book V, chapter 9. In this chapter, Bede returns to the question of the tribal origins of the Anglo-Saxons during a discussion of the missionary activity of Egbert, offering what reads like a rather more nuanced and complex version of his earlier statements on the topic:

He knew that there were very many peoples in Germany from whom the Angles and the Saxons, who now live in Britain, derive their origin... Now these people are the Frisians, Rugians, Danes, Huns, Old Saxons, and Boruhtware (Bructeri); there are also many other nations in the same land who are still practising heathen rites to whom the soldier of Christ proposed to go... (8)

Needless to say, this is a passage of considerable interest in the present context! It is, however, also a section of Bede's text that has caused some difficulties and controversy in the past, sometimes being ignored entirely, mentioned only in passing, or treated as merely a list of peoples Egbert intended to visit and preach to in eighth-century Germany, rather than a list of peoples that the Angles and Saxons had their origins in (with the mention of 'Huns' being thus interpreted as an allusion to the eighth-century Avars).(9) The first two responses are, of course, not really solutions at all, whilst the third is open to serious question. Thus James Campbell has argued forcibly that Bede was not saying that the list in HE V.9 was made up of peoples who lived in Germany that Egbert wished to convert; rather, he states that 'the sense of the Latin is that these were the peoples from whom the Anglo-Saxons living in Britain were derived.' It may be surprising or even inconvenient, 'but it is what he [Bede] says; and he does not generally write carelessly.' In other words, Campbell considers that Bede—a notoriously careful writer and historian—clearly believed that the Anglo-Saxons of his day derived somehow from the peoples that he listed, and that these peoples included the Huns.(10)

If the text of HE V.9 does indeed mean what it says, then it would provide a significant degree of confirmation for the position outlined above—that whilst Bede's division of post-Roman eastern Britain into 'Anglian' and 'Saxon' areas may well have had a significant basis in reality, so too was the situation in the fifth and earlier sixth centuries probably rather more complex than can sometimes be assumed. Certainly, Bede's second passage has often been understood and used in just this way by those studying the post-Roman period, and it would moreover even seem to support some of the specific suggestions made above as to other continental tribal groups potentially present in post-Roman Britain, with Frisians and Danes both mentioned previously and the Boruhtware (Bructeri) of Bede's passage being usually considered a Frankish group.(11) Furthermore, it has also been argued that a genuine early tradition or even source could well lie behind what Bede says in HE V.9, on the basis that 'these names belong to a fifth rather than eighth century context', with not only Huns and Bructeri being referenced—both names from the 'Migration Period'—but also the Rugini/Rugii, a tribal group that seems to have only really came close to Britain in the mid-fifth century, when they are said to have taken part in Attila's Hunnic invasion of Gaul in 451 alongside the Bructeri.(12)

We would therefore seem to have at least some potential positive evidence in favour of a Hunnic presence in post-Roman eastern Britain, on the basis of the above understanding of Historia Ecclesiastica V.9. However, even if a genuine tradition or even an early source does lie behind Bede's statement, we still need to ask what exactly this might imply with regard to fifth-century individuals and groups in eastern Britain. Ian Wood has, for example, considered that the claim that the Anglo-Saxons in part 'derive their origin' from Huns may, in reality, have resulted from there having been an Alan contingent amongst the post-Roman migrants to Britain (they were certainly present in northern Gaul in the first half of the fifth century), with the ethnic-term 'Hun' being used broadly for any 'Asiatic' people present here then, rather than being used specifically for Huns alone.(13) As such, the question necessarily becomes, is there any other evidence which might support the idea that Huns were specifically present in and/or had a degree of influence upon post-Roman eastern Britain?

The Roman Empire and the Hunnic Empire of Attila in c. 450; click image for a larger version (image: W. Shepard, Historical Atlas (New York, 1911), p. 48, Public Domain).

The second piece of evidence that might potentially indicate a degree of Hunnic involvement with fifth-century Britain actually derives from a mid-fifth-century and very well-placed source. The text in question was written by Priscus of Panium, an Eastern Roman diplomat who visited the court of Attila the Hun as part of an official delegation in AD 448/9. The account that he subsequently wrote only survives through fragments and excerpts but it nonetheless offers an enormously valuable, first-hand description of Attila's court and the Roman diplomatic contacts with this. In the course of relating his experiences, Priscus tells of how his party met up with an embassy from the Western Roman Empire and cites what one of the western ambassadors, Romulus, had to say on the topic of Attila's character:

When we expressed amazement at the unreasonableness of the barbarian, Romulus, an ambassador of long experience, replied that his very great good fortune and the power which it had given him had made him so arrogant that he would not entertain just proposals unless he thought that they were to his advantage. No previous ruler of Scythia or of any other land had ever achieved so much in so short a time. He ruled the islands of the Ocean and, in addition to the whole of Scythia, forced the Romans to pay tribute. He was aiming at more than his present achievements and, in order to increase his empire further, he now wanted to attack the Persians.(14)

The Western Roman ambassador's comments on the extent of Attila's empire in 449 are, of course, of considerable interest in the present context, in particular his statement that Attila 'ruled the islands of the Ocean'. The exact import of this statement is, of course, crucial. Although E. A. Thompson wrote in 1948 that 'historians now agree that the islands ruled by Attila were those of the Baltic Sea' (a statement that has been borrowed and repeated by some later commentators), this is not actually true. In the early twentieth century, for example, both Theodor Mommsen and J. B. Bury regarded an identification of these island dominions of Attila with the British Isles to be probable, and such an identification has been more recently supported by C. E. Stevens, James Campbell and now Peter Heather. Indeed, the latter's identification (without qualification) of Attila's 'islands of the Ocean' as being those of 'the Atlantic, or west', rather than the Baltic, in his 2005 Fall of the Roman Empire is of particular interest here—given that Heather edited and wrote the new afterword to the 1996 reissue of Thompson's book cited above, his subsequent comments must be read as a clear rejection of Thompson's opinion as to the identity of Attila's islands.(15)

Certainly, an identification of Attila's oceanic possessions with Britain and its associated islands would seem to be a more than credible interpretation of the above passage. First, Orosius, St Augustine, and other writers of Late Antiquity are clear that the British Isles were considered among the 'islands of the Ocean', and Britain was moreover by far the best known and most significant of these islands to the Roman world, having been a Roman province for several hundred years through until the early fifth century. Indeed, the probably fourth-century Tabula Peutingeriana, an important Late Roman itinerary map, shows little interest in or knowledge of lands lying beyond the northern Roman borders in Europe—whilst the Ocean is depicted as encircling the known world, there are no islands shown to the north of Europe at all, only to the west, where the British Isles and probably originally Thule were depicted.(16) In light of all of this, it might well be expected that the Western Roman ambassador, Romulus, would have offered a clarification of his reference to 'islands of the Ocean' if Britain and its associated islands were not meant, and the fact that he does not is something that is at the very least worth noting. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it is clear that Romulus was making a forceful point in his remarks to the Eastern Roman delegation about how exceptional Attila's achievements had been—no previous ruler of Scythia (Central Eurasia) had ever achieved so much as Attila, who had managed to both establish dominion over 'the islands of the Ocean' andforce the Romans to pay him tribute! Needless to say, the thrust of his argument at this point does rather depend on Attila's dominion over these islands being a remarkable, surprising and perhaps even shocking thing to a Roman diplomatic audience; something that was equivalent in its exceptionalness to his forcing the Romans to pay him tribute. In this context, it seems far more plausible that the 'islands of the Ocean' were indeed meant as the well-known and important British Isles, rather than some barely-known (to a Roman audience) islands in the far north.

In sum, given the cultural background of the time and the textual context of the passage in question, the most credible solution is arguably that the Western Roman ambassador to the Huns did indeed believe that Attila ruled in parts of Britain and its associated islands in the late 440s, as Peter Heather, C. E. Stevens and others have indicated in the past. Needless to say, if so, we would thus have two very interesting references to a Hunnic influence on and/or presence in fifth-century eastern Britain: one a contemporary, respected and well-placed Roman ambassador who thought that Attila ruled there (at least for a brief period), and the other a notoriously careful Anglo-Saxon historian who appears to have believed—possibly on the basis of an early tradition or even a written source—that the Anglo-Saxons of the eighth century counted Huns amongst their ancestors. Taken together, these two sources offer a rather intriguing and different perspective on the history of eastern Britain in the mid-fifth century, potentially involving a Hunnic presence in Britain and at least a nominal overlordship of some sort by Attila over parts of this region by the late 440s.

Extract from the probably fourth-century Tabula Peutingeriana, showing Britain at the top left of the map in the Ocean and Gaul across from it, via the nineteenth-century facsimile edition of Konrad Miller; full version available on Wikimedia (image: Wikimedia Commons)

With regard to the general plausibility and context of such suggestions of Hunnic influence on fifth-century Britain, three final points can be made. First, it needs to be emphasised that modern perspectives on the Adventus Saxonum now generally reject the traditional date of 449 for the start of continental immigrant activity in eastern and southern Britain, a point of some significance given that any nominal overlordship exercised by Attila is perhaps most easily envisaged as having been over these immigrants. It is clear from the archaeological evidence that 'Anglo-Saxon' groups were established in parts of eastern Britain within the first half of the fifth century, probably by the 430s, and it is furthermore often thought that at least parts of southern Britain were under the direct control of 'Saxon' immigrants from c. 441 on the basis of the Gallic Chronicle of 452.(17) As such, any concerns over a possible conflict between the date by which Attila is said to have possessed rule over the 'islands of the Ocean' in Priscus—by c. 448—and the date of the Adventus Saxonum can be easily disposed of.

Second, Lotte Hedeager has recently argued at length that a variety of archaeological and literary evidence indicates that the main 'Anglo-Saxon' homelands of northern Germany and southern Scandinavia were actually conquered and made a part of the Hunnic Empire during the first half of the fifth century, with a Hunnic presence maintained in this region for a period.(18) Needless to say this is a conclusion of considerable interest to both the present post and the study of the Adventus Saxonum in general. Certainly, if Hedeager is right, then the idea that the continental immigrants to eastern and southern Britain included Huns amongst their number and that there was a degree of Hunnic overlordship for at least the areas of Britain that had fallen under the immigrants' sway by the 440s would seem rather less surprising than might otherwise perhaps be the case.

Third and finally, it should be noted that there is a small amount of additional archaeological, literary and linguistic evidence that may, just possibly, offer support for any theory of a Hunnic presence and overlordship in fifth-century Britain. On the archaeological front, for example, it can be observed that the small number of gold open-ended earrings that Hedeager identifies as Hunnic in origin and indicative of the presence of Huns in Denmark are not confined to this part of north-western Europe alone. At least one gold earring of a very similar design and size is known from Britain too, and if Hedeager's identification of such items as Hunnic is upheld for the Danish examples, then there seems no obvious a priori reason why it should not be applied to any British examples too.(19) Likewise, a Dyerkan-type cicada brooch that was found in Suffolk and now housed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, may be of some potential interest in the present context, given that this type of dress-accessory is believed to have its origins in the early to mid-fifth century and is found primarily in the Middle Danube, the Black Sea area and the Northern Caucasus.(20)

On the literary and linguistic front, Hedeager has argued for southern Scandinavia that the royal sagas of the Skjoldunge–Skilfinger tradition preserve the memory of a period of Hunnic rule in that region, with the early Norse rulers Haldan, Roo, Ottar and Adils corresponding in name and details to the fifth-century Hunnic kings Huldin, Roas, Octar and Attila.(21) Whilst England lacks such a neat set of apparent correspondences, there are nonetheless a few hints which might point in a similar or related direction. Perhaps the most interesting of these occurs in the genealogy of the kings of Kent—the Oiscingas—preserved by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica II.5, where we find the name Octa recorded as that of the son of the probably divine dynastic progenitor Oisc, with Octa being both a name that seems not to have been otherwise used in Anglo-Saxon England and one that is very close in form to the Hunnic name Octar (Attila's uncle and one of his predecessors as ruler of the Hunnic Empire). Needless to say, in light of Hedeager's discussion of the Norse names, this is most intriguing, and it is worth noting here that Old English Octa is indeed generally linked by researchers with the Norse name Ottar mentioned above. Quite what this all means is open to debate, but one wonders whether it might not reflect at least some sort of early claim to either Hunnic descent or links on the part of the Oiscingas dynasty, to put alongside their potential claim to Gothic ancestry that was noted above?(22)

This is probably as far as we can sensibly go at present. On the whole, it would seem that there is at least a case to be made for a degree of Hunnic involvement in fifth-century Britain. Not only does the simplest and most common interpretation of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica V.9 imply that the latter believed that the Anglo-Saxons partly derived their origins from Huns, but a mid-fifth-century Roman ambassador also arguably thought that Attila ruled over the British Isles in the late 440s. Taken together, these two sources are certainly suggestive, and a small number of finds and names from pre-Viking England may offer some additional support here too. Furthermore, such a scenario may actually have a reasonable potential context. On the one hand, it is now generally agreed that the situation in the fifth and earlier sixth centuries in eastern Britain was rather more ethnically complex than has been sometimes assumed, with the post-Roman immigrants to Britain including individuals and groups drawn from a number of continental tribes and confederations, including potentially Danes, Swabians and Goths. On the other hand, Lotte Hedeager has recently argued that the main Anglo-Saxon homelands in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia were, in fact, under Hunnic rule in the first half of the fifth century and saw a Hunnic presence then, something that, if true, would clearly offer a credible context for any contention that there were Huns amongst the mid-fifth-century 'Anglo-Saxon' immigrants to Britain and that those parts of the island under 'Saxon' control after c. 441 were at least nominally also under Hunnic overlordship by the late 440s. As such, whilst the case cannot be said to be proven and is perhaps surprising, it does deserve at least some serious consideration.


Notes

1     Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, I.15, trans. B. Colgrave, in J. McClure & R. Collins (edd.), Bede: the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1994), p. 27. Bede similarly describes the immigrants as 'The people of the Angles or of the Saxons' in his Greater Chronicle of 725 (sa. 4410: McClure & Collins, Bede, p. 326).
2    For example, J. Hines, 'The origins of East Anglia in a North Sea Zone', in D. Bates & R. Liddiard (edd.), East Anglia and its North Sea World in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 16–43, esp. pp. 38–9; B. A. E. Yorke, 'Anglo-Saxon gentes and regna', in H-W. Goetz, J. Jarnut & W. Pohl (edd.), Regna and Gentes: The Relationship Between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World (Leiden, 2003), pp. 381–408, esp. pp. 385–90; C. Scull, 'Approaches to the material culture and social dynamics of the migration period in eastern England', in J. Bintliff and H. Hamerow (edd.), Europe Between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1995), pp. 71–83; H. Hamerow, 'The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms', in P. Fouracre (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, I: c.500–c.700 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 263–88, esp. pp. 268–70; H. Härke, 'Anglo-Saxon immigration and ethnogenesis', Medieval Archaeology, 55 (2011), 1–28 at p. 11; T. Williamson, 'The environmental contexts of Anglo-Saxon settlement', in N. J. Higham & M. J. Ryan (edd.), The Landscape Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 2010), pp. 133–56 at pp. 147–52; S. Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death (Stroud, 2000), p. 4; and also T. Martin, Identity and the Cruciform Brooch in Early Anglo-Saxon England: An Investigation of Style, Mortuary Context, and Use, 4 vols. (University of Sheffield PhD Thesis, 2011), I.152–91. Note, with regard to Angles and Saxons, it should be remembered that contemporary sources do indeed mention both groups as present in fifth- to sixth-century Britain—Angles are mentioned as a major immigrant group in Britain by Procopius in the 550s (History of the Wars, VIII.xx), whilst Saxons are mentioned in the Gallic Chronicle of 452 and by Gildas in his De Excidio Britanniae of c. 540 or before.
3    See J. Hines, The Scandinavian Character of Anglian England in the Pre-Viking Period, BAR British Series 124 (Oxford, 1984), and J. Hines, 'The Scandinavian character of Anglian England: an update', in M. O. H. Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo: the Seventh Century in North-western Europe (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 315–29; see also now Hines, 'The origins of East Anglia', from which the quotation given above is taken (p. 39). Note, with regard to the 'Anglian' material that forms the 'core' of the immigrant culture in this region, as per Hines, see Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650 (Lincoln, 2012), fig. 21a & pp. 93–5, and Williamson, 'Environmental contexts of Anglo-Saxon settlement', pp. 147–52, for two arguably complementary explanations for its distribution in early Anglo-Saxon England.
4     V. I. Evison, The Fifth-Century Invasions South of the Thames (London, 1965); J. Soulet, 'Between Frankish and Merovingian influences in Early Anglo-Saxon Sussex (fifth–seventh centuries)', in S. Brookes et al (edd.), Studies in Early Anglo-Saxon Art and Archaeology: Papers in Honour of Martin G. Welch (Oxford, 2011), pp. 62–71; and S. Harrington & M. Welch, The Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of Southern Britain AD 450–650: Beneath the Tribal Hidage (Oxford, 2014), especially pp. 174–210. On Thuringians, see I. N. Wood, 'Before and after the migration to Britain', in J. Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons From the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: an Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 41–64 at pp. 42, 44, 45. On Visigoths, see the cautious remarks in J. Schuster, P. Andrews & R. Seager-Smith, 'A late 5th–early 6th century context from Springhead, Kent', Lucerna, 31 (2006), 2–3.
5     S. Newton, 'Beowulf and the East Anglian royal pedigree', in M. O. H. Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo: the Seventh Century in North-western Europe (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 65–74; S. Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Woodbridge, 1993); B. Yorke, 'Political and ethnic identity: a case study of Anglo-Saxon practice', in W. O. Frazer & A. Tyrell (edd.), Social Organisation in Early Medieval Britain (London, 2000), pp. 69–89 at pp. 80–1. On an Anglo-Saxon knowledge of and interest in the Goths pre-dating the ninth-century, see for example L. Neidorf, 'The dating of Widsið and the study of Germanic antiquity', Neophilologus, 97 (2013), 165–83, esp. pp. 172–3. On the name Oisc < *Anskiz/*Anschis, see P. Sims-Williams, 'The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle', Anglo-Saxon England, 12 (1983), 1–41 at pp. 22–3 and fn. 94. With regard to a Gothic element in Kent, see also perhaps the Visigothic brooch from Springhead, Kent, discussed in Schuster et al, 'A late 5th–early 6th century context from Springhead, Kent', 2–3.
6    Procopius, History of the Wars, VIII.xx: 'Angíloi, Frísonnes kaì Brítannes', see E. A. Thompson, 'Procopius on Brittia and Britannia', Classical Quarterly, 30 (1980), 498–507.
7    See E. Ekwall, 'Tribal Names in English Place-Names', Namn Och Bygd, 41 (1953), 129–77 at p. 150; V. E. Watts, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 213 [Elm], 592 [Swaffhams], 602 [Tealby]; Green, 'Tealby, the Taifali, and the End of Roman Lincolnshire', Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 46 (2011), 5–10; F. W. Moorman, 'English Place-Names and Teutonic Sagas', Essays and Studies, 5 (1914), 75–103 at pp. 95–9 [Burgundian Volsungs may lie behind the early Norfolk place-name Walsingham]; M. Gelling & A. Cole, The Landscape of Place-Names (Stamford, 2000), p. 70 [Denver, Norfolk, a 'very early' place-name meaning 'the Danes' crossing', reflecting the presence of Danes 'much earlier than the Viking period']; H. F. Nielsen, The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations (Tuscaloosa, 1989), p. 62 [Tyringham, Buckinghamshire, and related names may reflect settlements of Thuringians]. On the name Suebdæg, see Neidorf, 'The dating of Widsið', p. 176, and H. Ström, Old English Personal Names in Bede's History: An Etymological-phonological Investigation (Lund, 1939), p. 35; a name in the East Saxon royal genealogy, Swæppa, may similarly derive from the Old English form of the ethnonym Swabian, see Ström, Old English Personal Names in Bede's History, p. 35, and M. Redin, Studies on Uncompounded Personal Names in Old English (Uppsala, 1919), pp. 69, 109.
8    Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, V.9, trans. Colgrave, in McClure & Collins (edd.), Ecclesiastical History, p. 247.
9    For example, D. Gary Miller, External Influences on English (Oxford, 2012), p. 29, and especially R. H. Bremmer Jr, 'The nature of the evidence for a Frisian participation in the Adventus Saxonum', in A. Bammesberger & A. Wollmann (eds.), Britain 400–600: Language and History (Heidelberg, 1990), pp. 353–71 at pp. 356–9.
10    J. Campbell, 'The first century of Christianity in England', in J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 49-67 at p. 53 and fn. 25 [first quotation]; J. Campbell, 'The lost centuries: 400–600', in J. Campbell (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons (London, 1982), p. 31 [second quotation]. See also J. Campbell, 'The Age of Arthur [review article]', Studia Hibernica, 15 (1975), 177–85 at p. 179.
11    See, for example, Yorke, 'Anglo-Saxon gentes and regna', p. 387; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1988), p. 181; D. P. Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, revised edition (London, 2000), p. 13; and Campbell, 'The lost centuries: 400–600', p. 31. See also Wood, 'Before and after the migration to Britain', pp. 41–5.
12    Campbell, 'Age of Arthur', quotation at p. 179; Campbell, 'The lost centuries: 400–600', p. 31. On the Rugii and Bructeri taking part in Attila's invasion of Gaul in 451, see for example Sidonius Apollinaris's contemporary Carmina, VII.321–5.
13    Wood, 'Before and after the migration to Britain', p. 41.
14    Priscus, Fragments 11.2: R.C. Blockley The Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus 2 vols. (Liverpool, 1983), vol. II, p. 277.
15    E. A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford, 1948), quotation at p. 75, repeated by Lotte Hedeager in her recent Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400–1000 (London, 2011), p. 193, with a reference to the 1996 largely-unchanged reissue of Thompson's 1948 book; note, the 1996 reissue was edited by Peter Heather and contained an afterword by him, with a new shortened title of The Huns (Oxford, 1996). The other works referenced here are: T. Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1906), vol. IV, p. 539 fn. 5; J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London, 1923), vol. I, p. 277 fn. 4; C. E. Stevens, 'Gildas Sapiens', English Historical Review, 56 (1941), 353–73 at p. 363 fn. 7; Campbell, 'Age of Arthur', p. 179; J. Campbell, 'Observations on the Conversion of England', in J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 69–84 at p. 70 fn. 5; P. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (London, 2005), p. 334.
16    S. F. Johnson, 'Travel, Cartography, and Cosmology', in S. F. Johnson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012), pp. 562–94; R. Talbert, Rome's World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Cambridge, 2010). A. D. Lee, Information and Frontiers: Roman Foreign Relations in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 89–90, comments usefully on the Romans lacking a conceptual framework for Europe north of the Danube and the Rhine, noting that the Tabula Peutingeriana offers barely any topographical information for these regions.
17    See, for example, N. J. Higham & M. J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven & London, 2013), pp. 59, 76, 104, 114–15.
18    L. Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400–1000 (London, 2011), especially pp. 191–228, and L. Hedeager, 'Scandinavia and the Huns: an interdisciplinary approach to the Migration Era', Norwegian Archaeological Review, 40 (2007), 42–58; see also perhaps M. Görman, 'Influences from the Huns on Scandinavian Sacrificial Customs during 300-500 AD', in T. Ahlbäck (ed.), The Problem of Ritual (Åbo, 1993), pp. 275–98, especially pp. 295–6. It should be noted that one piece of her evidence for this interpretation is explicitly rejected in the above discussion (Thompson's 1948 claim that 'he islands of the Ocean' are universally agreed to be the Baltic islands, see above and fn. 15), but she marshals much other evidence too in support of a period of Hunnic dominion over southern Scandinavia which isn't contradicted by the analysis offered here.
19    Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality, pp. 198, 200, fig. 9.2; Hedeager, 'Scandinavia and the Huns', pp. 7, 9, fig. 5. See also the debate in U. Näsman, 'Scandinavia and the Huns: a source-critical approach to an old question', Fornvännen, 103 (2008), 111–18, and especially L. Hedeager, 'Paradigm exposed: reply to Ulf Näsman', Fornvännen, 103 (2008), 279–83. Compare the earrings illustrated by Hedeager in Iron Age Myth and Materiality, fig. 9.2, and 'Scandinavia and the Huns', fig. 5, with, for example, Portable Antiquities Scheme NCL-ADA2E4, found in Yorkshire.
20    I. Gavritukhin & M. Kazanski, 'Bosporus, the Tetraxite Goths and the Northern Caucasus region during the second half of the fifth and the sixth centuries', in F. Curta (ed.), Neglected Barbarians, Studies in the Early Middle Ages vol. 32 (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 83–136 at pp. 132–3 and fig. 4.29; A. MacGregor, A Summary Catalogue of the Continental Archaeological Collections in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, 1997), pp. 267–8.
21    Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality, pp. 189–90, 224–8.
22    On Octa and Ottar, see Ström, Old English Personal Names in Bede's History, p. 72; Redin, Studies on Uncompounded Personal Names in Old English, p. 77. On the Gothic links of the Oiscingas of Kent, see further above and fn. 5, along with Yorke, 'Political and ethnic identity: a case study of Anglo-Saxon practice', pp. 80–1; it is perhaps interesting to note that both Octa's father and his son in Bede's genealogy bear names with Gothic links, given the close association between the Goths and the Huns in the early to mid-fifth century. Other intriguing linguistic and literary hints from England include the possibility that a number of Anglo-Saxon personal names derive from the Old English ethnonym Hunas/Hune, 'the Huns', something which would be very suggestive if true: Ström, Old English Personal Names in Bede's History, p. 25; D. Rollason & L. Rollason (eds.), The Durham Liber Vitae. II: Linguistic Commentary (London, 2007), p. 130; and cf. above and fn. 7 on Old English personal names such as Suebdæg. Also of potential interest are the medieval East Anglian tales that appear to treat Attila the Hun as an early medieval ruler of Norfolk with a base at Attleborough, a place-name that is Old English for 'fortified place belonging to Ætla (< Attila)', particularly as one of these is thought to preserve an otherwise lost 'heroic' tale of a fight between Attila and Hunuil/Unwen: see further C. E. Wright, The Cultivation of Saga in Anglo-Saxon England (Edinburgh and London, 1939), pp. 121–2; A. Bell, ‘Gaimar’s early “Danish” kings’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 65 (1950), 601–40 at pp. 608–10; C. Brett, 'Hunuil-Unwine-Unwen', Modern Language Review, 15 (1920), 77; R. W. Chambers, Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend (Cambridge, 1912), p. 219 on Hunuil/Unwen; and Watts, Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, p. 26 on Attleborough.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2015, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The aim of the following post is to draw attention to a recently-recognised find of a fifth- to mid-second-century BC Mediterranean ship anchor from British coastal waters. Previous posts on this site have discussed the presence of a significant quantity of Greek autonomous coinage of primarily the fourth to second centuries BC in Britain, including Carthaginian/Punic, Ptolemaic, Numidian and Indo-Greek issues. Needless to say, finds of early Mediterranean anchors off the coast of Britain would seem to add further weight to the argument that there was a degree of long-distance maritime contact between Britain and the Mediterranean during the first millennium BC and that some, at least, of the above coins may well be genuinely ancient, pre-Roman losses that were brought to Britain by Mediterranean traders.

A trapezoidal lead core from a Mediterranean Type IIa wooden anchor of the fifth century BC, found in the sea at Plymouth (image: ProMare, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Reconstruction of how the lead anchor stock would have fitted into the original wooden anchor (image: ProMare, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

The item under consideration here is a trapezoidal lead core from a wooden anchor stock that was almost certainly recovered by divers from the sea around Plymouth, where it was subsequently stored for a number of years with other recovered items from the water here—unfortunately without any record of its exact findspot—before it was identified as part of a classical-era wooden Type IIa anchor in 2010.(1) Such anchors represent the earliest departure from the use of stone in anchor construction, with the lead core being cast directly into a trapezoidal mould carved into the stock of a wooden anchor, and the Plymouth example has been suggested to date from the fifth century BC on the basis of a comparison with similar cores recovered from a Classical Greek shipwreck of c. 440–425 BC at Tektaş Burnu, Turkey, although Type IIa cores are also known from a ship of c. 400 BC found at Ma'agan Michael, Israel, and actually appear to have been widely used by Mediterranean ships through until the mid-second century BC.(2)

Such a find from the southern coast of Britain is, of course, of considerable interest. Given its considerable weight (26 kg), the fact that it seems to have been recovered from the sea by divers at Plymouth, its nondescript appearance, and its clear covering of marine growth, there seems little reason to doubt that this is a genuinely ancient loss, rather than some sort of misplaced modern tourist souvenir or the like. As such, the presence of this Mediterranean lead anchor stock core would appear to offer good potential evidence for a Mediterranean ship having visited Plymouth Sound at some point between the fifth and the mid-second century BC, although exactly who these visitors might have been is rather less clear, unfortunately, despite a recent description of the piece as being of 'Classical Greek' origin.(3) Whilst Type IIa anchors are certainly known from Classical Greek wrecks, they also seem to have been in use throughout the whole Mediterranean in that era, from Israel and Turkey in the east through to Morocco in the west. A somewhat lighter Type IIa anchor core (16.6 kg) found at Ras Achakar in Morocco, just on the Atlantic side of the Straits of Gibraltar, may, for example, have come from a Punic ship anchored there en route to the important Phoenician settlement of Gades (Cádiz), whilst another Type IIa anchor recovered from close to this area—at Cap Spartel—almost certainly dates from the fifth century BC and is likely to be Phoenician/Punico-Mauretanian in origin.(4)

If at least one perhaps Punic or Greek ship of the fifth to mid-second century BC may well therefore have visited Plymouth Sound on the basis of this find, it is worth emphasising that such a situation is not necessarily all that surprising. Even if we were to leave to one side the significant numismatic material mentioned above, the limited but intriguing textual sources, and the linguistic evidence for a degree of Carthaginian/Punic involvement and activity in pre-Roman Britain that was discussed at length in a previous post on this site, the Plymouth anchor stock core still would not stand totally alone and without context.(5) For example, the reality of long-distance maritime contact between Britain and the Mediterranean during the first millennium BC has received a significant boost in the past couple of years from the isotopic analysis of teeth found in a Late Bronze Age to Middle Iron Age cemetery on the Isle of Thanet, Kent. This analysis indicates that around 20% of those who were buried in that cemetery had actually been brought up in either North Africa or southernmost Iberia, much more probably the former, before they moved to Kent. Needless to say, this is a fascinating conclusion that offers considerable support for long-distance direct maritime movement between Britain and the Mediterranean in the first millennium BC, and it is interesting to observe that whilst at least some of these probably North African immigrants belonged to the Middle Iron Age phase of the cemetery (the same era as the anchor stock), the majority were actually interred in the Late Bronze Age.(6)

Aerial view of Poole Harbour at sunset; the two Iron Age piers/moles ran from Cleavel Point and Green Island into the South Deep on the left hand side of the photograph (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Potentially equally important are the results of investigations at Poole Harbour, Dorset, the site of the only excavated Iron Age harbour piers or moles in Britain and, indeed, the earliest such features yet known from the whole of north-west Europe. The two apparently monumental structures discovered here have been radiocarbon dated to around the third century BC, although a date of construction in the fourth-century BC is possible and Historic England's Pastscape database suggests a date of c. 300 BC. In either case, the two piers/moles are exceptionally early in date and clearly well-built and substantial—up to 160 metres long, 8 metres wide, and with paved stone surfaces of creamy-white Purbeck marble, the piers together extended out into the deep-water channel, narrowing its entrance and thus enabling the control of access to the harbour within. The very early construction of what would have been a visually impressive Iron Age harbour at Poole is, of course, important in itself as an indicator of probably significant levels of maritime trading taking place on the south coast of England by the third or fourth century BC. However, even more intriguing in the present context is the fact that a recent study of the site has suggested that the harbour design here might be potentially compared with a number of Mediterranean harbours, including that of Motya, Sicily, a Phoenician/Punic colony, and the fifth-century BC Greek harbour at Piraeus, and in this context it is at least interesting to note that a silver Siculo-Punic coin of the fourth century BC has been recovered from the shore of Poole Harbour.(7)

Another key piece of contextual evidence for the Plymouth find is the fact that it is not, in fact, the only early Mediterranean lead anchor stock to be found in British coastal waters, although it is the first Type IIa anchor to be identified here. A Type IIIb anchor stock weighing 71.5 kg was, for example, recovered from the sea at Porth Felen on the Llŷn Peninsula, North Wales, in the 1970s. This type of anchor stock appears to have been in use throughout the Mediterranean from perhaps the mid-third century BC through until the mid-first century AD, but ornamentation on the stock from Porth Felen indicates that a mid- to late second-century BC date may well be appropriate for this particular example. Needless to say, this anchor stock consequently represents valuable evidence for the presence of at least one other ship from the Mediterranean in British coastal waters in the centuries before the Roman conquest, and so offers further confirmation of the reality of long-distance maritime contact between Britain and the Mediterranean during the first millennium BC. Moreover, it itself does not stand alone, as yet another Type IIIb Mediterranean anchor stock has been very recently identified from British coastal waters, adding additional weight to the above case, this being found, interestingly enough, on the rocks off Fort Bovisand in Plymouth Sound!(8)

Plymouth Sound, as it appeared on Donn's map of 1765, with Rame Head at the western entrance to The Sound and Mount Batten & Bovisand Bay marked on its eastern side.

Lastly, it is worth pointing out that there is not only a reasonable national context for a Mediterranean ship of the fifth to mid-second century BC having been present in Plymouth Sound, but also a good local one too, even beyond the above-mentioned additional find of a Type IIIb Mediterranean anchor of the mid-third century BC to mid-first century AD here. Two points in particular are worth making. First, the large, natural deep water harbour of Plymouth Sound is part of what has been termed the 'Tamar Estuary Iron Age coastal node', and it moreover includes within its bounds the important Mount Batten Late Bronze Age and Iron Age port, which is one plausible candidate for the British tin-trading site Ictis mentioned by the Greek Pytheas of Massalia in the later fourth century BC. Second, the western side of the entrance to Plymouth Sound is guarded by the Iron Age promontory fort of Rame Head, a name that is usually considered 'completely obscure' and 'unexplained', but which has recently been argued by Richard Coates to be, in fact, potentially Proto-Semitic/Punic in origin (compare Ramat Gan, Israel, and Ramallah, Palestine). It goes without saying that both points are of considerable interest in terms of the local context of the fifth- to mid-second-century BC anchor stock under consideration here.(9)

To sum up, it seems clear that the Plymouth Type IIa anchor stock core is an important find, indicative of the presence of a Punic or Greek ship of the fifth to mid-second century BC in Plymouth Sound. Whilst this might appear surprising, such a situation would actually appear to have a reasonable context at both national and local levels, and the find itself adds yet more weight to the case for there having been a degree of long-distance maritime contact between the Mediterranean and Britain in the first millennium BC. Furthermore, this find and that of another, probably slightly later, lead anchor stock in Plymouth Sound means that there are now three early Mediterranean lead anchor stocks known from British coastal waters, something which is important in itself, not least because it means that the Porth Felen anchor stock discovered in the 1970s can no longer be dismissed as a one-off find.


Notes

1     SHIPS Project/ProMare, 'Wooden Anchor Stock Core (09A15)', Shipwrecks and History in Plymouth Sound Project, finds database, accessed 15 August 2015, online at http://www.promare.co.uk/ships/Finds/Fd_09A15AnchorStock.html.
2     K. Trethewey, 'Lead anchor-stock cores from Tektaş Burnu, Turkey', International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 30 (2001), 109–14; D. D. Haldane, The Wooden Anchor (Texas A & M University MA Thesis, 1984), esp. pp. 6–7; A. Trakadas & E. Erbati, 'Lead anchor elements from Tangier, Morocco', Bulletin D'Archeologie Marocaine, 21 (2009), 250–67 at p. 254.
3     G. Wear, 'The anchor stock core from Fort Bovisand', 2014 conference poster, online at https://www.academia.edu/9453256/The_Anchor_Stock_Core_from_Fort_Bovisand.
4     Trakadas & Erbati, 'Lead anchor elements from Tangier, Morocco', pp. 253–4, 256; A. Trakadas, 'Morocco Maritime Survey: the 2002 season', The INA Quarterly, 30 (2003), 12–21, esp. pp. 18–20 on the radiocarbon-dated Type IIa anchor. See also A. Trakadas & S. Claesson, 'On the shores of the Maghreb-al-Asqa: the 1999 survey of Tangier Bay, Morocco', The INA Quarterly, 28 (2001), 3–15; A. Trakadas, 'Morocco Maritime Survey: 2003 season', The INA Quarterly, 31 (2004), 3–9, especially pp. 8–9; and E. Erbati & A. Trakadas, The Morocco Maritime Survey (Oxford, 2008), for example p. 63. A fifth-century date for the Cap Spartel anchor core is based on a combination of the general chronology of Type IIa anchors, that is fifth to mid-second century BC, and the fact that the core still had some of its original wooden stock attached which has been radiocarbon dated to 785–400 cal BC.
5     The numismatic, textual and linguistic evidence relating to possible Punic/Carthaginian activity in pre-Roman Britain is summarised and discussed in C. R. Green, 'Thanet, Tanit and the Phoenicians: place-names, archaeology and pre-Roman trading settlements in eastern Kent?', 21 April 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/04/thanet-tanit-and-the-phoenicians.html. On the linguistic evidence, see further, for example, R. Coates, 'A Glimpse through a Dirty Window into an Unlit House: Names of Some North-West European Islands', in W. Ahrens et al (edd.), Names in Multi-Lingual, Multi-Cultural and Multi-Ethnic Contact: Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, August 17-22, 2008 (Toronto, 2009), pp. 228–42, and G. Broderick, 'Some island names in the former "Kingdom of the Isles": a reappraisal', Journal of Scottish Name Studies, 7 (2013), 1–28. On the textual evidence, including the possible expedition of a Carthaginian explorer named Himilco to Britain sometime just after 500 BC or thereabouts and references to the Kassiterides, the 'Tin Islands', see for example, D. W. Roller, Through the Pillars of Herakles: Greco-Roman Exploration of the Atlantic (London, 2006), pp. 12–14, 27–9; D. W. Roller, 'Himilco the Navigator', in E. K. Akyeampong & H. L. Gates Jnr. (edd.), Dictionary of African Biography, 6 vols. (Oxford, 2012), III.70; and B. Cunliffe, Britain Begins (Oxford, 2013), pp. 319–20.
6    J. I. McKinley et al, 'Dead-sea connections: a Bronze Age and Iron Age ritual site on the Isle of Thanet', in J. T. Koch & B. Cunliffe (eds.), Celtic from the West 2. Rethinking the Bronze Age and the Arrival of Indo-European in Atlantic Europe (Oxford, 2013), pp. 157–83, esp. pp. 166–8, and now J. I. McKinley et al, Cliffs End Farm, Isle of Thanet, Kent. A Mortuary and Ritual Site of the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon Period with Evidence for Long-Distance Maritime Mobility (Salisbury, 2014). Consultation of maps depicting water oxygen isotope composition across the Mediterranean basin, northern Africa and western Europe reinforces McKinley et al's suggestion that the 'southern' immigrants in the Thanet cemetery probably come from North Africa rather than southernmost Iberia; whilst a southern Iberian origin might possibly work for some of the samples analysed from this cemetery, others strongly indicate that the person involved spent at least part of their early life in northern Africa, not Iberia. See further J. A. Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, 5 (2012), 754–64 at fig 12; G. J. Bowen & J. Revenaugh, 'Interpolating the isotopic composition of modern meteoric precipitation', Water Resources Research, 39 (2003), fig. 8; L.J. Araguas-Araguas & M.F. Diaz Teijeiro, 'Isotope composition of precipitation and water vapour in the Iberian Peninsula', in IAEA, Isotopic composition of precipitation in the Mediterranean Basin in relation to air circulation patterns and climate (Vienna, 2005), pp. 173–90 at fig. 3; and S. Terzer et al, 'Global isoscapes for δ18O and δ2H in precipitation: improved prediction using regionalized climatic regression models', Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 17 (2013), 1–16.
7     M. Markey, E. Wilkes & T. Darvill, 'Poole Harbour: an Iron Age port', Current Archaeology, 181 (2002), 7–11. See also Historic England's Pastscape Database, Monument No. 457510 ('Poole Iron Age Port'); E. Wilkes, Iron Age Maritime Nodes on the English Channel Coast: An Investigation into the Location, Nature and Context of Early Ports and Harbours, 2 vols. (Bournemouth University PhD Thesis, 2004), I.169–215, II.316–17, 321–7, with the radiocarbon results reported at p. 326; and E. Wilkes, 'Prehistoric sea journeys and port approaches: the south coast and Poole Harbour', in V. Cummings & R. Johnston (eds.), Prehistoric Journeys (Oxford, 2007), pp. 121–30, particularly p. 128. On the Siculo-Punic coin of the fourth century BC from Poole Harbour, see E. S. G. Robinson, 'Greek coins', British Museum Quarterly, 11.1 (1936), 29–31 at p. 30; RCHME, 'Other Roman Monuments', in An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Dorset, Volume 2, South East (London, 1970), pp. 592–621, online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/dorset/vol2/pp592-621; J. G. Milne, Finds of Greek Coins in the British Isles (Oxford, 1948).
8     On the Porth Felen anchor stock and its date, see G. C. Boon, 'A Greco-Roman Anchor-Stock from North Wales', Antiquaries Journal, 57 (1977), 10–30; G. C. Boon, 'The Porth Felen anchor-stock', International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 6 (1977), 239–42. Note, images of the recently-discovered Punic anchorage at Cala Levante, Pantelleria, Sicily, indicate that Type IIIb anchors were being used by at least some Punic/Carthaginian ships in the Mediterranean in the mid-third century BC, thus extending the chronology of this type back half a century further than it is assigned in Haldane, The Wooden Anchor, pp. 7–8, 13: see L. Abelli et al, 'The Roman conquest of Pantelleria through recent underwater archaeological investigations', in C. Dagneau & K. Gauvin (eds.), ACUA Underwater Archaeology Proceedings 2014 (ACUA, 2014), 345–55 at p. 347. The Type IIIb lead anchor stock from Plymouth Sound is recorded as SHIPS Project/ProMare, 'Lead Anchor Stock (10A05)', Shipwrecks and History in Plymouth Sound Project, finds database, accessed 15 August 2015, online at http://www.promare.co.uk/ships/Finds/Fd_10A05Anchor.html.
9    On the 'Tamar Estuary Iron Age coastal node' and Mount Batten, see Wilkes, Iron Age Maritime Nodes on the English Channel Coast, I.139–42, II.466–7; A. Firth et al, Tamar Estuaries Historic Environment: A Review of Marine and Coastal Archaeology (Plymouth, 1998); B. Cunliffe, Mount Batten, Plymouth: a Prehistoric and Roman Port (Oxford, 1988). Rame Head Iron Age promontory fort is Cornwall & Scilly Historic Environment Record PRN 6000; on the name 'Rame', see O. J. Padel, Dictionary of Cornish Place-Names (Penzance, 1988), p. 147; Coates, 'Names of Some North-West European Islands', 237; and Green, 'Thanet, Tanit and the Phoenicians'.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2015, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following is just a very quick post offering some details and images of two ambitious twentieth-century plans to build cities on the Lincolnshire coastline that in the end came to nothing. There is little to be found online about either plan, but if they had come to fruition they would have entailed major changes to the landscape and ecology of the Lincolnshire coast, and they are fascinating examples of two very different types of twentieth-century town planning.

Harry Teggin's suggested plan for how the Wash might be reclaimed and developed (plan from Teggin's proposal, via Robinson, 1981)

The question of what to do with the Wash, that great bay with tidal marshes and mudflats into which the rivers of the Fenland and southern Lincolnshire pour, has long occupied people with dreams of its drainage and reclamation. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular saw significant 'new lands' recovered from the sea all along the edge of the Wash by these means, but some wished to go much further and alter its character almost entirely. One of the most recent of these dramatic coastal engineering schemes was proposed by the architect Harry Teggin on the BBC's Network Three (now Radio 3) in 1966 and in two subsequent studies published in 1969 entitled City of the Great Wash: A Theory of Cumulative Gain and Britain's Europort: the Real Treasure in the Wash.

Teggin argued for the construction of a massive 'Great Wash City' of 750,000 people on reclaimed silt and sand banks just to the south of Skegness, with an attendant new national freight airport, a vast deep-water 'Europort', extensive reclaimed farmlands, and huge freshwater reservoirs—his plan showing how these resources might be placed within the Wash basin is included above. Although none of these elements were considered to be individually viable, Teggin maintained that the cumulative economic and social benefits of constructing all of them together meant that the scheme was workable, desirable and cost-effective at the estimated price of around £1 billion. Indeed, it was argued that not only would the scheme bring major economic development to an area of England that was 'underdeveloped, underpopulated, and unexploited', whilst also relieving pressure on London and the south-east, but it would ensure effective flood control, improved navigation, and the creation of some of the richest agricultural land in England! Needless to say, the impact on Lincolnshire if Teggin's scheme had gone ahead would have been dramatic, and not simply from an economic standpoint: at a stroke, the county would have lost half its seaboard, along with all the wildlife that currently frequents it.

Looking across the salt marsh to the Wash at Friskney, Lincolnshire, with the top of a grain storage tower on the opposite side of the Wash at King's Lynn visible on the horizon; the wreck was a target for the former RAF Wainfleet bombing range and the object in the foreground is a navigation marker resting on the saltmarsh (image © Mat Fascione, via Geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0).

The proposed layout of Woldsea on the Lincolnshire coast, centred on Huttoft Bank, from the 1908 prospectus; click for a larger version of the image.

The second scheme to be mentioned here was perhaps more plausible than Teggin's fantastic vision of a new metropolis rising from the sand and silt of the Wash, and was presumably inspired by the success of the onshore developments of Cleethorpes and Skegness in the nineteenth century. Published in 1911 by the Woldsea Freehold Town Planning Syndicate Ltd under the title of Woldsea—The First Garden City by the Sea and summarized in The Times that year, it offered a plan to develop a new 'garden city' on a largely unexploited expanse of the Lincolnshire coastline around Huttoft Bank, just to the south of Mablethorpe, Sutton-on-Sea and Sandilands. The town was to have a two mile sea frontage with 'magnificent sands', its own railway station (on the Great Northern Railway, which ran close to the site), and a town entrance in the form of a pseudo-medieval gateway. The sandhills along the shoreline were to be planted with flowering shrubs and trees to enhance their charm, the existing golf course behind the dunes—which was laid out in 1901—was to be supplemented by a large 'Pleasure Gardens' with a band stand and cricket ground, and the 'garden city' townscape inland of these was to be filled with Mock Tudor hotels, houses, bungalows and villas, suggestive of a sort of Woodhall Spa-by-the-Sea.

Illustration of a pair of houses at Woldsea from the prospectus, the proposed cost of which would have been £1,200.

Suggested look of The Green, Woldsea, from the prospectus.

Certainly, the planners were determined that this should be a town very different from the other resorts of the early twentieth-century Lincolnshire coast. Unlike Skegness, Sutton-on-Sea, Mablethorpe and Cleethorpes, which were scornfully derided as populist resorts, this was to be a place designed solely for the upper classes and 'the better middle class', who were said to be poorly served along the east coast up until this point. It was thus to have no fashionable pier or promenade, but was rather planned along 'modern lines' with 'artistically designed walks of natural appearance', ample garden surroundings full of rural charm, and a tight control over development to prevent the sort of 'freak building' and 'jerry-built lodging-houses' that apparently offended the eye along much of the Lincolnshire coast. Furthermore, the site was sold as being perfectly positioned not only close to the sea, but also near to the Lincolnshire Wolds (hence its name), with Hubbard's Hills at Louth being promoted as a potential woodland park 'resort' for the future inhabitants of Woldsea via the GNR railway line north from Huttoft to Louth.

Although the project appears to have attracted considerable interest, with the well-to-do and soon-to-retire colonials coming up to inspect the site and consider plans for picturesque thatched cottages and Tudor villas (the latter priced at £2,000 each), the dream of an upper- and middle-class garden city on the Lincolnshire coast eventually came to naught, perhaps largely due to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The only tangible remains of the scheme are the golf course that still runs behind the sandhills from Sandilands down to Huttoft Bank, the Grange & Links hotel in Sandilands—whose style and name seem to recall The Links hotel that was proposed as part of the Woldsea development—and perhaps the design of some of the larger houses in that village too. As to the name of the Lincolnshire seaside resort that never was, this was not entirely forgotten either, although it's survival is only very minimal, being preserved as it is in the name of the isolated Woldsea Farm, Huttoft.

The beach today at Huttoft Bank, which would have lain at the centre of the Woldsea seafront if the project had reached fruition (photo: C. R. Green).

A planned hotel at Woldsea, as shown in the prospectus.

Needless to say, the above two schemes were not the only developments proposed for the Lincolnshire coastline that failed to reach fruition, but they are amongst the most intriguing and most fully thought out. Woldsea in particular might well have been built if World War I had not intervened, and the Great Wash City certainly had a degree of support and wasmentioned positively in the House of Commons. Of the two, the Great Wash City perhaps had the greatest transformative potential for the region, both economically and environmentally. Whereas Woldsea was merely envisaged as a rural utopia for the upper and 'better' middle classes, where they could enjoy the Lincolnshire coast away from the horrors of 'day-trippers' and the like, Teggin's vision of massive city and Europort rising from the sea would have provided a new economic hub for the whole East Midlands. In the end, however, it proved simply too ambitious and expensive a project for the government to countenance. Of course, Teggin's proposal would also have wreaked havoc on the ecology of the Lincolnshire coastline to a far greater degree than Woldsea ever could have, but it is worth remembering here that it was not the first nor the last proposal to risk this. Indeed, a generation before only the economic difficulties of the 1930s had intervened to prevent the Wash saltmarsh and coastal zone from Gibraltar Point to the mouth of the Witham being made into the proposed 15 mile long Wash Speedway track with an accompanying 4 mile long grandstand, 12 mile long TT track, motor boat speedway, aerodrome and amusement park, the whole project having the support of Sir Malcolm Campbell!

The proposed Wash Speedway of 1930; click for a larger version of the image.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2015, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following short note is based on a narrative preserved in the eleventh-century Fragmentary Annals of Ireland that tells of a Viking raid on Morocco in the 860s. This raid is said to have led to the taking of 'a great host' of North African captives by the Vikings, who then carried them back to Ireland, where they reportedly remained a distinct group—'the black men'—for some considerable period of time after their arrival. The narrative in question runs as follows:

At this time came the Aunites (that is, the Danes) with innumerable armies to York, and they sacked the city, and they overcame it; and that was the beginning of harassment and misfortunes for the Britons; for it was not long before this that there had been every war and every trouble in Norway, and this was the source of that war in Norway: two younger sons of Albdan, king of Norway, drove out the eldest son, i.e. Ragnall son of Albdan, for fear that he would seize the kingship of Norway after their father. So Ragnall came with his three sons to the Orkneys. Ragnall stayed there then, with his youngest son. The older sons, however, filled with arrogance and rashness, proceeded with a large army, having mustered that army from all quarters, to march against the Franks and Saxons. They thought that their father would return to Norway immediately after their departure.
     Then their arrogance and their youthfulness incited them to voyage across the Cantabrian Ocean (i.e. the sea that is between Ireland and Spain) and they reached Spain, and they did many evil things in Spain, both destroying and plundering. After that they proceeded across the Gaditanean Straits (i.e. the place where the Irish Sea [sic] goes into the surrounding ocean), so that they reached Africa, and they waged war against the Mauritanians, and made a great slaughter of the Mauritanians. However, as they were going to this battle, one of the sons said to the other, ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘we are very foolish and mad to be killing ourselves going from country to country throughout the world, and not to be defending our own patrimony, and doing the will of our father, for he is alone now, sad and discouraged in a land not his own, since the other son whom we left along with him has been slain, as has been revealed to me.’ It would seem that that was revealed to him in a dream vision; and his Ragnall's other son was slain in battle; and moreover, the father himself barely escaped from that battle—which dream proved to be true.
      While he was saying that, they saw the Mauritanian forces coming towards them, and when the son who spoke the above words saw that, he leaped suddenly into the battle, and attacked the king of the Mauritanians, and gave bim a blow with a great sword and cut off his hand. There was hard fighting on both sides in this battle, and neither of them won the victory from the other in that battle. But all returned to camp, after many among them had been slain. However, they challenged each other to come to battle the next day.
      The king of the Mauritanians escaped from the camp and fled in the night after his hand had been cut off. When the morning came, the Norwegians seized their weapons and readied themselves firmly and bravely for the battle. The Mauritanians, however, when they noticed that their king had departed, fled after they had been terribly slain. Thereupon the Norwegians swept across the country, and they devastated and burned the whole land. Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men [literally 'blue men' but with the sense 'black', see further here]. For Mauri is the same as nigri; 'Mauritania' is the same as nigritudo. Hardly one in three of the Norwegians escaped, between those who were slain, and those who drowned in the Gaditanian Straits. Now those black men remained in Ireland for a long time. Mauritania is located across from the Balearic Islands. (J. N. Radner (ed. & trans.), Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (Dublin, 1978), FA 330, pp. 120–1)

This is, of course, a most intriguing account, but two points in particular need to be noted. First, the text only survives in five fragments transcribed in the seventeenth century and appears to have its origin in the eleventh century, perhaps being composed during the latter part of the reign of Donnchad of Osraige (r. 1003–39), who was a descendant of the chief hero of the Fragmentary Annals, Cerball mac Dúnlainge of Osraige (r. 842–88). Second, the narrative preserved in the Fragmentary Annals not only probably dates from more than a century and a half after the events it purports to describe, but the FA moreover cannot be treated as a simple, reliable chronicle of events. Rather, it appears to be a composite text that derives from a number of pre-existing sources, including a derivative of the lost early to mid-tenth-century ‘Chronicle of Clonmacnoise’, a pseudo-historical narrative concerning the deeds of Cerball, and a handful of other sources including a Hiberno-Norse version of the legend of Ragnarr Loðbrók, with the African expedition believed to have its origins in the latter source.

The final section of FA 330, detailing how the Vikings brought a 'great host' of North African captives back to Ireland, from O'Donovan's 1860 edition of the text; click the image for a larger view (image: Internet Archive).

In light of the above, the account in the Fragmentary Annals has been viewed with some suspicion. Nonetheless, the suggestion that Vikings might have raided along the coast of North Africa and even perhaps captured and enslaved people from this region is supported, to some degree, by other historical and archaeological evidence. Of particular importance in this regard is the fact that medieval Muslim writers also refer to Vikings (Majūs) having raided along the North African coast in the mid-ninth century. For example, the Andalusi geographer Al-Bakrī in his Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik ('Book of Roads and Kingdoms'), completed c. 1068 but based on earlier materials, records the following:

Majūs [Vikings]—God curse them—landed at Nakūr [Nekor, Morocco], in the year 244 (858–859). They took the city, plundered it, and made its inhabitants slaves, except those who saved themselves by flight. Among their prisoners were Ama al-Raḥmān and Khanūla, daughters of Wakif ibn-Mu'tasim ibn-Ṣāliḥ. [The emir] Muḥammed ransomed them. The Majūs stayed eight days in Nakūr.

The same basic tale is recorded by a number of other writers too, including the tenth-century Andalusi historian Ibn al-Qūṭīya and the later authors Ibn Idhārī and Ibn Khaldūn, and a version also appears in the late ninth-century Christian Chronicle of Alfonso III, where it is related that the 'Northman pirates... sailed the sea and attacked Nekur, a city in Mauritania, and there they killed a vast number of Muslims.' Needless to say, the above is of considerable interest in the present context, and the reality of Viking activity in the region of Morocco is further supported by a recent analysis of bones of ancient mice recovered from the Portuguese island of Madeira, located off the coast of Morocco, which indicates that this island was probably visited by Vikings from Scandinavia/northern Germany in the tenth or early eleventh century, at least four centuries before the medieval Portuguese colonisation of the island.

Map showing the territories and voyages of the Vikings, with dates for key settlements and expeditions (image: Wikimedia Commons).

It would thus seem clear that the Vikings were active in the area of Morocco (ancient Mauretania) in the ninth and tenth centuries, just as the Fragmentary Annals claims, and that they moreover undertook a significant raid on the coast of Morocco—at Nakūr/Nekor—in the mid-ninth century that resulted in a significant number of slaves being taken. Indeed, in this light it might well be wondered whether the above raid on Nakūr/Nekor in 859 doesn't actually underlie the story of a mid-ninth-century North African adventure related in the Fragmentary Annals, as Janet Nelson has suggested. Of course, if the Viking raid on Morocco and the subsequent taking of captives there as described in the FA therefore has a good context in the real events of the 'Viking Age' and might even reflect a partially legendarised version of the raid on Nakūr, what then of the claim in the Fragmentary Annals that the North African captives were subsequently carried by the Vikings to Ireland and remained there 'for a long time'? Certainly, Ann Christys has noted that there is nothing inherently implausible about this final aspect of the FA's tale, especially given that other elements of the account appear to be historically credible and may derive from one or more real events. However, whilst other more reliable texts also mention Viking raids on the Moroccan coast and slaves being taken by them, none mention what happened to the non-royal prisoners that the Majūs (Vikings) captured in North Africa, only that the Emir of Córdoba ransomed the royal daughters of Wakif ibn-Mu'tasim ibn-Ṣāliḥ who were taken when the inhabitants of Nakūr were enslaved in 859. On the other hand, although external textual support for the final part of the account in the Fragmentary Annals may be lacking, there is nonetheless some archaeological evidence which, whilst not conclusive, is at the very least suggestive.

The archaeological evidence in question consists of three burials from early medieval Britain that have been identified as those of African women on the basis of an examination of their skeletal remains. One of the burials in question was discovered in 2013 at Fairford, Gloucestershire, and has been described as being that of 'a woman, aged between 18 and 24, from Sub-Saharan Africa', with radiocarbon analysis indicating that she very probably died at some point between AD 896 and 1025. Another was found in a Late Saxon cemetery at Norwich. And the third and best known is that of a young African woman buried c. 1000 in the Late Saxon cemetery at North Elmham, Norfolk. This last is discussed in detail in Calvin Wells' and Helen Cayton's contribution to the East Anglian Archaeology report on North Elmham, published in 1980, and also in Helen Cayton's 1977 PhD thesis, and whilst the identification was made from skeletal evidence alone (DNA analysis of the North Elmham woman's bones was planned in 2009, but was never carried out due to the relocation of the researcher), it is said to 'leave little doubt' and be 'incontestable'. Needless to say, if the identifications can indeed be relied upon, then these three burials are obviously of significant potential interest: although they were found in Britain, not Ireland, they do indicate that at least some people from Africa or of African descent were living and dying in rural and urban communities in the British Isles during the 'Viking Age' (eighth to eleventh centuries). Even though it is impossible to know quite how these specific women ended up in Britain, slavery has frequently been cited as a potential mechanism, and their presence would certainly seem to suggest that the claim that North African people captured by the Vikings ended up in the British Isles could have had some basis in reality.

Ruins of a Norman chapel located on the site of the Late Saxon church and cemetery at North Elmham, Norfolk (image: Wikimedia Commons).

The above is about as far as we can go at present. All told, whilst the eleventh-century Fragmentary Annals of Ireland is relatively late in date and often viewed with a degree of suspicion, it seems clear that some elements of its narrative of a Viking adventure in North Africa may well have a basis in real events. There is certainly good evidence to suggest that there was a significant Viking attack on Nakūr, Morocco, in 859 that saw the inhabitants of that city enslaved, and the notion that captives taken by the Vikings from North Africa were carried to Ireland, as the Fragmentary Annals claims, ought not to be summarily dismissed. Not only is there nothing inherently implausible about the notion, especially if we accept that the other aspects of the narrative have a basis in history, but there is also a small amount of archaeological evidence indicative of the presence of Africans in Viking-era Britain, at least, something that is of considerable potential interest in the present context.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2015, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following post offers a brief discussion of some of the oxygen isotope evidence for long-distance contact and migration between Britain and other parts of the world in the early medieval period and before. The particular focus here is on those individuals excavated in Britain whose results are above the expected range for people who grew up on these islands, indicating that they could well have spent part of their childhood in southern Iberia and/or North Africa.

The British Geological Society map of the oxygen isotope values of modern European drinking water (image © BGS, reproduced under an academic, educational and instructive licence from the BGS, as detailed on the Wessex Archaeology website).

The geographic distribution of areas outside of the UK with rainwater oxygen isotope values above ‑5.0‰, shown in dark blue; all twelve of the people from South Wales discussed above consumed water with a δ¹⁸O level of c. ‑4.5‰ or higher (up to c. ‑3.3‰) in early life. Note, only 1% of the UK has δ¹⁸Odw water levels above ‑5.0‰, up to a maximum value of c. ‑4.5‰, but as the map shows, such levels are widely encountered throughout North Africa and in small areas of southern Europe. Levels above ‑4.0‰ are even more restricted in extent, being only recorded in Europe from a small area around Cádiz, southwest Spain, and are otherwise confined to North Africa, whilst levels above c. ‑3.5‰ are only known from North Africa and further afield. Image: C. R. Green, based on data from the sources cited in fn 3, especially Evans et al 2012 and Bowen 2003–15, utilising a Wikimedia Commons map of the Mediterranean region as a base.

North African unguentaria from Grave 82 at the Late Roman cemetery, Lankhills, Winchester (image: Oxford Archaeology, reused under their CC BY-SA 3.0 license).

A Sicilian strumento of c. 1200–1100 BC, found on the sea-floor at Salcombe, Devon, with other Bronze Age items from a probable twelfth-century BC shipwreck (image: British Museum).

Conclusion

Several key points emerge from the above summary of burial sites producing oxygen isotope evidence indicative of the presence of people from North Africa and southern Iberia in Britain between c. 1100 BC and c. AD 800, three of which are highlighted here by way of a conclusion. First and foremost, it is important to note that at least some migrants from these areas appear to have been present in Britain during all periods from the Late Bronze Age onwards. Whilst the presence of people from North Africa in Roman Britain is to a large degree unsurprising, as they are otherwise attested via literary and epigraphic sources, the fact that it can be shown that people from these areas were very probably also present in Bronze Age, Iron Age and early medieval Britain is a point of some considerable interest.

Second, the proportion of such individuals in each of the cemeteries surveyed is significant. For example, around a fifth of those buried in the Cliffs End prehistoric cemetery have oxygen isotope values probably indicative of such origins, as do around a quarter of those tested from the three early medieval cemeteries in South Wales and the Late Roman cemetery at Winchester, whilst at Roman Gloucester the proportion may be as high as a third. In this context, it is interesting to note that the anthroposcopic/craniometric analysis of two Roman cemeteries at York similarly points towards the presence of a potentially large number of people whose own or family origins lay in North Africa, with 11%–12% of those examined considered very likely to be of 'African descent', and yet others thought to have potential 'mixed' or 'black' ancestry, up to a possible maximum of 38% of the population buried at Trentholme Drive and 51% of the population in the higher-status The Railway cemetery. Of course, the sites and cemeteries surveyed here are likely to be to some extent exceptional, being located either at local capitals or close to the coast, but these results are nonetheless fascinating and certainly imply that some areas of Britain, at least, saw a degree of immigration from North Africa and/or southern Iberia in the early medieval period and before.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the potential migrants to Britain from North Africa and/or southern Iberia discussed above include men, women and non-adults, implying that contact between Britain and these areas was not solely the preserve of male mercantile or military groups, as has sometimes been assumed. Indeed, in some cases women and non-adults actually form the majority of the migrants identifiable there via oxygen isotope analysis, as is the case at Winchester and in South Wales.


Notes

1     On current approaches to oxygen isotope analysis and the underlying methodology, principles and issues, see, for example, J. A. Evans, C. A. Chenery & J. Montgomery, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, 27 (2012), 754–64 and Supplementary Material I (14 pp.), and C. Chenery et al, 'Strontium and stable isotope evidence for diet and mobility in Roman Gloucester, UK', Journal of Archaeological Science, 37 (2010), 150–63. The current post follows the interpretations and approaches to those individuals with notably enriched dental enamel oxygen isotope results adopted in these studies and also in other recent publications such as K. A. Hemer et al, 'Evidence of early medieval trade and migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea region', Journal of Archaeological Science, 40 (2013), 2352–59.
2    See, for example, C. R. Green, 'Thanet, Tanit and the Phoenicians: place-names, archaeology and pre-Roman trading settlements in eastern Kent?', 21 April 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/04/thanet-tanit-and-the-phoenicians.html; 'A Mediterranean anchor stock of the fifth to mid-second century BC found off the coast of Britain', 29 August 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/08/a-mediterranean-anchor.html; and 'A great host of captives? A note on Vikings in Morocco and Africans in early medieval Ireland & Britain', 12 September 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/09/a-great-host-of-captives.html.
3     The current oxygen isotope range for drinking water (δ¹⁸O_dw) in Britain and Ireland is around -9.0‰ to -4.5‰, with only 1% of the British Isles having values above -5.0‰, namely in the extreme south-west of Britain, the extreme south-west of Ireland, and part of the Outer Hebrides, a situation that is believed to have changed little between the Mesolithic and Medieval eras. This range accords well with the apparent local British range of phosphate oxygen isotope values from excavated teeth, which is usually agreed to fall between 16.6‰ and 18.6‰ δ¹⁸O_p, although Evans et al have recently concluded that people brought up on the far west of the British Isles could potentially have values a little higher too, reflecting the degree of normal ambient variation that might be seen within populations exposed to the extremes of drinking water composition within the British Isles. Similar or lower drinking water oxygen isotope values, from <-10.0‰ to -5.0‰, are found across much of western Europe, as can be seen from the first map reproduced above. In contrast, southern Iberia has notably higher drinking water/precipitation δ¹⁸O values, from -5.0‰ up to a maximum of c. -4.0‰, except around Cádiz where drinking water values of up to c. -3.5‰ have been noted, and North Africa has values from the British range right up to around 0‰, with even higher values found in parts of Sudan (ancient Nubia) and Ethiopia. See further on Britain W. G. Darling et al, 'The O and H stable isotope composition of freshwaters in the British Isles. 2. Surface waters and groundwater', Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions, 7 (2003), 183–95;  J. A. Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, 27 (2012), 754–64 at pp. 757–8 and Table 1; C. Chenery et al, 'Strontium and stable isotope evidence for diet and mobility in Roman Gloucester, UK', Journal of Archaeological Science, 37 (2010), 150–63 at pp. 153, 156–7, 160. On mainland Europe and Africa, see BGS/C. Chenery, 'Oxygen isotopes values for modern European drinking water' (map), online at www.wessexarch.co.uk/projects/amesbury/tests/oxygen_isotope.html; Evans et al, 'Summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation', fig. 12; G. Bowen, 'Waterisotopes.org: global and regional maps of isotope ratios in precipitation', online dataset 2003–15, figures online at http://wateriso.utah.edu/waterisotopes/pages/data_access/figures.html; L. J. Araguas-Araguas & M. F. Diaz Teijeiro, 'Isotope composition of precipitation and water vapour in the Iberian Peninsula', in IAEA, Isotopic composition of precipitation in the Mediterranean Basin in relation to air circulation patterns and climate (Vienna, 2005), pp. 173–90 at fig. 3; M. R. Buzon & G. Bowen, 'Oxygen and carbon isotope analysis of human tooth enamel from the New Kingdom site of Tombos in Nubia', Archaeometry, 52 (2010), 855–68, esp. Table 2; C. White et al, 'Exploring the effects of environment, physiology and diet on oxygen isotope ratios in ancient Nubian bones and teeth', Journal of Archaeological Science, 31 (2004), 233–50 and Table 2.
4    K. A. Hemer et al, 'Evidence of early medieval trade and migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea region', Journal of Archaeological Science, 40 (2013), 2352–59.
5    See further the references cited in footnote 4, especially Evans et al, 'Summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation', fig. 12, and Araguas-Araguas & Diaz Teijeiro, 'Isotope composition of precipitation and water vapour in the Iberian Peninsula', fig. 3. See also K. Killgrove, Migration and Mobility in Imperial Rome (University of North Carolina PhD Thesis, 2010), pp. 263, 280, 284–5, 310–11 who identifies the three people in her study of Rome who have oxygen isotope results indicative of consuming drinking water with a δ¹⁸O value above -4.0‰ as probable North African immigrants to the city, rather than European.
6    See, for example, M. Fulford, 'Byzantium and Britain: a Mediterranean perspective on post-Roman Mediterranean imports in western Britain and Ireland', Medieval Archaeology, 33 (1989), 1–6; E. Campbell, Continental and Mediterranean Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, AD 400–800, Council for British Archaeology Research Report 157 (York, 2007); E. Campbell & C. Bowles, 'Byzantine trade to the edge of the world: Mediterranean pottery imports to Atlantic Britain in the 6th century', in M. M. Mango (ed.), Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th Centuries: The Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange (Farnham, 2009), pp. 297–314; T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 222–3.
7    Hemer et al, 'Evidence of early medieval trade and migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea region', 2357–8.
8    S. E. Groves et al, 'Mobility histories of 7th–9th century AD people buried at early medieval Bamburgh, Northumberland, England', American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 151 (2013), 462–76. The description of Bamburgh as 'the royal city' of Bernicia is that of Bede, writing in the first half of the eighth century (Historia Ecclesiastica, III.6). With regard to the documentary evidence for Africans in Anglo-Saxon England, see also Historia Ecclesiastica IV.1, where Bede describes Hadrian, the later seventh- and eighth-century Abbot of St Augustine's, Canterbury, as 'a man of African race' (HE IV.1).
9    Groves et al, 'Mobility histories of 7th–9th century AD people buried at early medieval Bamburgh', esp. pp. 465, 470 and Supplementary Figure 7.
10    P. Booth et al, The Late Roman Cemetery at Lankhills, Winchester: Excavations 2000–2004 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 421–8; H. Eckardt et al, 'Oxygen and strontium isotope evidence for mobility in Roman Winchester', Journal of Archaeological Science, 36 (2009), 2816–25.
11     Evans et al, 'Summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation', fig. 11 & pp. 760–2.
12    Booth et al, The Late Roman Cemetery at Lankhills, pp. 249–51, 361, 509–16.
13    G. Müldner et al, 'The ‘Headless Romans’: multi-isotope investigations of an unusual burial ground from Roman Britain', Journal of Archaeological Science, 38 (2011), 280–90; S. Leach et al, 'Migration and diversity in Roman Britain: a multidisciplinary approach to the identification of immigrants in Roman York, England', American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 140 (2009), 546–61.
14    Leach et al, 'Migration and diversity in Roman Britain', Table 4 and pp. 546, 550–2, 558–9; S. Leach et al, 'A Lady of York: migration, ethnicity and identity in Roman Britain', Antiquity, 84 (2010), 131–45. On the isotopic values of water in North Africa, see for example Evans et al, 'Summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation', fig. 12, and G. Bowen, 'Waterisotopes.org: global and regional maps of isotope ratios in precipitation'.
15    C. Chenery et al, 'Strontium and stable isotope evidence for diet and mobility in Roman Gloucester, UK', Journal of Archaeological Science, 37 (2010), 150–63, who note that 'the probability of these [individuals] being from Britain is small and an origin abroad is more likely' (p. 158).
16    The above is based primarily on J. I. McKinley et al, 'Dead-sea connections: a Bronze Age and Iron Age ritual site on the Isle of Thanet', in J. T. Koch & B. Cunliffe (eds.), Celtic from the West 2. Rethinking the Bronze Age and the Arrival of Indo-European in Atlantic Europe (Oxford, 2013), pp. 157–83, esp. pp. 166–8 and figs. 6.5, 6.6 and 6.7.
17    The oxygen isotope values from the Mendes burial site in the Nile Delta, Egypt, are expressed as both δ¹⁸O_dw and δ¹⁸O_c in Buzon & Bowen, 'Oxygen and carbon isotope analysis of human tooth enamel from the New Kingdom site of Tombos in Nubia', Table 2, and the latter can be converted to δ¹⁸O_p using the equation in C. Chenery et al, 'The oxygen isotope relationship between the phosphate and structural carbonate fractions of human bioapatite', Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, 26 (2012), 309–19. Needless to say, the δ¹⁸O_p and equivalent δ¹⁸O_dw values of the two people from Thanet fall within both the reported δ¹⁸O_dw and the calculated δ¹⁸O_p ranges for Mendes, and are moveover above the bottom of the range of δ¹⁸O_p values for people who grew up in the Nile Valley (21.0‰) as reported in Chenery et al, 'Strontium and stable isotope evidence for diet and mobility in Roman Gloucester, UK', p. 158.
18    On pre-Roman Iron Age contacts, see especially C. R. Green, 'Thanet, Tanit and the Phoenicians: place-names, archaeology and pre-Roman trading settlements in eastern Kent?', 21 April 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/04/thanet-tanit-and-the-phoenicians.html, and 'A Mediterranean anchor stock of the fifth to mid-second century BC found off the coast of Britain', 29 August 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/08/a-mediterranean-anchor.html. On the Barbary ape from Navan Fort, Northern Ireland, see for example I. Armit, Headhunting and the Body in Iron Age Europe (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 72–3, and K. A. Costa, 'Marketing archaeological heritage sites in Ireland', in Y. M. Rowan and U. Baram (eds.), Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past (Walnut Creek, 2004), pp. 69–92 at p. 73. On possible finds of Late Bronze Age Mediterranean items from Britain, see for example S. Needham & C. Giardino, 'From Sicily to Salcombe: a Mediterranean Bronze Age object from British coastal waters', Antiquity, 82 (2008), 60–72, and D. Parham et al, 'Questioning the wrecks of time', British Archaeology, 91 (2006), 43–7, online at http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba91/feat2.shtml. A possible three-holed Bronze Age stone Mediterranean anchor from Plymouth Sound has been mentioned in news reports relating to the SHIPS Project/ProMare, but is as yet unidentified on the database for this project; see T. Nichols, 'Unique project launched to shed light on hidden treasures in Plymouth Sound', Plymouth Herald, 5 July 2014, online at http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/Shedding-light-hidden-treasures-Sound/story-21332210-detail/story.html, although it should be noted that the dating and geographical origins of such stone anchors is open to debate.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2015, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

This post is primarily intended to share images of some of the interesting early maps of Lincolnshire that still exist, dating from the medieval era through until the early seventeenth century. Details of each map and a brief discussion of the principal points of interest is provided in the captions to the following image gallery, which I aim to add to over time.

Map of Lincolnshire, extracted from the map of England by Matthew Paris, c. 1250. Norfolk is at the bottom with an thin depiction of The Wash above it and then the Holland district; the Witham and Humber (with its many tributaries) are depicted in blue with the district of Lindsey located between them (Image: BL Cotton MS Claudius D VI, fol. 12v, via Wikimedia Commons).

A map of England attributed to Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte in Marino Sanudo's Liber secretorum of c. 1325, based on his earlier portolan chart and mariners' reports; click for a larger view. The Wash is clearly visible as a deep, circular bay halfway up the eastern side of the island; however, whilst numerous ports are marked along the south coast of England and up the east coast as far as The Wash, Lincolnshire is left empty aside from indications of two rivers (the Witham and the Humber?), with the first name inscribed north of The Wash probably representing Ravenserodd, the important thirteenth- and fourteenth-century island port near Spurn Head, East Yorkshire, that was destroyed by the sea in 1362 (Image: Wikimedia Commons).

Close up of Lindsey (the northern district of Lincolnshire) on the fourteenth-century Gough Map, with north on the left and major roads, rivers and settlements marked. Lincoln is shown at the bottom right with the Trent running along the bottom edge of the image; Boston is at the top right; and Grimsby is at the top left, with the Humber then running down the left edge of the image. Note the curious name 'Ageland' assigned to roughly the area of the Wolds between Grimsby and Louth, being written in a very similar way to the district-name Lindsey. This name also appears in the fifteenth-century work of Osbern Bokenham, where it seems to again be associated with the Lindsey district of Lincolnshire (Bolingbroke is mentioned shortly afterwards), and it also appears on some sixteenth-century maps of Lincolnshire as a district-name for eastern Lindsey written in the area around Louth, as can be seen below. There are few discussions of this name and its import, sadly; the editors of the Gough Map assume it reflects the wapentake-name Aveland, but it is not clear why this wapentake-name alone would be highlighted like this nor why it would be spelled with a -g- here but nowhere else and then placed in totally the wrong part of Lincolnshire, Aveland wapentake being part of the southern Lincolnshire district of Kesteven, not north-eastern Lindsey (Image: Wikimedia Commons).

Extract from the Angliae Figura, a vellum map probably created in the 1530s and perhaps hanging at Hampton Court (included on the map) as the property of Henry VIII. The coastline of Lincolnshire is clearly faulty between Wainfleet and Spalding, but is close to that seen on the Gough Map; both are thought to derive from a common source map dating from around 1290. As on the Gough Map, the curious name 'Ageland' appears highlighted in red as a major (?district-)name and is once again placed in eastern Lindsey, close to Louth (Image: British Library).

Extract from Sebastian Münster's 1540 map of Britain, showing Lincolnshire. The coastline appears derivative of the tradition of the Gough Map/Angliae Figure, but with more of an indication of The Wash than the latter (as is the case on the 1546 Lily map as well). Only the major rivers are shown along with just a handful of Lincolnshire place-names: Lincoln, Stamford, the Isle of Axholme, Sleaford and 'Walflet', which looks to be Wainfleet or a combination of Wainfleet and Saltfleet. Only two district names appear in Lincolnshire, Axholme and 'Agelon', the latter clearly being equivalent to the earlier 'Ageland' and written across Lindsey in a larger font than the other names, whilst the district-name Lindsey is left out entirely (Image: Lancaster University).

John Leland's sketch map of the Humber district, created c. 1544 to show the drainage basins of the Humber and Witham rivers. Leland's sketch includes a rough approximation of the coastline, rivers and key settlements of Lincolnshire; despite it being a rough sketch, the north and east coasts of Lincolnshire appear to be more realistically rendered than they are on the earlier maps discussed above, although his depiction of the northern Wash coastline continues to be in the Gough Map/Angliae Figura tradition (image: Sheppard 1912).

Detail of eastern Lincolnshire from John Leland's sketch map of c. 1544, showing his attempt to sketch both Saltfleet Haven and the early Wainfleet Haven, including the latter's associated tributaries and lakes. Note, Northlod is also mentioned on the 1570 plan of the proposed New Cut at Wainfleet (Image: Sheppard 1912).

Gerard Mercator's engraving of a map of Lincolnshire, originally produced in 1564 and put together into atlas form in the 1570s; north is on the right hand side for this map, which is thought to have been simply engraved by Mercator from an English original, possibly produced by John Elder to assist the French or Spanish in planning an invasion to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I. It is worth noting that not only does the map offer considerably a much improved coastline for Lincolnshire and more detail than many earlier maps, in terms of both rivers and settlements depicted (though Mercator seems to have misread some of the names on his original), but that it also once more includes the odd district-name 'Agland' in the area around Louth, despite the fact that the whole area had clearly been resurveyed. As was observed above, versions of this name also occur on the fourteenth-century Gough Map of Lincolnshire in approximately this position, in a fifteenth-century text relating to Lincolnshire, and on the earlier sixteenth-century Angliae Figura and Münster maps too; it also continued to appear on maps in the later sixteenth-century—being found on, for example, Gerard de Jode's 1578 and 1593 maps and on Sebastian Petri's 1588 map—and even appears on some seventeenth-century maps, as can be seen below (Image: British Library).

Map of Lincolnshire drawn by Humphry Lhuyd before his death in 1568 and published in Abraham Ortelius's Atlas in 1573. The map shows the Lincolnshire Wolds for the first time and other areas of local high ground, along with major rivers and key settlements (Image: Wikimedia Commons).

Proof version of John Speed's 1611/12 map of Lincolnshire, which closely followed the Saxton map of 1576 in offering a much more accurate and detailed depiction of the county; a zoomable version of this map is available here. Of particular interest on both maps is the fact that nearly every settlement in Lincolnshire is mapped and so too are the courses of most of the rivers; the latter are of especial note, given how much these courses changed over the following two centuries—note, for example, the original course of the Lud before its canalisation, with its dual outfalls either side of Conisholme, and the fact that the Long Eau and Great Eau were originally separate rivers (Image: Cambridge University, CC-BY-NC 3.0).

Detail from John Speed's early seventeenth-century proof map of Lincolnshire, showing the coastline of north-east Lincolnshire and a whale menacing the Humber estuary! (Image: Cambridge University, CC-BY-NC 3.0).

Extract from a map of Britain by Johannes Janssonius, printed in 1621 and reprinted in 1630, one of the last maps to feature Agland/Ageland as a district-name located in eastern Lindsey. As to what the name Ageland/Agland might mean if it was a real Lincolnshire district-name that somehow largely avoided being recorded outside of maps, this must remain a matter of speculation in the absence of early evidence. However, the second element might be either OE land or ON lundr, both of which appear in early district-names in the form 'land' (cf. Rutland/Holland & Framland/Wayland), with the first element then potentially being either a personal name or perhaps OE for oak, āc/āca (gen. pl.), with c > g as in medieval and later spellings of other place-names, cf. for example Acthorpe nr Louth, Aggetorp in 1200 and Agthorp in 1485–96, and Agden, South Yorks/Cheshire? (Image: BnF).

The text content of this post and page is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2015, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following brief post lists a number of field and other local minor names from Lindsey that make reference to folkloric and monstrous creatures inhabiting northern Lincolnshire, based on the collection made by I. M. Bowers in 1940 for her Place-Names of Lindsey (PhD thesis, University of Leeds). The majority of these names derive from medieval and early modern sources and suggest the existence of local folklore and tales, long since lost, focused on the pits, mires, fields, pools and mounds of the pre-Modern Lincolnshire landscape.

Theodor Kittelsen's 1904 drawing of a nøkk, the Norwegian equivalent of the English nicor, mentioned below (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Old Norse þurs (thurs)/Old English þyrs (thyrs)—a giant, a monster/ogre/demon

A word indicating a giant or similar monster with a dangerous or destructive nature; most famously found in the Old Norse compound hrímþursar, the 'frost giants', and as a description of Grendel in line 426 of the Old English poem Beowulf. The names imply a number of features thought to be either inhabited by—or made by—such creatures in the medieval/early modern Lincolnshire landscape; note, the dates given below indicate the year in which the name is first documented.

• Thurspit, Alvingham (1579)—'giant-pit' or similar, cf. the Thyrspittes recorded in Foston, Kesteven (S. Lincolnshire) in 1280–90.
• Thrusmyre, Edlington (1579)—a mire, Old Norse myrr, inhabited by a thurs.
• Thruswelker, Selby in Stallingborough (1200s)—literally 'ogre-spring-marsh' or similar, the final element being Old Norse kiarr, 'marsh, wetland'.
• Thursedale, Hemingby (1577)—the second element is either Old Norse dalr, 'valley', or deil(l), 'portion, share, part'.

J. R. Skelton's 1908 illustration of Grendel, who is described as a þyrs/thyrs in Beowulf (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Old English nicor—a water-monster

A word for a water-monster or water-goblin. As above, this term occurs in Beowulf, notably in lines 422 and 575, where Beowulf relates how he has fought nicors. Both it and its continental cognates—such as the Old Icelandic nykr—appear to have been applicable to a wide range of 'water-monsters', including sirens, water-mermaids, hippopotamuses, half-human creatures and water-wyrms!

• Nykarpole, Nychar-pool, Nicarpool, Lincoln (1409)—the pool inhabited by a nicor; the pool in question lay at the junction of Sincil Dyke and the Great Gowt. Compare Nicker Pool, Wimboldsley (Cheshire), first recorded in 1309, and Nicker's Well, Church Holme (Cheshire), first recorded in 1840.

Stukeley's early eighteenth-century map of Lincoln; the Nicarpool is at the bottom of the image, where the Great Gowt met the Sincil Dyke.

Middle English hob(be)—a mischievous spirit/hobgoblin

A word for a mischievous spirit or goblin; a hob in Northern and Midland English folklore was a rough, hairy, creature of the 'brownie' type, whose work could bring prosperity to farms but who could become mischievous or dangerous if annoyed. Household variants might be given new clothes to get them to leave forever, although other hobs lived outside in caves or holes.

• Hoblurke, East Halton (1200s)—self-explanatory; place where a hob lurks/lies hidden, perhaps particularly for an evil purpose.
• Hobbeheadland, Hobheadland, Halton Holegate (1601)—the headland, or 'place where the plough turns', where there is a hob.
• Hob Lane Yate/Gate, Scotter (1567)—hob + lane + Middle English gate/ȝate, 'a gate'.
• Hobbecroft, Theddlethorpe (1200s)—croft, 'small enclosure', with a hob in it.
• Hobcroftheade, Yarborough (1601)—as above + head, 'head, top', cf. Hobbeheadland.
• Hobhole Drain, the East Fen (1805)—name of an artificial drain made in 1805, running N–S across the East Fen; presumably references a pre-existing Hobhole, which is self-explanatory.

Dragons, pixies, ghosts & other creatures

Other local minor names potentially make reference to dragons, pixies, ghosts, shucks and warlocks.

• Drake Acers, Messingham (1577)—Middle English drake, 'dragon, huge serpent', from Old English draca, plus acre, 'field'.
• Dragons Hole, Corringham (1852)—self-explanatory.
• Pixsieacre, Pixsie Acre, Newton-next-Toft (1601)—the field inhabited by a pixie.
• Gasthehowe, Gastehowe, Ashby Puerorum (1200s)—Middle English gast/Old English gāst, 'ghost, dead-spirit', plus ME howe from Old Norse haugr, 'burial mound', so the burial mound haunted by a gast; note, the same parish also contained a place called dedmansgrave in the thirteenth century.
• Shucdale, Haxey (1655)—Probably contains Middle English Shucke, 'demon, devil, evil spirit', from Old English scucca, plus either Middle English dale, 'valley', or deil(l), 'portion, share, part', referencing the area frequented by this creature.
• Wallow Farm, Wharloe, Warlowe Close, Salmonby (1577)—Although late, the name appears to contain Middle English warlowe, from Old English wǣrloga, 'traitor, oath-breaker, liar, devil'; the Modern English descendant of this word is 'warlock'.
• Warlocke Meare, Conisholme (1601)—as above plus mere, 'pool'. 

This post offers a brief discussion of some isotopic evidence for the presence in Britain of people from the cold far north and east of Europe between the Bronze Age and the Late Saxon/Viking eras, following on from a previous posting that looked at the evidence for African and southern Iberian migrants in Britain between c. 1100 BC and c. AD 800.

The geographic distribution of areas with rainwater/drinking water oxygen isotope values below ‑10.0‰, shown in dark grey, and below -12.0‰, shown in black; note, drinking water in the UK has δ¹⁸O values ranges from around -9.0‰ to -4.5‰. Image: C. R. Green, based primarily on the IAEA's 2013 RCWIP model and L. J. Araguas-Araguas & M. F. Diaz Teijeiro, 'Isotope composition of precipitation and water vapour in the Iberian Peninsula', in IAEA, Isotopic composition of precipitation in the Mediterranean Basin in relation to air circulation patterns and climate (Vienna, 2005), pp. 173–90 at fig. 3. Note, this map used the 2013 IAEA precipitation models as its source; other published maps, such as the BGS/Chenery 2003 drinking-water map, show a smaller area of southern Sweden/Norway and a greater area of Central/Eastern Europe as having values below ‑10.0‰, although a more detailed drinking-water map of Germany offers a picture much closer to that depicted here.

As in the previous post, the evidence presented below primarily derives from recent research into the British oxygen isotope data retrieved from archaeological dental enamel. The burials in question all have tooth enamel phosphate oxygen isotope (δ¹⁸O_p) values of 16.2‰ or lower, a level generally believed to fall below the range expected for people who spent their childhood in Britain and to be probably indicative of an origin in a colder and/or more northerly climate than is found here.(1) Moreover, according to both of the major equations used for relating tooth enamel oxygen isotope results to the drinking-water values that produced them, such values reflect the consumption of drinking-water with an oxygen isotope level below -9.2‰. This is depleted beyond the usual range of drinking-water oxygen isotope values encountered in Britain—around -9.0‰ to -4.5‰—and instead indicates an origin in either Scandinavia (where values varying from below -14‰ up to c. -8‰ are found) or central/eastern Europe (where, in the high Alps, values fall as low as -12.9‰).(2)

Rather than discuss each site in turn, I've decided instead to present a list of people with results that fit the above criteria, based on a 2012 catalogue of all oxygen isotope results retrieved over the previous c. 15 years by NIGL plus some more recent and important results, primarily from the fascinating Cliffs End, Thanet cemetery. The results are presented below in a table format arranged by broad era and then from lowest to highest values within these eras, with the tooth enamel δ¹⁸O_p results converted to drinking-water values using both the 2010 revised Levinson equation (Drinking-water value A) and the 2008 Daux et al equation (Drinking-water value B). Although only a relatively limited number of archaeological sites have been investigated from Britain using isotope analysis, there is probably now enough for some conclusions to start to be drawn, and a brief discussion and chronological overview of this data is consequently offered after the table.(3)

Era	Site & burial ID	Oxygen isotope value	Drinking-water value A	Drinking-water value B	Strontium value
Early Bronze Age	Amesbury – Archer	16.2	-10.0	-9.2	0.709400 & 0.710340
Late Bronze Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 3673	14.0	-14.8	-13.0	0.7101
Late Bronze Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 2058/ON101	15.4	-11.7	-10.6	0.7123
Late Bronze Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 3649	15.6	-11.3	-10.3	0.7104
Late Bronze Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 3680	16.1	-10.2	-9.4	0.7083
Iron Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 3651	13.9	-15.0	-13.2	0.7088
Iron Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 3662	14.1	-14.6	-12.9	0.7098
Iron Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 3656	14.4	-13.9	-12.4	0.7120
Iron Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 3644	14.5	-13.7	-12.2	0.7090
Iron Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 3660	15.1	-12.4	-11.1	0.7103
Iron Age	Cliffs End, Thanet – 3616	15.4	-11.7	-10.6	0.7105
Roman	York – DRIF6-24	14.7	-13.3	-11.8	0.708500
Roman	Winchester – Lankhills 081	14.7	-13.3	-11.8	0.709300
Roman	York – DRIF-10	15.0	-12.6	-11.3	0.709563
Roman	Winchester – Lankhills 426	15.1	-12.4	-11.1	0.709400
Roman	Gloucester – 44-77-I46	15.2	-12.2	-11.0	0.711010
Roman	Winchester – Ay21-1119	15.8	-10.9	-9.9	0.709416
Roman	Winchester – Lankhills 013	15.8	-10.9	-9.9	0.706400
Roman	Winchester – Lankhills 351	16.0	-10.4	-9.6	0.709000
Roman (Iron Age)	Galson, Isle of Lewis – Gals-93	16.1	-10.2	-9.4	0.713033
Roman	Winchester – Lankhills 357	16.2	-10.0	-9.2	0.709100
Anglo-Saxon	Bamburgh – D48	15.0	-12.6	-11.3	0.711486
Anglo-Saxon	Ketton – KCC 065	15.5	-11.5	-10.4	0.710489
Anglo-Saxon	Bamburgh – BH 04/245	15.7	-11.1	-10.1	0.709420
Anglo-Saxon	Bamburgh – BH 06/416	15.8	-10.9	-9.9	0.712764
Anglo-Saxon	West Heslerton – G169	15.9	-10.7	-9.7	0.709032
Anglo-Saxon	Bamburgh – BH 03/176	15.9	-10.7	-9.7	0.709995
Anglo-Saxon	Bamburgh – BH 99-134	16.0	-10.4	-9.6	0.710478
Anglo-Saxon	Bamburgh – BH 04/293	16.0	-10.4	-9.6	0.710493
Anglo-Saxon	Empingham – EMP-031B	16.1	-10.2	-9.4	-
Anglo-Saxon	Ketton – KCC 98 54	16.1	-10.2	-9.4	0.709835
Anglo-Saxon	Ketton – KCC 98 9	16.1	-10.2	-9.4	0.709349
Anglo-Saxon	Bamburgh – D54	16.2	-10.0	-9.2	0.710946
Anglo-Saxon	Ketton – KCC 047	16.2	-10.0	-9.2	0.709372
Anglo-Saxon	Ketton – KCC 98 40	16.2	-10.0	-9.2	0.709564
Viking	Weymouth – WEY08 SK3711	13.7	-15.4	-13.5	0.713770
Viking	Oxford – Sk1787	14.9	-12.8	-11.5	0.712919
Viking	Weymouth – WEY08 SK3707	15.1	-12.4	-11.1	0.713060
Viking	Weymouth – WEY08 SK3704	15.2	-12.2	-11.0	0.711560
Viking	Weymouth – WEY08 SK3739	15.4	-11.7	-10.6	0.710890
Viking	Weymouth – WEY08 SK3720	15.6	-11.3	-10.3	0.712940
Viking	Weymouth – WEY08 SK3724	15.8	-10.9	-9.9	0.720510
Viking	Weymouth – WEY08 SK3744	15.8	-10.9	-9.9	0.710720
Viking	Weymouth – WEY08 SK3706	15.9	-10.7	-9.7	0.710320
Viking	Oxford – Sk1898	16.0	-10.4	-9.6	0.710943
Viking	Oxford – Sk1990	16.0	-10.4	-9.6	0.710348
Viking	Weymouth – WEY08 SK3730	16.1	-10.2	-9.4	0.710130

Finds from the grave of the Amesbury Archer, c. 2300 BC (image: Wessex Archaeology).

Discussion

In total, just over 5% of the 579 medieval and earlier oxygen isotope results obtained by NIGL up to 2012 are recorded in the above table, and the total corpus of individuals buried in Britain who almost certainly grew up in Scandinavia or central/eastern Europe recorded above is distributed across the entire period of study from the Bronze Age through to the Late Saxon/Viking era. As can be seen from the above, the earliest—and perhaps most famous—of these migrants was the Early Bronze Age individual known as the Amesbury Archer, who was interred in the richest Bronze Age burial known from Britain at Amesbury, near Stonehenge, in c. 2300 BC. Given his gravegoods and the fact that he seems to have consumed drinking-water with an oxygen isotope value of perhaps -10‰ in childhood, it has been argued that it is extremely unlikely that the man spent his childhood in Britain and he instead probably grew up in a mountainous part of central Europe, perhaps Austria, Hungary, parts of Germany or the Czech Republic (see the map included above for an illustration of areas with water oxygen isotope values of -10‰ and lower). Interestingly, the 'Companion' burial found with him had results which suggest he consumed water with an only slightly higher value than the Archer in later childhood, but that he had spent his early childhood somewhere with water values more akin to those found in southern Britain where he was buried.(4)

Moving into the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, some extremely interesting results have recently been obtained from 10 individuals interred at Cliffs End, Thanet, Kent. Four of the Cliffs End individuals belong to the Late Bronze Age (eleventh to ninth centuries BC) and six to the subsequent Early and Middle Iron Ages, and their results suggest the childhood consumption of drinking-water with values primarily between -15.0/-13.2‰ and -11.3/-10.3‰—needless to say, the lowest of these are only really compatible with an early life spent in the more northerly, Arctic parts of Scandinavia, and an origin in Norway or Sweden is thought very probable for most if not all of the rest too.(5) Two things are particularly interesting in this context. The first is that the same cemetery also includes a number of people with values at the opposite end of the scale, indicative of a childhood spent in southernmost Iberia and North Africa, including two individuals (one from the Late Bronze Age and one from the Iron Age) who have the highest δ¹⁸O values ever recorded from Britain, implying that they very probably grew up somewhere like the Nile Delta region, as was discussed in an earlier post.

The second, related point is that recent work on the Bronze Age suggests that there was a significant degree of contact and exchange taking place between the Mediterranean, Iberia and Scandinavia in that era. So, not only have Egyptian and Mesopotamian glass beads been found in Scandinavia and Baltic amber items in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, but recent work on metalwork in Scandinavia suggests the existence of a 'maritime' Atlantic route carrying metal ingots and metalwork north from the Mediterranean/Iberia to Sweden via Britain in the Bronze Age, with tin from Cornwall playing a potentially significant part in this, as a ring-ingot of pure Cornish tin found at Vårdinge, Sweden, and dated to c. 950–700 BC seems to confirm. Indeed, it has been argued that, as part of this, 'ports in the British Isles acted as transit centres for copper from other parts of Europe as well as providing local tin ore' during the Bronze Age.(6) Needless to say, this is a point of considerable interest both in the present context and in light of the southern Iberian/North African isotopic results that were also retrieved from Cliffs End, Thanet, and this site has, in fact, been interpreted as a key strategic 'Late Bronze Age trading centre' within this system, visited by groups from both the north and the south.(7)

Bronze Age amber beads, probably made from Baltic amber, found in the grave of an adolescent at Boscombe Down, Wiltshire, dating to around 1550 BC; the boy they were buried with reportedly has a tooth enamel oxygen isotope value of 18.8‰, indicative of an early life spent in southern Iberia (image: Wessex Archaeology, used under their CC BY-NC 3.0 license).

To what degree this degree of contact, exchange and movement occurred elsewhere along the British coast is unclear, due to a general lack of relevant isotopic analysis at other sites, although it is thought likely that similar Atlantic 'transit centres' might exist at obvious nodal sites on the south and east coasts, such as Mount Batten, Plymouth.(8) Similarly, the degree to which such north–south contact and movement persisted into the Iron Age is less clear, although the presence of both Scandinavians and at least some probable North Africans in the Cliffs End cemetery during that era is certainly suggestive. In this context, it is worth observing that previous posts on this site have discussed the increasing archaeological, numismatic, literary and linguistic evidence for Mediterranean traders being active in Iron Age Britain, with Thanet standing out as a possible key centre then too. It might also be cautiously noted that a case has recently been made for the presence of at least some speakers of a Germanic language in East Anglia during the Late Iron Age too, although such a suggestion is certainly not uncontroversial.(9)

Turning to the Roman era, several cemeteries have been subjected to isotopic analysis and a number of these show the presence of people with tooth enamel oxygen isotope results at or below 16.2‰, in particular those at Winchester (Lankhills), York and Gloucester. The most common interpretation of these results is that they represent the presence of people in these Roman cities who grew up elsewhere in the Roman Empire where drinking-water with significantly lower values is found, in particular Roman Pannonia (now split between a number of countries including Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Slovakia). In general, this has proven a popular solution for such individuals. There are, however, reasons to be cautious here about assigning all of the Roman-era individuals with very low oxygen isotope results to central European areas within the Roman Empire. First, a contemporary 'Iron Age' burial from Galson on the Isle of Lewis, well beyond the area ever controlled by Rome, also has an oxygen isotope result below 16.2‰, and Scandinavia is surely a more plausible region of origin in this case, at least. Second, one of the people in question is the famous early fifth-century 'Gloucester Goth', whose silver belt fittings have parallels in eastern Europe and south Russia and whose oxygen isotope results have been interpreted as indicating a childhood origin 'way outside of the Roman Empire', in the cold climate of those same areas. Third and finally, nearly half of the Roman-era people listed above have results even more depleted than those of the 'Gloucester Goth' and probably indicative of the childhood consumption of drinking-water with values below -12.4‰, with two of then having results that may reflect drinking water with a exceptionally low value of -13.3‰, whilst at the same time none has a strontium isotope result outside of the range found in Norway and Sweden. In such cases, at least, either a Scandinavian origin or one in the very far east of Europe, beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, might well be considered credible.(10)

A probable late fifth- or early sixth-century buckle tongue, which has its best parallels in finds from Norway and Estonia; found Thimbleby, Lincolnshire (image: PAS).

Looking finally to the post-Roman era, it is perhaps unsurprising that there is at least some isotopic evidence for the presence of immigrants from the Scandinavian peninsula in Britain at that time. Certainly, it is now well-established that the late fifth- to early seventh-century archaeology of eastern England region exhibits strong cultural links with western Scandinavia right up to Sogn og Fjordane, Norway, which are most credibly explained via a degree of immigration from that area in the immediate post-Roman period followed by a degree of continued contact, and it has even been suggested that the East Anglian royal Wuffingaswere potentially either of Swedish/Geatish origin or claimed to be so.(11) Similarly, few now doubt the reality of at least a degree of significant Scandinavian settlement in eastern and northern England during the ninth- to eleventh-centuries—the 'Viking Age'—with this being testified to not only by documentary sources, but also by small finds, personal names and place- and field-names.(12) However, several points are worth making when it comes to the isotopic evidence relating to the fifth- to eleventh centuries AD.

The first point is that the evidence from the early part of this period isn't actually quantitatively that much greater than that from other, earlier eras—some early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, such as those at West Heslerton and Empingham (though not, for example, those at Wasperton or Berinsfield), do include individuals whose tooth enamel oxygen isotope results are below 16.2‰ and thus clearly indicate that they were first-generation immigrants, probably from Norway or Sweden, but even where such people occur they are in a significant minority within their cemeteries, representing around 5% or less of the total analysed, similar to the overall proportion for Bronze Age to Late Saxon/Viking Age Britain noted above. This could, of course, simply reflect the fact that the 'core of the Germanic culture' that appears in post-Roman eastern England is still, despite the above, considered to derive from the traditional Anglian and Saxon 'homelands' of southern Denmark and northern Germany, where drinking-water oxygen isotope levels are similar to those found in eastern Britain, rendering attempts to use isotopic analysis to positively identify migrants from these areas very difficult, rather than Sweden and Norway, with their much lower values, but it is nonetheless worth noting.(13)

The second point is that a similar proportion of probable migrants from Norway and Sweden is actually found amongst the people buried in the massive seventh- to early ninth-century Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Bamburgh, Northumberland, despite the fact that this site falls, chronologically, between the above two presumed major periods of post-Roman contact with Scandinavia. So, three of the 21 results from Bamburgh reported in the 2012 catalogue are indicative of the consumption of water with oxygen isotope values between -12.6‰ and -10.0‰, and a further four out of the 91 reported separately in 2013 have similar values—in total, 6.25% of those tested from seventh- to ninth-century Bamburgh have results indicative of an origin in an area with a drinking-water value below -10.0‰. With regard to this, it ought to be emphasised that there is no especial reason to think that movement and contact between Norway/Sweden and Britain must have ceased during the seventh and eighth centuries. Certainly, Bede, for example, writing in the early eighth century at Jarrow mentions both the Arctic phenomenon of the 'midnight sun' and actual Arctic travellers/inhabitants in his In Regum xxx Quaestiones, making reference there to ‘the stories of the elders and the men of our time who come from these regions’ and who ‘see it happen’. It may also be of some significance that documentary sources make it clear that Bamburgh was, in fact, the 'royal city' of the pre-Viking Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria; as such, it is perhaps likely to have been more cosmopolitan than the norm, and in this context it is worth observing that, once again, there are also a number of people buried in the cemetery with exceptionally elevated oxygen isotope results indicative of an origin in North Africa too.(14)

A 3D view of the Weymouth mass-burial pit containing the remains of 51 decapitated Vikings (image: Oxford Archaeology, used under their CC BY-SA 3.0 license).

The last point is that we seem to be able to identify the burials of at least some Scandinavian people and/or immigrants of the Viking Age in Britain from the oxygen isotope evidence, including at least one potential mass-burial of a failed Viking raiding party. As was noted above, people who grew up in Denmark and some other parts of southern Scandinavia are likely to have oxygen isotope values within the British range and so are both hard to identify isotopically and not considered in the present post. However, even accepting this limitation on the evidence (which, for example, results in the probable Viking warrior in Grave 511 at Repton not being listed above, as his δ¹⁸O results are within the British range), we can still identify some likely Viking Age migrants from Norway and Sweden. Of particular interest here is a mass-burial of 51 decapitated (executed?) men who were buried sometime between AD 970 and 1025 to the north of Weymouth, Dorset, 10 of whom were selected for isotopic analysis. All of these individuals have tooth enamel oxygen isotope results below 16.5‰, equivalent to a drinking-water value of -9.2‰ using the revised Levinson equation, and nine have results sufficiently low to be included in the above table—indeed, 50% have results indicative of the childhood consumption of water with a value of -10‰ on both conversion equations, whilst one actually possesses the lowest value ever recorded from Britain, 13.7‰ δ¹⁸O_p, which implies the consumption of drinking-water with a value potentially as low as -15.4‰! Such a result clearly implies a childhood spent in the Arctic, either in an inland area of the most northerly part of Scandinavia or on the southwestern coast of Greenland, based on the IAEA's 2013 RCWIP model and oxygen isotope results reported from the Inuit of Greenland. The latter in particular is an intriguing possibility, given that the Norse settlement of the southwest coast of Greenland took place during the 980s and it is therefore chronologically plausible that someone brought up there might have taken part in a failed Viking raid in perhaps the early eleventh century.(15)

Also of considerable interest, finally, are the isotope results from the late ninth- to mid-eleventh-century Late Saxon cemetery at Ketton, Rutland, although for different reasons. Whilst the burials from Weymouth and Oxford probably represent those of executed Viking raiders, those at Ketton are thought to be the graves of rural workers on a manorial estate in the Danelaw. In such circumstances, the fact that there are no less than five individuals in this cemetery with oxygen isotope results indicative of a Scandinavian origin is both important and intriguing, particularly in terms of the debate over the degree of Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw—indeed, one individual has a very depleted δ¹⁸O_p value of 15.5‰, clearly far outside of the British range and indicative of the consumption of water with a value of perhaps -11.5‰ during an early life spent in Norway, Sweden or Iceland. In this context it is worth observing that whilst the name Ketton is Old English, there is a Normanton—'the farm or estate of the Norwegians'—three miles to the northwest of Ketton, something that is arguably suggestive given the isotope results obtained.(16)


Conclusion

In conclusion, a survey of the total available isotopic evidence for the presence of Scandinavian and central/eastern European people in Britain before the mid-eleventh century AD produces some potentially very interesting results, even if we narrow our focus only to those people who possess results indisputably outside of the British ranges and so exclude all those potential migrants who fall just on the edge of this range or who come from areas such as southern Denmark that have very similar oxygen isotope levels to much of Britain.

Perhaps the most intriguing conclusion to draw from the above presentation of the evidence is that there was arguably a persistent Scandinavian element in the population of Britain for several millennia, with evidence for such first-generation migrants and settlers not being restricted simply to the 'early Anglo-Saxon' and 'Viking' eras, as might be expected from the documentary sources and recent archaeological studies of the 'Scandinavian character' of post-Roman eastern England, but rather occurring throughout the whole period under study. So, for example, people from that region are thought to have been present during the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age in Kent based on the exceptionally depleted results of people buried there, and it is arguable that at least a proportion of the Roman-era individuals with very low oxygen isotope results may have grown up in Scandinavia too (see above). Similarly, over 6% of the individuals analysed from the seventh- to early ninth-century royal cemetery at Bamburgh, Northumberland, are considered to have grown up in Norway or Sweden, despite the fact that this cemetery falls chronologically between the above two presumed post-Roman episodes of significant British–Scandinavian contact. Of course, we do need to recognise that only a few cemeteries have been properly analysed, that the Thanet and Bamburgh sites have features which suggest that they may be unusual in their degree of cosmopolitanism, and that it cannot be forgotten that any Anglo-Saxon or Viking migrants from, say, Denmark rather than Norway and Sweden are largely invisible to the present survey, as was observed above. Nonetheless, the above situation is at the very least intriguing and certainly worthy of note, and might moreover be taken to suggest that a multi-millennial pattern of a degree of British–Scandinavian movement and contact, with peaks and troughs, might be worth some consideration, in contrast to the more usual assumption of simply a handful of discrete, post-Roman migrationary episodes.

With regard to central/eastern European migrants, the situation is rather less clear. The Early Bronze Age Amesbury Archer is certainly believed to fall into this category, and some of the Thanet burials could potentially have such origins, although the highly depleted oxygen isotope values of many of the individuals buried here suggest that Scandinavia is a more plausible place of origin, as the excavators argue. For the Roman period, a central/eastern European origin in perhaps Roman Pannonia has often been favoured for at least some of the people with δ¹⁸O results below the British range, but it arguably doesn't work for them all—around half of the Roman-era individuals listed above have extremely low results of the sort seen at Thanet, and the early fifth-century 'Gloucester Goth' is certainly now usually considered to have origins that lie beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, perhaps in central/eastern Europe or southern Russia. As to the post-Roman period, it is by no means impossible that some of the less extreme oxygen isotope values listed above could reflect people who grew up in the cold areas of central/eastern Europe rather than Norway or Sweden—and a previous post on this site has certainly discussed some possible evidence for Huns, Goths and others in post-Roman Britain—but at present no candidates for such an origin have yet been identified in the published literature.


Notes

1     See C. Chenery et al, 'Strontium and stable isotope evidence for diet and mobility in Roman Gloucester, UK', Journal of Archaeological Science, 37 (2010), 150–63, and also J. A. Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, 27 (2012), 754–64 at p. 762 with regard to the Amesbury Archer, who has a tooth enamel phosphate oxygen isotope value of 16.2‰.
2     For the two equations used to relate δ¹⁸O_p to δ¹⁸O_dw, see Chenery et al, 'Strontium and stable isotope evidence for diet and mobility in Roman Gloucester', pp. 156–7, 159–61 & especially Table A1 which gives both equations, and V. Daux et al, 'Oxygen isotope fractionation between human phosphate and water revisited', Journal of Human Evolution, 55 (2008), 1138–47. For the drinking-water range from Britain, see W. G. Darling et al, 'The O and H stable isotope composition of freshwaters in the British Isles. 2. Surface waters and groundwater', Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions, 7 (2003), 183–95; for values from Scandinavia and Central/Eastern Europe, see the map included above, which is based on the IAEA's 2013 RCWIP model, and J. I. McKinley et al, 'Dead-sea connections: a Bronze Age and Iron Age ritual site on the Isle of Thanet', in J. T. Koch & B. Cunliffe (eds.), Celtic from the West 2. Rethinking the Bronze Age and the Arrival of Indo-European in Atlantic Europe (Oxford, 2013), pp. 157–83 at p. 167.
3     The main catalogue is extracted from the data included in Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', Supplementary Material I (14 pp.). The Thanet results are taken from McKinley et al, 'Dead-sea connections: a Bronze Age and Iron Age ritual site on the Isle of Thanet', figs. 6.5 and 6.6; the Oxford results are taken from A. M. Pollard et al, '"Sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat": The St Brice's Day Massacre and the isotopic analysis of human bones from St John's College, Oxford', Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 31 (2012), 83–102; and the additional Bamburgh results are taken from S. E. Groves et al, 'Mobility histories of 7th–9th century AD people buried at early medieval Bamburgh, Northumberland, England', American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 151 (2013), 462–76 and Supplementary Materials: Tables.
4     Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', p. 762; C. A. Chenery & J. A. Evans, 'A Summary of the Strontium and Oxygen Isotope Evidence for the Origins of Bell Beaker individuals found near Stonehenge', in A. P . Fitzpatrick (ed.), The Amesbury Archur and the Boscombe Bowmen: Bell Beaker Burials at Boscombe Down, Amesbury, Wiltshire (Salisbury, 2011), pp. 185–90.
5     McKinley et al, 'Dead-sea connections: a Bronze Age and Iron Age ritual site on the Isle of Thanet', pp. 167–8.
6     J. Varberg et al, 'Between Egypt, Mesopotamia and Scandinavia: Late Bronze Age glass beads found in Denmark', Journal of Archaeological Science, 54 (2015), 168–81; A. J. Mukherjee et al, 'The Qatna lion: scientific confirmation of Baltic amber in late Bronze Age Syria', Antiquity, 82 (2008), 49–59; J. Ling et al, 'Moving metals II: provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age artefacts by lead isotope and elemental analyses', Journal of Archaeological Science, 41 (2014), 106–32, quotation at p. 126. See also J. Ling & C. Uhnér, 'Rock art and metal trade', Adoranten, 21 (2014), 23–43, and T. Earle et al, 'The political economy and metal trade in Bronze Age Europe: understanding regional variability in terms of comparative advantages and articulations', European Journal of Archaeology, 18.4 (2015), 633–57, esp. pp. 642–4.
7     Ling & Uhnér, 'Rock art and metal trade', pp. 35–9, and see now J. I. McKinley et al, Cliffs End Farm, Isle of Thanet, Kent. A Mortuary and Ritual Site of the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon Period with Evidence for Long-Distance Maritime Mobility (Salisbury, 2014).
8     Ling & Uhnér, 'Rock art and metal trade', p. 37; B. Cunliffe, Mount Batten, Plymouth: a Prehistoric and Roman Port (Oxford, 1988). Note, a possible three-holed Bronze Age stone Mediterranean anchor from Plymouth Sound has been mentioned in news reports relating to the SHIPS Project/ProMare, but is as yet unidentified on the database for this project; see T. Nichols, 'Unique project launched to shed light on hidden treasures in Plymouth Sound', Plymouth Herald, 5 July 2014, online at http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/Shedding-light-hidden-treasures-Sound/story-21332210-detail/story.html, although it should be remembered that the dating and geographical origins of such stone anchors is open to debate.
9     See especially C. R. Green, 'Thanet, Tanit and the Phoenicians: place-names, archaeology and pre-Roman trading settlements in eastern Kent?', 21 April 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/04/thanet-tanit-and-the-phoenicians.html, and 'A Mediterranean anchor stock of the fifth to mid-second century BC found off the coast of Britain', 29 August 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/08/a-mediterranean-anchor.html; D. Nash Briggs, 'The language of inscriptions on Icenian coinage', in J. A. Davies (ed.), The Iron Age in Northern East Anglia: New Work in the Land of the Iceni (Oxford), pp. 83–102.
10     J. Evans et al, 'A strontium and oxygen isotope assessment of a possible fourth century immigrant population in a Hampshire cemetery, southern England', Journal of Archaeological Science, 33 (2006), 265–72; H. Eckardt et al, 'Oxygen and strontium isotope evidence for mobility in Roman Winchester', Journal of Archaeological Science, 36 (2009), 2816–25; G. Müldner et al, 'The ‘Headless Romans’: multi-isotope investigations of an unusual burial ground from Roman Britain', Journal of Archaeological Science, 38 (2011), 280–90; M. Pitts, 'Wealthy man in Roman Gloucester was migrant Goth', British Archaeology, 113 (2010), 7; BBC News, 'Gloucester body "is Goth warrior"', 9 October 2009, news report including quotation by D. Rice, curator at Gloucester City Museum, online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/gloucestershire/8298825.stm; H. Eckardt et al, 'People on the move in Roman Britain', World Archaeology, 46 (2014), 534–50 at p. 537. For the expected Strontium isotope ranges from Norway and Sweden, see further K. J. Knudson et al, 'Migration and Viking Dublin: paleomobility and paleodiet through isotopic analyses', Journal of Archaeological Science, 39 (2012), 308–20 at pp. 310–11.
11     See especially J. Hines, The Scandinavian Character of Anglian England in the Pre-Viking Period, BAR British Series 124 (Oxford, 1984); J. Hines, 'The Scandinavian character of Anglian England: an update', in M. O. H. Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo: the Seventh Century in North-western Europe (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 315–29; and now also J. Hines, 'The origins of East Anglia in a North Sea Zone', in D. Bates & R. Liddiard (edd.), East Anglia and its North Sea World in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 16–43. On the Wuffingas theory, see S. Newton, 'Beowulf and the East Anglian royal pedigree', in M. O. H. Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo: the Seventh Century in North-western Europe (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 65–74, and S. Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Woodbridge, 1993). See also, for example, the evidence for a link between the Sleaford region and the Baltic in the early Anglo-Saxon period, including some possible ceramic evidence for connection between people in the Sleaford inhumation cemetery and those living on the Swedish Baltic island of Gotland—on Sleaford and the early Anglo-Saxon importation of amber, see for example Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650 (Lincoln, 2012), pp. 191–4; on the possible ceramic evidence, see J. N. L. Myres, 'The Anglo-Saxon Pottery of Lincolnshire', Archaeological Journal, 108 (1951), 65–99 at pp. 68–9, 81, 99.
12     On the course of the Viking conquests and their impact, a good general overview is available in D. M. Hadley’s The Vikings in England: Settlement, Society and Culture (Manchester, 2006), and her The Northern Danelaw: Its Social Structure, c. 800–1100 (London, 2000); P. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1998), and K. Leahy, The Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Lindsey (Stroud, 2007), are useful on the evidence for settlement in one of the most affected areas of eastern England—note especially Kevin Leahy's discussion of the small finds reported in recent years by metal detectorists. On place-names and field-names, there are innumerable published discussions, but see perhaps L. Abrams and D. N. Parsons, ‘Place-names and the history of Scandinavian settlement in England’, in J. Hines et al (eds.), Land, Sea and Home (Leeds, 2004), pp. 379–431, which argues in favour of the Scandinavian influence on place-names, field-names and personal names being together sufficient to indicate that there was a substantial influx of Scandinavian immigrants in the Viking era.
13     Results from all four of the cemeteries mentioned are tabulated in Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', Supplementary Material I (14 pp.), although they have also been separately published too, for example in S. S. Church et al, 'Anglo-Saxon origins investigated by isotopic analysis of burials from Berinsfield, Oxfordshire, UK', Journal of Archaeological Science, 42 (2014), 81–92, and P. Budd et al, 'Investigating population movement by stable isotope analysis: a report from Britain', Antiquity, 78 (2004), 127–41 at pp. 134–6. On the core of early Anglo-Saxon material culture still being considered to primarily derive from southern Denmark and northern Germany, see Hines, 'The origins of East Anglia in a North Sea Zone', esp. p. 39 (quotation), and also, for example, T. Williamson, 'The environmental contexts of Anglo-Saxon settlement', in N. J. Higham & M. J. Ryan (edd.), The Landscape Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 2010), pp. 133–56 at pp. 147–52, along with the other references cited in my very brief discussion of this in a previous post: C. R. Green, 'Were there Huns in Anglo-Saxon England? Some thoughts on Bede, Priscus & Attila', 25 July 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/07/were-there-huns-in-anglo-saxon-england.html. Note, whilst identifying first-generation Anglo-Saxon migrants to Britain from southern Denmark and northern Germany is extremely difficult using isotopic analysis, as mentioned above, it may be possible to identify first-generation migrants from northern Denmark/Jutland by looking for immediately post-Roman individuals with relatively enriched results compared to what might be expected, as lake waters from those areas are unusually enriched compared to their local precipitation due to exceptional evaporation—see further on this Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', pp. 758 & 760.
14     The results from Bamburgh are reported in Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', Supplementary Material I (14 pp.), and S. E. Groves et al, 'Mobility histories of 7th–9th century AD people buried at early medieval Bamburgh, Northumberland, England', American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 151 (2013), 462–76. On Bamburgh as 'the royal city' of Northumbria, see for example Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, III.6; note, the Jarrow area where Bede was based was itself the second royal centre of pre-Viking Northumbria, see I. N. Wood, ‘Bede’s Jarrow’ in C. A. Lees & G. R. Overing (eds), A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 76, 79–80, 83. For Bede's reference to Arctic visitors in early eighth-century Northumbria, see Bedae Venerabilis. Opera. Pars II. Opera Exegetica 2, ed. D. Hurst (Turnhout, 1962), p. 317, and see F. Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest. Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford, 2006), pp. 128-29, for discussion and translation; contemporary Irish and arguably Welsh knowledge of the Arctic 'midnight sun' is discussed in Green, 'An alternative interpretation of Preideu Annwwfyn, lines 23–8', Studia Celtica, 43 (2009), 207–13. There is also some artefactual evidence for contacts between eastern England and Scandinavia in the seventh century that is worthy of note, such as a class of small, seventh-century figurines that are found in East Anglia, Sweden and Russia: H. Geake, 'Figurine SF5471', PAS finds database, 8 September 2014, online at https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/19570, & 'Figurine SF3807', PAS finds database, 8 September 2014, online at https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/18358. On the people with elevated oxygen isotope results indicative of North African origins, see C. R. Green, 'Some oxygen isotope evidence for long-distance migration to Britain from North Africa & southern Iberia, c. 1100 BC–AD 800', 24 October 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/10/oxygen-isotope-evidence.html, and Groves et al, 'Mobility histories of 7th–9th century AD people buried at early medieval Bamburgh, Northumberland, England', p. 470.
15     On the Weymouth Vikings, see C. A. Chenery et al, 'A Boat Load of Vikings?', Journal of the North Atlantic, 7 (2014–15), 43–53; another similar probable mass-burial of Vikings has been found at Oxford, see A. M. Pollard et al, '"Sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat": The St Brice's Day Massacre and the isotopic analysis of human bones from St John's College, Oxford', Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 31 (2012), 83–102. On Repton Grave 511, which contained the body of a mature male who appears to have died in battle and was buried with a sword, a silver Thor’s hammer, and a boar’s tusk, see, for example, J. D. Richards, 'Pagans and Christians at the frontier: Viking burial in the Danelaw', in M. O. H. Carver (ed.), The Cross Foes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300 (York/Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 383–95, and J. Montgomery et al, 'Finding Vikings with isotope analysis: the view from wet and windy islands', Journal of the North Atlantic, 7 (2014–15), 54–70 at p. 65. On the possibility that one of the Weymouth Vikings might have grown up in southwestern Greenland in the late tenth century, compare Montgomery et al, 'Finding Vikings with isotope analysis: the view from wet and windy islands', pp. 61–2, discussing an individual with a similarly depleted oxygen isotope value who is buried in Dublin.
16     The results from Ketton are presented and discussed in S. P. Tatham, Aspects of Health and Population Studies in Northern Europe Between the Tenth and Twelfth Centuries (University of Leicester PhD Thesis, 2004), pp. 43–4, 68–72, 77–8, 80-91. Note, the analysis of the isotopic data in this thesis is somewhat out of step with modern approaches; it is reinterpreted in the present post in light of Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain' (2012), and other more recent research, and the tooth enamel results have been furthermore converted afresh to drinking-water values using the 2010 and 2008 equations noted above. On Normanton, see B. Cox, The Place-names of Rutland (Nottingham, 1994), p. 201.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following is just a very quick post about the historically interesting Old English word wealhstod, 'translator' or 'interpreter' (plural wealhstodas), which is used of a variety of people including St Jerome, who is praised by Ælfric in the late tenth-century as the 'first wealhstod between Hebrew, Latin and Greek'; the seventh-century king St Oswald of Northumbria, who is said by Ælfric to have acted as wealhstod for St Aidan because he, unlike the churchman, knew both Old English and Gaelic; and King Alfred the Great, who is described as the translator—wealhstod—of the Old English Boethius in the Prose Preface to that work.

The entry for wealhstod from J. Bosworth, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ed. T. N. Toller, Oxford 1898, p. 1174 (image: Bosworth-Toller).

The historical interest of OE wealhstod, 'translator/interpreter',stems primarily from its likely early origins and etymology. With regard to the former, it is worth emphasising that this occupational term occurs several times as a personal name for people who lived in the later seventh and early/mid-eighth centuries. So, we read of in both the Anonymous Life of St Cuthbert and Bede's Prose Life of St Cuthbert of a seriously ill but faithful monk of Lindisfarne named Wealhstod (Walhstod, Walchstod) who was healed by St Cuthbert and was there at the saint's death in 687. Similarly, a Glastonbury charter (S1410) dated AD 744 is witnessed by a priest named Wealhstod (Walcstod), who may also have been an early abbot there, and Bede and other sources refer to a man named Wealhstod (Walhstod, Walcstod) who served as 'bishop of the people who dwell west of the river Severn', i.e. Bishop of Hereford, in c. 727–36 (HE v.23). It thus seems clear that a personal name Wealhstod was in existence by the mid-seventh century at the latest, when Wealhstod of Lindisfarne was presumably named, and this in turn implies that the occupational term wealhstod is of even greater antiquity, given that 'such a name could not become used as a baptismal name until it had become first used as a "nickname" or occupational name', as J. R. R. Tolkien long ago observed.

These indications of an early origin for the term wealhstod become even more interesting when one turns to the etymology of the word, as wealhstod is based upon Old English wealh/walh. Although wealh/walh gained the generalized meaning of 'slave' by the end of the ninth century, this is a later, secondary development of an original sense of 'Briton' or 'Welsh-speaker', and it is with this sense that the word is found in the late seventh-century Laws of Ine and in English place-names such as Walton, 'the farmstead or village of the Britons'. In this light, the word wealhstod is clearly of some potential historical interest: given that it appears to have its origins in the mid-seventh century or before, wealhstod must—as Margaret Faull notes—'originally have referred to someone who could understand the languages both of the Wēalas [the Britons] and the English and so could act as the medium between the two'. Of course, the probable existence of such bilingual individuals in the post-Roman period is nowadays largely uncontroversial, especially as it is now usually agreed that 'Anglo-Saxon' immigrants from north-western Europe cannot have made up the majority of the population of what became England in the fifth and sixth centuries and that there must have been a significant degree of British acculturation and bilingualism during the pre-Viking era, but it is nonetheless intriguing to note that the Old English word for translator/interpreter seems to directly reference this!

Image from NLW MS. Peniarth 4 (The White Book of Rhydderch), 84r, showing a section of Culhwch ac Olwen that reads 'Gỽrhẏr gỽalstaỽd ieithoed ẏr holl ieithoed aỽẏdat', 'Gwrhyr Gwalstawd Ieithoedd—he knew all languages' (image: National Library of Wales, Public Domain).

Finally, by way of a conclusion, it is worth pointing out that this early medieval word for a translator was not confined only to Old English speakers, but was actually borrowed by the Britons (Welsh) themselves at some point too. The most frequently discussed evidence for this comes from the early Arthurian prose tale Culhwch ac Olwen, the extant redaction of which is generally placed in the late eleventh century. One of the recurring characters in this tale is Arthur's interpreter, Gwrhyr Gwalstawd Ieithoedd, literally Gwrhyr the 'wealhstod of languages' or 'interpreter of tongues', with gwalstawd representing Old English wealhstod borrowed into Welsh. Moreover, Gwrhyr's character in Culhwch ac Olwen lives up to this billing, with Arthur himself stating that not only does Gwrhyr 'know all languages', but that he 'can speak the same language as some of the birds and the beasts' too, something that Gwrhyr proceeds to do as part of the quests undertaken in Culhwch ac Olwen. However, this is not the only evidence for a Welsh borrowing of Old English wealhstod. Indeed, whilst wealhstod appears to have been superseded as a term for a translator in England—replaced by latimer, translator and drugeman—the word actually survives in Wales through to the end of the medieval period and beyond. So, for example, there was a Walstot/Walstottus of the Carmarthen commotes of Elfed and Widigada in the later medieval and early modern eras, who is variously described as an official interpreter/translator or steward and whose title reflects Welsh gwalstot/gwalstawd from Old English wealhstod, and the word continued to be recorded and used in both its original sense and a new one into the modern era as well, as the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru notes.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The aim of the following post is primarily to share a map of the villages, towns and lands that have been lost to the sea along the east coast of Yorkshire since the Roman period, along with some details of what is arguably the most interesting of these lost settlements, the medieval 'island town' of Ravenserodd. The post also includes some maps of the potential far-future coastlines of this region if coastal erosion and sea-level changes continue in the manner that they are expected to.

The lost towns and villages of the East Yorkshire coastline, based on the map in T. Sheppard, The Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast (London, 1912), with some modifications. The coastline at the end of the Roman period is shown in orange-brown and is set against the modern landscape (green), showing the extent of the erosion on the east coast. Also depicted are the lost settlements of this coast and some of the major population centres today. Note: the 'new lands' on the north side of the Humber were created via reclamation from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries (image: C. R. Green).

The above map is a simplified version of that published by Thomas Sheppard, the first curator of Hull Municipal Museum, in his Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast (London, 1912). Shown on it are 29 towns and villages that Sheppard considered lost, or partially lost, to the sea along the coast of East Yorkshire—some in the medieval period and others, such as Old Kilnsea, much more recently—along with a depiction of the potential amount of land lost from the east coast since the Roman era. Although each of the lost settlements mapped on there has a potential story, perhaps the most interesting (and certainly one of the best documented) is that of Ravenserodd, or Ravenser Odd, a town and port that was not only destroyed by the sea but also apparently born from it, being said by near-contemporary witnesses to have been founded on an island thrown up by the waves in the mid-1230s:

[B]y the casting up of the sea, a certain small island was born, which is called Ravenserodd, which is distant from the town of Grimsby by the space of one tide. And afterwards fishers dried their nets there, and men little by little first began to dwell and stay there, and afterwards ships laden with divers kinds of merchandise began to unload and sell there... 

The above account is taken from an inquisition of 1290, and the same source goes on to give further details of the foundation of the town, stating that:

forty years ago a certain ship was cast away at Ravenserodd, where no house was then built, which ship a certain man appropriated to himself, and from it made for himself a hut or cabin, which he inhabited for so long a time that he received ships and merchants there, and sold them food and drink, and afterwards others began to dwell there. 

The exact location and nature of Ravenserodd is open to some debate, but it is often believed to have been located to the east of the present-day Spurn Point and was said in the fourteenth-century Chronica Monasterii de Melsa to have been 'distant from the mainland a space of one mile and more', with George de Boer considering it part of a cyclical history of Spurn Point, although his model of the development of Spurn has been disputed by other researchers. Whatever the case may be, it appears clear that the settlement on this new island or semi-island at the mouth of the Humber expanded rapidly under the lordship of William de Forz, Count of Aumale, and his heirs, who obtained a charter for a market and a fair at Ravenserodd in 1251. Certainly, it had begun to seriously threaten the trade of Grimsby by 1290, with the men of that Lincolnshire port accusing those of Ravenserodd of piracy, stating that the Ravenserodd men arrested 'with a strong hand' any merchant ships headed to Grimsby and 'by fear and force have compelled and daily do compel them to turn aside to the aforesaid new town, and to sell their merchandize there', leading to the growth of Ravenserodd and the partial desertion of the port of Grimsby!

Detail of Spurn Point and Grimsby at the mouth of the Humber in the late sixteenth century, from the pocket atlas of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, dated 1595; click for a larger view (image: BL).

Despite these complaints, Ravenserodd continued to prosper as a significant mercantile centre, and in 1299 it received a borough charter from Edward I and a 30 day fair, purchased by the people of the town for £300. Indeed, it is perhaps telling with regard to its importance in the early fourteenth century that the first port marked north of The Wash on Pietro Vesconte's c. 1325 map of England—which is based on his earlier portolan chart and mariners' reports—appears to be Ravenserodd. Nonetheless, by the mid-fourteenth century the tide had quite literally begun to turn. As a number of contemporary documents detail, the island port suffered increasing erosion and destruction by the sea from the 1330s onwards, barely a century after it had reportedly first emerged from the waves. In 1346, for example, it was stated that two parts of the tenements and soil of the town of Ravenserod had been destroyed by inundations of the sea, with the town being 'daily diminished and carried away'. A subsequent writ from 1347 indicates that the destruction had begun in the eighth year of Edward III (1334/5) and that over 200 buildings and properties had been lost by the mid-1340s. The final destruction of the town and port came in the following years and is recorded by the fourteenth-century Chronica Monasterii de Melsa ('Chronicle of Meaux Abbey'). This relates that:

the inundations of the sea and of the Humber had destroyed to the foundations the chapel of Ravenserodd, built in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, so that the corpses and bones of the dead there horribly appeared, and the same inundations daily threatened the destruction of the said town.

The Abbot of Meaux was consequently directed to gather up the disinterred bodies from the chapel yard of Ravenserodd and rebury them in the churchyard of Easington in 1355, and the Chronicle records that 'the whole town of Ravenserodd' was not long after 'totally annihilated by the floods of the Humber and the inundations of the great sea', giving a broad summary of the nature of the place and the supposed reasons for its undoing as follows:

that town of Ravenserodd, in the parish of the said church of Easington, was an exceedingly famous borough devoted to merchandise, as well as many fisheries, most abundantly furnished with ships, and burgesses amongst the boroughs of that sea coast. But yet, with all inferior places, and chiefly by wrong-doing on the sea, by its wicked works and piracies, it provoked the wrath of God against its self beyond measure. Wherefore, within the few following years, the said town, by those inundations of the sea and the Humber, was destroyed to the foundations, so that nothing of value was left.

With regard to the date of this 'total annihilation', the last evidence for commercial activity at Ravenserodd comes from 1358, when 'ships from Ravensrode' are mentioned as being made to carry wool from Boston to Flanders, and its final abandonment appears to have taken place by 1362, when a number of men were brought before Easington manorial court for 'throwing down and rooting up the timber of the staithes at Ravensrod', implying that the town was by then derelict.

The end of the road at Aldborough, East Yorkshire, showing the continuing coastal erosion here (image: British Geological Society, used under their non-commercial licence).

If Ravenserodd thus represents the most dramatic tale from the Yorkshire coastline, a town and port that was said to have risen from and fallen back into the sea in the space of little over a century, there are nonetheless numerous other instances of the destructive power of the sea that might be cited too. For example, Hyde, in the manor of Skipsea and Cleeton, was totally destroyed by the sea as early as 1396, having suffered damage from at least as early as 1344–5, whilst St Mary’s Church at Withernsea was lost to the sea in around 1444 and that of Owthorne (or Sisterkirke), located immediately to the north of Withernsea, was finally demolished in 1816, after the last traces of the village were destroyed by the waves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Similarly, the settlement of Hornsea Beck is mentioned in the early thirteenth century and rivalled Hornsea itself for size in the late fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries, but in 1609 it was said that 38 houses had been destroyed since 1547 and by 1695 all but one or two houses had been washed away. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the settlements of Northorpe and Southorpe by Hornsea probably weren't eroded by the sea as Sheppard thought, but instead were simply deserted, with traces of both still to be found on the ground according to the recent Victoria County History account of this parish.

Turning finally to the question of any potential future losses along the coastline of East Yorkshire, this has been the subject of a number of studies. The continuing erosion of the coast here is reportedly occurring at the fastest rate seen in Europe and is part of a long-term trend that began at the end of the last 'Ice Age', as has been discussed in two previous posts on this site. Looked at from a historical, multi-millennial perspective, the continued erosive force of the sea on the glacial till of Holderness is thought likely to result in the drowning and loss of a significant part of the coastline here over the next 5,000 to 10,000 years, as the following two maps depict. The first shows the suggested natural end-point of the erosion of the east coast, assuming no further significant sea-level rises, with a wide bay ultimately taking shape between the two hard headlands at Flamborough and Cromer, Norfolk, over the course of the next several thousand years. The second map shows the likely final coastal retreat if there is a significant degree of sea-level rise on a multi-millennial scale, which the Institute of Estuarine and Coastal Studies indicates will deepen the offshore waters and thus cause the eventual retreat of the coastline back to its pre-glacial position. With regard to these two scenarios, it is worth noting that the present-day climate appears to be approaching 'a level associated with significant polar ice-sheet loss in the past', as one recent study put it, something that may ultimately imply six metres or more of future sea-level rise spread over the next several thousand years. If so, then the second scenario could well be the most credible of the two outlined below, albeit one set perhaps 10,000 or so years in the future.

Two possible scenarios for future coastal erosion of East Yorkshire on a multi-millennial scale, as per the Institute of Estuarine and Coastal Studies, Hull, and assuming that the sea defences on this coast are unsustainable in the very long-term: A, the scenario if there is no significant future sea-level rise, after IECS, Humber Estuary & Coast (Hull, 1994), p. 7; B, the scenario assuming significant sea-level rise on a multi-millennial scale, based on the pre-glacial coastline during MIS 5e (images drawn by C. R. Green).

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following post offers a little idle speculation on those names from the East Midlands that make reference to the Hwicce, an Anglo-Saxon people who are better known as the inhabitants of a well-documented, seventh- to eighth-century kingdom based in the Worcestershire and Gloucestershire area. In particular, it asks whether these names could have anything to tell us about the early history of the Hwicce and, if so, what this might possibly be?

The seventh- and eighth-century kingdom of the Hwicce and place-names that definitely or possibly contain the group-name Hwicce, but which are located outside of the bounds of the kingdom; click image for a larger view and see the text below for a key to the names. Note, the names and the kingdom of the Hwicce are set against a reconstruction of a suggested likely coastline during the pre-Viking era (image: C. R. Green).

The above map depicts both the boundaries of the kingdom of the Hwicce and the eight place- and district-names that contain the group-name Hwicce or a similarly formed personal name derived from the group-name and also lie outside of documented territory of the Hwicce.(1) The names in question are as follows:

1. Witchley Warren/Wicheley Heath—now the name of a farm in Edith Weston parish, Rutland, but originally the name of an extensive common area between Normanton, Edith Weston, Empingham and Ketton, labelled as Wicheley Heath on Speed's 1603–11 map of Rutland, Bowen's 1756 map, and other early maps. Early forms include Wicheslea, Whicchele, Wicheleyetc, recorded from 1185 onwards.(2)
2. Hwicceslea east hundred—first recorded in the Northamptonshire Geld Roll of 1072–8; see further number three, below.
3. Hwiccleslea west hundred—first recorded in the Northamptonshire Geld Roll of 1072–8. In Domesday Book, both 'Witchley' hundreds were treated as a single unit (Wiceslea Hund', Wicelea Wapent') and included in Northamptonshire, although they are usually believed to have been originally part of the Anglo-Saxon-era Rutland. 'Witchley Hundred' is unrecorded after 1086 and its territory—roughly a third of the total area of Rutland—was subsequently divided into the medieval East Hundred and Wrangdike Hundred of Rutland. The hundred-name Wicelea/Witchley is, needless to say, identical in etymology to nearby Witchley Warren/Wicheley Heath (above)—although the farm currently bearing that name actually lies just outside of both East and Wrangdike hundreds—and Witchley Hundred is believed to be named from the original, extensive Wicheley Heath, with this being the original meeting-place/common for the eleventh-century hundred(s). With regard to the meaning of the name 'Witchley', the apparent genitival ‑s‑ in some of the early forms has led to the suggestion that this name was formed around an unrecorded personal name derived from the group-name Hwicce; however, these genitival forms disappear at an early date and both Cox and Insley suggest that the totality of evidence points rather to an original *Hwicca-lēah/*Hwiccenalēah, 'the woodland of the Hwicce' or similar.(3)
4. Whissendine—located in the north-west of Rutland, early spellings include Wichingedene (1086), Wissendene (1206), and Wissinden' (1238). This name can be read either as an ‑inga‑ name formed around the above personal-name plus Old English denu, 'valley' or, more likely according to both Cox and Gelling, as an original *Hwiccena-denu, 'valley of the Hwicce'; certainly, the latter suggestion would seem a better fit for the majority of the surviving forms.(4)
5. Wichley Leys—a minor name within Whissendine parish, first recorded in 1861; appears to be identical in meaning to Witchley Warren/Wicheley Heath, above, and is accepted as such by Cox.(5)
6. Whiston—a parish in Northamptonshire, around 20 miles from the Rutland concentration of names; potentially early forms include Wychenton (974) and Hwiccingtune (974). On the basis of the second form, it is sometimes suggested that this is an ‑ingtūn name formed around an unrecorded personal name derived from the group-name Hwicce, as above; however, it has more recently been noted that the second form is from a late copy of a dubious charter and that this place-name and its other forms are more plausibly explained as reflecting an original *Hwiccenatūn, 'the village/settlement of the Hwicce'.(6)
7. Wychwood Forest—a large area in western Oxfordshire on the boundary of the kingdom of the Hwicce; first mentioned as Huiccewudu in 841, 'the forest of the Hwicce'.(7)
8. Wychnor—located in Staffordshire; the earliest forms are Hwiccenofre and Wicenore, probably representing either 'the flat-topped ridge of the Hwicce' or 'the river-bank of the Hwicce'?(8)

The aim of this post is simply to share an interesting mid-twelfth-century map and description of eastern England compiled by the great Muslim scholar Muhammad al-Idrisi for his geographical encyclopedia Nuzhat al-mushtaq, or Tabula Rogeriana, written for Roger II of Sicily and completed in 1154.

Britain according to al-Idrisi in the twelfth century, orientated with north at the bottom of the image; click for a larger view. Note, Scotland is the 'peninsula' at the bottom of the map, whilst the long thin peninsula on the right is Cornwall, which is said to 'resemble a bird's beak'. The original sectional maps have been combined in this image and the Arabic script transliterated/expanded by Konrad Miller; the original Arabic atlas map of eastern England, from a copy contained in the Oxford MS Pococke 375, is included at the bottom of this post for comparison. The towns named can be identified as follows, running clockwise from top-left: Dover (with London and Oxford inland along the Thames), Hastings, Shoreham, Southampton (with Winchester inland from this), Wareham, Dorchester, Salisbury, Durham (wrongly placed on the west side of the island), York, Grimsby, Boston (with Lincoln inland along the Witham), Norwich, and Yarmouth (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Al-Idrisi was a descendant of the eleventh-century Ḥammūdid dynasty of North Africa and Spain (Al-Andalus), which claimed in turn to derive from the Idrisids of Morocco, and his Nuzhat al-mushtaq is one of the great geographical works of the medieval period. In this work, written at Palermo, Sicily, he gathered together a vast array of information on the various regions of the world known to him, illustrated by a series of 70 maps, including a brief description of eastern England north of the Thames that runs as follows:

This [England] is an island resembling the head of an ostrich, and contains flourishing cities, lofty mountains, flowing rivers, and level ground. There is abundant fertility in it. Its inhabitants are hardy, resolute, and prudent. The winter there is of long duration... 

[Gernemutha=Yarmouth] is a handsome town beside the sea... From the town of Gernemutha [Yarmouth] to the town of Norwicca [Norwich] is ninety miles. The town of Norwicca [Norwich] is distant ten miles from the sea, and from there to Grimsby is a hundred and fifty miles by sea. From the said town of Gernemutha [Yarmouth] the sea[-coast] curves round in a circle, but still tending northwards. From the said town of Grimsby to the town of Evrvic [York] is eighty miles. The latter lies at a distance from the Ocean, and on the border of the peninsula of Scotia, which is contiguous with the island of l'Angleterre. It is a long peninsula stretching northwards of the larger island; it has no flourishing cities, towns or villages; its length is a hundred and fifty miles. From the town of Evrvic [York] to the estuary of the river of [Boston] is a hundred and forty miles, and [Boston] is a fortress situated on this river twelve miles upstream from the sea. From the aforementioned town of Grimsby to the the town of Nicolas [Lincoln] inland is a hundred miles; the river flows through the midst of it and flows out of it towards the town of Grimsby, but flows into the sea on the south of the latter, as we have mentioned before. From the inland Nicholas [Lincoln] to the town of Evrvic [York] is moreover ninety miles, and from thence to the town of Donelme [Durham] eighty miles northwards.(1) 

Map of places in eastern England between the Thames and the Tees that are mentioned in al-Idrisi's Nuzhat al-mushtaq, above (image: C. R. Green).

Detailed view of the east coast of England from Konrad Miller's redrawn and transliterated version of al-Idrīsī's map, with north at the bottom. The green river running left to right is the Witham, which is shown flowing past the fortress of Boston and then through the city of Nicholas, i.e. Lincoln, which is depicted as lying close to the centre of England. Further north, towards the bottom of the map, are shown Grimsby and York, after which comes the southern part of the 'peninsula' of Scotland; the northern bank of the Humber and Northumbria are missed out entirely, except for Durham, which is wrongly mapped on the west coast of Britain (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Although this description adds little to the historical record, and some of the distances appear rather dubious, it is nonetheless interesting both as an illustration of the spread of knowledge of this part of England by the mid-twelfth century and for the places that are chosen to be mentioned. With regard to the latter point, it seems clear from both the text and the map that the area from Yarmouth to York was the part of the east coast of Britain with which al-Idrisi's source of information was familiar. There is, for example, nothing depicted or mentioned to the south of Yarmouth until one reaches the mouth of the Thames and moreover little evidence for any knowledge of any sites north of the Humber aside from Durham (which is wrongly mapped on the western side of England, not the east), with the northern bank of the Humber being omitted entirely so that York is consequently placed on the coast and close to the border with Scotland. Similarly, it is noteworthy that the only river depicted between the Thames and Scotland is the Witham, which is rightly said to flow through the midst of Lincoln (it runs between the old Lower City and its medieval southern suburbs), and the statement that Boston lower down the Witham is a 'fortress' is also of interest, given that the riverside town was indeed moated/ditched in this period. Likewise, the description of the river at Lincoln as not only flowing into the sea near Boston, but also flowing 'out of [Lincoln] towards the town of Grimsby', equally seems to reflect an awareness of the local situation, as the two were indeed connected by inland waterways in the twelfth century, with one being able to travel by boat from the Witham at Lincoln north-westwards along the Foss Dyke and then down the Trent and the Humber through to Grimsby after 1121, when the Foss Dyke was renovated and made navigable again by Henry I. Needless to say, the fact that al-Idrisi's source thus appears to have had a greater familiarity with Norfolk and Lincolnshire than other parts of the east coast is perhaps a point of some interest, both generally and from the perspective of those concerned with the history of these regions.

A sixteenth-century copy of al-Idrīsī's original Arabic map of eastern England, Scotland and the west coast, from Oxford's MS Pococke 375, fol. 310b-311a (image: Bodleian Library).

Notes

1     A. F. L. Beeston, 'Idrisi's Account of the British Isles', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 13.2 (1950), 265–80 at pp. 278, 279–80.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following post offers a map and brief discussion of the Islamic gold coins of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries that have been found in England and their context. Whilst clearly rare finds, there are now ten coins of this period known, all but one of which are thought to most probably have their origins in Spain. Moreover, these coins are considered to be the survivals of a potentially substantial body of this material present in England at that time.

Distribution of late eleventh- to twelfth-century Islamic gold coins in England (image: C. R. Green).

The ten later eleventh- and twelfth-century gold dinars found in England up to December 2015 can be catalogued as follows: 1 Fatamid quarter dinar or tari from Sicily, minted c. 1050–72, found St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex; 4 Almoravid dinars from Spain, minted in 1087–1106/1106–07/1130–1 (x2), found in York, Oxford and London (x2); 1 counterfeit Almoravid dinar from Spain, mounted as brooch, dated 1106–42 and found near Winchester; 1 Murcian dinar from Spain, minted ?1169–70, found Standon, Hertfordshire; 2 Almohad dinars of Spain/North Africa, both minted 1168–84, found Wattisham, Suffolk, and Sporle with Palgrave, Norfolk; and, finally, 1 gold mancus from Barcelona, imitating an eleventh-century Hammudid dinar of North Africa, struck for the Christian king Raymond Berengar I in 1069–75, found Denham, Buckinghamshire.

Although gold dinar finds of this period have often been associated with English documentary references to oboli de musc and the like, which are generally agreed to represent gold Islamic coins, the first of these references is found in the Pipe Roll for 1189–90—when obol' de Muscze are recorded as being purchased for Richard I—and the majority come in the mid-thirteenth century, when numerous purchases of these coins were made for Henry III, mainly for royal alms and to further the king's personal interests. The problem, as Marion Archibald has pointed out, is, of course, that every one of the gold dinars found in Britain and under discussion here was issued before even the first of these documentary references, with the 70% being issued in the later eleventh century or first half of the twelfth. The solution to this apparent conflict of evidence is difficult, but Mark Blackburn has noted that even where there is evidence for a significant circulation of gold coinage, finds of these coins tend to be very rare indeed or even completely absent, presumably due to the value of the individual pieces, leading to a general suggestion that 'when there is even a modest distribution of high-value coinage, as with the Arabic coins in Western Europe, this may represent a substantial volume of such coinage in circulation.' In this light, Archibald has suggested that Islamic gold dinars were thus not only present in England throughout the whole medieval period from the later eleventh century onward, but were actually very probably here in significantly larger numbers earlier than they were later, given the chronological distribution of the finds we have, despite what the documentary evidence might imply. Consequently, the most credible explanation is probably simply that the official documentary references to Islamic gold coins in England represent a skewed version of reality that favours the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries due to the absence of appropriate financial records for earlier periods that might record the presence of such coins, rather than anything else.

An Almohad half dinar of Abu Ya'qub Yusuf I , minted between 1168 and 1184; found Wattisham, Suffolk (image: PAS).

Needless to say, the degree to which this apparent presence of a large quantity of Islamic gold coinage in England between the later eleventh and mid–late twelfth century reflects direct contact between England and Spain—where 90% of the coins likely have their origins—is a point of some interest. The possibility that these coins could result from Anglo-Norman trade with Spain and/or the Mediterranean has certainly been raised in the past, and there now appears to be solid evidence for English merchants engaging in a significant degree of commerce with Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, particularly from the Deorman family and the subsequent pepperers' guild of London, but also from the merchants dealing in leather goods from Córdoba who were apparently based around Cordwainer Street, London, by 1120. It is similarly suggestive that the great Muslim scholar Muhammad al-Idrisi, who was educated at Córdoba, named the modern Bay of Biscay as the 'Sea of the English' (bahr al-Inqlishin) in his Nuzhat al-mushtaq, completed c. 1154, and that he is now also often thought to have probably visited England himself during the first half of the twelfth century.

Places in southern England mapped by al-Idrisi for his Nuzhat al-mushtaq of c. 1154; for the original map, see the previous post on al-Idrisi's account on Britain. Al-Idrisi appears to show particular knowledge of two areas of Britain, namely the east coast from East Anglia to York (as discussed in the previous post) and the south coast from Dorset to Kent. Of these two areas, the fullest descriptions and praise are reserved for the south coast towns: for example, Shoreham is described as a 'fine and cultivated city containing buildings and flourishing activity', and Hastings as 'handsome, having markets, workpeople and rich merchants'. Interestingly, London is merely named and not described at all by al-Idrisi, despite its documented importance (image: C. R. Green).

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The aim of the following post is to offer a draft look at an interesting Arabic account of early medieval Britain that appears to have its origins in the late ninth century. Despite being rarely mentioned by British historians concerned with this era, this account has a number of points of interest, most especially the fact that it may contain the earliest reference yet encountered to there having been seven kingdoms (the 'Heptarchy') in pre-Viking England and the fact that its text implies that Britain was still considered to be somehow under Byzantine lordship at that time.

Al-Idrisi's mid-twelfth-century Arabic map of southern Britain and northern Frances, from the copy preserved in the sixteenth-century Oxford MS Pococke 375, fol. 281b–282a. Note, north is at the bottom of this map (image: Bodleian Library).

The author of the account discussed here is Harun ibn Yahya, a Syrian who was probably captured at Ascalon (Ashkelon, Israel) sometime around AD 886 by Byzantine pirates and kept prisoner at Constantinople for a period, before being released and subsequently travelling to Rome.(1) His account survives in fragments preserved by Ibn Rustah in his early tenth-century Book of Precious Records and includes the following passage on Britain:

From this city (sc. Rome) you sail the sea and journey for three months, till you reach the land of the king of the Burjān (here Burgundians). You journey hence through mountains and ravines for a month, till you reach the land of the Franks. From here you go forth and journey for four months, till you reach the city (capital) of Bartīniyah (Britain). It is a great city on the shore of the Western Ocean, ruled by seven kings. At the gate of its city (capital) is an idol (șanam). When the stranger wishes to enter it, he sleeps and cannot enter it, until the people of the city take him, to examine his intention and purpose in entering the city. They are Christians. They are the last of the lands of the Greeks, and there is no civilization beyond them.(2)

Needless to say, there are several points of interest in this account. Perhaps the most important of these is the statement that 'the city (capital) of Bartīniyah (Britain)' is 'ruled by seven kings'. The notion that Anglo-Saxon England was divided into seven kingdoms—the 'Heptarchy'—in the pre-Viking era is one that was common in English historiography from the sixteenth century through to the twentieth, despite it arguably never having been strictly the case, as David Dumville, Simon Keynes and others have pointed out.(3) The term 'Heptarchy' for the pre-Viking kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England appears to have been first used by William Lambarde in a handwritten explanation of his map of the 'seven kingdoms' of Saxon England, dated 1570, but the historiographical idea that pre-Viking England was made up of seven kingdoms is generally believed to have arisen rather earlier than this, in the early twelfth century with Henry of Huntingdon.(4) Henry is, for example, said by James Campbell to have 'introduced the idea of the Heptarchy' to English historical writing in his Historia Anglorum of 1129, stating in that text that 'when the Saxons subjected the land to themselves, they established seven kings, and imposed names of their own choice on the kingdoms', before listing these kingdoms as Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria.(5) However, the account under discussion here would seem to offer a fundamental challenge to this consensus. In particular, unless it is the result of a somewhat bizarre coincidence—which seems rather unlikely—then the late ninth-century reference by Harun ibn Yahya to there being 'seven kings' in Britain would appear to strongly indicate that the concept of a 'Heptarchy' in Anglo-Saxon England actually had a significantly earlier currency than Henry of Huntingdon and the early twelfth century. Furthermore, it would imply that this concept of the political situation in pre-Viking England was sufficiently well-known to have reached at least Rome, if not Constantinople, by the end of the ninth century, which is itself a point of some considerable significance.(6)

William Lambarde's 1568 woodcut map of the seven kingdoms of England in 'the Saxones time', as printed by John Foxe in 1576 (image via johnfoxe.org).

The second point of interest is the description of Britain as 'the last of the lands of the Greeks', that is the most oceanward land of the Rūm or Byzantines. Dunlop considered this to be a statement deriving from Harun ibn Yahya's time in Constantinople, and it might simply be interpreted as reflecting the fact that Britain was once a part of the Roman Empire, nearly 500 years earlier—that is to say, Britain is 'the last of the [former] lands of the Rūm'. However, this is not what he says in the extract preserved by Ibn Rustah, which was written in the present tense and implies that Harun ibn Yahya believed Britain actually still lay 'at the outer fringes of the Byzantine Empire', or at least that the Byzantines considered it to be potentially still within their sway.(7) In this context, it is worth recalling that Procopius, writing in the mid-sixth century—around a century and a half after Britain is usually considered to have ceased to be part of the Roman Empire—mentions both that the emperor Justinian was then making large payments of subsidies to Britain (Secret History, XIX.13) and that Justinian's leading imperial general, Belisarius, offered Britain to the Ostrogoths in exchange for Sicily (Wars, VI.vi.28). Whilst both suggestions could have been a fantasy or meant flippantly, it is equally possible that they might be a genuine reflection of an early Byzantine imperial ideology that continued to consider Britain to be somehow part of Byzantium's holdings, albeit a distant one, as a number of commentators including Eurydice Georganteli, J. O. Ward and Ian Wood have pointed out.(8)

Certainly, with regard to the latter possibility, it has to be admitted that there is now considerable archaeological evidence for Byzantine trading and interaction with southern and western Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, focussed especially on Tintagel but also more widely, and that the coin evidence from sites in western Britain and along the south coast has been recently interpreted as reflecting continuing relations into the seventh century too.(9) Likewise, a recent isotopic analysis of burials in western Britain suggests that people who had probably grown up in Byzantine North Africa were actually being buried here in the post-Roman period, with one of these individuals being radiocarbon-dated to the late seventh century at the earliest—although it cannot be established with certainty, this might well be seen as the burial of someone brought up during the last days of Byzantine Carthage before the Arab conquest of the city in 697/8, and the Byzantine coin evidence from the seventh-century in Britain is certainly dominated by Carthaginian issues.(10) We should also note here the seventh-century Life of St John the Almsgiver, which tells of a ship from Alexandria that visited Britain around AD 610–620 and exchanged a cargo of corn for one of tin, a tale that is undoubtedly suggestive as to seventh-century contacts and continued familiarity, and the Byzantine text of the 630s known as the Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati, which offers a very similar concept to Harun ibn Yahya, claiming that 'Roman lands' then extended from Britain (βρεττανίας) to Africa.(11)

Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is the early medieval memorial stone at Penmachno, North Wales, which dates itself with reference to a Byzantine consulship, stating that it was erected 'in the time of the consul Justin'. This has often been thought to refer to the consulship of Justinus in AD 540, which would itself be a point of considerable significance, but it has recently been powerfully argued that the consul in question is actually more probably the Emperor Justin II himself, who was consul successively from 567–79. Such a situation would, of course, be extremely noteworthy in the present context, and the stone's erection and use of consular dating has consequently been considered by Thomas Charles-Edwards to reflect 'British loyalty to the Emperor Justin' and an affirmation that the erectors of the stone believed that they 'still belonged to the far-flung and loose-knit community of citizens of which he was the head'.(12)

A copper-alloy Byzantine follis of Heraclius, minted in Nicomedia in 611–12 and found near to Tamworth in the West Midlands; Sam Moorhead considers this coin to be potentially a genuine early medieval import, rather than a modern-era loss (image: PAS).

Needless to say, given all of the above, the idea that early Byzantine imperial ideology might have envisaged Britain as being still somehow part of their sphere long after the supposed end of 'Roman Britain' in c. AD 410, with this then underlying the statements made and recorded by Procopius in the mid-sixth century, is clearly worthy of some serious consideration. Moreover, in this light, Harun ibn Yahya's belief that Britain was 'the last of the lands of the Greeks' would appear to be rather more interesting than might be at first thought too—indeed, it could be taken to suggest that any potential sixth-century sense of Britain as still part of the Byzantine world continued to somehow persist in Byzantine thinking into the ninth century. In support of such a contention, another rarely mentioned eastern account of early medieval Britain can be cited here, as it too seems to share this idea of Britain as a continuing element within the Byzantine Empire. This is the tenth-century Persian Hudud al-'Alam, 'The Regions of the World', written in 982 for a prince in north-western Afghanistan. In addition to a general statement that 'there are twelve islands called Briṭāniya, of which some are cultivated and some desolate. On them are found numerous mountains, rivers, villages, and different mines', the author of the Hudud al-'Alam also comments as follows:

Britannia (Bariṭīniya), the last land (shahr) of Rūm on the coast of the Ocean. It is an emporium (bārgāh) of Rūm and Spain.(13)

Whilst the first part of this statement might well be seen as derivative of Harun ibn Yahya and Ibn Rustah, the second part clearly is not. It is found nowhere else, according to V. V. Barthold, but it clearly fits with the suggestions made above, namely that, from an eastern perspective, Britain was a place that continued to have some sort of relationship with the Byzantine Empire.(14) Indeed, it is worth pointing out here that there is again no necessity to treat the statement that Britain 'is an emporium of Rūm' as a primarily historical statement transposed into the tenth century, referring perhaps to the fifth- to seventh-century activity mentioned above—there are, after all, a number of ninth- to eleventh-century Byzantine coins and seals known from Britain, not least from Winchester and London, and there is moreover documentary evidence for both the presence of Byzantine churchmen in tenth-century England and the use of the Byzantine title basileus at that time, which must be seen as suggestive.(15) As to the mention of Spain in this passage, this again suggests that the author of the Hudud al-'Alam had sources additional to those available to us. As to its origins, it may be referring to the possibility of some sort of trading relationship between the the Islamic world and the British Isles in the eighth and ninth centuries, for which there is certainly some archaeological, numismatic and documentary evidence, or possibly to Spanish–English contacts in the tenth century. Indeed, Patricia Nightingale, for example, considers that this reference to Spain 'might hint at Anglo-Saxon participation in the slave trade to the Muslim kingdoms' in the tenth century, which again would be a point of some interest.(16)

The Penmachno stone in North Wales, which includes a consular dating most probably referring to the successive consulships of the Emperor Justin II, 567–79 (image: Richard Hoare/Geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0).

Notes

1     N. E. Hermes, The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth–Twelfth Century AD (New York, 2012), pp. 72–80; A. Classen, 'East meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: many untold stories about connections and contacts, understanding and misunderstanding', in A. Classen (ed.), East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World (Berlin/Boston, 2013), pp. 1–222 at p. 26.
2    D. N. Dunlop, 'The British Isles according to medieval Arabic authors', Islamic Quarterly, 4 (1957), 11–28 at p. 16.
3     D. N. Dumville, 'Essex, Middle Anglia and the expansion of Mercia, in S. Bassett (ed.) The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (London, 1989), pp. 123–40 at p. 126; S. Keynes, 'Heptarchy', in M. Lapidge et al (eds.), Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2001), p. 233.
4     On the word Heptarchy and William Lambarde, see W. Goffart, 'The first venture in 'medieval geography': Lambarde's map of the Saxon Heptarchy (1568)', in J. Roberts et al (eds.), Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately on the Occasion of Her Sixty-fifth Birthday (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 53–60; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. Heptarchy. On Henry of Huntingdon and the seven kingdoms of England, see Keynes, 'Heptarchy', p. 233; J. Campbell, 'Some twelfth-century views of the Anglo-Saxon past', in J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 209–28 at p. 213; Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: the History of the English People, ed. & trans. D. Greenway (Oxford, 1996), pp. lx–lxi.
5     Campbell, 'Some twelfth-century views of the Anglo-Saxon past', p. 213; Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, i.4, ed. & trans. Greenway, p. 17.
6     It is worth noting here that Harun ibn Yahya's statement that the unnamed capital city of Britain was ruled by the seven kings is most credibly seen as a confusion deriving from a source that mentioned both the political situation in pre-Viking Britain and this city. However, if it is indeed London—as Dunlop suggests ('British Isles according to medieval Arabic authors', p. 16) and seems plausible, given that Lundenwic (London) was actually the largest of the major wics or towns of pre-Viking England, with a core zone of c. 55–60 hectares—then it is interesting to note in this context that Middle Saxon London (Lundenwic) was actually sited in a marginal position to several pre-Viking kingdoms and was variously under the control of the kingdoms of Mercia, Kent, Wessex and Essex at different points between the mid-seventh and the mid-ninth centuries. On pre-Viking London/Lundenwic, see, for example, A. G. Vince, Saxon London: An Archaeological Investigation (London, 1990); L. Blackmore, 'The origins and growth of Lundenwic, a mart of many nations', in B. Hårdh & L. Larsson (eds), Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods (Stockholm, 2002), pp. 273–301; and L. Blackmore, 'London in the Not-So-Dark Ages', lecture given at Gresham College, 13 October 2014, available online at http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/london-in-the-not-so-dark-ages.
7     Dunlop, 'British Isles according to medieval Arabic authors', p. 16; D. G. König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe, (Oxford, 2015), pp. 109, 277.
8     E. S. Georganteli, 'Byzantine coins', in M. Biddle (ed.), The Winchester Mint and Coins and Related Finds from the Excavations of 1961-71, Winchester Studies 8 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 669–78 at p. 673; J. O. Ward, 'Procopius's Bellum Gothicum II.6.28: the problem of contacts between Justinian and Britain', Byzantion, 38 (1968), 460–71; and I. N. Wood, 'Before and after the migration to Britain', in J. Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons From the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: an Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 41–64 at p. 48. See also, for example, P. Sarris, Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500-700 (Oxford, 2011), p. 200, and J. Campbell, 'The impact of the Sutton Hoo discovery on the study of Anglo-Saxon history', in J. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (Hambledon, 2000), pp. 55–83 at p. 76. For more sceptical views, see A. Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century (London, 1985), pp. 217–18, and C. A. Snyder, An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons, AD 400–600 (Stroud, 1998), pp. 34–5.
9     See, for example, Georganteli, 'Byzantine coins', pp. 672–6, 678. See also M. Fulford, 'Byzantium and Britain: a Mediterranean perspective on post-Roman Mediterranean imports in western Britain and Ireland', Medieval Archaeology, 33 (1989), 1–6; E. Campbell, Continental and Mediterranean Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, AD 400–800, Council for British Archaeology Research Report 157 (York, 2007); E. Campbell & C. Bowles, 'Byzantine trade to the edge of the world: Mediterranean pottery imports to Atlantic Britain in the 6th century', in M. M. Mango (ed.), Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th Centuries: The Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange (Farnham, 2009), pp. 297–314; T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 222–3; M. Duggan, 'Ceramic imports to Britain and the Atlantic Seaboard in the fifth century and beyond', Internet Archaeology, 41 (2016), online at http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue41/3/index.html; and S. Moorhead, 'Early Byzantine copper coins found in Britain – a review in light of new finds recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme', in O. Tekin (ed.), Ancient History, Numismatics and Epigraphy in the Mediterranean World (Istanbul, 2009), pp. 263–74.
10     K. A. Hemer et al, 'Evidence of early medieval trade and migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea region', Journal of Archaeological Science, 40 (2013), 2352–59; C. R. Green, 'Some oxygen isotope evidence for long-distance migration to Britain from North Africa & southern Iberia, c. 1100 BC–AD 800', 24 October 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/10/oxygen-isotope-evidence.html. Moorhead, 'Early Byzantine copper coins found in Britain', p. 265, notes that the majority of the seventh-century Byzantine coins from Britain that he surveyed were minted at Carthage and suggests that they are indicative of 'continued maritime activity with people from the Mediterranean in the 7th century'.
11     Leontius, Life of St John the Almsgiver, chapter 10; Snyder, Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons, AD 400–600, p. 152; C. J. Salter, 'Early tin extraction in the south-west of England: a resource for Mediterranean metalworkers of late antiquity', in M. M. Mango (ed.), Byzantine Trade, 4th–12th Centuries: The Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange (Farnham, 2009), pp. 315–22 at p. 320; M. M. Mango, 'Tracking Byzantine silver and copper metalware, 4th–12th centuries', in Mango (ed.),&nbsp Byzantine Trade, 4th–12th Centuries, pp. 221–36 at p. 223. For the Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati, III.9, reference I am indebted to Sihong Lin; see O. Heilo, Seeing Eye to Eye: Islamic Universalism in the Roman and Byzantine Worlds, 7th to 10th Centuries (Wein University PhD dissertation, 2010), pp. 28–9, and D. Thomas & B. Roggema, Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, volume 1 (600-900) (Leiden, 2009), pp. 117–9.
12     T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 234–8, quotations at p. 235 and 238; the other identification mentioned is that of V. E. Nash-Williams, The Early Christian Monuments of Wales (Cardiff, 1950), pp. 14, 93. It may be additionally worth noting here that another, less certain although still intriguing, source of evidence is the recent suggestion that some of the apparently obscure 'local' saints of western Britain are not actually otherwise unknown 'Celtic' saints, as they were portrayed to be in much later medieval hagiographies, but rather Byzantine cults transplanted to Britain in the early medieval period whose origins were subsequently forgotten. With regard to this, perhaps the most convincing instance is provided by St Ia of St Ives, Cornwall. Although she is claimed by very much later sources to be an otherwise unknown Irish saint, she actually bears a name identical to that of a martyred Greek saint, St Ia of Persia, whose important church in Constantinople—located next to the Golden Gate—was restored by the emperor Justinian in the sixth century: see further K. Dark, Britain and the End of the Roman Empire (Stroud, 2000), p. 163.
13     V. V. Minorsky (ed. & trans.), Ḥudūd al-'Ālam, 'The Regions of the World' – A Persian Geography 372 A.H. – 982 A.D., ed. C. E. Bosworth with a preface by V. V. Barthold (London, 1970), pp. 59 and 158.
14     V. V. Barthold in Ḥudūd al-'Ālam, 'The Regions of the World', p. 8.
15     Georganteli, 'Byzantine coins', pp. 676–9; J. Shepard, 'From the Bosporus to the British Isles: the way from the Greeks to the Varangians', Drevnejshie Gosudarstva Vostochnoi Evropy, 2009 (Moscow, 2010), pp. 15–42 at pp. 22–38.
16     On a 'Late Saxon' Spanish connection, see P. Nightingale, 'The London Pepperers' Guild and some twelfth-century English trading links with Spain', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 58 (1985), 123–32 at p. 128. On the possibility of a degree of trading activity between the Islamic world and the British Isles in the eighth and ninth centuries, see C. R. Green, 'Some imitation Islamic coins minted in early medieval Europe', 1 March 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/03/some-imitation-islamic-coins.html; L. Webster & J. Backhouse, The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture, AD 600–900 (London, 1991), p. 190; A. O'Sullivan et al, Early Medieval Ireland: Archaeological Excavations 1930-2009 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 179–80; T. O'Hagan, 'In the name of Allah? Broaching Carolingian connections at Ballycottin, Co. Cork', 9 April 2013, blog post, online at https://voxhiberionacum.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/cork-carolingian-connections/.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

This aim of this post is simply to report the rather exciting discovery of two joining pieces from a Anglo-Saxon standing cross in the rectory garden at Louth, Lincolnshire, which David Stocker and Paul Everson have dated to the tenth century. Both of these pieces depict the body of the crucified Christ and the original ring-headed cross was probably a very substantial monument, several metres high, that must have been of considerable importance in the local area.

The two joining pieces of the Anglo-Saxon cross-head found at Louth, shown shortly after the discovery of the second piece; the surviving parts of the cross-head together measure around 0.4m top to bottom (image copyright © C. R. Green).

Needless to say, this new pre-Conquest cross is a very significant find indeed, and its discovery in Louth is of especial interest. The current parish church—which possesses the tallest parish spire in England—dates largely from the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, and whilst it contains within it the fabric of earlier churches dating back to the later twelfth century, this is by far the earliest Christian artefact yet found in the town. As such, it provides something of a 'missing link' between the medieval structural evidence of the parish church and the important documentary evidence for both a significant Middle Saxon minster at Louth which produced Offa of Mercia's last Archbishop of Canterbury, St Æthelheard (792–805), and a tenth-century shrine to Louth's own Anglo-Saxon saint, St Herefrith, who is thought to have been potentially the last ninth-century Bishop of Lindsey (c. 870 or thereabouts) and perhaps martyred by the Vikings.

For further details of the finding of the cross and commentary on its significance, see the press release from St James's Church and The Louth Cross sub-committee and the Lincolnshire Echo article on the Louth Cross, published this morning.

The largest piece of the cross-head, photographed shortly after its discovery during routine maintenance work (image copyright © Richard Gurnham, St James's Church, Louth, and The Louth Cross sub-committee).

Compilation of views of the different sides of the cross-head; click the image for a larger view (image copyright © Chris Marshall, St James's Church, Louth, and The Louth Cross sub-committee).

St James's Church, Louth, from Westgate; the church possesses the tallest parish church spire in England, completed 1515 (image copyright © C. R. Green).

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

Previous posts on this site have discussed a variety of material found in Britain that is suggestive of long-distance trade and movement in the past. For this post and the next, however, I thought it might be interesting to look briefly at some recent research into artefactual evidence pointing in the opposite direction instead—that is to say, at finds of British-made items from areas outside of the British Isles. What follows looks at Romano-British brooches and other objects found in Europe and North Africa, and the subsequent post will do the same for Anglo-Saxon items.

The distribution of Romano-British objects in Europe and North Africa, primarily brooches, after Ivleva, 2011, p. 135, and Ivleva, 2012, with minor additions and modifications and plotted on a base map from Wikimedia Commons (image: C.R. Green).

Romano-British brooches found outside of the British Isles have recently been the subject of considerable research by Tatiana Ivleva, who completed her PhD on this topic in 2012. All told, she has identified 242 British-made brooches of the first to third centuries AD found on 102 sites in continental Europe or North Africa, along with a number of inscriptions in which the people mentioned are either identified or identifiable as Britons. The vast majority of these finds have been made in the north-western Roman Empire, from the provinces of Germania Inferior, Germania Superior and Gallia Belgica, but smaller numbers are found in Pannonia and even across to the northern Black Sea coast, with two coming from urban sites in Morocco. Needless to say, such finds form an intriguing body of evidence and Tatiana Ivleva suggests that their findspots can be explained in a number of ways. For example, 17 of the 103 sites that produced these brooches are in places or areas where we otherwise know that Roman military units raised in Britain were present in the era that the brooches were made, such as Cohors VI Brittonum in what is now the Netherlands, the Ala I Britannica and cohors I Britannica in Hungary, and British numeri units on the German limes. Equally, other brooches come from sites where there is surviving epigraphic evidence for the presence of Britons in the Roman era, as at Cologne, or where there is evidence for returning veterans whose units were once stationed in Britain, whilst yet others come from sites that are likely to have seen the presence of craftsmen and/or traders who could have been either Britons themselves or have visited Britain.(1)

The most distant examples of British objects identified overseas by Ivlev consist of two brooches from what is now Morocco, a fitting from Egypt, and a number of British items from two sites on the northern Black Sea coast. The two items from Morocco are a trumpet brooch found either in or close to the administrative centre of the Roman province of Mauretania Tingitana, Volubilis, a city that is believed to have had a vexillatio Brittonum posted in one of its five surrounding forts in the second century AD, and a headstud brooch from the civilian quarter of Thamusida (insula G5), a town inhabited by retired veterans. It has been argued that both brooches are most credibly interpreted as items brought to Mauretania Tingitana by members of British military units or their detachments, perhaps as heirloom pieces worn over several generations given that they are corroded, extremely worn, and date from the later first century AD rather than the second century, when the presence of British detachments in North Africa is attested.(2) A similar interpretation might be applied to the Egyptian find too. This is a British enamelled terret ring from a horse harness, which was found at Fayum (ancient Crocodilopolis/Arsinoë) and is of a type that was very common in Britain, with a virtually identical example having been excavated from the Romano-British 'small town' at Wanborough, Wiltshire, in 1969. Although it is impossible to be entirely certain how it came to be in Fayum, it has been noted that detachments of legion III Augusta were sent from Numidia to Britain in the second century AD and that the cohors I Ulpia Afrorum equitata, a cavalry unit, was stationed in Britain in the 120s and then in Egypt during the 130s, which is potentially suggestive.(3)

Finally, the finds of British items from the northern Black Sea coast come from ancient Gorgippia (Anapa, Russia) and Chersonesos Taurica (near Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula) and consist of Romano-British enamelled oil scrapers/strigils, an enamelled hexagonal alabastron or incense burner, and a number of British-made belt buckles. Both cities were within the Bosporan Kingdom, a client kingdom of the Roman Empire, and Chersonesos—where the buckles were found—certainly saw a number of Roman military units posted there, something that Ivleva suggests may account for the presence of the British finds at both sites, via soldiers who had previously served with other units from the region that had been to Britain, such as the legio I Italica. On the other hand, Jane Petersen has noted that the Gorgippia finds, at least, come from an exceptionally high status grave context, perhaps even belonging to the ruling family, and are luxury items imbued with Romanitas, which suggests these might be better seen as exotic imports from Romano-British workshops that were being used by the Bosporan elite as a means of signalling their familiarity with and connection to Roman culture.(4)

A probably British enamelled terret ring from a horse harness, found at Fayum—ancient Crocodilopolis/Arsinoë—in Egypt (image: British Museum). A virtually identical example was excavated from the Romano-British 'small town' at Wanborough, Wiltshire, in 1969, see A. S. Anderson et al, The Romano-British 'small town' at Wanborough, Wiltshire: Excavations, 1966-1976 (London, 2001), p. 96.

Notes

1     T. Ivleva, 'British emigrants in the Roman Empire: complexities and symbols of ethnic identities', in D. Mladenovič & B. Russel (eds.) TRAC 2010: Proceedings of the 20th Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Oxford 2010 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 132–53. Slightly different figures are reported in her 2011 article compared to her PhD thesis of 2012 (see fn. 2); the latter are adopted here.
2     T. Ivleva, Britons Abroad: the Mobility of Britons and the Circulation of British-made Objects in the Roman Empire (University of Leiden PhD Thesis), pp. 329–31.
3     A. S. Anderson et al, The Romano-British 'Small Town' at Wanborough, Wiltshire: Excavations, 1966–1976 (London, 2001), p. 96; Ivleva, Britons Abroad, pp. 329, 331.
4     Ivleva, Britons Abroad, pp. 323–4; J. H. Petersen, 'Communicating identities from beyond? Assessing expressions of identity in funerary material from the Black Sea region', HEROM, 2.1 (2013), 45–73, especially pp. 55, 57–60, 67 and fig. 6; M. Treister, 'The date and significance of tomb II at Gorgippia (1975 Excavations)', Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia, 9 (2003), 43–85 at p. 59. On the incense burner/alabastron and its British origins, see also H. Cool, 'Panelled Enamel Vessels', Roman Finds Group Newsletter, 13 (1997), pp. 2–3.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following post picks up from the previous one and offers a brief look at Anglo-Saxon objects found outside of the British Isles, primarily in France and Africa. From France, there are now over 300 Anglo-Saxon artefacts recorded, these being mainly distributed along the coast and considered to be at least partly indicative of the settlement of Anglo-Saxons from Britain there in the later fifth to sixth centuries, something supported by documentary references. In contrast, there are only a small number of finds known from other areas such as Switzerland and East Africa, but these are nonetheless intriguing too, not least as they may well come from contemporary contexts.

The distribution of sites producing late fifth- to sixth-century Anglo-Saxon brooches in France, after Soulat, 2009, and Soulat, 2011, plotted against a topographic base-map from Wikimedia Commons (image: C. R. Green).

A sixth-century, square-headed brooch of Kentish type, found in the early medieval cemetery at Herpes-en-Charente, France, see further K. R. Brown et al (eds.), From Attila to Charlemagne: Arts of the Early Medieval Period in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2000), pp. 284–8 (image: The Met).

The existence of a substantial body of early Anglo-Saxon finds from the coast of France has been known for some time but only occasionally finds mention in works concerned with the early Anglo-Saxon period. This material is mainly distributed along the Channel coast and in Charente-Maritime, on the south-western coast, and recent studies have identified over 300 'Anglo-Saxon' artefacts from these areas, a total that suggests a significant degree of contact and activity. In general, this insular-style 'Anglo-Saxon' material, similar to items found from Kent across to the Isle of Wight, appears to date from the latter part of the fifth century and into the sixth, and has been considered to reflect a mixture of trade, an early medieval 'Channel/Maritime culture', and probably a degree of settlement by insular 'Anglo-Saxons' on the Gallic coast in that era.(1) Certainly, the latter suggestion is one that finds support in the available early textual evidence. So, for example, the mid-sixth-century Byzantine writer Procopius of Caesarea reports that a Frankish embassy to Constantinople in around 548 included 'Angles' amongst the party and that the Merovingian kings claimed jurisdiction over Britain on the basis that Angles from Britain had settled within the Frankish kingdom, bringing with them title to their previous insular homeland:

The island of Brittia is inhabited by three very numerous nations, each having one king over it. And the names of these nations are Angili, Frissones, and Brittones, the last being named from the island itself. And so great appears to be the population of these nations that every year they emigrate thence in large companies with their women and children and go the land of the Franks. And the Franks allow them to settle in the part of their land that appears to be most deserted, and by this means they say that they are winning over the island. Thus it actually happened that not long ago the king of the Franks, in sending some of his intimates on an embassy to the Emperor Justinian in Byzantium, sent with them some of the Angili, thus seeking to establish his claim that this island was ruled by him.(2)

Similarly, the Gallo-Roman aristocrat and bishop Sidonius Apollinaris makes reference in a letter of around 480 to Saxon raiders on the south-western Gallic coast who, after their raids, set their sails 'for the voyage home from the continent', which suggests that they too could have been based in Britain. The letter in question was addressed to his friend Namatius, who was serving as a naval and army officer on the coast of Visigothic Aquitaine and tasked with dealing with these Saxon raiders. and Sidonius Apollinaris warns him there to be on his guard, as the Saxons are not only skilled brigands and brutal enemies, but on taking their leave of the continent are

accustomed on the eve of departure to kill one in ten of their prisoners by drowning or crucifixion... distributing to the collected band of doomed men the iniquity of death by the equity of the lot.(3) 

Needless to say, Anglo-Saxon finds of this era are not simply confined to the modern French coast. Anglo-Saxon brooches and pottery of similar types and date are, for example, found in significant numbers in Belgium as well, with brooches recorded from sites such as Tournai and Broechem (Ranst), indicating that the above 'Channel culture' and Anglo-Saxon influence was present in this part of coastal Merovingian Gaul too.(4) Away from the Channel and Atlantic coast, the number of finds of insular Anglo-Saxon material culture declines markedly, but there are nonetheless still some intriguing finds and findspots. Within Europe, two are of particular interest, namely an intriguing lead great square-headed brooch found at Geneva, Switzerland,(5) and an Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooch of the first half of the sixth century discovered in the nineteenth century in south-eastern France near to Castelnaudary, Aude.

No details are recorded of the exact circumstances of the latter find, but other 'barbarian' material of the same era is recorded from the area around Castelnaudary, which may well be significant. Also of potential interest are the stylistic affinities of this cruciform brooch, with only three other examples of this specific type—Toby Martin's type 3.1.2—known, from Suffolk and Lincolnshire, and the general distribution of cruciform brooches with similar terminals being concentrated in the Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire area.(6) As to quite how such a brooch found its way to south-eastern France, this must remain a matter of speculation, but it is worth noting that there is some other evidence for Anglo-Saxons in the Mediterranean area during Late Antiquity. There were, after all, Angles amongst the c. 548 delegation to Constantinople that was mentioned above, and Bede (Historia Ecclesiastica, II.1) furthermore reports that Gregory the Great encountered Angles from the Northumbrian kingdom of Deira—roughly the area of modern Yorkshire—in the slave market at Rome during the second half of the sixth century. As such, the Castelnaudary brooch is not wholly without a context, particularly given that it too dates from the sixth-century; has clear stylistic links to items found in the traditionally 'Anglian' areas of Suffolk, Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire; and was recovered from a site that lies in the Carcassonne Gap, one of the chief ancient overland routes between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

An Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooch of the first half of the sixth century, found at Castelnaudary, Aude, south-eastern France (image: Barrière-Flavy, 1893).

Two apparently early Anglo-Saxon or Frankish beads found at Kisiju and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; original shaded image converted to colour using key provided (original image: J. R. Harding/ADS, used under their non-commercial license, colourized by C. R. Green).

Looking even further afield, there have been somewhat later finds of Anglo-Saxon coins made from Italy and Spain, and a Late Saxon strap-end has been excavated from an early to mid-tenth-century level at Riurikovo Gorodishche, near Novgorod, Russia, which is virtually identical to examples from Whitby Abbey and has been considered indicative of the presence of an Anglo-Saxon travelling to the Byzantine Empire along the 'way from the Greeks to the Varangians'.(7) The most far-flung potentially Anglo-Saxon finds were not discovered in Europe, however, but instead in Africa. In particular, a small number of beads have been found in Sudan and on the coast of Tanzania, at Dar es Salaam and Kisiju, which appear to be identical in both form and manufacture to early Anglo-Saxon or Frankish beads and are closely comparable to examples of these in the British Museum. Of course, the very close resemblance of these items to early Anglo-Saxon or Frankish beads could be put down to a notable coincidence, but Harding, Chami and other researchers studying East Africa concur with D. M. Wilson, D. B. Harden and Richard Hodges that these beads aren't local products but rather Anglo-Saxon or Frankish in origin, and furthermore consider it credible that they arrived on the Tanzanian coast in or around the era that they were manufactured. Certainly, the sites from which these beads were recovered are believed to be early trading areas on the Tanzanian coast, occupied from perhaps the first century AD and centered in a region where other trade-goods of the fifth- to sixth-century are found, and Graeco-Roman sources moreover indicate that the central coast of East Africa was the location for settlements connected to the ongoing Indian Ocean trade. In fact, Rhapta, the most southerly emporium visited by Graeco-Roman traders and mentioned by both the Roman-era Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Ptolemy's Geography, is often considered to have been located in just this area, which is arguably a point of some considerable significance, particularly as the Graeco-Roman trade down the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean seems to have continued into the sixth century AD on the basis of the testimony of the Byzantine traveller Cosmas Indicopleustes, who apparently travelled to Ethiopia and possibly India too in that era.(8)

In considering quite how these early Anglo-Saxon or Frankish beads might have found there way to trading sites in East Africa, it is worth recalling that early Anglo-Saxon England and Merovingian Gaul both saw imports via the eastern Mediterranean of a number of materials that ultimately originated in Africa and India, including cowrie shell (from the Red Sea or Indian Ocean), amethyst (probably India or possibly Egypt/Ethiopia?), garnet (India), sapphire (Sri Lanka), elephant ivory (Africa or India), and also pepper (India) and incense (Horn of Africa/Arabia) by the time of Aldhelm and Bede.(9) As such, it certainly doesn't seem impossible that these beads could have travelled back along the same trade routes that brought these items to north-western Europe from the eastern Mediterranean and that they were subsequently carried into East Africa via the routes linking the Graeco-Roman world and East Africa/India. Furthermore, Joan Harding has suggested that, given their comparative rarity, these beads might even have been personal possessions carried by a small number of individuals from Anglo-Saxon England or Gaul who chose to travel back along this same trade route, which is a most intriguing conclusion in the present context.(10)

Map of the Roman-era Periplus of the Erythraean Sea with the three locations producing Anglo-Saxon/Frankish beads marked with stars; the location of Rhapta has been updated from the original map as per Chami, 1994; for a larger version of this map, click here (image: C. R. Green, modified from a map on Wikimedia Commons by George Tsiagalakis, CC-BY-SA-4).

The distribution of imported amethyst (stars) and cowrie shell (circles) in early Anglo-Saxon England; the former probably originated in India and the latter either in the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean (image: C. R. Green).

Notes

1     See, for example, M. Welch, 'An early entente cordiale? Cross-Channel connections in the Anglo-Saxon period', Archaeology International, 4 (2000), 28–30; J. Soulat, Le Matériel de Type Saxon et Anglo-Saxon en Gaule Mérovingienne (Paris, 2009); S. Fischer & J. Soulat, 'Runic Swords and Raw Materials – Anglo-Saxon Interaction with Northern Gaul', Vitark, 7 (2009), 72–9; J. Soulat, 'La présence Saxonne et Anglo-Saxonne sur le littoral de la Manche', in S. Lebecq et al (eds.), Quentovic: Environnement, Archéologie, Histoire (Lille, 2010), pp. 147–63; J. Soulat, 'Trois fibules de type Anglo-Saxon datant du VIe siècle provenant de la collection Diergardt du musée d'Archéologie nationale', Antiquités Nationales, 42 (2011), 101–09; J. Soulat et al, 'Hand-made pottery along the Channel coast and parallels with the Scheldt valley', in R. Annaert et al (eds.), ACE Conference Brussels: The Very Beginning of Europe? Early-Medieval Migration and Colonisation (Bruxelles, 2012), pp. 215–24; S. Harrington & M. Welch, The Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of Southern Britain AD 450–650: Beneath the Tribal Hidage (Oxford, 2014), p. 179.
2     Procopius, History of the Wars, VIII.xx.7–10, trans. H. B. Dewing, Procopius, Vol. V: History of the Wars, Books VII and VIII (London, 1962), pp. 252–5.
3     Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters, VIII.6, trans W. B. Anderson, Sidonius, Vol. II: Letters 3–9 (London, 1965), p. 431. See, for example, N. J. Higham & M. J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven & London, 2013), p. 76, for the view that these Saxons were potentially based in Britain.
4     Soulat et al, 'Hand-made pottery along the Channel coast and parallels with the Scheldt valley'; Fischer & Soulat, 'Runic Swords and Raw Materials – Anglo-Saxon Interaction with Northern Gaul', pp. 72, 76; H. Hamerow et al, 'Migration period settlements and “Anglo-Saxon” pottery from Flanders', Medieval Archaeology, 38 (1994), 1–18.
5     Discussed recently by John Hines, in A New Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Great Square-Headed Brooches (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 206, and Kevin Leahy in 'Medieval Britain and Ireland in 2004', Medieval Archaeology, 49 (2005), 323–473 at pp.337–41.
6     C. Barrière-Flavy, Étude sur les sépultures barbares du Midi et de l'ouest de la France (Tolouse/Paris, 1893), pp. 52, 131, and pl. IV.2; J. P. Gil, 'A crossroads of cultures in a mosaic of regions? The early Visigothic regnum from the perspective of small finds', Archaeologia Baltica, 18 (2012), 109–23 at p. 119; and T. Martin, pers. comm.. For the three other examples of cruciform brooch type 3.1.2, see T. Martin, A Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Cruciform Brooches, Archaeology Data Service (2015), online at http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/asbrooch_na_2015/, and the following records: British Museum 1927,1212.21; British Museum 1971,0901.1; and Portable Antiquities Scheme NLM-58E945. See further T. Martin, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2015), p. 47; T. Martin, Identity and the Cruciform Brooch in Early Anglo-Saxon England: An Investigation of Style, Mortuary Context, and Use, 4 vols. (University of Sheffield PhD Thesis, 2011), I.57, 135, 149.
7     J. Shepard, 'From the Bosporus to the British Isles: the way from the Greeks to the Varangians', Drevnejshie Gosudarstva Vostochnoi Evropy, 2009 (Moscow, 2010), pp. 15–42 at pp. 24–5.
8     O. G. S. Crawford et al, The Welcome Excavations in the Sudan, volume III: Abu Geili and Saqadi & Dar el Mek (London, 1951), p. 72; J. R. Harding, 'Two Frankish beads from the coast of Tanganyika', Medieval Archaeology, 4 (1960), 126–7; J. R. Harding, 'On some crucible and associated finds from the coast of Tanganyika', Man, 60 (1960), 136–9 at p. 138; J. R. Harding, 'Glass beads and early trading posts on the east coast of Africa', South African Archaeological Bulletin, 33 (1978), 3–4; F. Chami, The Tanzanian Coast in the First Millennium AD (Uppsala, 1994), pp. 25–6, 32, 95–8; F. Chami and E. T. Kessy, 'Archaeological Work at Kisiju, Tanzania, 1994', Nyame Akuma, 43 (1995), 38–45. Note, the beads were examined and identified by both D. B. Harden, an ancient glass specialist and director of the London Museum/Museum of London, and D. M. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon archaeologist and subsequently director of the British Museum, who are cited by Harding, Chami and Crawford; the identification is also supported by Richard Hodges, who considers them Anglo-Saxon, as does Barbara Green: R. Hodges, The Anglo-Saxon Achievement: Archaeology & the Beginnings of English Society (London, 1989), p. 9; B. Green, cited in P. Wade-Martins, Excavations in North Elmham Park, 1967–1972, East Anglian Archaeology Report no. 9, 2 vols. (Gressenhall, 1980), vol. II, p. 262. On Cosmas Indicopleustes and mid-sixth-century Graeco-Roman contacts with Africa and India, see for example S. Faller, 'The world according to Cosmas Indicopleustes – concepts and illustrations of an Alexandrian merchant and monk', Transcultural Studies, 1 (2011), 193–232.
9     See, for example, J. Drauschke, 'Byzantine Jewellery? Amethyst beads in East and West during the early Byzantine period', in C. Entwistle & N. Adams (eds.), 'Intelligible Beauty': Recent Research on Byzantine Jewellery (London, 2010), pp. 50–60 at pp. 51–2, and also J. Huggett, 'Imported grave goods and the early Anglo-Saxon economy', Medieval Archaeology, 32 (1988), 63–96; Higham and Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World, p. 147; K. S. Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 60–8; and L. Webster, 'Bone and ivory carving', in M. Lapidge et al (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2014).
10     Harding, 'Two Frankish beads from the coast of Tanganyika', p. 127. Another suggestion, tentatively raised in Crawford et al, The Welcome Excavations in the Sudan, volume III, p. 72, is that Anglo-Saxon and Frankish beads could have been made in Egypt and the Sudanese and Tanzanian examples could therefore represent the same products exported southwards. This seems implausible, however, given the rarity of such finds in Africa, and recent research on Anglo-Saxon glass beads furthermore strongly indicates that whilst raw glass for bead-making was imported from the Near East in the post-Roman period, fifth- and sixth-century Anglo-Saxon beads were themselves manufactured in England: see J. R. N. Peake, Early Anglo-Saxon Glass Beads: Composition and Origins Based on the Finds from RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk, 2 volumes (Cardiff University D.Phil Thesis, 2013).

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations unless otherwise stated, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following note discusses a rather intriguing medieval superstition which states that the king of England must not enter the city of Lincoln for fear of calamity. Some of the key witnesses to this superstition are noted below, the earliest of them dating from the mid-1140s and the last from around 1201.

John Speed's proof plan of Lincoln, created at some point between 1603 and 1611, with east at the top of the plan. The former Roman walled city (Lincoln proper) lies on the left side of this plan, separated by the River Witham from on its Wigford suburb; according to Roger of Hoveden and William of Newburgh, it was in the latter suburb beyond the walls that Henry II was crowned, due to the superstition that a king of England may not enter the city of Lincoln. Click the image for a larger view of Speed's plan (image: Cambridge University).

The first reference to a belief that the king of England ought not to enter the city of Lincoln comes from the fourth version of Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum (X.25), probably written in 1147, shortly after the event it relates. Henry describes the event as follows:

In the twelfth year, at Christmas [25 December 1146], King Stephen showed himself in the kingly regalia in the city of Lincoln, where no other king—deterred by superstitious persons—had dared to do so. This shows King Stephen possessed great boldness and a spirit that was not fearful of danger.

Needless to say, this is an intriguing statement, particularly given that Henry of Huntingdon was not only a contemporary source, but also a canon of Lincoln cathedral and clearly very familiar with the city and its clergy. As such, it would seem that this must have been a genuine superstition current in mid-twelfth-century Lincoln, and one that previous kings had, in fact, respected. Unfortunately, Henry offers no further details of this superstition, but two late twelfth-century historians from Yorkshire, William of Newburgh and Roger of Howden, pick up the tale and offer some relevant details and incidents. So, William of Newburgh—whose abbey had significant lands in north Lincolnshire—wrote the following expansion of Henry of Huntingdon's passage in 1196–7:

In the twelfth year of his reign, king Stephen having (as before-mentioned) wrested the city of Lincoln from the earl of Chester, was desirous of being solemnly crowned there on Christmas-day, wisely disregarding an ancient superstition, which forbade the kings of England from entering that city. On his proceeding into the town, without the least hesitation, he encountered no sinister omen, as that idle tradition had portended would be the case; but after having solemnized his coronation, he retired from it, after a few days, with joy, and contempt at this superstitious vanity.

This section is best understood as largely derivative of Henry's account and adds little of substance, aside from an apparent clarification of the nature of the superstition, indicating that it did not simply relate to the wearing of a crown in Lincoln, but rather the king of England's entry into the city at all. Perhaps more important, however, is the evidence offered by both William of Newburgh and Roger of Howden for the continuing existence of this superstition at Lincoln into the reigns of Henry II and John. With regard to the former reign, Roger of Howden—who wrote and revised his work between the early 1170s and 1201—offers the following account:

In the year of grace 1158, being the fourth year of the reign of king Henry, son of the empress Matilda, the said king Henry caused himself to be crowned a second time at Lincoln without the walls of the city, at Wikeford.

William of Newburgh relates the same event and suggests that the reason for Henry's crown-wearing outside of Lincoln's walls was the previously mentioned 'ancient superstition':

In the fifth year of his reign, Henry, the illustrious king of England, was solemnly crowned at Lincoln on Christmas-day, not within the walls, indeed, on account, I suppose, of that ancient superstition which king Stephen (as before related) laudably condemned and ridiculed, but in a village adjoining the suburbs.

There are two particular points of interest here. First and foremost, if William is correct, then this would indicate that the superstition not only survived into Henry II's reign, but that Henry II actually indulged it, unlike his immediate predecessor. Second, the place where Henry was crowned outside the walls of the city is named as Wikeford. This name is that of the medieval Lincoln suburb of Wigford, which lies just to the south of both the Witham and the walled town and seems to have seen a notable degree of activity during the Anglo-Scandinavian and medieval periods. As to where in Wigford the crown-wearing took place, it was suggested in the nineteenth century that the church of St Mary-le-Wigford—possibly founded in the second half of the tenth century by the mercantile elite of Lincoln—may have been the site in question. Alternatively, it has been more recently argued that Henry II actually had a royal town-house (hospicium) constructed in the 1150s a little further to the south and away from the city, at St Mary's Guildhall next to St Peter-at-Gowts, and that it was at this newly built and interestingly extramural royal residence that the crown-wearing ceremony took place.

The eleventh-century tower of St Mary-le-Wigford church, Lincoln (photo: C. R. Green)

St Mary's Guildhall & St Peter-at-Gowts in 1784, by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm (image: Wikimedia Commons).

The final probable reference to this superstition comes from Roger of Howden, writing in 1201, who appears to allude to it when describing King John's visit to Lincoln in 1200 to receive the homage of William, king of Scotland:

On the tenth day before the calends of December, being the fourth day of the week, John, king of England, fearlessly, and contrary to the advice of many of his followers, entered the cathedral church of Lincoln, and offered on the altar of St John the Baptist, in the new buildings there, a gold chalice. After this, on the same day, he and William, king of the Scots, met for a conference, outside the city of Lincoln, upon a lofty hill.

Although Roger doesn't mention the 'ancient superstition' explicitly, the fact that John is said to have entered the cathedral—located in the walled Upper City—'fearlessly' and 'contrary to the advice of many of his followers' strongly suggests that the superstition survived to this point and was a matter of concern to some of John's entourage. Moreover, as W. A. B. Coolidge points out, it may also be noteworthy that John subsequently retreated 'outside the city of Lincoln' to a 'lofty hill' to receive the homage of William.

We thus have a rather interesting trail of evidence, suggesting that there was a genuine superstition warning against the king of England entering Lincoln wearing his crown, or perhaps even entering it at all, which was current in at least the 1140s and perhaps continued to carry weight through to the reign of John. As to its origins, these are likely to remain mysterious, although one could speculate whether the story might have something to do with the stories of independent kings of Lincoln and Lindesi that appear in the twelfth-century Havelok tale and other medieval Lincolnshire sources, arguably reflecting a continuing memory in Lincolnshire folklore of the genuine pre-Viking kingdom of Lindissi/Lindsey. Interestingly, two other cities—Leicester and Oxford—are also said to be the subject of similar superstitions, although as these superstitions are only recorded by authors of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, it might be wondered whether they are not somehow derivative of the Lincoln tradition recorded by Henry of Huntingdon and William of Newburgh.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations unless otherwise stated, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2016, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The degree to which pre-modern Britain included people of African origin within its population continues to be a topic of considerableinterest and some controversy. Previous posts on this site have discussed a variety of textual, linguistic, archaeological and isotopic evidence for people from the Mediterranean and/or Africa in the British Isles from the Late Bronze Age through to the eleventh century AD. However, the focus in these posts has been on individual sites, events or periods, rather than the question of the potential proportion of people from Africa present in pre-modern Britain per se and how this may have varied over time. The aim of the following post is thus to briefly ponder whether an overview of the increasingly substantial British corpus of oxygen isotope evidence drawn from pre-modern archaeological human teeth has anything interesting to tell us with regard to this question.

Map of the British Isles, showing drinking-water oxygen isotope values and the 16 British archaeological sites, including three in York, with evidence for pre-modern people whose results are consistent with an early life spent in North Africa (image: C. R. Green, using a base-map image © BGS/NERC, reproduced under their non-commercial licence, as detailed on the BGS website).

Proportion of investigated sites from each period with at least one oxygen isotope result consistent with an origin in North Africa (image: C. R. Green).

The rationale for using oxygen isotope evidence as a tool for identifying people from Africa in pre-modern Britain was set out at some length in a previous post—essentially, tooth enamel oxygen isotope values reflect those of the water that was drunk by an individual in childhood, with drinking-water values varying markedly with climate and related factors. As such, it should be possible to identify first-generation migrants to Britain in the archaeological record by measuring their tooth enamel oxygen isotope levels, so long as they grew up in a region with significantly different drinking-water values to those found in Britain, a criteria North Africa fits comfortably, with many parts of it possessing levels notably higher than those found anywhere in Britain or, indeed, Europe.

In order to make a first pass at trying to assess whether isotopic data can help answer the question of the potential number of African people in medieval and earlier Britain and the variations in this number over time, I pulled together a rough corpus of 908 oxygen isotopes results taken from individuals buried at 79 Bronze Age–Medieval sites across Britain published up to the start of 2016, and then sorted these into four broad chronological periods: Bronze Age–Iron Age (22 sites), Roman (15 sites), Early Medieval (29 sites) and Medieval (14 sites), with one site in use across two of the periods.(1) I then went through this material to identify individuals whose results are sufficiently elevated so as to be both clearly indicative of a non-local origin and most consistent with a childhood spent in North Africa, rather than anywhere in Britain or Europe.(2) Needless to say, taking such an overview of the entire period from the Bronze Age to the Medieval era via a single dataset produces some interesting results, as well as some pitfalls. The former can be summarized as follows:

• 20.3% of the 79 surveyed Bronze Age–Medieval sites contained at least one person who has results consistent with a childhood spent in Africa (n=16). As can be seen from the map included above, these sites are spread across Britain, with the majority coming from what is now England, although not exclusively so. Note, some of the 'gaps' in the resultant distribution may well be more apparent than real, stemming from a lack of published sites in some areas, such as north-western England and Norfolk. 
• Sites possessing isotopic evidence consistent with the presence of first-generation immigrants from North Africa are found in all periods looked at, although there is a clear peak in the Roman era. The Roman era—the mid-first to early fifth centuries AD—has the greatest number of sites with such evidence, namely seven, these being Winchester (Lankhills), Gloucester, York (three sites: Trentholme Drive, The Railway & Driffield Terrace), Scorton near Catterick, and Wasperton. Furthermore, nearly 47% of all Roman sites where isotopic analysis has occurred have produced evidence suggestive of the presence of people who grew up in North Africa, a significantly higher proportion than is found for any other era. The next highest raw totals of sites with such isotopic evidence belong jointly to the 'Early Medieval' and 'Medieval' eras (four sites each), although it is important to note that the Early Medieval total results from over twice as many sites being isotopically investigated than is the case for the Medieval era—as such, whilst 28.6% of the Medieval-era sites in the corpus have isotopic evidence consistent with the presence of North African migrants, only 13.8% of the Early Medieval sites do. Finally, the Bronze Age–Iron Age is represented by only a single qualifying site on the Isle of Thanet, Kent, equivalent to 4.5% of all Bronze Age–Iron Age sites where isotopic analysis has taken place, although this Late Bronze Age–Middle Iron Age cemetery has multiple people with such results buried within it.
• In total, 3.6% of the 908 Bronze Age–Medieval individuals surveyed from these 79 sites have results consistent with a childhood spent in Africa (n=33). This percentage reflects the fact that the majority of the sites looked at here only contain one or two individuals with values high enough for inclusion in the present study.
• A small number of results are elevated to such a degree that they strongly indicate a childhood spent in the Nile Valley or Delta. Around 9% of the individual oxygen isotope results that were highlighted here were exceptionally elevated to above 21.0‰ δ¹⁸O_p (n=3), a level that is probably indicative of a childhood spent in or around the Nile Valley, where equivalent values have been recorded from the ancient burial site at Mendes in the Nile Delta, Egypt, and other sites up to the third Nile cataract at Tombos. Interestingly, these results come from individuals spread across the chronological range: one from a Late Bronze Age burial at Thanet, Kent (ninth century BC), one from a Middle Iron Age grave at the same site (fourth century BC), and another from the medieval cemetery at Whithorn, Scotland (late twelfth to thirteenth century AD).

With regard to explanations for such a potential presence of people who grew up in North Africa in Britain from the Late Bronze Age through to the medieval period, several possibilities can be identified. For example, the peak in sites with isotopic evidence consistent with the presence of such people in the Roman era is perhaps unsurprising, given the significant epigraphic, textual and archaeological evidence for people from Africa and/or of African descent in Britain at that time, and a major research project has, in fact, recently been completed on the topic of diaspora communities in Roman Britain. Indeed, at York around 11–12% of the individuals buried in two of the large Roman-era cemeteries there are considered to be very likely of 'African descent' on the basis of anthroposcopic/craniometric analysis, whilst yet more are thought to have potential 'mixed' or 'black' ancestry, up to a possible maximum of 51% of the population in the higher-status 'The Railway' cemetery. Similarly, there is documentary and archaeological evidence for contacts between the Byzantine Empire, North Africa and post-Roman western Britain and England in the early medieval period which may well offer a potential explanation for some of the results retrieved—significant quantities of fifth- to sixth-century Byzantine imported pottery have, for example, been found along the west coast of Britain, including some produced in the Carthage region, and Middle Saxon England included churchmen such as Hadrian, the later seventh and early eighth-century Abbot of St Augustine's, Canterbury, who was 'a man of African race' (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, IV.1) and is thought to have grown up in Libya Cyrenaica before moving to Italy following the mid-seventh-century Arab conquest of North Africa. For the Medieval period, the Crusades and the evidence for trade and contacts between England and the Mediterranean/Spain have been suggested as obvious potential reasons for the presence of people from Africa here then, whilst the Late Bronze Age to Middle Iron Age evidence from Thanet can perhaps be seen in the context of both the well-evidenced Bronze Age trading along the Atlantic coast between the Mediterranean, Iberia, Britain and Scandinavia, and the increasing body of linguistic, numismatic and archaeological evidence for Mediterranean/Punic contacts with Britain during the Iron Age.

Of course, whilst the above isotopic evidence is certainly intriguing, there are undoubtedly pitfalls to be aware of. On the one hand, we need to be wary of overestimating the proportion of any North African migrants in pre-modern Britain using isotopic evidence. For example, sites are sometimes chosen for isotopic analysis because they look potentially 'interesting', as was arguably the case with the cemeteries at York, Winchester and Thanet, and such a situation might well lead to a greater proportion of positive 'hits' in any corpus aiming to look for potential evidence of long-distance migration. Similarly, it is not totally impossible that a few of the people with the more marginal results discussed here could just have had their origins in a small area of southernmost Iberia rather than North Africa, although the bar for inclusion in the present corpus was set at such a level as to hopefully significantly reduce the possibility of this, and a substantial proportion of the results included here are, moreover, well above any plausible southern Iberian range.(3) On the other hand, the corpus could well underestimate both the number of individuals who may have had their origins in North Africa and their chronological spread. So, for example, whilst over 900 results were surveyed here, we still end up with a situation whereby none of the individuals with elevated values date from the Late Saxon/Anglo-Scandinavian period (later ninth to eleventh centuries). Taking this as a reflection of a lack of people from Africa in Britain at that time would, however, be a mistake: not only do we have good textual evidence for the presence of such people in the British Isles, but there are three burials of people of African descent known from tenth- and eleventh-century Gloucestershire and East Anglia—the problem is simply that none of them have been subjected to isotopic analysis and so they haven't been included here. Likewise, there are at least four burials of people who appear to be of African descent in the medieval cemetery at Ipswich, but only one has been isotopically tested (interestingly, five of the post-medieval/sixteenth-century burials there also appear to be those of people of African descent). Finally, by adopting a fairly high bar to inclusion in the corpus so as to avoid—as much as possible—the risk of 'false positives', we actually end up excluding a significant number of individuals who are generally accepted as being of African origin. So, only three members of a group of thirteen burials from Lankhills (Winchester) have results high enough to be included in the current corpus, despite the fact that all thirteen are considered to form a sub-group that is probably of African origin within the cemetery. All told, therefore, it might well be wondered whether the above tendencies to both overestimate and underestimate don't, in fact, cancel each other out.

North African unguentaria found in a grave from the Late Roman cemetery at Lankhills, Winchester, that is part of the sub-group with elevated oxygen isotope results mentioned above, but which has values just a little below the cut-off for inclusion in the corpus used in this post (image: Oxford Archaeology, reused under their CC BY-SA 3.0 license).

Notes

1     This corpus is based primarily upon J. A. Evans, C. A. Chenery & J. Montgomery, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, 27 (2012), 754–64 and 'Supplementary Material I' (14 pp.), to which have been added studies published after that paper or missing from it, using a Google Scholar search to catch any publications that weren't already known. Note, the periods assigned to the results taken from Evans et al, 'Supplementary Material I', have been checked and revised by me for this corpus, as they were occasionally idiosyncratic: 'Roman' is here used as a catch-all term for results from the first to early fifth centuries AD, 'Early Medieval' for those results from the period between the early fifth and late eleventh centuries AD, and 'Medieval' for those from the twelfth through to the fifteenth centuries. The additional studies used in creating this corpus are as follows, arranged by date of publication: S. Lucy et al, 'The burial of a princess? The later seventh-­century cemetery at Westfield Farm, Ely', Antiquity, 89 (2009), 81–141; J. Montgomery, 'Isotope analysis of bone collagen and tooth enamel', in C. Lowe (ed.), The P.R. Ritchie Excavations at Whithorn Priory, 1957–67: Medieval Bishops' Graves and Other Discoveries (Edinburgh, 2010), pp. 65–82; A. M. Pollard et al, '"Sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat": The St Brice's Day Massacre and the isotopic analysis of human bones from St John's College, Oxford', Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 31 (2012), 83–102; S. E. Groves et al, 'Mobility histories of 7th–9th century AD people buried at early medieval Bamburgh, Northumberland, England', American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 151 (2013), 462–76; K. A. Hemer et al, 'Evidence of early medieval trade and migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea region', Journal of Archaeological Science, 40 (2013), 2352–59; M. Jay et al, 'British Iron Age burials of the Arras culture: a multi-isotope approach to investigating mobility levels and subsistence practices', World Archaeology, 45 (2013), 473–91; E. Kendall et al, 'Mobility, mortality, and the middle ages: identification of migrant individuals in a 14th century black death cemetery population', American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 150 (2013), 210–22; C. A. Roberts et al, 'Isotopic tracing of the impact of mobility on infectious disease: the origin of people with treponematosis buried in Hull, England, in the Late Medieval period', American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 150 (2013), 273–85; K. A. Hemer et al, 'No Man is an island: evidence of pre-Viking Age migration to the Isle of Man'. Journal of Archaeological Science, 52 (2014), 242–9; J. I. McKinley et al, Cliffs End Farm, Isle of Thanet, Kent. A Mortuary and Ritual Site of the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon Period with Evidence for Long-Distance Maritime Mobility (Salisbury, 2014); J. Montgomery et al, 'Finding Vikings with isotope analysis: the view from wet and windy islands', Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 7 (2014), 54–70; H. Eckardt et al, 'The Late Roman field army in northern Britain? Mobility, material culture and multi-isotope analysis at Scorton (N. Yorks)', Britannia, 46 (2015), 191–223; S. A. Inskip et al, 'Osteological, biomolecular and geochemical examination of an early Anglo-Saxon case of lepromatous leprosy', PLoS ONE, 10.5 (2015), pp. 1–22, online at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124282. I also include 'Ipswich Man' in the corpus, a man of African descent who was buried in the thirteenth century in Ipswich, as he was isotopically investigated and consequently determined to probably have his origins in North Africa, although the results are still as yet unpublished: BBC, History Cold Case: Series 1, Episode 1—Ipswich Man (broadcast 27 July 2010); 'Medieval African found buried in England', Discovery News, 11 February 2013, online at http://news.discovery.com/history/medieval-african-england.htm; K. Wade, Ipswich Archive Summaries: Franciscan Way, IAS 5003 (2014), online at http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/ipswich_5003_2015/downloads.cfm; and Xanthé Mallett, pers. comm..
2     The following footnote outlines the methodology adopted here. The conventional upper cut-off for phosphate oxygen isotope values for people who grew up in the British Isles is 18.6‰ δ¹⁸O_p, although it has been suggested that people brought up on the far western margins of Britain and Ireland—where drinking-water oxygen isotope values are at their highest, between -5.0‰ and -4.5‰ δ¹⁸O_dw (see map)—could theoretically have values up to 19.2‰ δ¹⁸O_p (see K. A. Hemer et al, 'Evidence of early medieval trade and migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea region', Journal of Archaeological Science, 40 (2013), 2352–59; C. Chenery et al, 'Strontium and stable isotope evidence for diet and mobility in Roman Gloucester, UK', Journal of Archaeological Science, 37 (2010), 150–63; and especially J. A. Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain', Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, 27 (2012), 754–64). As such, and in order to avoid as much doubt as possible, I decided only to look at people with tooth enamel phosphate oxygen isotope results of 19.2‰+ for this post. This reflects, across the entire resulting corpus, the childhood consumption of drinking-water with values from -3.5‰ δ¹⁸O_dw up to +1.3‰ δ¹⁸O_dw on the 2010 revised Levinson equation or -4.0‰ δ¹⁸O_dw to -0.2‰ δ¹⁸O_dw on the 2008 Daux et al equation—needless to say, whichever equation is used, these values are notably higher than the maximum British drinking-water value of c. -4.5‰ δ¹⁸O_dw (found only in a few spots in the far west of the Outer Hebrides and Cornwall), but in line with results from North Africa, whilst the highest of the recorded results in the corpus can only be matched in the Nile Valley, as was discussed in a previous post. Indeed, over 50% of the individuals studied in this post have results of at least 19.5‰ δ¹⁸O_p, equivalent to a drinking-water value of -2.8‰ δ¹⁸O_dw (-3.5‰ δ¹⁸O_dw) or more, significantly above any credible British range and only really paralleled in some areas of North Africa. Moreover, it is worth noting from the map attached to this post that none of the individuals who are included in the study corpus were actually found in the areas with the highest drinking-water values in Britain, removing any lingering potential doubt as to their non-local origin. In fact, only a single individual of the 33 discussed here was found in an area with a local drinking-water value below -6.0‰ δ¹⁸O_dw, whilst the vast majority (79%) come from areas where drinking water values are between -7.0‰ and -8.5‰. As such, not only do they largely come from areas where the theoretical maximum for tooth enamel phosphate oxygen isotope values is closer to c. 18.5‰, according to Evans et al (2012, p. 759), not 19.2‰, but their results actually reflect the childhood consumption of water with values at least 3.0‰ higher than the local level right up to potentially as much as 8.4‰ higher (at the Cliffs End, Thanet, site)—in all cases, this is significantly above any plausible variations around the local range and is massively so in the case of many results. Finally, it is worth noting that the adoption of this relatively conservative approach may mean that the number of individuals of in Britain who grew up in North Africa is underestimated, rather than overestimated. For example, even a small drop of the bar to include all those with results of 19.0‰ δ¹⁸O_p or above more more than doubles the number to be taken into the current corpus from our main source (the 2012 Evans et al corpus), and it is worth noting that many of the people with results at this level are indeed usually accepted as being probable migrants from North Africa, as are a significant number of people with slightly lower results too (see, for example, Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation', pp. 760–2; K. A. Hemer et al, 'Evidence of early medieval trade and migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea region'; and the discussion in a previous post, 'Some oxygen isotope evidence for long-distance migration to Britain from North Africa & southern Iberia, c.1100 BC–AD 800', 24 October 2015, blog post, online at http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/10/oxygen-isotope-evidence.html). Nonetheless, it was felt worthwhile to set the bar higher in the present study in order to minimize as fully as possible the risk of false positives, and also to avoid as much as possible increasing the chance of some of the people studied here could have their origins in the one other area of Europe with very high drinking-water oxygen isotope values, southernmost Iberia, see note 3.
3     The map included in Evans et al, 'A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation', p. 761, indicates that the only part of Europe other than Britain with water oxygen isotope values above -5.0‰ is a small area of the south-eastern Iberian peninsula. L. J. Araguas-Araguas & M. F. Diaz Teijeiro, 'Isotope composition of precipitation and water vapour in the Iberian Peninsula', in IAEA, Isotopic composition of precipitation in the Mediterranean Basin in relation to air circulation patterns and climate (Vienna, 2005), pp. 173–90 at p. 178, state that values in this area range down to -4.3‰ δ¹⁸O, which is slightly enriched over the upper end of the British range (c. -4.5‰ δ¹⁸O); they also indicate that similar values above -5.0‰ δ¹⁸O are found in limited areas of the south-western coast of Iberia too, contrary to Evans et al, with groundwater results of c. 4.0‰ or even slightly higher reported from a very small zone around Cádiz (Araguas-Araguas & Diaz Teijeiro, fig. 3 at p. 180). In consequence, the bar for consideration in the present post was set relatively high to reduce the chance of including people from southernmost Iberia in the corpus—as was mentioned in note 2, above, only people with tooth enamel phosphate oxygen isotope results of 19.2‰+ were considered here, which on the 2010 revised Levinson equation (as used in K. A. Hemer et al, 'Evidence of early medieval trade and migration between Wales and the Mediterranean Sea region', Journal of Archaeological Science, 40 (2013), 2352–59, and other recent studies) equates to the consumption of drinking-water with values of -3.5‰ δ¹⁸O or above, with the majority of the results included here moreover reflecting the consumption of drinking-water with even higher values than this, ranging from -2.8‰ δ¹⁸O right up to +1.3‰ δ¹⁸O, well above the southern Iberian range.

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