The existence of early medieval Christian and secular centres in the Hayle Estuary, Cornwall, was mentioned in a previous post. The aim of the following post is simply to share—for the sake of interest—a number of pictures of some of the key sites and finds from this area, not least the important late fourth-/fifth-century chi-rho stone now built into Phillack Church, along with a brief discussion of the Late and post-Roman archaeological evidence from here.

St Ives Bay and the Hayle Estuary on Christopher Saxton's 1576 map of Cornwall, showing Phillack, Lelant, St Ives and Gwithian (image: PD via the BSJW Trust).

A topographic map of the Hayle Estuary overlaid on top of the satellite image of the area. Marked on the map are Phillack church, Carnsew fort, Lelant church, and the early chapel and fourth-/fifth-century burial site just to the north-east of Lelant church, marked here by a simple cross. The coastal zone, estuary and low-lying land is shown in blue, with the surrounding higher land shown in green, yellow, orange and purple, in order of increasing height; note, with regard to the early extent of the East Pool of the estuary before the modern era, the British Geological Survey map of this area accords relatively well with this topographic map, showing Holocene tidal flat (estuarine) deposits extending eastwards beyond the current limit of the estuary across to approximately the A30 Loggans Moor Roundabout. Click here for a larger version of this map (image: C. R. Green, based on a topographic map from topographic-map.com that incorporates satellite imagery © 2018 Google, TerraMetrics, Data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO, and map data © 2018 Google, used in accordance with their attribution guidelines).

The Hayle Estuary is one of the few natural safe landing-ports of any size on the north coast of Cornwall and, as such, it is perhaps unsurprising that there should be evidence for activity here during the Roman and early medieval eras. In this light, the evidence from Phillack (or Egloshayle), which overlooks the East Pool of the Hayle Estuary may be of particular interest. A significant quantity of mainly Late Roman coins have been discovered from a number of sites in Phillack in recent years, with this regionally unusual concentration of Late Roman non-hoarded coinage including coins from eastern Mediterranean mints such as Alexandria and Heraclea that are rarely represented amongst site-finds in Britain.(1) Needless to say, such finds have attracted attention, being both supportive of the idea that the Hayle Estuary might have functioned as a Roman-era landing-port and also of there having potentially been a direct maritime trading link between Cornwall and the Mediterranean in the fourth century AD. Any such trading links between the north coast of Cornwall and Mediterranean would obviously prefigure the well-known post-Roman trading links between these areas, which are primarily evidenced by extensive finds of fifth- to sixth-century eastern Mediterranean imported pottery in the county (as discussed in a number of previous posts), and, as such, are of considerable interest, with the coins found at Phillack thus perhaps reflecting items lost or exchanged by seaborne long-distance traders who landed in the Hayle Estuary after following similar trade-routes to those in use in the following centuries.(2)

Two fourth-century AD Roman coins minted in the eastern Mediterranean and found on two different sites at Phillack. The top coin is a copper alloy nummus of Constantine I, mint of Heraclea, c. AD 330–3; the bottom coin is a copper alloy nummus of Constantius II, mint of Alexandria, c. AD 340. Click here for a larger version of these coins (images: PAS, CORN-367F46 and CORN-6D9753).

Phillack church; the church here was extensively rebuilt in the nineteenth century, but contains an unusual amount of physical evidence for post-Roman/early medieval activity. Click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Moving into the fifth and sixth centuries, there is good evidence for Phillack and the Hayle Estuary continuing to be a site of some significance. First and foremost, links with the eastern Mediterranean are indicated by the discovery at Phillack of a rim-sherd of late fifth- or early sixth-century Phocaean Red Slip-Ware from what is now western Turkey associated with a number of pre-Norman long-cist graves, some of which were cut into the underlying bedrock, during a limited excavation of the edge of the churchyard due to road-widening work in 1973.(3) Second, an important and very early chi-rho stone was found in the church walls during nineteenth century rebuilding work and was subsequently incorporated into the gable of the south porch. Charles Thomas has argued that this stone almost certainly dates from the early to mid-fifth century AD and the stone has subsequently been compared to early chi-rhos from the continent and eastern Mediterranean, which is intriguing given the above finds from Phillack and the potential Early Byzantine origins of St Ia, the patron saint of nearby St Ives.(4)

Other evidence and finds from Phillack develop this picture further. For example, a probably late sixth- or early seventh-century memorial stone inscribed with the name CLOTUALI MOBRATTI still stands in the churchyard and the church also seems to have been the focus for more than a hundred early cist burials, found both within the current churchyard and in its immediate vicinity, whilst Phillack's original patron saint Felec is named in a tenth-century list of Cornish saints, suggesting an early origin and significance. Taken together, this concentration of early medieval evidence has been considered indicative of Phillack probably being a significant and very early Christian centre and burial site from the fifth century onwards, potentially one that was monastic in character and comparable with early Welsh monasteries such as Llandough, and Charles Thomas moreover raises the possibility that Christianity may have been introduced to here via the sea from Gaul or even further afield.(5)

A probably fifth-century AD small chi-rho stone from the porch gable of the church at Phillack, or Egloshayle, photographed with raking evening light to show up the surface detail. This chi-rho which has been compared to early chi-rhos from the continent and eastern Mediterranean, e.g. S. M. Pearce, South-Western Britain in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester, 2004), p. 244, and C. Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain (Cardiff 1994), pp. 199–200. Click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

A close-up view of the fifth-century Chi-Rho stone from Phillack; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Left: drawing of the Phillack chi-rho stone (photo: C. R. Green, from an original drawing by Charles Thomas in the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro). Right: drawing of the other early chi-rho stone found in Cornwall, from St Helen's Chapel, Cape Cornwall, near St Just; the original was taken to St Just church where it was displayed for a while, until it was apparently thrown down a well in the Rectory garden in the nineteenth century by a Rector who objected to it as being 'Roman Catholic' (image: Langdon 1893, plate I, Internet Archive). Click here for a larger version of this combined image.

A perhaps late sixth- or seventh-century memorial stone inscribed with the name CLOTUALI MOBRATTI in the churchyard at Phillack, and a slightly modified drawing of the lettering from R. A. S. Macalister, Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum (Dublin, 1945), vol. 1 (images: C. R. Green & Macalister 1945).

In addition to the finds from Phillack above the East Pool, there are also a number of interesting features around the Carnsew Pool, to the south of the mouth of the Hayle Estuary. This is the location for Carnsew Hillfort, a small coastal multivallate hillfort that commands the entrance to the Hayle Estuary and sits atop a low cliff around 15 metres high. The hillfort—which has been partially destroyed by ploughing, a deep railway cutting, and the construction of an ornamental park along its ramparts in 1845 ('The Plantation')—dates originally from the Iron Age, but there are indications of potential later activity. One of these is a Late Roman hoard of several thousand coins apparently deposited in the late third century in a bronze container; this was found a little to the west of the hillfort in 1825, when workmen were taking away the upper part of the cliff and the adjoining field during the construction of the Hayle causeway. Even more interesting is a late fifth- or very early sixth-century AD burial and associated inscribed memorial stone that originally stood at the foot of the hillfort on its eastern side. The stone pillar found by the grave in 1843 contains an unusually long Latin inscription running to ten lines which has been read as follows: 'Here in peace lately went to rest Cunaide. Here in the grave she lies. She lived 33 years.'(6) In light of this, it has been suggested that Carnsew Hillfort may well have had a role to play in our period, perhaps as a secondary centre of secular power within the post-Roman kingdom of Dumnonia, complementing an ecclesiastical centre at Phillack, with such a centre potentially being responsible for the distribution of Mediterranean imports within western Cornwall.(7)

Carnsew Hillfort, Hayle; the photo shows the north-east corner of this multivallate coastal hillfort, which was somewhat landscaped in the nineteenth century to become 'The Plantation'. Click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

The view from Carnsew Hillfort, which commands the entrance to the Hayle Estuary and sits atop a low cliff around 15 metres high. Click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Left: photograph of the late fifth- or very early sixth-century Cunaide Stone; this originally stood at the foot of the hillfort by a grave, but was set into a wall of The Plantation (a Victorian park created from the landscaped ramparts of Carnsew Hillfort) after its rediscovery in 1843 and was subsequently removed to Hayle Heritage Centre in December 2017. Right: drawing of the lettering on the stone from R. A. S. Macalister, Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum (Dublin, 1945), vol. 1; note, Charles Thomas reads the inscription differently to Macalister: HIC PACE NVP(er) REQVIEVIT CVNAIDE HIC (IN) TVMVLO IACIT VIXIT ANNOS XXXIII, 'Here in peace lately went to rest Cunaide. Here in the grave she lies. She lived 33 years.' (Photograph and image: CISP& Macalister 1945).

A number of coins from a Late Roman hoard deposited in the late third century in a bronze container on the edge of the Hayle Estuary; it was found a little to the west of Carnsew Hillfort in 1825, when workmen were taking away the upper part of the cliff and the adjoining field during the construction of the Hayle causeway. Click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Phillack Church seen from Carnsew Hillfort, Hayle, with the sand dunes of The Towans behind. Click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

If there were arguably Late/post-Roman centres within the Hayle Estuary at Phillack and Carnsew, it is worth noting that they didn't stand alone. For example, on the western side of the entrance to the estuary at Lelant there is a probably fourth- or fifth-century AD burial site and an apparently early chapel located close to the cliff edge that was uncovered during the laying of the railway to St Ives in the late nineteenth century, and it has moreover been suggested that the churchyard within which Lelant parish church now sits may preserve the rectangular platform of a Roman fort that was well placed to control access to the estuary.(8) Likewise of potential interest is the Neolithic tor enclosure and Iron Age multivallate hillfort of Trencrom Hill, which is located 1.5 miles to the west of the Hayle Estuary. This impressive site not only overlooks both the Hayle Estuary and Carnsew Hillfort, but also has good views across St Ives Bay—whose skyline it dominates—to the north and Mount's Bay/St Michael's Mount on the south coast. Although the site is unexcavated, an early medieval inscribed memorial stone has been identified in a stile at the foot of the hill and there are reports of early medieval grass-marked wares having been found on the fort, which might offer a degree of support for Charles Thomas's suggestion of some sort of role for Trencrom Hill in the post-Roman era.(9)

Lelant Church and churchyard as seen from Carnsew Hillfort, Hayle, showing the intervisibility of the two sites; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

A closer view of Lelant's rectangular churchyard which sits around 1.5 metres above the surrounding ground; it has been suggested that the churchyard may preserve the rectangular platform of a Roman fort that was well placed to control access to the estuary. Click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

View of the entrance to the Hayle Estuary from the north-east corner of Lelant churchyard; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Trencrom Hill as seen above the Hayle Estuary near to Carnsew Hillfort; the hillfort dominates the western skyline both from the estuary and from St Ives Bay. Click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

A view of St Ives Bay and the entrance to the Hayle Estuary from Trencrom Hill; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

St Michael's Mount and Mount's Bay on the south coast of Cornwall as seen from Trencrom Hill; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Notes

1.     R. D. Penhallurick, Ancient and Early Medieval Coins from Cornwall & Scilly, Royal Numismatic Society Special Publication 45 (London, 2009), pp. 183–90; M. Allen, P. De Jersey & S. Moorhead, 'Coin Register 2007', British Numismatic Journal, 77 (2007), p. 316; A. Tyacke, 'The work of the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Cornwall', Cornish Archaeology, 50 (2011), pp. 71–6 at pp. 74–5; Portable Antiquities Scheme database, e.g. CORN-6D9753, a copper alloy nummus of Constantius II, mint of Alexandria, c. AD 340, and CORN-367F46, a copper alloy nummus of Constantine I, mint of Heraclea, c. AD 330–33.
2.     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 at pp. 264 (n. 4) & 266; I. Tompsett, Social Dynamics in South-West England AD 350–1150: An Exploration of Maritime Oriented Identity in the Atlantic Approaches and Western Channel Region (University of Nottingham PhD Thesis, 2012), pp. 377, 423–4; S. Moorhead, 'A group of fourth-century Roman coins from Phillack Towans, Cornwall', Portable Antiquities Scheme Annual Report 2005/06 (London, 2006), pp. 56–7; S. Moorhead, 'Curator's report: site scatter of 35 Roman coins', Portable Antiquities Scheme entry IOW-85AAB2.
3.     C. Thomas, Phillack Church (Gwithian, 1990), pp. 24–5; C. Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain (Cardiff, 1994), pp. 197–8; C. Thomas, A Provisional List of Imported Pottery in Post-Roman Western Britain and Ireland, Institute of Cornish Studies Special Report No. 7 (Redruth, 1981), p. 6; C. Thomas, 'The context of Tintagel: a new model for the diffusion of post-Roman Mediterranean imports', Cornish Archaeology, 27 (1988), 7–25 at p. 22.
4.     C. Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain (Cardiff, 1994), pp. 198–200; S. M. Pearce, South-Western Britain in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester, 2004), pp. 12, 149–51, 244; E. Okasha, Corpus of Early Christian Inscribed Stones of South-west Britain (Leicester, 2003), pp. 205–07.
5.     C. Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain (Cardiff, 1994), pp. 197–8, 206, 284–6; S. Turner, 'Making a Christian landscape: early medieval Cornwall', in M. Carver (ed.), The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, 300–1300 (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 171–94 at pp. 175–6, 178; S. Turner, Making a Christian Landscape: How Christianity Shaped the Countryside in Early-Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex (Exeter, 2006), pp. 35–6; I. Tompsett, Social Dynamics in South-West England AD 350–1150: An Exploration of Maritime Oriented Identity in the Atlantic Approaches and Western Channel Region (University of Nottingham PhD Thesis, 2012), pp. 39, 132–3, 138, 377–81; C. Thomas, Phillack Church (Gwithian, 1990), pp. 9–10, 25.
6.     For Carnsew Hillfort, see Historic England, 'Small multivallate hillfort, early Christian memorial stone and C19 landscaped paths at Carnsew', List entry no. 1006720. Details of the Roman coin hoard found just to the west are in R. D. Penhallurick, Ancient and Early Medieval Coins from Cornwall & Scilly, Royal Numismatic Society Special Publication 45 (London, 2009), pp. 50–1. For the probably fifth-century burial at Carnsew, see the extensive discussion in C. Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain (Cardiff, 1994), pp. 190–4, translation of the inscription from Carnsew at p. 193.
7.     On Carnsew as a potential important secondary centre of power within the Dumnonian kingdom, see C. Thomas, 'The context of Tintagel. A new model for the diffusion of post-Roman Mediterranean imports', Cornish Archaeology, 27 (1988), 7–25, especially p. 16 and fig. 3 (p. 17); C. Thomas, Tintagel: Arthur and Archaeology (London, 1993), pp. 95–6; C. Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain (Cardiff, 1994), pp. 193–5.
8.     For the fourth-/fifth-century burial site and early chapel at Lelant, see I. Tompsett, Social Dynamics in South-West England AD 350–1150: An Exploration of Maritime Oriented Identity in the Atlantic Approaches and Western Channel Region (University of Nottingham PhD Thesis, 2012), pp. 134 (fig. 45), 375 (fig. 201), and 379–81; C. Noall, 'Nineteenth-Century discoveries at Lelant', Cornish Archaeology, 3 (1964), 34–6; Cornwall & Scilly Historic Environment Record no. 31061; C. Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain (Cardiff 1994), p. 198, fig. 12.1. For the possible Roman origins of the current Lelant graveyard, see N. Cahill, Hayle Historical Assessment, Cornwall: Main Report (Truro, 2000), p. 21; Cornwall & Scilly Historic Environment Record no. 140942; P. Herring et al, 'Early medieval Cornwall', Cornish Archaeology, 50 (2011), 263–86 at pp. 269–70.
9.     For the suggestion that Trencrom Hill may have had a significant role in post-Roman western Cornwall, see C. Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain (Cardiff 1994), p. 194; for the early medieval inscribed stone, see Cornwall & Scilly Historic Environment Record no. 31051 and Celtic Inscribed Stones Project TCROM/1, online at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/cisp/database/stone/tcrom_1.html; for the report of early medieval grass-marked pottery from Trencrom Hill, see C. Thomas, 'Evidence for post-Roman occupation of Chun Castle, Cornwall', Antiquaries Journal, 36 (1956), 75–8 at p. 78.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2018, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The aim of the following post is to briefly discuss another global distribution from Late Antiquity, this time of Indo-Pacific beads. Indo-Pacific beads were made in southern India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia from the third century BC onwards, and by c. 400 to 700 AD they have an impressive distribution stretching from northern and eastern Africa across to China, Korea and Japan, with recent research demonstrating that they were exported to Europe at this time too.

Distribution of Indo-Pacific beads and Jatim beads during Late Antiquity, c.AD 400 to c.700, showing both findspots (dots) and production sites (stars) thought to be active during finds of the fifth to seventh centuries; Indo-Pacific beads are shown in orange and Jatim beads in red, with the latter included here for interest due to the fact that an example has been recovered from the Byzantine Red Sea port of Berenike alongside a sizeable quantity of Indo-Pacific. For a larger version of this map, click here. Note, the map is based on the sources listed in fn. 1 and is not exhaustive; rather, it is intended to offer an impression of the wide distribution of these beads across Eurasia and Africa in this era based on published discussions. Likewise, findspots of Jatim beads are very general for some territories and are only be plotted at a country/region level in these cases. Image: C. R. Green.

Previous posts on this site have discussed fifth- to seventh-century AD global distributions of Early Byzantine and Late Sasanian objects stretching across Eurasia and Africa. The following piece looks at an additional global distribution from Late Antiquity, this time of tiny glass beads produced in southern India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, which are recognizable both morphologically/typologically and by chemical analysis due to their use of Southern Asian high aluminous soda glass. These Indo-Pacific monochrome drawn beads were first produced in the third century BC and continued to be made through until the early twenty-first century in India, but they seem to have reached their widest pre-modern distribution from the late fourth century through to the seventh century.(1) For example, over 150,000 of these beads were discovered during excavations of the Yongningsi Temple site in the Northern Wei capital of Luoyang, China, founded by the Empress Wu in AD 516 and destroyed by lightning in 534.(2) Similarly, thousands of these beads have been recovered from fifth- to seventh-century Silla and Kofun tombs in Korea and Japan, and significant numbers have also been found on a number of sites in Africa—indeed, 51% of the beads discovered from the Late Roman/Early Byzantine Red Sea port of Berenike, Egypt, are Indo-Pacific beads, with finds from this site also including a probably sixth-century Jatim bead made on the Indonesian island of Java, and such beads are also found as far afield as sixth- to seventh-century Zanzibar (Tanzania) and the Late Garamantian kingdom in the Fazzan area of the Libyan Sahara.(3)

In this light, recent work by Constantin Pion and Bernard Gratuze is of particular interest as it extends this Late Antique distribution of Indo-Pacific beads even further, into the far west of Eurasia. They have demonstrated that thousands of these tiny beads were imported into continental Europe during the fifth and sixth centuries, being found on 44 sites stretching from Spain across to Serbia, with one cemetery in France (Saint-Laurent-des-Hommes, Dordogne) containing as many as 3,037 of these Indo-Pacific beads.(4) Pion and Gratuze date the graves containing these beads primarily to the period from the mid-fifth to later sixth centuries and note that these are the smallest of the glass beads that appear in early medieval European cemeteries, being predominantly c. 2.5mm or smaller in diameter and green in colour. In 75% of the graves where the deposition context is clear, these tiny imported beads were used within necklaces, whilst in 25% of graves they were used to decorate the embroidery of textiles, notably headresses of silk, and it is possible that they arrived in Europe already attached to such textiles as well as on their own (the latter witnessed by the discovery of uniform strings of these beads at the Byzantine Red Sea port of Berenike).

Indo-Pacific beads discovered in the Roman/Early Byzantine cemetery at Qau, Egypt, similar to those discovered in fifth- to sixth-century Europe, from bead assemblage UC74134 (image: Petrie Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

As to the context of these imports from India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, it should be remembered that they do not stand alone as Red Sea and Indian Ocean products traded through to western Europe in the fifth to seventh centuries AD. Perhaps the most obvious of these other imports were the garnets used in the polychrome gold jewellery of this period that is found widely distributed across Europe, notable examples including the garnet cloisonné items discovered in the late fifth-century burial of Childeric (at Tournai, Belgium) and the probably mid- to late sixth-century shoulder clasps from the early seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship-burial (Suffolk, England); these garnets have been shown via archaeometric data to have had their origins in India and Sri Lanka.(5) Likewise, the cowrie shells that were popular all across early medieval northern Europe and Anglo-Saxon England as amulets and elements within necklaces are believed to have their origins either in the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean, whilst recent studies of the large number of ivory rings found both in fifth- to seventh-century England and on the continent indicate that they came from the tusks of African savannah elephants, probably obtained via the Red Sea from the east coast of Africa.(6) Lastly, it is likely that a number of other gemstones in use in Europe during this period, such as sapphires and perhaps amethysts, were definitely or possibly ultimately obtained from India/Sri Lanka, as were most certainly the spices such as pepper that are recorded in impressive quantities in Europe during this period and after: for example, the mid-seventh-century Merovingian king Chlothar III granted an annual rent of 30 pounds of pepper (grown in India) to the monastery of Corbie in northern France, along with sizeable amounts of other spices including cinnamon (from Sri Lanka) and cloves (from Indonesia).(7)

Finally, in addition to such Indo-Pacific beads, the map included at the start of this post also shows the distribution of Jatim beads made in East Java, Indonesia, and these deserve a brief concluding comment too. Such beads were produced from the end of the fourth century AD through until perhaps the seventh century, and have a fairly extensive distribution in Southeast Asia and across to Korea and Japan, where—like Indo-Pacific beads—they are found in Silla Kingdom and Kofun period tombs. Although no examples of these beads are (yet) known from sites in Europe, at least some definitely made their way to the fifth-/sixth-century Byzantine Empire, as an example was found at the Byzantine Red Sea port of Berenike, Egypt, in 1999. This is, in itself, fascinating and worthy of note. However, what is particularly interesting about these beads is that they also help illustrate trade in the opposite direction too, as recent compositional analysis indicates that both Early Byzantine and Sasanian Persian glass was used to produce some of these beads in East Java!(8)

The distribution of possible Red Sea and Indian Ocean imports in fifth- to seventh-century Britain; click here for a larger version of this map. Finds of garnet are indicated by diamonds, cowries by dots, ivory rings by open squares, and amethysts by stars (image: C. R. Green).

The stunning gold, garnet and millefiori glass shoulder-clasps from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, using garnets imported from India or Sri Lanka; although they were deposited in the early seventh-century, Noël Adams has concluded that they were probably made in the mid- to late sixth century, see N. Adams, 'Rethinking the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps and armour', in C. Entwistle & N. Adams (eds.), Intelligible Beauty: Recent Research on Byzantine Jewellery (London, 2010), pp. 83–112 (image: British Museum).

A probable elephant ivory ring from an early Anglo-Saxon bag, found at Ruskington, Lincolnshire; such rings from early Anglo-Saxon burials have been to shown to be cut from the base of tusk of an African savannah elephant (image: C. R. Green).

A cowrie shell from the Red Sea or Indian Ocean found in an Anglo-Saxon grave in Lincolnshire (image: PAS).

The fifth- or sixth-century AD Escrick Ring, found in Yorkshire, set with a central cabochon sapphire gem from Sri Lanka (image: Yorkshire Museums Trust, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notes

1.     The distribution map of Indo-Pacific and Jatim beads and production sites in the fifth to seventh centuries AD included here is based on a number of sources including C. Pion & B. Gratuze, 'Indo-Pacific glass beads from the Indian subcontinent in Early Merovingian graves (5th–6th century AD)', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 51–64; A. K. Carter, 'The Production and Exchange of Glass and Stone Beads in Southeast Asia from 500 BCE to the early second millennium CE: an assessment of the work of Peter Francis in light of recent research', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 16–29; S. A. Abraham, 'Glass beads and glass production in early South India: contextualizing Indo-Pacific bead manufacture', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 4–15; J. W. Lankton, L. Dussubieux & T. Rehren, 'A Study of Mid-first Millennium CE Southeast Asian Specialized Glass Beadmaking Traditions', in E. Bacus, I. Glover & P. Sharrock (eds.), Interpreting Southeast Asia’s Past: Monument, Image and Text (Singapore, 2008), pp. 335–56; K-W. Wang, Cultural and Socio-Economic Interaction Reflected by Glass Beads in Early Iron Age Taiwan (University of Sheffield PhD Thesis, 2016); J. Then-Obluska, 'Cross-cultural bead encounters at the Red Sea port site of Berenike, Egypt: preliminary assessment (seasons 2009–2012)', Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean, 24 (2015), 735–77; M. Wood, 'Glass beads from pre-European contact sub-Saharan Africa: Peter Francis's work revisited and updated', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 65–80; M. Wood et al, 'Zanzibar and Indian Ocean trade in the first millennium CE: the glass bead evidence', Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 9 (2017), 879–901; V. Leitch et al, 'Early Saharan trade: the inorganic evidence', in D. J. Mattingly et al (eds.), Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 287–340; A. K. Carter, S. A. Abraham & G. O. Kelly (eds.), Asia's Maritime Bead Trade, special issue of Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), pp. 1–104; P. Frances, Asia's Maritime Bead Trade: 300 B.C. to the Present (Honolulu, 2002); A. K. Carter, 'Beads, exchange networks and emerging complexity: a case study from Cambodia and Thailand (500 BCE–CE 500)', Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 25 (2015), 733–57;A. Jiayao, 'Glass beads found at the Yongningsi Temple', Journal of Glass Studies, 42 (2000), 81–4; J. W. Lankton, I-S. Lee & J. D. Allen, 'Javanese (Jatim) beads in late fifth to early sixth-century Korean (Silla) tombs', in Annales du 16e Congrès de l'Association Internationale pour l'Histoire du Verre (Nottingham, 2005), pp. 327–30; T. Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 38, 41, 45; S. Lee & D. P. Leidy, Silla: Korea's Golden Kingdom (New York, 2013), pp. 115–9; I. Nakai & J. Shirataki, 'Chemical Composition of Glass Beads Excavated from Kofun (ca. AD 2nd to 7th c.) in Western Japan by Portable XRF Showing Glass Trade among Asian Countries', in F. Gan et al (eds.), Recent Advances In The Scientific Research On Ancient Glass And Glaze (Hackensack, 2016), pp. 73–94; and K. Oga & T. Tomomi, 'Ancient Japan and the Indian Ocean interaction sphere: chemical compositions, chronologies and trade routes of imported glass beads in the Yayoi-Kofun periods (3rd century BCE – 7th century CE', Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology, 9 (2013), 35–65. Unfortunately, no cemeteries in England were examined as part of Pion & Gratuze's research into early medieval European Indo-European beads; however, it seems more than credible that these beads were also imported to early Anglo-Saxon England too given both that other exotic imports of the period are indeed found on both sides of the English Channel and that some of the beads recorded from fifth- to sixth-century graves in eastern England appear to be similar to their continental examples. Consequently, one such site is plotted here to reflect this; my thanks are due to Dr Sue Brunning, the curator of the European Early Medieval Collections at the British Museum, and to Dr Rose Broadley, archaeological glass specialist and Kent Historic Environment Record officer, for sharing photographs and thoughts on some of these beads from early Anglo-Saxon Kent.
2.     A. Jiayao, 'Glass beads found at the Yongningsi Temple', Journal of Glass Studies, 42 (2000), 81–4.
3.     For Korea and Japan, see S. Lee & D. P. Leidy, Silla: Korea's Golden Kingdom (New York, 2013), pp. 115–9; I. Nakai & J. Shirataki, 'Chemical Composition of Glass Beads Excavated from Kofun (ca. AD 2nd to 7th c.) in Western Japan by Portable XRF Showing Glass Trade among Asian Countries', in F. Gan et al (eds.), Recent Advances In The Scientific Research On Ancient Glass And Glaze (Hackensack, 2016), pp. 73–94; and K. Oga & T. Tomomi, 'Ancient Japan and the Indian Ocean interaction sphere: chemical compositions, chronologies and trade routes of iimported glass beads in the Yayoi-Kofun periods (3rd century BCE – 7th century CE', Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology, 9 (2013), 35–65. On Berenike, Egypt, see for example T. Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 38, 41, 45; J. Then-Obluska, 'Cross-cultural bead encounters at the Red Sea port site of Berenike, Egypt: preliminary assessment (seasons 2009–2012)', Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean, 24 (2015), 735–77; J. W. Lankton, I-S. Lee & J. D. Allen, 'Javanese (Jatim) beads in late fifth to early sixth-century Korean (Silla) tombs', in Annales du 16e Congrès de l'Association Internationale pour l'Histoire du Verre (Nottingham, 2005), pp. 327–30. On Indo-Pacific beads from the earliest layers at the Unguja Ukuu site, Zanzibar Island, Tanzania, see for example M. Wood, 'Glass beads from pre-European contact sub-Saharan Africa: Peter Francis's work revisited and updated', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 65–80; M. Wood et al, 'Zanzibar and Indian Ocean trade in the first millennium CE: the glass bead evidence', Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 9 (2017), 879–901, and M. Wood, 'Glass beads from pre-European contact sub-Saharan Africa: Peter Francis's work revisited and updated', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 65–80. For the Garamantian kingdom, see V. Leitch et al, 'Early Saharan trade: the inorganic evidence', in D. J. Mattingly et al (eds.), Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 287–340.
4.     C. Pion & B. Gratuze, 'Indo-Pacific glass beads from the Indian subcontinent in Early Merovingian graves (5th–6th century AD)', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 51–64.
5.     For the origins of the garnets in use in Europe from the fifth to seventh centuries AD, see T. Calligaro et al, 'Contribution à l'étude des grenats mérovingiens (Basilique de Saint-Denis et autres collections du musée d'Archéologie nationale, diverses collections publiques et objets de fouilles récentes): nouvelles analyses gemmologiques et géochimiques effectuées au Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France', Antiquités Nationales, 38 (2006–07), 111–44; for a distribution map and discussion of garnet finds from Britain, see H. Hamerow, 'The circulation of garnets in the North Sea Zone, AD 400–700', in A. Hilgner, S. Greiff & D. Quast (eds.), Gemstones in the First Millennium AD (Mainz, 2017), pp. 71–86; for the date of the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps, see N. Adams, 'Rethinking the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps and armour', in C. Entwistle & N. Adams (eds.), Intelligible Beauty: Recent Research on Byzantine Jewellery (London, 2010), pp. 83–112.
6.     For the continent, see J. Drauschke, '"Byzantine" and "oriental" imports in the Merovingian Empire from the second half of the fifth to the beginning of the eighth century', in A. Harris (ed.), Incipient Globalisation? Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century (Oxford, 2007), pp. 53–73 at p. 67, and 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. For Britain, see J. W. Huggett, 'Imported grave goods and the early Anglo-Saxon economy', Medieval Archaeology, 32 (1988), pp. 63–96, and H. Geake, The Use of Grave-Goods in Conversion-Period England, c.600–c.850 (Oxford, 1997), for the distributions of cowries and ivory rings; recent work on finds from Rutland and Kent confirm that the ivory in use in this era was indeed elephant ivory, e.g. seven of the nine ivory rings examined from Empingham Anglo-Saxon cemetery, Rutland, could be confirmed to be elephant ivory cut from the base of a tusk: G. Edwards & J. Watson, Ancient Monuments Laboratory Report 31/91: Mineral Preserved Organic Material from Empingham Anglo-Saxon Cemetery, Rutland (London, 1991), p. 2.
7.     D. W. Rollason, Early Medieval Europe 300-1050: The Birth of Western Society (London, 2012), p. 160; I. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751 (London, 1994), pp. 215–16.
8.     J. W. Lankton, L. Dussubieux & T. Rehren, 'A study of mid-first millennium CE Southeast Asian specialized glass beadmaking traditions', in E. Bacus, I. Glover & P. Sharrock (eds.), Interpreting Southeast Asia’s Past: Monument, Image and Text (Singapore, 2008), pp. 335–56; J. W. Lankton, I-S. Lee & J. D. Allen, 'Javanese (Jatim) beads in late fifth to early sixth-century Korean (Silla) tombs', in Annales du 16e Congrès de l'Association Internationale pour l'Histoire du Verre (Nottingham, 2005), pp. 327–30; T. Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 39–40; J. Then-Obluska, 'Cross-cultural bead encounters at the Red Sea port site of Berenike, Egypt: preliminary assessment (seasons 2009–2012)', Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean, 24 (2015), 735–77 at p. 751.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations unless otherwise stated, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2018, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The aim of this post is simply to share some recent images of the underwater prehistoric forests at Trusthorpe and Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. The submerged forest at Trusthorpe is only rarely seen, especially since beach replenishment works along the coast here; however, an unusually low tide on Monday 13th August, 2018, exposed at least two of the tree stumps and I was able to take the following pictures of these.

One of the tree stumps exposed on Monday, 13th August 2018 at Trusthorpe, Lincolnshire; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Top view of the submerged prehistoric tree stump exposed at Trusthorpe, Lincolnshire, in August 2018, showing its tree rings; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Another of the prehistoric tree stumps exposed by an exceptionally low tide at Trusthorpe, Lincolnshire; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

The tree stumps and trunks that are revealed by such very low tides and in excavations all along the Lincolnshire coast from Immingham to Ingoldmells have their origins in a drowned prehistoric forest that once stretched out over what is now the floor of the North Sea after the last Ice Age, when global sea-levels dropped to around 120 metres below their current levels. For the early part of the Mesolithic era, beginning c. 9600 BC, the actual coastline lay a significant distance to the north-east and eastern Lincolnshire represented part of an upland district rather than a coastal zone. However, from about 8,500 years ago, this situation began to change as the inexorably rising sea-level due to the melting of the glaciers pushed the coastline ever nearer. 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 seaward of its present position along much of east Lincolnshire. As this process continued, the trees that are now found submerged off the Lincolnshire coast were first subject to waterlogging as the water-table rose and were then submerged by the rising tide. The date of this waterlogging and submersion varies from site to site, depending on the elevation of the land on which the forest grew: at Immingham and Theddlethorpe the waterlogging of the prehistoric landscape has been dated to 5840–5373 BC and 6205–6012 BC respectively, whilst at Anderby Creek and Cleethorpes the trees on the foreshore were submerged in 3514–3349 BC and 2912–2299 BC, as determined by the radiocarbon dating of their wood.

The extent of Doggerland about 12,000 years ago at the end of the last glacial era, with possible reindeer migration routes shown (drawn by C. R. Green for Origins of Louth, based on Barton, 2005 and Shennan et al, 2000, with permission).

The last stages in the drowning of Mesolithic Doggerland, from the perspective of Lincolnshire and the Fens (drawn by C. R. Green for Origin of Louth, based on Shennan et al, 2000, with permission). Louth is marked to help in understanding the changes; darker blue indicates areas permanently under water, light blue the inter-tidal zone and low-lying marshland.

The photographs of submerged trees at Trusthorpe included above were taken at approximately 14:30 in the afternoon, when the tide was at its lowest point of 0.4 metres above chart datum, equivalent to around 3.35 metres below Ordnance Datum. Unfortunately, this wasn't quite low enough to expose more than a handful of tree stumps, especially after beach replenishment works along this coast, although wading a short way out beyond the shoreline revealed a number of additional tree stumps lying just below the water's surface. A number of photographs are available online of the more dramatic exposures in the Mablethorpe to Huttoft area visible in previous decades, especially those in 1984 and 1992, although none of these in turn seem to approach those recorded in previous centuries, leading to the suggestion that the drowned forest remains have been subject to recent erosion as well as being covered up by beach replenishment schemes. In particular, the outcrop of exposed forest seen in 1796 by Sir Joseph Banks and Joseph Correa de Serra was around 1 mile wide just to the south of Trusthorpe at Sutton-on-Sea (something also apparent on Robert Mitchell's 1765 coastal sailing chart, where the forest 'islets' are marked as a wide belt of 'Clay Huts' between Sutton and Anderby Creek), whereas in 1923 it was only 150 yards wide. According to A. J. Clapham, 'even allowing for the shifting pattern of the sand covering the foreshore and the fact that the tides might not have fallen as low in 1923 as on the 1796 visit, this is evidence for considerable erosion of the outcrop in a century and a quarter'.(1) With regard to the 1796 exposure, it is worth quoting Joseph Correa de Serra's 1799 description of the 'submarine forest' at length as an indication of what was visible in the eighteenth century:

It was a common report in Lincolnshire, that a large extent of islets of moor, situated along its coast, and visible only in the lowest ebbs of the year, was chiefly composed of decayed trees. These islets are marked in Mitchell's chart of that coast, by the name of the clay huts... In the month of September, 1796, I went to Sutton, the coast of Lincolnshire, in company with the Right Hon. President of this Society [Sir Joseph Banks], in order to examine their extent and nature. The 19th of the month, being the first day after the equinoctial full moon, when the lowest ebbs were to be expected, we went in a boat... and soon after set foot upon one of the largest islets then appearing. Its exposed surface was about thirty yards long, and twenty-five wide, when the tide was at its lowest. A great number of similar islets were visible round us, chiefly to the eastward and southward... These islets, according to the most accurate information, extend at least twelve miles in length, and about a mile in breadth, opposite to Sutton shore... The channels between the several islets [representing the eroded lines of drainage from wave backwash], when the islets are dry, in the lowest ebbs of the year, are from four to twelve feet deep.(2)

Banks and De Serra examined the composition of these 'islets' on the 19th, 20th and 21st of September, 1796, and concluded that

they consisted almost entirely of roots, trunks, branches, and leaves of trees and shrubs, intermixed with some leaves of aquatic plants. The remains of some of these trees were still standing on their roots; while the trunks of the greater part lay scattered on the ground, in every possible direction. The bark of the trees and roots appeared generally as fresh as when they were growing; in that of the birches particularly, of which a great quantity was found, even the thin silvery membranes of the outer skin were discernible. The timber of all kinds, on the contrary, was decomposed and soft, in the greatest part of the trees; in some, however, it was firm, especially in the knots.... The sorts of wood which are still distinguishable are birch, fir, and oak...
     The soil to which the trees are affixed, and in which they grew, is a soft, greasy clay; but for many inches above it is entirely composed of rotten leaves, scarcely distinguishable to the eye, many of which may be separated by putting the soil in water, and dextrously and patiently using a spatula, or a blunt knife. By this method, I obtained some perfect leaves of Ilex Aquifolium [holly], which are now in the Herbarium of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks; and some other leaves which, though less perfect, seem to belong to some species of willow. In this stratum of rotten leaves, we could also distinguish several roots of Arundo Phragmites [common reed].

Robert Mitchell's 1765 coastal sailing chart of Lincolnshire, showing 'clay huts' (islets of exposed submerged forest separated by deep eroded backwash channels) extending significantly offshore from Sutton to Anderby Creek.

Whilst only the tops of a few tree stumps were visible at Trusthorpe as a result of the unusually low tides this August, rather more was visible of the submerged forest at Cleethorpes on 14 August 2018 (when low tide was only 0.1 metres higher than on the previous day) and some pictures from this visit are shared below as a comparison. As was noted above, the forest at Cleethorpes is perhaps a thousand years younger than that further south at Mablethorpe–Anderby, being probably drowned in the Late Neolithic era, and both this and the lack of intensive beach replenishment as seen elsewhere on the Lincolnshire coast may explain why significantly more trees are visible here. In any case, as can be seen from the pictures below, a variety of fallen tree trunks, stumps and roots were easily to be seen on Cleethorpes beach without having to venture too far out, many well-persevered due to a layer of marine crustaceans overlying them.

A tree stump from the Late Neolithic drowned forest on Cleethorpes beach; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Two fallen trees from the Late Neolithic drowned forest on Cleethorpes beach; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Another tree trunk from the Late Neolithic drowned forest on Cleethorpes beach; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

A tree stump from the submerged prehistoric forest on Cleethorpes beach; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Another piece of the drowned Late Neolithic forest visible on Cleethorpes beach; click here for a larger version of this photograph (image: C. R. Green).

Notes

1.     See A. J. Clapham, The Characterisation of Two Mid-Holocene Submerged Forests (Liverpool John Moores University PhD Thesis, 1999), pp. 62–4, for a brief discussion.
2.     This and the following quotation are taken from J. C. de Serra, 'On a submarine forest, on the east coast of England', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 89 (1799), 145–56.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations unless otherwise stated, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2018, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following brief note is concerned with an intriguing fifteenth-century reference to both Bactrian camels and dromedaries (aka Arabian camels) in England, examining both the context of these specific animals in late medieval Kent before moving on to look at the wider evidence for the presence of camels in medieval Britain and Ireland.

King Arthur riding a camel on a glass roundel of c. 1500; click here for a larger version of this picture (image: Met Museum).

Previous posts on here have discussed the archaeological and textual evidence for the presence and use of camels in Roman and early medieval Europe, but have only touched on their presence in medieval Britain and Ireland. The prompt for the present discussion is an intriguing reference in the fifteenth-century work known as John Stone's Chronicle, f. 78b:

In the year of the Lord 1466, on the twelfth day of the month of December, namely, on the vigil of St. Lucy the Virgin, there came to Canterbury [gap in text] the Lord Patriarch of Antioch, who, in honor of the king and queen, had here four dromedaries and two camels. And this had never before been seen in England.(1)

Needless to say, this is a most intriguing reference, indicating the presence of both two-humped Bactrian camels and single-humped dromedaries (or Arabian camels) in medieval Kent! The chronicle itself is preserved in a fifteenth-century manuscript, CCCC MS 417, written by a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, in 1467, with contemporary additions through until 1472, and as such can be considered an exemplary witness. The context of the presence of six camels at Canterbury is rather more mysterious. In particular, the identity of the 'Lord Patriarch of Antioch' who seems to have brought these camels to Canterbury 'in honour of the king and queen', has often been unclear. The first editor of the text, W. G. Searle, identified him simply as 'Peter II, Maronite patriarch' of Antioch, following W. F. Hook's suggestion in his 1867 Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury.(2) However, it seems likely that he was, in fact, Ludovico Severi da Bologna, a Franciscan observant who styled himself as Patriarch of Antioch and papal legate to the East.

One of a number of gold camels bearing flower baskets that march across the fifteenth-century Erpingham Chasuble, embroidered in late medieval England (image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, used under their non-commercial licence).

A miniature of a camel from a manuscript probably made for King Edward IV of England (1461–70, 1471–83), who was the king in whose honour the six camels were paraded by the Patriarch of Antioch in 1466; from MS Royal 15 E III f. 200 (image: British Library).

Although Ludovico da Bologna is sometimes described as a fraud, this is arguably unfair. Ludovico first appears in a papal bull of 1454, when he is residing in Jerusalem and is granted privileges and dispensation by Pope Nicholas V to travel to Ethiopia and India, and in 1456 he is again engaged to act as Pope Callixtus III's messenger to Ethiopia. In 1457 Ludovico is sent by the pope with letters of recommendation to the Christians of Persia and Georgia, and the next pope, Pius II, confirmed these tasks and the perogatives granted to him in 1458. In 1460, Ludovico returned from the East accompanied by what seem to be genuine ambassadors from a number of eastern rulers including David Megas Komnenos, the Emperor of Trezibond, and George VIII of Georgia, who were seeking aid against the Ottomans, and Uzun Hasan, the Turkoman ruler of Persia, who was said to be ready to provide military assistance. Upon meeting with Pope Pius II, the ambassadors not only specified the readiness of their kingdoms to engage in military action, but also requested that Pope Pius II name Ludovico as Patriarch of Antioch, something that the pope agreed to do but stipulated that Ludovico should not use the title until he was consecrated as such by him after both the completion of his mission and the territorial jurisdiction of the patriarchate had been defined. Ludovico's party was then sent on by the pope to Milan, France and Burgundy—where they were received with apparent enthusiasm and great celebrations—in order to obtain and confirm commitments for a future crusade against the Ottomans, before returning to Italy in 1461.

It is at this point that things seem to have gone somewhat awry, as Ludovico da Bologna and his party for some reason decided not to wait any longer for Pope Pius II to do as he promised and instead had Ludovico consecrated as Patriarch of Antioch immediately in Venice, a decision that aroused papal wrath and saw Ludovico having to leave Venice to escape this. In the long-term, however, this dispute over his proper consecration as patriarch seems not to have greatly affected Ludovico's ability to function as a papal envoy and diplomat. In 1465, for example, he is recorded as acting as papal legate for Pope Paul II (1464–71) to the first Crimean khan Hacı I Giray and then subsequently ambassador from the khan to Casimir IV Jagiellon, King of Poland, with Ludovico using the title Patriarch of Antioch whilst in Poland. Similarly, in 1468–9 he seems to have been present in Denmark as papal ambassador and 'Patriarch', where he helped in ending the rivalries between Denmark and Sweden, and in 1471 he was in Rome meeting with Pope Paul II on behalf of the Uzun Hasan of Persia. In 1472, the new pope, Sixtus IV, reconfirmed and republished Ludovico's nomination to Patriarch of Antioch and invited him to resume negotiations for an anti-Ottoman alliance. Ludovico was subsequently also appointed by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, as his ambassador to Persia in 1473, and in 1475 he was recorded in Persia in audience with Uzun Hasan, who sent back positive messages with him to Europe.

In light of all of the above, it thus seems highly likely that the 'Lord Patriarch of Antioch' who arrived in England in December 1466 can be identified as Ludovico Severi da Bologna. Not only was he clearly active as a diplomat in this period, visiting a number of northern European countries as a papal ambassador using just this title, but he also clearly had close connections to a number of eastern rulers and states that might have provided the camels that he brought with him 'in honor of the king and queen' of England, if they weren't sourced in Europe itself. The visit of 1466 was presumably an otherwise-unrecorded diplomatic endeavour by Ludovico acting as 'Patriarch of Antioch' to promote positive relations and commitments for an anti-Ottoman alliance between the rulers of East and Europe.

A miniature of a man riding a camel, probably drawn in south-east England (possibly Rochester, Kent); from the mid-thirteenth-century MS Royal 12 F XIII f. 38v (image: British Library).

If this is the immediate political context for the presence of four dromedaries (Arabian camels) and two Bactrian camels in fifteenth-century Kent, what of the wider context of camels in medieval Britain? Whilst John Stone's assertion that such a mixed troop of six Bactrian and Arabian camels 'had never before been seen in England' could be true, it is demonstrably not the case that 1466 represented the first appearance of camels in Britain since the Roman era. Indeed, the earliest reference to camels as definitely present in medieval Britain comes rather from the beginning of the twelfth century. William of Malmesbury, writing in the early twelfth century, records the following of the menagerie of King Henry I of England (1100–35) installed at Woodstock near Oxford, which he had apparently visited himself:

Henry took a passionate delight in the marvels of other countries, with much affability... asking foreign kings to send him animals not found in England—lions, leopards, lynxes, camels—and he had a park called Woodstock in which he kept his pets of this description. He had put there an animal called a porcupine, sent him by William of Montpellier, which is mentioned by Pliny in the eighth book of his Natural History and in Isidore in his Etymologies; they report the existence of an animal in Africa, called by the Africans a kind of hedgehog, covered with bristling splines, which it has the power to shoot out at dohgs pursuing it. The spines, as I have seen for myself, are a palm or more in length, and sharp at both ends, something like goose quills at the point where the feather-part leaves off, but rather thicker, and as it were striped black and white.(3)

Moreover, the king of England was not the sole possessor of camels in Britain and Ireland then, with the Irish Annals of Inisfallen recording under 1105 that 'in the above year a camel, an animal of remarkable size, was brought from the king of Alba to Muirchertach Ua Briain', indicating that the rulers of both Scotland and Ireland had camels amongst their own royal menageries in the early twelfth century. Whether there were any camels in medieval Britain or Ireland before the start of the twelfth century is undocumented, although Rodulf Tortarius writing, according to Mark Hagger, at the end of the eleventh century in his Epistula IX, recounts that William the Conqueror provided the citizens of Caen in Normandy with a wild animal show involving lions, leopards, lynxes, camels and ostriches that Rodulf himself witnessed. If correct, this obviously raises the distinct possibility that an Anglo-Norman royal menagerie containing camels may have been at least occasionally present in William's English domains too, and that Henry I's menagerie at Woodstock could furthermore have been partly an inheritance from his father.

Two Bactrian camels positioned above Duke William of Normandy, later King William I of England, on the Bayeux Tapestry, probably made in England in the 1070s (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Camels in the eleventh-century Old English Hexateuch, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius B IV, f. 39v (image: British Library).

Looking forward in time from Henry I, the medieval English royal menagerie seems to have regularly included camels. For example, in 1235 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II sent a camel to King Henry III of England 'as a token of the continuation of his regard', and Henry's son King Edward I is recorded as having kept a camel at his palace at Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, for the amusement of his children. Edward II likewise kept a camel at Kings Langley Palace—his camel-keeper was called Ralph Camyle and the animal's feed included hay, beans, barley and oats, with the area of the royal park responsible for producing the camel's fodder apparently being subsequently known as Camylesland. Edward II is also recorded as being the recipient of two camels in 1317 from the wealthy Genoese merchant Antonio di Pessagno in return for appointing him steward of Gascony, and camels continued to be kept during the reigns of Edward III and Richard II too. Indeed, the latter granted John Wyntirbourne 'the keepership of the king's camel' for life in January 1393 and apparently receiving a camel and a pelican from the people of London at around the same time, the two events presumably being related. Finally, moving into the fifteenth century, Henry VI is recorded as having received 'of late three camels and an ostrich from Turkey' in March 1443 from an Italian merchant named Nicholas Jone of Bologna, and in 1472 Edward IV sent a camel to Ireland, this being potentially one of the beasts brought to England in 1466 by the Patriarch of Antioch 'in honor of the king and queen'.

In conclusion, it seems possible to elucidate the context of the intriguing reference to both Bactrian camels and dromedaries in medieval Kent found in John Stone's Chronicle for 1466. Firstly, the 'Lord Patriarch of Antioch' who paraded six of these beasts in Canterbury can be identified as Ludovico Severi da Bologna, an important papal diplomat who was promoting positive relations and a potential anti-Ottoman alliance between the rulers of East and Europe in this period. The four dromedaries and two Bactrian camels that John Stone saw were presumably intended as gifts for King Edward IV as part of this diplomatic effort, and in this light it is interesting to note the possibility that one of these camels was subsequently 'regifted' by Edward IV to Ireland a few years later. Secondly, although John Stone expressed astonishment at the sight of these six exotic beasts, it ought to be emphasised that they were by no means the first camels to be physically present in medieval Britain. Indeed, there is solid evidence for the presence of such creatures in England, Scotland and Ireland at least as far back as the early twelfth century, with potential hints of an even earlier presence, and English kings are recorded as receiving a number of camels as gifts from other rulers as well as townsfolk and merchants at various points in previous reigns.

A Barbary macaque riding backwards on a camel, England, c. AD 1300; note, there is both documentary and archaeological evidence for the presence of Barbary macaques in medieval Britain and Ireland. Click here for a larger version of this illustration (image: MS. Douce 151 f.26r).

Notes

1.     M. Connor (ed. & trans.), John Stone's Chronicle: Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, 1417–1472 (Kalamazoo, 2010), p. 116, and W. G. Searle (ed.), Christ Church, Canterbury: I. The Chronicle of John Stone (Cambridge, 1902), p. 97; my thanks to Richard Hopper for drawing my attention to this reference.
2.     W. G. Searle (ed.), Christ Church, Canterbury: I. The Chronicle of John Stone (Cambridge, 1902), p. 122; W. F. Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (London, 1867), vol. v, p. 357.
3.     William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, v.409.2–3, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, & M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 740–1.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2018, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

One of the more intriguing references to early medieval contacts between Britain and the wider world is found in the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', which mentions a late ninth-century AD embassy to India that was supposedly sent by King Alfred the Great. The following post offers a quick discussion of the evidence for this voyage before going on to consider its potential context and feasibility.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 883 AD in MS F, which refers to Alfred sending alms to the shrines of St Thomas in India and St Bartholomew (image: British Library, Cotton MS Domitian A VIII, f. 55v).

According to the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' for AD 883, King Alfred of Wessex sent two men, Sigehelm and Æthelstan, overseas with alms to carry both to Rome and to the shrines of 'St Thomas in India/Indea and to St Bartholomew', fulfilling a promise made when he besieged a Viking raiding-army at London (MSS D, E & F; also mentioned with additional details by William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester, see below).

883: Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome—and also to St Thomas in India and to St Bartholomew—the alms which King Alfred had vowed to send there when they beseiged the raiding-army in London; and there, by the grace of God, they were very successful in obtaining their prayers in accordance with those vows.(1)

Needless to say, this passage has been the subject of considerable interest. Some have suggested that 'India seems an unlikely destination for two English thanes' and argued that we might thus see India/Indea as a mistranscription of Judea, based on variant forms in MSS B & C.(2) However, whilst possible, this is by no means a necessary assumption, and a reading of Sigehelm and Æthelstan's intended goal as indeed being India remains commonly accepted.(3) Certainly, a final destination for Alfred's two emissaries at shrines in India, rather than Judea, would fit well with contemporary Anglo-Saxon knowledge of the two saints mentioned in the Chronicle's account. As the ninth-century Old English Martyrology attests, both St Thomas and St Bartholomew were said to have been martyred in India in tales that were current in King Alfred's time; likewise, Cynewulf's arguably ninth-century Old English poem The Fates of the Apostles explicitly links these two saints with India, and so too do the works of Aldhelm, d. 709, whom King Alfred notably considered England's finest poet.(4) Furthermore, it may well be that, rather than India being an 'unlikely destination for two English thanes', its remoteness from early medieval England was, in fact, the very point of Alfred's gift: that, in return for success against a Viking raiding-army that had occupied London, King Alfred had deliberately pledged to send alms to the very furthest-known reaches of Christendom, to the land that was conceived of as mirroring Britain's position on the very far edge of the known world.(5)

A Late Anglo-Saxon map of the world, orientated with east at the top; Britain and India are situated at opposite sides of the world and both at its very margins, Britain on the far bottom edge of the map and India at the far top. Click the image for a larger version of this map (image: British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius BV, f. 58v).

If two emissaries of an Anglo-Saxon king carrying alms for the shrines of St Thomas and St Bartholomew were indeed sent to India in the 880s, then this would naturally raise a number of additional questions, namely what, exactly, were Sigehelm and Æthelstan travelling to visit? How might they have travelled there and what was the context for such a visit? And who actually were these two travellers?

With regard to their intended destination, the usual—and most credible—interpretation of alms being sent to India by King Alfred is that they were being sent to shrines located in southern India. The existence there of an early and notable Syriac Christian community, known usually as 'Thomas Christians' after their claimed founder St Thomas the Apostle, is well-established. Although the exact circumstances of this community's origins are much debated, there is little doubt that stories of St Thomas's claimed missionary activity in India were circulating in the Mediterranean world by the third and fourth centuries AD, nor that there was indeed a permanent Christian community established in southern India by at least Late Antiquity.(6) So, for example, the Chronicle of Se’ert is believed to offer plausible testimony for fifth-century Christians in India, referring to a bishop of Rev-Ardashir at coastal Persis (Fars, Iran) sending materials for use among Christians in India in c. AD 470, and Isho'dad of Merv mentions that 'Daniel the Presbyter, the Indian', assisted Mar Koumi in preparing a Syriac translation of a Greek text for Bishop Mari of Rev-Ardashir, something that must have taken place in the early to mid-fifth century. Likewise, two letters of Isho‘yabh III, bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and Patriarch of the Church of the East from 649 to 659, refer to the metropolitan of Fars administering Indian episcopal sees then, and India recieved its own metropolitan bishop in the seventh century by his hand and then again—possibly after a period in which it was once more under the authority of Fars—in the eighth century.(7)

A copper plate grant of AD 849 from Kollam, southern India, providing documentary evidence of the privileges and influence that the Saint Thomas Christians of the church at Kollam enjoyed in early Malabar; the document contains signatures of the witnesses in Pahlavi, Kufic and Hebrew scripts. For a colour image of these plates and further details, see the De Monfort University/British Museum project on the copper plates (image: Wikimedia Commons).

As to a knowledge of this Indian Christian community, with its Persian connections, in the Mediterranean region and Europe, various pieces of evidence from the fifth century and after are suggestive of an awareness of Christians in India that extended beyond the circulating accounts of the Acts of the Apostle Thomas. For example, the anonymous author usually known as Gelasius of Cyzicus, writing around AD 475 in Bithynia (modern Turkey), was certainly aware that Indian Christians were linked with the Persian church. Furthermore, by c. AD 500 the tradition had begun to circulate in Greek, Latin and Syriac sources that St Thomas had died at Kalamene/Calamina in India (Cholamandalam), something that is thought to reflect knowledge of the establishment of a tomb/shrine associated with St Thomas on the Coromandel coast in south India by this point at the latest, presumably the site at Mylapore where Thomas Christians venerated his tomb in subsequent periods (it is perhaps worth noting that this site is indeed mentioned in the ninth-century Old English Martyrology account of St Thomas, referred to above).(8) Other sources take us even further. Perhaps most famously, the Byzantine author known as Cosmas Indicopleustes—probably writing in Alexandria, Egypt, in the sixth century—demonstrates a notable degree of knowledge of India and Sri Lanka, making a number of references to Christians in India and Sri Lanka:

Even in the Island of Taprobane [Sri Lanka] in Inner India, where also the Indian sea is, there is a church of Christians, clergy and believers... The same is true in the place called Male [Malabar, India], where the pepper grows, and the place called Kaliana, and there is a bishop appointed from Persia... 

[Sri Lanka] has a church of Persian Christians who are resident in that country, and a priest sent from Persia, and a deacon, and all that is required for conducting the worship of the church.(9)

Even more intriguingly, Gregory of Tours—writing at Tours, France, towards the end of the sixth century—not only recounts a number of significant details regarding the shrine of St Thomas in India in his account of the saint, but also specifies the source of his knowledge of the shrine and church there as someone who had actually visited it, a point of considerable significance in the present context. The account in question is found in Gregory's Glory of the Martyrs, chapter 31, finished c. AD 590, and runs as follows:

The tomb of the apostle Thomas... [I]n that region of India where he had first been buried there are a monastery and a church that is spectacularly large and carefully decorated and constructed. In this church God revealed a great miracle. A lamp was placed there in front of the spot where he had been buried. Once lit, by divine command it burned without ceasing, day and night: no one offered the assistance of oil or a new wick. No wind blew it out, no accident extinguished it, and its brightness did not diminish. The lamp continues to burn because of the power of the apostle that is unfamiliar to men but is nevertheless associated with divine power. Theodorus, who visited the spot, told this to me.(10)

All told, it thus seems clear that there was indeed an early Christian community in southern India that was associated with St Thomas, as per the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', and which had a shrine and church—'spectacularly large and carefully decorated and constructed'—that visitors carrying alms from north-western Europe might journey to during the early medieval period. If the destination itself is therefore not implausible, what then of the second query outlined above, namely the context of such a visit and how two ninth-century Anglo-Saxons might have travelled to India?

Illustration of pepper trees, accompanying the text of Cosmas Indicopleustes's sixth-century Christian Topography in Codex Sinaiticus graecus 1186, fol. 202v, eleventh century, probably from Cappadocia, now at St. Katherine's monastery, Sinai; the text associated with it is translated as follows in Faller 2011: 'This is a picture of the tree which produces pepper. Each separate stem being very weak and limp twines itself, like the slender tendrils of the vine, around some lofty tree which bears no fruit. And every cluster of the fruit is protected by a double leaf. It is of a deep green colour like that of rue.' Faller suggests that both the image and text are 'so detailed and accurate that personal inspection and experience are almost a certainty' (image: Faller 2011, used under the CC BY 3.0 licence specified by the Journal of Transcultural Studies).

An Old English recipe for a salve against cysts, which contains a number of ingredients including radish, turnip and pepper from India, from BL Cotton MS Domitian A. i, f.55v (image: British Library, via For the Wynn).

With regard to this wider context, the early medieval journey of Theodorus to St Thomas's church in India, probably located at Kalamene/Calamina (Mylapore), and then back to western Europe—where he could inform the Bishop of Tours, Gregory, of the magnificent monastery and church that he found there—coincides with a period in which there is significantmaterial evidence for contact between the Mediterranean and Europe on the one hand and the Indian Ocean world on the other.(11) However, there is no reason to think that subsequent centuries saw the severing of routes between India and the Mediterranean/Europe. Certainly, pepper from India continued to be used in north-western Europe into the mid-seventh century and beyond, and in impressive quantities: for example, the mid-seventh-century Merovingian king Chlothar III granted an annual rent of 30 pounds of pepper (grown in India) to a single monastery at Corbie in northern France, along with sizeable amounts of other spices including cinnamon (from Sri Lanka) and cloves (from Indonesia), and this grant was reconfirmed by Chilperic II in 716.(12) Likewise, in England Bede's few personal possessions included pepper when he died in AD 735, and Aldhelm at the end of the seventh century composed a riddle to which the answer was 'pepper', indicating that he expected his audience to be familiar with this spice:

I am black on the outside, covered with wrinkled skin, yet inside I have a glistening core. I season the delicacies of the kitchen: the feasts of kings and extravagant dishes and likewise sauces and stews. But you will find me of no value unless my inwards are crushed for their shining contents.(13) 

Indeed, in the probably late ninth-century 'Bald's Leechbook', written for Anglo-Saxon physicians in King Alfred's reign, Indian pepper frequently occurs and is, it should be noted, mentioned more times than many native ingredients, being prescribed in more than thirty recipes in the first book alone.(14) Perhaps most famously of all, however, several trade routes leading from western Europe to India and beyond were, in fact, documented during the mid-ninth century in Ibn Khordadbeh's account of the Jewish Radhanite merchants found in his Book of Roads and Kingdoms:

These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman (i.e. Greek and Latin), the Frank, Spanish, and Slav languages. They journey from West to East, from East to West, partly on land, partly by sea. They transport from the West eunuchs, female slaves, boys, brocade, castor, marten, and other furs, and swords. They take ship from Firanja (France), on the Western Sea, and make for Farama (Pelusium, Egypt). There they load their goods on camel-back and go by land to al-Kolzom (Suez), a distance of twenty-five farsakhs (parasangs). They embark in the East Sea (Red Sea) and sail from al-Kolzom to al-Jar (port of Medina) and Jeddah (port of Mecca), then they go to Sind, India, and China. On their return from China they carry back musk, aloes, camphor, cinnamon, and other products of the Eastern countries to al-Kolzom and bring them back to Farama, where they again embark on the Western Sea. Some make sail for Constantinople to sell their goods to the Romans; others go to the palace of the King of the Franks to place their goods. Sometimes these Jew merchants, when embarking from the land of the Franks, on the Western Sea, make for Antioch (at the mouth of the Orontes); thence by land to al-Jabia (? al-Hanaya on the bank of the Euphrates), where they arrive after three days’ march. There they embark on the Euphrates and reach Baghdad, whence they sail down the Tigris, to al-Obolla. From al-Obolla they sail for Oman, Sind, Hind, and China... These different journeys can also be made by land. The merchants that start from Spain or France go to Sus al-Aksa (Morocco) and then to Tangier, whence they walk to Afrikia (Kairouan) and the capital of Egypt. Thence they go to ar-Ramla, visit Damascus, al-Kufa, Baghdad, and al-Basra (Bassora), cross Ahwaz, Fars, Kirman, Sind, Hind, and arrive in China.(15)

In light of all this, it seems clear that Sigehelm and Æthelstan's claimed late ninth-century journey from England to 'St Thomas in India' was not only credible in terms of its proposed destination, as noted above, but also the availability of routes for getting there, to judge both from the continued availability of imports from India (and beyond) in north-western Europe and Ibn Khordadbeh's testimony as to routes accessible in the ninth century for travelling from West to East and back again (note, a northern trade-route that brought a small number of Indian coins and at least one statuette of the Buddha to eighth- to tenth-century northern Europe and England also existed, but is perhaps less relevant to the present inquiry, not least because King Alfred is said to have sent Sigehelm and Æthelstan with alms for Rome as well as India).

Map of Eurasia and North Africa, c. AD 870, showing trade routes of the Radhanite Jewish merchants (blue) and other major routes (purple) blue; cities with sizable Jewish communities are shown in brown. Click here for a larger version of this map (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Finally, as to the question of the identity of these two Anglo-Saxon royal emissaries, several candidates have been proposed. William of Malmesbury, writing in England in the early twelfth century, identified Sigehelm as a bishop of Sherborne in both his Gesta Pontificum Anglorum and his Gesta Regum Anglorum, and claims that the gems Sigehelm brought back from India could still be seen at Sherborne in William's day:

He [Ealhstan, bishop of Sherborne] was followed as bishop by Heahmind, Æthelheah, Wulfsige, Asser and Sigehelm. Both the last two are known to have been bishops in the time of king Alfred, who was the fourth son of Æthelwulf... Sigehelm was sent overseas on almonry duties for the king, even getting as far as to St Thomas's in India. Something which could cause wonder for people of this generation is that his journey deep into India was a marvellously prosperous one, as he brought back exotic precious stones, in which the land abounds, and some of them can still be seen in precious objects in the church.(16)

Being devoted to almsgiving, he [King Alfred] confirmed the privileges of churches as laid down by his father, and sent many gifts overseas to Rome and to St Thomas in India. For this purpose he dispatched an envoy, Sigehelm bishop of Sherborne, who made his way to India with great success, an astonishing feat even today, and brought with him on his return gems of exotic splendour and the liquid perfumes of which the soil there is productive...(17)

This identification of Sigehelm is also briefly alluded to by John of Worcester in the early twelfth-century Chronicon ex Chronicis, in which he states that the 'bishop of Sherborne', Swithelm [sic], 'carried King Alfred's alms to St Thomas in India, and returned thence in safety'.(18) Needless to say, the claim that Sigehelm returned from India bringing with him 'exotic precious stones' that 'can still be seen in precious objects in the church' suggests that William was basing his account on local traditions at Sherborne. Nonetheless, his identification has been subject to some scepticism on account of the fact that William omits the names of three bishops of Sherborne who come between Asser and Sigehelm in the preserved episcopal lists, and that Sigehelm signs charters as bishop from AD 925 to 932, not in Alfred's reign, 871–99.(19) Whether these discrepancies are fatal to William's identification is open to debate, however. The mistaken attribution of Sigehelm's episcopacy to Alfred's reign and the omission of three intervening bishops in the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum may simply reflect an attempt by William and/or his source to reconcile a local Sherborne tradition that Sigehelm, bishop of Sherborne, was Alfred's envoy to India—and that he returned with riches subsequently used to endow the church at Sherborne with, and which could still be pointed out in the early twelfth century—with the dates of King Alfred, working from a false assumption that Sigehelm must have been bishop when he was sent overseas. In this light, it is worth pointing out that Sigehelm could conceivably have both travelled to India in 883 and attested charters from 925–32 if his pilgrimage carrying alms to India for King Alfred took place in his relative youth and he had become the Bishop of Sherborne in his relative old age.(20)

On the other hand, if the early tenth-century bishop of Sherborne named Sigehelm was not the Sigehelm sent to India in 883, contrary to what William of Malmesbury appears to have been told and shown of his supposed spoils from his trip at Sherborne, then identifying him is significantly more difficult: he could be the western Kentish ealdorman killed by the Danes in 902, as some have speculated, but he could equally well be another Sigehelm active in the era, either recorded or otherwise. As to Sigehelm's companion, Æthelstan, he is even more obscure, and unfortunately no recorded traditions of his identity survive. He may be a Mercian priest and chaplain of this name who was associated with Alfred according to Asser's contemporary Life of Alfred, but the name is very common and there are multiple alternative candidates available, including at least two thegns and an ealdorman active in Alfred's reign.(21)

In conclusion, what can be said of King Alfred's apparent embassy to India in the 880s? All told, it seems credible that India was indeed the intended destination for the alms carried by Sigehelm and Æthelstan in 883. Not only is this reading of the text the most commonly supported position and backed by the majority of the manuscripts, but it accords well with the identity of the two saints whose shrines were to be visited according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, St Thomas and St Bartholomew: these were both explicitly and repeatedly associated with India in material current in Alfred's day. Indeed, India's remoteness from early medieval England could well have been the very point of Alfred's gift, as noted above, and it would moreover fit with what we know of Alfred's own intellectual curiosity about the wider world and its limits, as Oliver Pengelly has recently pointed out.(22) Beyond this, it would seem that such a journey would also have a good context. It is clear that there was indeed a permanent Christian community in India from at least Late Antiquity, if not before, and knowledge of a shrine and church dedicated to St Thomas at Mylapore had spread to the west by c. 500; indeed, Gregory of Tours' account of the church and monastery of St Thomas in India indicates that Sigehelm and Æthelstan would have been by no means the first to visit this shrine in the early medieval era. Furthermore, a journey from western Europe to southern India appears plausible in terms of not only its proposed destination, but also the availability of routes for getting there, given the continued availability of imports from India and Ibn Khordadbeh's account of ninth-century trans-continental routeways. Finally, whilst the identity of King Alfred's two emissaries, Sigehelm and Æthelstan, remains uncertain, it can be tentatively suggested that we should be wary of rejecting outright the apparent Sherborne tradition recorded by William of Malmesbury in the early twelfth century that Sigehelm, bishop of Sherborne, was one of those who travelled to India; likewise, it is not impossible that Æthelstan may have been the Mercian priest of that name who appears in Asser's contemporary Life of Alfred as Alfred's close confidant.

The famous stone cross preserved on St Thomas's Mount, Mylapore, Chennai; the cross includes an inscription in Pahlavi ('Our lord Christ, have pity on Sabriso, (son) of Caharboxt, (son) of Suray, who bore (brought?) this (cross).') that is considered to date on palaeographic grounds to around the eighth century AD.(23) The cross was found in the area of India believed to be the location of the Indian tomb/shrine associated with St Thomas that was known in the early medieval west as Kalamene/Calamina, discussed above; as such, if Sigehelm and Æthelstan did indeed travel to India to visit the shrine of St Thomas in the late ninth century, then it is not implausible that they could have looked on this cross during their visit there (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Notes

1.     M. J. Swanton (ed. & trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London, 1996), p. 79. Note, this annal is missing from MS A of the Chronicle but is present in MSS B, C, D, E and F, and is thus thought to represent a contemporary insertion into the text—see, for example, O. Pengelly, Rome in Ninth-Century Anglo-Saxon England (University of Oxford D.Phil Thesis, 2010), pp. 164–5, 246, 286; S. Keynes, 'King Alfred and the Mercians', in M. A. S. Blackburn & D. N. Dumville (eds.), Kings, Currency, and Alliances: History and Coinage of Southern England in the Ninth Century (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 1–45 at pp. 21–4.
2.     J. Harris, 'Wars and rumours of wars: England and the Byzantine world in the eighth and ninth centuries', Mediterranean Historical Review, 14 (1999), 29–46, quotation at p. 39; others holding to this interpretation include R. Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1998), p. 192, and J. Parker, 'Ruling the waves: Saxons, Vikings, and the sea in the formation of an Anglo-British identity in the nineteenth century', in S. I. Sobecki (ed.), The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture (Cambridge, 2011), pp.195–206 at p. 200.
3.     See, for example, M. J. Swanton (ed. & trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London, 1996), p. 79; D. Anlezark, Alfred the Great (Bradford, 2017), p. 54; C. R. Hart, Learning and Culture in Late Anglo-Saxon England and the Influence of Ramsey Abbey on the Major English Monastic Schools (Lampeter, 2003), p. 178; O. Pengelly, Rome in Ninth-Century Anglo-Saxon England (University of Oxford D.Phil Thesis, 2010), pp. 245–7, 254, 267, 277; M. B. Busbee, 'A paradise full of monsters: India in the Old English imagination', LATCH, 1 (2008), 51–72; R. E. Frykenberg, Christianity in India (Oxford, 2008), pp. 112, 117; N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 225 (fn. 67) & 228; H. R. Loyn, Society and Peoples: Studies in the History of England and Wales, c. 600-1200 (London, 1992), p. 253; D. Whitelock (ed. & trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation (London, 1961), p. 50; and Dr Beachcoming, 'Anglo-Saxons in southern India?', blog post, 15 July 2011, online at http://www.strangehistory.net/2011/07/15/anglo-saxons-in-southern-india/.
4.     Old English Martyrology: C. Rauer (ed. & trans.), The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 167, 227 ('On the twenty-first day of the month [December] is the feast of the apostle St Thomas, who in Greek was called Didymus... And after Christ's ascension he instructed many nations in Christ's faith...[including] two Indian nations... he travelled through the lands of pagan people and the eastern parts of the world, and in India he built their king's hall in heaven, whose name was Gundaphorus... In another Indian country... one of the pagan bishops then killed the servant of Christ, and the texts sometimes say that he was stabbed with a sword, sometimes they say he was stabbed with spears. He suffered in the city of Calamina in India...'; 'On the twenty-fifth day of the month [August] is the feast of the apostle St Bartholomew; he was Christ's missionary in the country of India, which is the outermost of all regions... In this country he cast out idols which they had previously worshipped there...'). The Fates of the Apostles: S. A. J. Bradley (ed. & trans.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1995), pp. 155–6 ('Certainly, it has been no secret fact abroad that Bartholomew, a soldier strong in the strife, went to live among the people of India... So too Thomas bravely ventured to other parts in India, where the heart was illumined and the purpose strengthened in many people through his holy word...'). The works of Aldhelm: M. Lapidge & J. L. Rosier, Aldhelm: the Poetic Works (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 53–4, 55 ('On Thomas: ...Christ, therefore, the holy offspring of God, sent this man, who was performing many miracles with magnificent success, to convert the peoples of the orient with holy books. India at that time worshipped icons with unspeakable rite... but it confessed the true faith when Thomas won its salvation and (henceforth) believed in Christ, Who controls the sceptres of heaven.'; 'On St Bartholomew: Mighty India stands as the last of the lands of the earth... Given over to pagan rites, India used to worship idols. But Bartholomew destroyed the pagan shrines, duly smashing the images of the pagan gods...'); M. Lapidge & M. Herren, Aldhelm: the Prose Works (Cambridge, 1979), p. 81 ('Didymus [Thomas] at one time the disbelieving doubter of the Lord's resurrection—but once the scars of Christ's wounds had been seen, (became) its confident preacher—who illumined the tripartite provinces of eastern India with the clear light of evangelical preaching and totally annulled the... rites of (pagan) sanctuaries...'). On King Alfred's view of Aldhelm as the finest Anglo-Saxon poet, see M. Lapidge, 'The career of Aldhelm', Anglo-Saxon England, 36 (2007), 15–69 at p. 18 and fn. 17, & A. Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm (Cambridge, 1994), p. 5.
5.     For the view that there was indeed a Viking raiding-army that occupied London in 883, see S. Keynes, 'King Alfred and the Mercians', in M. A. S. Blackburn & D. N. Dumville (eds.), Kings, Currency, and Alliances: History and Coinage of Southern England in the Ninth Century (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 1–45 at pp. 21–4; for the idea that India was conceived of as mirroring Britain's position on the edge of the known world, see M. B. Busbee, 'A paradise full of monsters: India in the Old English imagination', LATCH, 1 (2008), 51–72. See further O. Pengelly, Rome in Ninth-Century Anglo-Saxon England (University of Oxford D.Phil Thesis, 2010), pp. 246–7, 267, 277–8, on how dispatching a expedition to the far-eastern limits of Christendom may have been a deliberate choice on Alfred's part.
6.     See especially R. E. Frykenberg, 'Thomas Christians and the Thomas tradition', in Frykenberg, Christianity in India (Oxford, 2008), pp. 91–115; N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture (Cambridge, 2018); S. Neill, A History of Christianity in India (Cambridge, 1984); and W. Baum & D. W. Winkler, The Church of the East: A Concise History (London, 2003), pp. 51–8.
7.     N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2018), especially pp. 143–4; M. D. Gibson (ed. & trans.), The Commentaries of Isho'dad of Merv, Bishop of Hadatha (Cambridge, 1916), vol. V, part 2, pp. xi–xiv; C. Buck, 'The universality of the Church of the East: how Persian was Persian Christianity?', Journal of the Assyrian Academic Society, 10 (1996), 54–95 at pp. 68–9; S. Neill, A History of Christianity in India (Cambridge, 1984), p. 44.
8.     N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2018), especially pp. 144–5, 212–13, 222–5, 227–32; C. G. Cereti, L. M. Olivieri & J. Vazhuthanapally, 'The problem of the Saint Thomas Crosses and related questions: epigraphical survey and preliminary research', East and West, 52 (2002), 285–310 at pp. 303–04. On the shrine/tomb and associated church at Mylapore, Chennai, see further Cereti, Olivieri & Vazhuthanapally, 'The problem of the Saint Thomas Crosses and related questions', East and West, 52 (2002), 285–310 at pp. 302–09.
9.     R. E. Frykenberg, Christianity in India (Oxford, 2008), p. 110; on Cosmas Indicopleustes and his knowledge of India, see further S. Fallar, 'The world according to Cosmas Indicopleustes—concepts and illustrations of an Alexandrian merchant and monk', Journal of Transcultural Studies, 1 (2011), 193–232. Incidentally, it is worth noting that Cosmas Indicopleustes's work was probably known in Anglo-Saxon England, see B. Bischoff & M. Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 208–11.
10.     R. Van Dam (trans.), Gregory of Tours: Glory of the Martyrs (Liverpool, 1988), p. 51; N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2018), p. 227.
11.     Long-distance trade and contacts in the fifth to seventh centuries AD have been the topic of several previous posts on this site, especially C. R. Green, 'A very long way from home: early Byzantine finds at the far ends of the world', blog post, 21 March 2017, online at https://www.caitlingreen.org/2017/03/a-very-long-way-from-home.html, & C. R. Green, 'Indo-Pacific beads from Europe to Japan? Another fifth- to seventh-century AD global distribution', blog post, 22 July 2018, online at https://www.caitlingreen.org/2018/07/indo-pacific-beads-europe.html. See further, for example, R. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade: From Pots to Pepper (London, 2008); K. R. Dark, 'Globalizing late antiquity: models, metaphors and the realities of long-distance trade and diplomacy', in A. Harris (ed.), Incipient Globalisation? Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century (Oxford, 2007), pp. 3–14; J. Drauschke, '"Byzantine" and "oriental" imports in the Merovingian Empire from the second half of the fifth to the beginning of the eighth century', in A. Harris (ed.), Incipient Globalisation? Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century (Oxford, 2007), pp. 53–73; C. Pion & B. Gratuze, 'Indo-Pacific glass beads from the Indian subcontinent in Early Merovingian graves (5th–6th century AD)', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 51–64.
12.     D. W. Rollason, Early Medieval Europe 300-1050: The Birth of Western Society (London, 2012), p. 160; I. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751 (London, 1994), pp. 215–16.
13.     Aldhelm: M. L. Cameron, 'Bald's Leechbook and cultural interactions in Anglo-Saxon England', Anglo-Saxon England, 19 (1990), 5–12 at p.8. Bede: Epistola de Obitu Bede, 'Cuthbert's letter on the death of Bede', translated in J. McClure & R. Collins (ed.), Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1994), p. 302. Another reference to pepper (and cinnamon) in Anglo-Saxon England comes in a letter of 732–42 to an English abbess named Cuniburg that mentions the sending of both pepper and cinnamon to her: E. Emerton, The Letters of St Boniface (New York, 1940), pp. 55–6.
14.     M. L. Cameron, 'Bald's Leechbook and cultural interactions in Anglo-Saxon England', Anglo-Saxon England, 19 (1990), 5–12 at p.8; K. S. Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 62–5. Note, 'Bald's Leechbook' is not the only Anglo-Saxon medical recipe book to include pepper and other eastern ingredients; they also occur in the tenth-century Lacnunga, for example. Moreover, it is worth emphasising that the evidence is against these medical recipes being simply indiscriminately copied and not actually used: whole recipes containing rarely used exotic ingredients were omitted and other recipes saw modification to omit perishable exotic ingredients, whilst further recipes see pepper and cinnamon compounded with native ingredients according to typical English methods, as Beckett, p. 65, observes.
15.     Ibn Khordadbeh in E. N. Adler, Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages (New York, 1987), pp. 2–3; on the Radhanite merchants, see further M. Gil, 'The Rādhānite merchants and the land of Rādhān', Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 17 (1974), 299–328.
16.     William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, chapter 80, trans. D. Prest (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 117–18.
17.     William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ii.122.2, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, & M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 190–1.
18.     John of Worcester, Chronicon ex Chronicis, trans. T. Forester, The Chronicle of Florence of Worcester (London, 1854), p. 73.
19.     For the bishops and their dates, see M. A. O'Donovan, 'An interim revision of episcopal dates for the province of Canterbury, 850–950: Part II', Anglo-Saxon England, 2 (1973), 91–113 at pp. 104–05. For scepticism over William's identification, see W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred (Oxford, 1904), pp. 289–90; D. Whitelock, 'William of Malmesbury on the works of King Alfred', in D. A. Pearsall & R. A. Waldron (eds.), Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway (London, 1969), pp. 78–93 at p. 83. R. M. Thomson & M. Winterbottom, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: II, General Introduction and Commentary (Oxford, 1999), pp. 98–9, accept Stevenson's scepticism, but also note that 'There is no reason to doubt that William here represents local (Sherborne) tradition' (p. 99), and Whitelock similarly considers that William of Malmesbury must have been 'told at Sherborne that this church still had in its possession some rare gems brought back from India by Bishop Sigehelm' (Whitelock, 'William of Malmesbury', p. 83).
20.     See, for example, L. White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (London, 1978), pp. 214–5.
21.     The two specific alternative candidates for Sigehelm and Æthelstan detailed here are supported by W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred (Oxford, 1904), p. 290; D. Pratt, 'The illnesses of King Alfred the Great', Anglo-Saxon England, 30 (2001), 39–90 at p. 69; and R. Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1998), p. 191. Æthelstan, a priest, is said to have been summoned from Mercia by King Alfred in Asser's Life of Alfred, chp. 77; he attests a number of charters and may be the Æthelstan who was appointed bishop of Ramsbury in c. 909, which is intriguing given the traditional identity of his companion, Sigehelm, and the suggestion made above as to his career: S. Keynes & M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (London, 1983), pp. 92–3, 259.
22.     O. Pengelly, Rome in Ninth-Century Anglo-Saxon England (University of Oxford D.Phil Thesis, 2010), pp. 246–7, 267, 277–8; Pengelly has argued that the dispatch of the mission arguably reflects 'something of the king's intellectual curiosity about the wider world and its limits... Alfred was probing the horizons of the wider world he had inherited from Christian Latin culture' (p. 247).
23.     S. Neill, A History of Christianity in India (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 47–8; C. G. Cereti, L. M. Olivieri & J. Vazhuthanapally, 'The problem of the Saint Thomas Crosses and related questions: epigraphical survey and preliminary research', East and West, 52 (2002), 285–310; N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 211–2.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2019, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The aim of the following brief note is to direct attention to a burial from a late ninth- to early eleventh-century cemetery in York. The burials here were originally excavated in 1989–90, but an osteological analysis in 2015 suggested that one of the people buried here was a man of possible African or mixed ancestry.

Reconstruction painting of the wooden houses of the Viking-Age city of Jorvik (York), as it might have appeared in the early 10th century (image: York Archaeological Trust, CC BY-NC-SA).

The burial in question is known as SK 3377, which is a well-preserved skeleton of a mature adult male that was buried in a wooden coffin dated via dendrochronology to 'after 892'. This oak coffin comes from a late ninth- to early eleventh-century cemetery that was excavated at 12-18 Swinegate, 14 Little Stonegate and 18 Back Swinegate, York, in 1989–90, this being originally the graveyard of the former St Benet's Church at York (demolished between 1299 and 1307). Around 100 burials have been excavated from this site, half of which were placed in wooden coffins with no metal fittings, and only a single burial within the cemetery was accompanied by grave goods. In this context, SK 3377 doesn't appear to have been treated noticeably different from the majority of the people who were buried there.(1) Seven of the skeletons from this cemetery, including SK 3379, were subsequently examined in 2015 by Katie Keefe and Malin Holst of York Osteoarchaeology. They concluded that the population of this cemetery as a whole showed signs of having lived a physically strenuous life and suffered from poor health, with SK 3379 being just one of a number of people buried here who had evidence for dietary deficiencies, joint disease and crush injuries to their spines. However, an examination of the remains in order to make ancestry determinations suggested that SK 3379 was unusual in one way: unlike the other six individuals examined, Malin Holst and Katie Keefe concluded that he 'may have been of African or mixed ancestry and may have migrated to York or descended from those that did'.(2)

A tableau of fishermen working and talking at Anglo-Scandinavian York, from the Jorvik Viking Centre, York (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Needless to say, the above possibility is of considerable interest. SK 3379 is not, of course, the first person from Late Saxon/Anglo-Scandinavian England to have been identified as of potential 'Sub-Saharan' African ancestry. As was detailed in a previous post, a small number of other burials from this period have been identified with varying degrees of certainty as those of people of African ancestry on the basis of an examination of their skeletal remains. One of these burials 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 dating indicating that she very probably died at some point between AD 896 and 1025, although the full details of this burial are unfortunately yet to be published.(3) Perhaps the best known, however, is that of an apparent African woman buried c. 1000 in the Late Saxon cemetery at North Elmham, Norfolk. This burial 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 the identification is said by them to 'leave little doubt' and be 'incontestable', although we do need to be aware that this ancestry determination was made some time ago and without details provided of how it was reached.(4) In addition, there is an interesting body of oxygen isotope evidence drawn from archaeological human teeth for the presence of people in seventh- to ninth-century in eastern Britain who could potentially have grown up in North Africa. In particular, multiple people buried in both the Bamburgh and Ely cemeteries have phosphate oxygen isotope values that might be consistent with them having spent their youth in a warmer and more southerly region such as parts of southernmost Iberia or North Africa. Such a situation would, of course, find support in the often-noted description of Hadrian—the later seventh and early eighth-century Abbot of St Augustine's, Canterbury—as 'a man of African race' by Bede (Historia Ecclesiastica, IV.1), perhaps reflecting an early life spent in Libya Cyrenaica, although in the present context it must be recognised that the above isotopic evidence cannot tell us about the ancestry so much as the geographical origins of these people.(5)

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 addition to such archaeological parallels, attention can also be drawn to the evidence of the eleventh-century Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, which relates the story of a Viking raid on Morocco (Mauritania) in the mid-ninth century that led to the taking of 'a great host' of captives:

Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. 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.(6)

This account was discussed at length in a previous post, and the notion that it reflects real events is supported by Al-Bakrī's Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik, which relates that 'Majūs [Vikings]—God curse them—landed at Nakūr [Nekor, Morocco], in the year 244 (858–9). They took the city, plundered it, and made its inhabitants slaves, except those who saved themselves by flight... The Majūs stayed eight days in Nakūr.'(7) Likewise, the late ninth-century Christian Chronicle of Alfonso III relates that the 'Northman pirates... sailed the sea and attacked Nekur, a city in Mauritania, and there they killed a vast number of Muslims.'(8)

Of course, it does need to be emphasised that there is no reason to directly connect the burials of a small number of people of possible African or mixed ancestry in Late Saxon/Anglo-Scandinavian England with this specific, mid-ninth-century Viking raid on Morocco. Rather, the various accounts of a raid on Morocco are best interpreted as offering support for the plausibility of the sort of movement between North Africa and Britain/Ireland in this period that might have resulted in SK 3379 having 'migrated to York' or been 'descended from those that did', if he was indeed of 'African or mixed ancestry' as Keefe and Holst cautiously suggest. Likewise, we don't need to assume that all such interactions were hostile in the way described in the Fragmentary Annals either, nor that any people of African ancestry who might have been present in Britain at this time were enslaved or descended from enslaved people. Certainly, there is nothing from the burial of SK 3379 himself to offer support for such a conclusion; instead, he appears in both life and death to be similar to the rest of the community buried at St Benet's.

A silver penny minted at York in the name of St Peter of York, c. 921–7, found in Lincolnshire near to Newark (image: PAS).

Notes

1.     For details of this burial site and discussions of the material found there, see K. Keefe & M. Holst, Osteological Analysis 12-18 Swinegate, 14 Little Stonegate & 18 Back Swinegate, York, North Yorkshire, York Osteology Report no. 1815 (York, 2015); J. M. McComish, The Pre-Conquest Coffins from 12-18 Swinegate and 18 Back Swinegate, York Archaeological Trust Report no. 2015/46 (York, 2015); S. J. Allen, Wooden Coffins and Grave Furniture from 12–18 Swinegate, 14 Little Stonegate, and 18 Back Swinegate, York (YORYM 1989.28, 1990.28, 1990.1): an Insight Report (York, 2015); and J. L. Buckberry, A Social and Anthropological Analysis of Conversion Period and Later Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, 4 vols. (University of Sheffield PhD Thesis, 2004), vol. 1, pp. 23–5, 185, 217–19.
2.     Keefe & Holst, Osteological Analysis; see especially pp. 1 (quotation), 7–8, on the ancestry determination; my thanks to Malin Holst of the York Osteoarchaeology and the University of York for discussing this burial with me. The remains were analysed using standard methods for the assessment of ancestry in modern forensic anthropology, like those undertaken recently for a significant number of Roman-era burials from York too, using the criteria set out by S. N. Byers, Introduction to Forensic Anthropology (International Edition), 3rd edn (Boston, 2010), pp. 152-65. For the Roman-era studies, see 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, and S. Leach et al, 'A Lady of York: migration, ethnicity and identity in Roman Britain', Antiquity, 84 (2010), 131–45.
3.     M. Archer, 'Fairford schoolboys who found skull are fascinated to hear it dates back 1,000 years', Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard, 20 September 2013, newspaper report, available online.
4.     P. Wade-Martins, East Anglian Archaeology Report No. 9: Excavations in North Elmham Park 1967–72, 2 vols. (Gressenhall, 1980), vol. 2, pp. 259–62, 317–9; H. M. Clayton, Anglo-Saxon Medicine within its Social Context (University of Durham PhD Thesis, 1977), pp. 224–6.
5.     The phosphate oxygen isotope values recorded from the seventh- to ninth-century cemetery at Bamburgh (the 'royal city' of the Northumbrians) and the seventh-century cemetery at Ely both show the presence of multiple people buried there with values significantly above the maximum values expected for people who grew up in the British Isles (often defined as 18.6‰ δ¹⁸O_p, although people on the far western margins of Britain and Ireland could theoretically have values up to 19.2‰ δ¹⁸O_p) or, indeed, anywhere in Europe: see further this previous post, especially footnote 2. So, at Ely two people buried there had results of 19.7‰ δ¹⁸O_p and 19.9‰ δ¹⁸O_p, whilst at Bamburgh two people had results of 20.1‰ δ¹⁸O_p and 20.3‰ δ¹⁸O_p and a further five people had results ranging from 19.3‰ δ¹⁸O_p to 19.5‰ δ¹⁸O_p. See on these sites S. Lucy et al, 'The burial of a princess? The later seventh-­century cemetery at Westfield Farm, Ely', Antiquity, 89 (2009), 81–141; 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 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 Hadrian's origins, see for example B. Bischoff & M. Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 84–92.
6.     J. N. Radner (ed. & trans.), Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (Dublin, 1978), FA 330, pp. 120–1.
7.     A. Christys, Vikings in the South: Voyages to Iberia and the Mediterranean (London, 2015), p. 54.
8.     V. E. Aguirre, The Viking Expeditions to Spain During the 9th Century, Mindre Skrifter No. 30 (Odense, 2013), p. 21.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2019, 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 Cornwall that still exist, dating from the medieval era through until the early seventeenth century, following on from a similar post on early maps of Lincolnshire. Details of each map and a brief discussion of the principal points of interest are provided in the captions to the following image gallery, which I aim to add to over time.

Detail from the Anglo-Saxon world map from Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1, dated c. 1025–50, probably drawn at Canterbury; click for a larger view. The map is in an unusual rectangular format and is believed to have been based on a model made during the Roman period. Many medieval mappa mundi don't offer any real indication of the Cornish peninsula, but this map clearly depicts it; the British Library notes that the size of the Cornish peninsula is exaggerated' and suggests that this is 'probably reflecting the importance of its copper and tin mines in the ancient world'. The image drawn on the Cornish peninsula is uncertain: it could be two figures fighting, possibly a reference to conflicts between the Britons of that area and the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex, as the BL suggests? (image: British Library).

Al-Idrīsī's mid-twelfth-century Arabic map of Britain, from a late sixteenth-century copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the map is split across three different drawings which have been combined together here so that the whole island can be seen (Bodleian Library MS. Pococke 375 folios 281b-282a, 308b, 310b-311a)—click for a larger view. The map is orientated with south at the top, rather than north; the south coast of England runs right-to-left along the top of the map and then down to the bottom right corner. As with the Anglo-Saxon Cotton Map, which may be based on a lost Roman original, the Cornish peninsula is exaggerated and very obvious as the sharp-pointed finger of land on the right of the image, though no towns or rivers are named and the peninsula is noted only as 'the extremity of England'. For more on this map, see my note 'Al-Idrisi's twelfth-century map and description of eastern England', which includes Konrad Miller's redrawn and transliterated version of al-Idrīsī's map, and 'Islamic gold dinars in late eleventh- and twelfth-century England', which maps the towns al-Idrīsī depicts along the south coast, the most westerly of these being Dorchester, Dorset. (Image: Bodleian Library).

Map of Cornwall and the South-West, extracted from the map of England by Matthew Paris, c. 1250; click for a larger view. The names Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset are large labels written in blue and red ink, with Dorset written in red ink; Dorset is oddly placed north of Somerset and Devon is curiously to the north of both of these and slightly to the east of Dorset. The place-name on the far west of Cornwall is Bodmin, with Tintagel then to the north-east of this (above the label for Cornwall), whilst the next name to the east, on the south coast, is Dartmouth, with a river separating it from Totnes and the Scilly Isles then being depicted as an island immediately to the south of these names; the Corpus Christi College Library, Cambridge, version of this map (top half only) also mentions St Michael's Mount in Cornwall on its scale legend, but this is not depicted on this map. Note, the name next to the 'Cornwall' label and on the west of a bend of the river is Exeter, with Portsmouth written vertically below this to the east of Totnes. (Image: BL Cotton MS Claudius D VI, fol. 12v, via Wikimedia Commons).

A portolan chart of south-western England and southern Wales by Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte with north on the right, c. 1331, based on his earlier portolan sailing charts and mariners' reports; click for a larger view. The Cornish peninsula is clearly visible, as is the Bristol Channel, and various place-names are readable, including Mousehole, St Michael's Mount, Lizard, Falmouth, Fowey and Plymouth. Note, there is significantly more detail shown of the south coast of Cornwall than there is of the north (Image: British Library).

Close up of Cornwall and Devon on the fourteenth-century Gough Map (c. 1360), which has east at the top and north on the left, showing major roads, rivers and settlements. Cornwall and Devon are written in red on the map, along with a single routeway marked in red moving from the top of the map (east) and ultimately London through to the tip of Cornwall. Important places are marked by drawings of buildings/churches of varying sizes; the names are very difficult to decipher, but the road is believed to terminate at Iwes, St Ives, which is potentially a point of some interest with regard to St Ives's local import. Other places on the map have been identified as Bodmin, Boscastle, Camelford, Fowey, ?Launceton, Liskeard, Looe, Lostwithiel, Padstow, Penzance, Redruth, St Buryan, St Colomb, St Germans, St Michael's Mount, ?Stratton, ?Tintagel, Tregony, and Truro. (Image: Wikimedia Commons).

A redrawn version of the Gough Map showing more clearly the details of the Devon and Cornwall; note, only a few of the names are transcribed on this; click image for a larger view. (Image: Ordnance Survey, 1875).

A portolan sailing chart of Cornwall drawn by Grazioso Benincasa of Ancona, Italy, dated 1466, showing numerous places including Mousehole, Falmouth, Fowey and Portsmouth. It is worth comparing this to the c. 1331 chart by Pietro Vesconte, above, as there is slightly more detail of the north coast, with two bays shown, perhaps St Ives Bay and Padstow/the Camel Estuary. (Image: BnF).

Another, slightly later portolan sailing chart of Cornwall drawn by Visconte Maggiolo of Genoa, Italy, dated 1510; a comparison with the previous portolans of c. 1331 and 1466 shows that there had been further development of the north coast of Cornwall and Devon. (Image: British Library, Egerton MS. 2803 f. 6v).

Extract from the Angliae Figura showing Cornwall and Devon (click image for a larger view), a vellum map probably created in the 1530s and perhaps hanging at Hampton Court as the property of Henry VIII; both this map and the Gough Map are thought to derive from a common source map dating from around 1290. The coastline of Cornwall and Devon is included in this extract, with Devon, Cornwall and Exeter labelled in red. A significant number of place-names in Cornwall are also labelled, including St Just, St Buryan, St Ives, Lelant, St Michael's Mount, St Columb, Falmouth, Padstow, Bodmin, Tintagel, St Austell and Looe; there are also reasonable depictions of the Hayle Estuary, the Fal Estuary, and the Tamar river. (Image: British Library).

The Cornish section of a detailed, ten-foot-long map of south-west coast of England from Exeter to Lands End, dated 1539-40; click here for a zoomable version. According to the British Library, this map is the result of an order by Thomas Cromwell in 1539 for the coasts to be surveyed by local people, with these then being edited and compiled and then presented to King Henry VIII and displayed in Whitehall; the intent was to show where foreign invaders might land, with forts and intended-but-unmade forts marked. The following images consist of details taken from this map. (Image: British Library, Cotton Augustus I. i. 35).

St Ives Bay and the Hayle Estuary on the above 1539-40 map of Cornwall, showing St Ives' church, medieval harbour and the fortification built in 1490 known as 'The Castle' (perhaps modern Quay House on the harbour beach), Phillack Church in the Towans (sand-dunes) of St Ives Bay, and Lelant; click image for a larger view (Image: British Library, Cotton Augustus I. i. 35).

Mount's Bay in around 1540 under a hypothetical invasion scenario, showing Mousehole on the top right, Penzance on the bottom right, St Michael's Mount in the bay, and Chapel Rock between the Mount and Marazion still with its chapel upon it. (Image: British Library, Cotton MS Augustus I i 34)

The Cornish peninsula on the France page of Mercator's Atlas of Europe, which was based on his 1554 wall map of Europe (p. 10). (Image: British Library, Maps C.29.c.13)

Gerard Mercator's engraving of a map of Cornwall, 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 the map offers more detail than many earlier maps, but also has a notable number of inaccuracies, such as the placement of St Michael's Mount as inland rather than in Mount's Bay and St Ives on the east of the Hayle Estuary. (Image: British Library, Maps C.29.c.13).

A section from the detailed Map of Cornwall by William Saxton, dated 1576, included in the atlas of Lord Burghley, first published 1579; click the image for a larger view of this section and here for zoomable version of the entire map. (Image: British Library, Royal MS. 18. D.III, f.8r).

A full view of a different copy of the Map of Cornwall by William Saxton, dated 1576; click the image for a larger view of this map. (Image: British Library).

A map of Falmouth Haven from the atlas of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, dated 1595. It takes the form of a bird's eye view of Falmouth Haven, with St Mawes and its larger sister castle, Pendennis at the mouth. (Image: British Library, Royal MS. 18. D.III, f.16).

Proof version of John Speed's 1611/12 map of Cornwall, which closely followed the Saxton map of 1576 in offering a much more accurate and detailed depiction of the county, but includes additional settlements, rivers and other details; a zoomable version of this map is available here. Speed's map also includes a plan of Launceston and drawings of some stones, including The Hurlers. (Image: Cambridge University).

A map of Cornwall and Devon with places and rivers represented anthropomorphically, drawn by William Hole and used to illustrate Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion, from a copy dated 1622; click the image for a closer view or here for a zoomable version. The maps from Poly-Olbion are particularly interested in the rivers of Cornwall and the other counties of England, and depict a nymph for each major river; these are shown 'disporting themselves in a variety of engaging poses', as the Society of Antiquaries puts it. (Image: David Rumsey).

The text content of this post and page is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2020, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

A previous post on here listed a number of field and other local minor names from Lindsey that made reference to folkloric and monstrous creatures inhabiting northern Lincolnshire; the aim of the following brief discussion is to offer some further names of the same type, based this time on the Place-Names of Lincolnshire, volumes 1–7. Once again, it should be noted that 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.

J. R. Skelton's 1908 illustration of Grendel, who is described as a þyrs/thyrs in Beowulf (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. It seems to indicate a malevolent, fen-dwelling monster of the Grendel type, with the Old English Maxims II saying that þyrs sceal on fenne gewunian ana innan lande, 'the þyrs(giant, ogre) shall dwell in the fen, alone in his realm'; compare the Thrusmyre in Edlington parish, 'a mire, Old Norse myrr, inhabited by a þurs'. The names below 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 indicate the year in which the name is first documented.

• Thirsewell, Thorsey Nab, Glentham (1220)—'spring haunted by giants', sometimes with nabbi, 'hill/knoll'.
• Thyrstpit, Usselby (1372)—'giant-pit' or 'demon-haunted pit'; note, the compound þyrspyt etc is first recorded in a ninth-century Old English charter.
• Thurspits, Bottesford (1679)—'the pits, hollows haunted by giants, demons or goblins'.
• Low Thrush pits/Upper thrushpit, Ashby near Scunthorpe (1750)—'the pit/hollow haunted by a demon or giant' or 'giant-pit'.
• Trusdall, Nettleton (1577)—'the share of land haunted by a demon or giant'.
• Tursfeild Crosse, Scawby (1669)—'the field haunted by demons, giants or goblins' + cros, 'cross'.
• Threshole, Saxilby and Ingleby (1766)—'the hollow occupied by a giant or demon'. Note, Bishop White Kennett, in a glossary written in c. 1700, defines a 'Thurs-house or Thurs-hole' as 'a hollow vault... looked on as enchanted holes'.
• Thirspitts, Waltham (1601)—'the pit occupied by a giant or demon'.
• Thuswelle closes, Hemswell (1670)—'spring haunted by a giant or demon'.

Image from the title page of 'Robin Goodfellow: His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests' (1629); Robin Goodfellow is generally considered a type of hob or hobgoblin (image: Wikimedia Commons).

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. The normal form in Northern and North Midland counties was apparently Hobthrus or Hobthrust, which is a compound of Middle English hob(be), 'a hobgoblin', and thurs(e), 'a devil, evil spirit', from OE þyrs/ON þurs, 'a giant, monster'; note, Dickins considers hob to be in fact an abbreviation of hobthrus, with the latter being the original form and the hob as a creature thus being a less-malevolent development of the Old Norse þurs (thurs)/Old English þyrs (thyrs).

• Hob Lane, East Halton (1804)—'a lane haunted by a hobgoblin'; see also the Hoblurke recorded at East Halton in the 1200s in the previous post. A tale of a hobthurst (hob + thurs) from East Halton was collected by Mabel Peacock around the turn of the nineteenth century, when it was apparently living in the cellar of Manor Farm in an iron pot and was described as 'a kind of devil' and 'a little fellow with a big head'. He would apparently help the farmer on occasion, for example driving sheep to the barn so that they could be sheared, although he was also mischievous and once left the wagon on top of the barn; the farmer was meant to leave the hobthrust a linen shirt for his help each year, but when he gave the creature a hempen shirt one year instead, the hobthrust set up an angry wail and refused to ever help on the farm again.
• Hobbing hole, Lissingleys in Buslingthorpe parish (1846)—'hollow frequented by a hobgoblin', presumably somewhere on the ancient medieval common pasturage and meeting-place of Lissingleys, now in Buslingthorpe parish but before 1851 an extra-parochial area shared between the surrounding parishes.
• Hobthrust Dale, Burton-upon-Stather (1698)—'the share of land haunted by a hob-thrust, a goblin', with hob-thrust as above.
• Hobtrust Lane, Goxhill (1775)—another name involving the compound hobthrust< hob(be) + thurs(e). Note, Goxhill is a neighbouring village to East Halton, above.

Jane Eyre encountering Mr Rochester's horse, which she at first mistakes for a Gytrash, a Northern English variant of the 'shag foal' (image: Wikimedia Commons).

The 'Shag Foal'—a rough-coated goblin horse

Also known as the Tatterfoal, he was goblin horse or donkey that was common across Lincolnshire and seems to have had a preference for hills; he is also said to have haunted Spittle Hill at Frieston, Ogarth Hill at Tathwell, Kirton-in-Lindsey, South Ferriby, and Boggart Lane at Roxby (below). According to Westwood and Simpson, something akin to the 'shag foal' was first mention by Gervase of Tilbury in c. 1211, when he termed it a 'grant'; Eli Twigg of Asgarthorpe in the nineteenth century described the shag foal as 'a shagg'd-looking hoss, and given to all manner of goings-on', including catching hold of anyone riding home drunk, pulling them from the saddle, and 'scaring a old woman three parts out of her skin, and making her drop her shop-things in the blatter and blash, and run for it'.

• Shag Foal, Ulceby in North Lincolnshire (1826)—a piece of land haunted by a 'shag foal'.

The road from Roxby to Winterton Cliff House in 1898, showing the position of Roxby Mill; this was presumably known as Boggart Lane in the 1830s, where a 'shag foal' was seen by a young man as he passed Roxby Mill  (image: David Rumsey).

Boggarts

'Boggart' was a general northern term for a frightening creature that might be a ghost, malicious fairy or minor demon, with outdoor boggarts generally haunting pits, wells or lonely lanes.

• Bogger Furlong, Caistor (1649)—a furlong in the old open field that was haunted by a boggart.
• Boggart Lane, Roxby (1830s)—the boggart haunting this lane, also known as Goosey Lane, may be identical with the 'shag foal' met by a young man as he passed Roxby Mill, which was 'sum'ate as big as a watter-tub' and 'a gret shagg'd thing', with huge eyes; it 'shooved him roond wheniver he tried to slip past it'.

J. R. Skelton's 1908 illustration of the slave in Beowulf who stole the dragon's golden cup, thinking to redeem himself, and thus awoke the dragon (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Dragons, trolls, elves & other creatures

• Drakehou, drackhole, Owmby by Spital (1330)—probably the hollow inhabited by a dragon, although the earliest form has the second element Old Norse haugr, 'mound, barrow', which would fit with other early-recorded dragons; as the Old English Maxims II puts it, Draca sceal on hlæw, frod, frætwum wlanc, 'A dragon belongs in a mound, old and proud of treasures', and compare Drakelow, Derbyshire, æt Dracan hlawen in 942, which is Old English dracan hlāw, 'the dragon's mound'.
• Drakehord, Nettleham (1348–9)—Old English dracanhord, 'dragon's hoard'; see above.
• Draykmoor, Tetney (1764)—Middle English drāke, 'a dragon', + mōr, 'a marsh'.
• Poke Close, Willoughton (1554)—'the goblin infested enclosure', pūca, compare 'Puck of Pook's Hill'.
• Trolleheudland, Goxhill (1309)—'the headland (place where the plough turned) haunted by a troll'.
• Aluehou, Tetney (12th century)—a Scandinavian name meaning 'the mound, haugr, haunted by elves',
• Scrittecroft, Scothern (1216–72)—'croft, small field' + scritta, probably with the sense 'devil, wizard', cf. ON skratti.
• Grimesdic, Dunholme (1154–89)—'Grim's ditch', with reference to the Óðinn-name Grímr used as a synonym for the devil.
• Grimeshow, Nettleham (1348–9)—'Grim's mound/barrow, ON haugr', with reference to the Óðinn-name Grímr used as a synonym for the devil.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2020, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The aim of the following piece is simply to share some interesting accounts of the tin-trade in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly one written in Arabic and another in Persian. Taken together, these two accounts suggest that tin from southwestern England (i.e. Cornwall and Devon) was exported via southern France to both Egypt and ultimately Iran in this period, with it being used by potters in the latter area to make tin-opacified ceramic glazes.

A tin-glazed vase made in 14th-century Persia, now in The Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro; click the image for a larger view (image: Caitlin Green).

I'm pleased to announce that the second edition of my Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650 has now been published and is available to buy as both a paperback (401 pages, ISBN 978-0-902668-26-3) and a PDF ebook.

Britons and Anglo-Saxons was first issued in 2012 and represents the published version of my Oxford DPhil thesis. It offers an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the Lincoln region in the post-Roman period, drawing together a wide range of sources. In particular, it indicates that a British polity named *Lindēs was based at Lincoln into the sixth century, and that the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindsey (Lindissi) had an intimate connection to this British political unit. The picture that emerges is also of importance nationally, helping to answer key questions regarding the nature and extent of Anglian-British interaction and the origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

This new second edition of Britons and Anglo-Saxons includes a brand new, 52-page introduction discussing recent research into the late and post-Roman Lincoln region, consisting of sections on 'Romano-British pottery in the fifth- to sixth-century Lincoln region', 'Archaeology and the British ‘country of *Lindēs’', 'Place-names and history in early Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire', and 'Territories, central clusters and persistent places in the pre-Viking Lincolnshire landscape'.

Britons and Anglo-Saxons is the third volume in the Studies in the History of Lincolnshire, a peer-reviewed academic project published by the History of Lincolnshire Committee (established 1966). Click here to buy the paperback from Lulu and here to buy the PDF ebook. Alternatively, the paperback of Britons and Anglo-Saxons can also be purchased from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

A selection of reviews of Britons and Anglo-Saxons:

“Britons and Anglo-Saxons is an impressively interdisciplinary book that combines linguistic, historical, literary, and archaeological evidence into a coherent narrative for the post-Roman fate of Lincolnshire... [the] central contention that “the Britons based at Lincoln in the fifth and sixth centuries left a political, administrative, cultural, and even potentially a symbolic, legacy for succeeding centuries” (153) is amply borne out by [the] thorough interdisciplinary methodology, and [Green's] findings are sure to have an impact on the wider historiography of early-medieval British history... a major accomplishment by a promising young scholar...”  (Speculum: the Journal of the Medieval Academy of America, 2013)

“This book, based on the author’s doctoral thesis, explores the relationships between British and Anglo-Saxon populations in post-Roman Britain and the formation of kingdoms, using Lincolnshire as a case study... As an exploration of the aftermath of Roman Britain, the relationships between native populations and immigrant communities, and the mechanisms behind the development of subsequent administrative units, this book makes for a very thought-provoking read... It is a welcome addition to our understanding of the early centuries of post-Roman Britain.” (Medieval Archaeology, 2013)

“This book should recommend itself to the introductory reading lists of history and archaeology students but will also serve the general reader well... This study draws upon the combined application of history, archaeology, place-names, and early literature to reconstruct its narrative —approaches that one would wish to see duplicated across the country... This book not only provides a narrative for Lincolnshire but also reinforces the potential value of similar approaches elsewhere in Britain while at the same time offering a compelling introduction to the challenges of studying this period of Britain’s past.” (Midland History, 2013)

“[F]ully engaged with up-to-date scholarship and operating assuredly across all relevant disciplines... Not only does it offer a sophisticated study of Dark-Age Lincolnshire but it also makes an important contribution to wider debates about the ending of Roman Britain and the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon England... This inter-disciplinary exploration of *Lindes offers a new standard for regional work. It also provides a model capable of explaining how Roman Britain transmuted into Anglo-Saxon England... this book makes an important contribution to the central historical debates and will provide an important point of reference as to how we model the British/Anglo-Saxon interface for the next generation.” (N. J. Higham, Lincolnshire History & Archaeology, 2015)

Two maps showing (a) the location of the ceremonial county of Lincolnshire and (b) a reconstruction of the coastal landscape of pre-Viking England, showing the low-lying areas and wetlands in the Lincoln region, along with the 'barrier islands' that existed off the Lincolnshire coast until the thirteenth century (images: map a—Wikimedia Commons; map b—Caitlin Green).

From an archaeological perspective, the notion that Lincolnshire was truly peripheral in the pre-Viking period is difficult to justify. For example, metal-detectorists continue to recover astonishing quantities of pre-Viking coinage from Lincolnshire. Nearly thirty years ago, Mark Blackburn observed that the quantity of coinage from Lincolnshire marked it out as one of the richest parts of seventh- and eighth-century England, and this conclusion has only been strengthened by recent finds and the work of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS). So, a significant quantity of Merovingian gold coinage has been found in this area of Britain, testifying to significant trading with the continent from an early date, whilst one site at Garwick in southern Lincolnshire has produced the second largest group of Middle Saxon coins from any site in England, exceeded only by the major West Saxon trading-site at Southampton. Likewise, if we look at the overall ranked totals for seventh- to eighth-century coins recorded on the PAS, Lincolnshire is not only is in 'first place', but has over twice as many coins recorded as is the case for the second-place county, Suffolk, and many more times those recorded in counties like Oxfordshire, Wiltshire or even Kent (a fact that becomes even more impressive once one notes that around a third of Lincolnshire's land area, the entire Fenland district which lies below 5m OD, has produced virtually no finds of this date at all). 

Bar chart showing the number of seventh- to eighth-century coins recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme from each county through to December 2020; note, this only represents a proportion of the total coin finds known, with others recorded on the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds or EMC, but it is a large enough dataset for the present purposes (image: Caitlin Green).

Two maps; click here for a larger version of both: (a) A map of the distribution of seventh- to eighth-century coin finds recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme in the Lincoln region to December 2020, showing how they are largely absent from the extensive low-lying parts of Lincolnshire, especially the Fenland district of Holland; note, a significant number of other finds from this region are also recorded on the EMC, but the broad pattern is the same even if these are added (image: Caitlin Green, based on data from the PAS and my base-map of the pre-Viking landscape from Britons and Anglo-Saxons) (b) A map of England showing John Blair's core ‘eastern zone’ of pre-Viking English identity and building tradition (forward hashing) and Toby Martin's zone of fifth- to sixth-century Anglian immigration, burial tradition, costume and ethnogenesis (backward hashing, based on the primary area of his Phase B brooches), combined with the distribution of Anglian cremation-predominant cemeteries (image: Caitlin Green).

Two maps showing the difference between the likely extent of the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindissi and the modern district of Lindsey; note, the map also shows the pre-Viking landscape of the Lincoln region, with light-blue representing low-lying wetlands. Click the image for a larger version (images: Caitlin Green).

Two maps showing (a) the large early Anglo-Saxon cremation cemeteries of the Lincoln region, set against the late/post-Roman landscape, and (b) the distribution of both the large and small early Anglian cremation-predominant cemeteries, represented by filled squares, plotted against Saxon artefacts of the second half of the fifth century, represented by stars, and the Late Roman provincial boundaries as reconstructed by J. C. Mann in ‘The creation of four provinces in Britain by Diocletian’, Britannia, 29 (1998). Click here for a larger version of these maps (images drawn by Caitlin Green, based on Caitlin Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, figs 11 and 21a).

A map of Lincolnshire, Lindisfarne and the North, showing key sites, groups and place-names (image: Caitlin Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, fig. 46)

St. Paul's church, Jarrow; part of the Anglo-Saxon monastery of Jarrow survives today as the chancel of St Paul's Church (image: Stanley Howe/Geograph).

The aim of the following brief note is simply to share a recent find of a late ninth- or early tenth-century Byzantine coin that was discovered amongst the rocks at low tide on Carbis Bay beach, Cornwall. Carbis Bay is part of the wider St Ives Bay, where several sites have produced finds of Early Byzantine material and there seems to have been a significant early medieval site at Phillack on the Hayle estuary. There are only a handful of Byzantine coins of this date found in Britain when compared to both earlier and later periods, so it is an interesting find, and may offer some further context for the interesting tenth-century description of Britain as 'an emporium (bārgāh) of Rūm' in the Persian Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam.

A copper-alloy Byzantine follis of Leo VI, dating from the late ninth or early tenth century, found at Carbis Bay, Cornwall (images: Jon Mann/PAS).

The coin in question is a copper-alloy follis of the Byzantine emperor Leo VI, dating 886–912 and minted at the imperial capital of Constantinople, which is reported to have been recovered from amongst the rocks at low tide on Carbis Bay beach, Cornwall. Jon Mann kindly communicated this discovery to me and the find circumstances, and I have subsequently passed it on to the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), where the coin is now recorded as CORN-9511B2.

The distribution of ninth- to twelfth-century Byzantine coins and seals in Britain, based on data from the PAS, the EMC, De Jersey 1996, Biddle 2012, Kelleher 2012 and Naylor 2010; click here for a larger version of this map. Note the two major concentrations of coins and seals shown on this map are Winchester and London, and coins nowadays considered to be modern losses are not included (image: Caitlin Green).

A previous post discussed a find of a Northern Song dynasty Chinese coin from England whose context suggested that it may have been a genuine ancient loss from the medieval period, along with a variety of textual and archaeological evidence for contact between England and East Asia in the Middle Ages. The following post returns briefly to this question, noting the recent discovery of a second Northern Song dynasty coin from England. 

A copper-alloy Chinese coin of the Northern Song emperor Zhenzong, dated 1008–16, found near Petersfield, Hampshire (image: PAS).

The distribution of archaeological and textual evidence for the presence of medieval Chinese pottery (black open circles) and coins (blue dots) west of India, set against the maximum extent of the Mongol Empire in the late thirteenth century in red; the map is based on Whitehouse 1972, Cribb and Potts 1996, Zhao 2015, Vigano 2011, Vigano 2014, Meicun and Zhang 2017, Василев 2017 (image: Caitlin Green, drawn on a base map from Wikimedia Commons).

The focus of this post is on two important yet lost elements of the pre-modern landscape of Lincolnshire, namely a large area of common land named Lissingleys—very probably the meeting-place for the whole of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian Lindsey—and the road running north-eastwards from Lincoln to the coast at Grimsby. The latter routeway is first recorded in 1675, but is believed to have originally run along the northern border of this common pasturage and meeting-site, and other place- and field-name evidence suggests that this road may well be of a similar antiquity to the meeting-place itself.

(a) Lissingleys in 1820, before its enclosure in 1851, as depicted in Henry Stevens' drawing for the Ordnance Survey (image: Wikimedia Commons); (b) A map of the three ridings of Lindsey set against the pre-Viking landscape of the region, showing the location of Lissingleys at the point at which the three ridings met (image: Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, fig. 27). Click here for a larger version of both maps.

The following draft is concerned with the curious use of the nickname 'Cousin Jack' for the Cornish in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The 'Great Emigration' of the Cornish between around 1815 and the First World War saw what has been termed the 'wholescale scattering' of the Cornish to the new mining frontiers of North and South America, Australia and South Africa. From at least the mid-nineteenth century, these emigrants were known as 'Cousin Jacks', but the origin of this term seems rather obscure. The aim of the following note is to investigate the evidence for the early usage of the term 'Cousin Jack' and make some suggestions as to its origins in light of this evidence. 

The cover of Oswald Pryor's Cousin Jack Cartoons (Sydney, 1945); Pryor was the son of Cornish parents and born at Moonta, South Australia. The books says the following of the front cover image: 'The cover design suggests a miner who has knocked off early, and has come up a ladderway remote from the main shaft in order to avoid running into the boss. Unfortunately he has run into the trouble he meant to avoid. This situation will be, obvious to all who know the Moonta scene. —The miner's hat here depicted is made of hard compressed pulp and colored a deep maroon when new. The candle is stuck on the front of the hat with a lump of wet red clay. This was the practice of old Cornish miners for generations.' (Image: State Library of Victoria)

The 'Great Emigration' of the Cornish in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seems to have occurred on a quite remarkable scale. Margaret James-Korany has, for example, identified 42,000 individual emigrants sailing from the principal ports of Cornwall for Canada between 1831 and 1860, with some 6,200 leaving from Padstow alone in that period, and this outflow continued long after 1860 too. Thus the Cornish Telegraph for 5 September 1866 published a piece regretting 'the rage for emigration' in recent years, noting that 'the rush for Australia and America has been very great', and recent calculations suggest that at least 240,000 Cornish went overseas between 1860 and 1900, with a similar number leaving for England and Wales, with the result that Cornwall lost around a third of its population across the period. This depopulation was particularly marked amongst the youngest age-groups. Philip Payton observes that 44.8% of the Cornish male population aged fifteen to twenty-four left for overseas between 1861 and 1900, along with 26.2% of the female population in the same age group, and another 30% and 35.5% respectively left for other counties within Britain as well.(1)

The use of the term 'Cousin Jack' for the Cornish, particularly miners and especially emigrant miners, along with its companion-term 'Cousin Jenny', is well-evidenced from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. John H. Forster's account of 'Life in the copper mines of Lake Superior', given to the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society in 1887, contains the following illustrative passage:

The Cornishman, or "cousin Jack," is a native of the duchy of Cornwall, England... The Cornishman of the present day, like his father, is of a roving disposition. His footsteps may be traced around the globe. There is no prominent mining field in the world wherein you will not find "Cousin Jack." He is in Alaska, California, the Rocky Mountains, Mexico, Central and South America, in Australia, India and Lake Superior. He is a first rate miner and possesses a certain sturdiness of frame and disposition that commends him to the observer. He works hard, eats well and fights bravely. He is, numerically, very strong in our northern mines, and, being, as a rule, steady, conservative and skillful, he finds ready employment. He likes mining; esteems his vocation among the most honorable, if not aristocratic. He despises the duties of an ordinary day laborer. In short, he is a born miner and nothing else... But "Cousin Jack's" language attracts most attention. His dialect, pure and simple, is unique. He uses many English words with a strange twist, while other words of his you would look for in vain in Webster's unabridged... But we find in the mines many gentlemen of Cornish birth who are well educated and efficient, occupying positions of trust and responsibility. Many of the captains and agents are Cornishmen.(2)

Quite when and where these Cornish emigrants started to be known as 'Cousin Jacks' is not wholly clear, unfortunately, and various theories have been proposed over the years, most of which locate the genesis of the term overseas in America, Australia or other places where Cornish miners emigrated to in the nineteenth century. The Cornubian and Redruth Times in 1908, for example, carried a piece suggesting that the term 'Cousin Jack' was first used in the California mining districts in the very late 1840s and spread out from there, with the additional claim that 'twenty years ago the term in Cornwall was unknown'; however, as we shall see, neither claim stands up to scrutiny, and the reality is perhaps even more interesting.(3)

An Australian Cousin Jack cartoon by Oswald Pryor from 1915; the caption reads 'Cousin Jack miner:- "Call isself Cap'n 'e do; and I 'spoase ef the truth ez known, 'e never did a day's work underground in all 'ez life."' (Image: Trove)

Looking at the documentary evidence for the usage of the term, a traditional place to start is with the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites a number of examples of the use of Cousin Jack under their Cousin, n. and Jack, n.¹ entries. One, from Rolf Boldrewood's Australian novel Miner's Right of 1890, describes 'a short man, whose blue-black curly hair and deep-set eyes betrayed the Cousin Jack',(4) whilst the earliest given is from The Star newspaper of Ballarat, Victoria (Australia) on the 19 March 1857, which runs as follows:

They were ‘Tips’, and ‘Geordies’, and ‘Cousin Jacks’, altogether, and I did as well as I could.(5) 

The fact that both of the early citations are from Australia has sometimes been taken to suggest that the term could have emerged there, and it is certainly treated as such by the English Dialect Dictionary under its entry for Cousin.(6) In addition to these entries, the OED also records what it treats as a variant of Cousin Jack, Cousin Jacky. This is said to be documented first in the South Australian Register, from Adelaide, for 2 June 1854, via the following passage: 'John O'Connell then said to him, ‘You're a b——, Cousin Jacky, an't you?'', although the term also occurs in dialogue from Australian court reports of the 1840s too, e.g.'I don't like you cousin Jackies, keep your own company, and I'll keep mine', which appeared in the South Australian, 30 May 1848.(7) However, 'Cousin Jacky' is not only documented in Australian contexts; it also appears in, for example, Thomas Quiller Couch's East Cornwall Words, published by the English Dialect Society in 1880, where it is treated as an East Cornwall term for a miner from West Cornwall:

There is a marked difference between the speech of East and West Cornwall... At the beginning of the present century mining adventure, especially in the search for copper, became a furor in East Cornwall, and a passionate enthusiasm brought hither the skilled miners of the West, who flocked to the banks of Tywardreath Bay, and further east to the central granite ridge about the tors of Caradon. These immigrants brought with them and have left an infusion of their language, especially its technical portion, but I remember when it was a great mimetic feat, and productive of much mirth amongst us, to be able to imitate the talk of Cousin Jacky from Redruth or St. Just.(8)

T. Q. Couch of Bodmin, the father of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (aka Q), was born in 1826 at Lansallos near Fowey, and seems to be here recounting a usage known to him in his youth, and is clearly referring to someone from West Cornwall, not a Cornish emigrant overseas. Likewise, in a letter printed in the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser for 28 March 1862, Christopher Childs of Liskeard uses 'Cousin Jacky' in passing as a seemingly well-known, common and friendly term traditionally used between Cornish miners:

The very motto of the Cornish miners, "One and All," at once bespeaks our favour, and indicates that [Cornish miners] are not naturally selfish, but on the contrary, are kindly disposed one toward another. If any one doubt this, let him attend the funeral of a miner, and observe how they congregate to pay the last sad tribute of respect, and drop a tear over the grave of their departed comrade... How forcibly does the familiar name "comrade," and the expression of "Com'se along Cousin Jacky," speak in favour of his friendly and social disposition.(9)

In contrast, in Margaret Ann Courtney's West Cornwall Words (which was bound together with Couch's East Cornwall Words of 1880), 'Cousin Jacky' features as a local dialect term meaning 'a foolish person, a coward', with 'Cousin Jan' instead being given as the name for Cornishman—the latter variant is discussed further below, as is the former definition for Cousin Jacky.(10) 

The first two pages of Elfin's A Cornish Ghost Story, first published at Truro sometime before 1862; these two pages are taken from an 1868 edition of the text in Cornish Tales in Prose and Verse (Truro: Netherton, 1868), pp. 37–8 (image: Internet Archive).

Needless to say, the above references do seem to cast serious doubt upon the implication of the report in the Cornubian and Redruth Times in 1908 that the term 'Cousin Jack' and similar was unknown in Cornwall in the late 1880s, and in this light it is worth noting that Sharron Schwartz has, in fact, suggested that the 'evidence seems to point to the mines of Devonshire in the eighteenth century' as the place where the term Cousin Jack originated, via migrant Cornish miners seeking work in Devon rather than overseas.(11) Although she unfortunately offers no citation to support this, this suggestion certainly would seem to accord reasonably well with the apparent mid-nineteenth-century Cornish usage of 'Cousin Jacky' for a miner from West Cornwall discussed above. Some further evidence that supports such an early usage in Britain, rather than just overseas, for 'Cousin Jack'/'Cousin Jacky' might be sought in the following three publications. The first is A Cornish Ghost Story, by Georgina Verrall writing as "Elfin", of which only the second edition survives, which was printed at Lemon Street, Truro, in 1862, priced 3d. Quite when the first edition was printed is unfortunately unrecorded, although a notional date of c. 1860 has sometimes been supplied; this poem starts as follows:

One foggy night, a year ago
Ere yet had fallen December's snow,
A Cornish miner half afraid,
Stroll'd down Tremaine to meet his maid...
Poor Cousin Jack felt ill at ease,
And totter'd on with trembling knees,
In short, dear reader, you may see,
Jack had his failings,—so have we...
Now cousin Jacky was, no doubt,
A comely youth when "oal trick'd out;"
To use his own expression, he
A "clain-off man" was said to be,
And many a maiden inly sighed
To be the handsome miner's bride;...(12)

It then continues with long passages written to reflect Cornish dialect, relating the meeting of the miner 'Cousin Jack/Jacky' with his maid, Mary, and their subsequent talk and deeds. Needless to say, this passage would seem to provide evidence for a Cornish usage of 'Cousin Jack/Jacky' for a miner still living in Cornwall sometime in the 1850s or very early 1860s. Interestingly, the same pamphlet also offers evidence for 'Cousin Jan' and perhaps Jenny—both Jan and Jenny occur for other characters in the text of the poem, suggesting they too were seen as conventional names for Cornish characters, and 'Cousin Jan' moreover recurs in the titles of two further pamphlets that are advertised on the rear of A Cornish Ghost Story, namely The Bâl, or, 'Tes a Bra' Keenly Lode, Cousin Jan's Story (first published at Helston in 1850) and its sequel Cousin Jan's Courtship and Marriage (first published at Truro in 1859), both by William Bentinck Forfar. The earliest of these, published three years before the first reference in the OED reference to Cousin Jan (which is, in fact, taken from a newspaper advert for this pamphlet from 1853, although the OED doesn't mention this), includes the following passage:

If you'll listen to me for a moment, you shall
Hear all about trying and working a Bâl;
How the Lode is discovered by a small hazel twig,
Carried over the ground by some knowing old prig...
When the knowing old Dowzer this discovery's made
He marks out the spot and then calls his comrade,
Saying, "Hallo! Cozen Jan, d'ee come 'long wi' me,
'Tes the keenliest gozan thee ever ded'st see...(13)

Cousin Jan in the narrative then takes a sample of the ore to a Captain Polglaze, 'a Purser, well known, Who quickly, by mining, a rich man had grown'. He declares that they must go to London to raise funds ('The went up to Bristol by a steamer from Hayle, And proceeded from Bristol to London by rail'), and their adventure is then recounted in Cornish dialect by Cousin Jan. Subsequently, the form 'Cousin Jan' is found in a handful of Cornish newspaper articles from the 1860s to the 1890s as the name of a Cornish 'everyman' or as a general name for Cornishmen/Cornish miner, i.e. it seems to have functioned as a variant form of 'Cousin Jack'/'Cousin Jacky'. This is supported by the fact that 'Cozen Jan' first appears in Forfar's poem as part of a phrase that seems essentially identical to Christopher Child's traditional Cornish miner's phrase "Com'se along Cousin Jacky".

The second publication that further illustrates an early usage of 'Cousin Jack' and similar in Britain, without obvious reference to Cornish emigrants, is a report in The Cornish Telegraph for 27 September 1854. This briefly recounted the exhumation of a miner who fell down the shaft of Pednandrea Mine, Redruth in the 1820s. The rediscovery of his remains apparently prompted 'great excitement' and his funeral procession on Sunday, 17 September 1854, was attended by four thousand people, equal to around half of the population of Redruth at that time. What is particularly striking is that, although his real name is given as John Stephens, the newspaper notes that in life he was 'better known as "Cousin Jack Cobbler,"'(14) something that obviously suggests the use of the nickname 'Cousin Jack' in Cornwall as far back as the 1820s. The status of Stephens' alternative name as a nickname is confirmed by the report on the inquest published the previous week in the Royal Cornwall Gazette:

On Saturday the 16th instant, an inquest was held... on the body of John Stephens, aged 25 years. According to the evidence of William Thomas, miner, it appeared that as long ago as the 9th of August, 1828, the deceased and his brother were employed in stripping the shaft, and drawing up the materials in the Pednandrea Mine, near Redruth... The deceased and witness both fell into the shaft together... Deceased was well known in the neighbourhood by the nickname of "Cousin Jack Cobbler."(15)

A mid-nineteenth-century advert for H. J. Daniel's The Cornish Thalia, published c. 1860 at Devonport, which included two poems with 'Cousin Jack' in the title (image: Internet Archive).

The third interesting early publication from Cornwall to refer to Cousin Jack is the collection of comic poems by Henry John Daniel's published as The Cornish Thalia, Being Original Cornish Poems, Illustrative of the Cornish Dialect. Although this was published at Devonport without date, it is advertised in the rear of a pamphlet published in 1859 and advertised in the Cornish Times on 28 July 1860, so was presumably written in the 1850s and in print by either the end of that decade or 1860.(16) This volume included poems with the titles 'Cousin Jack and the London barber' and 'Cousin Jack's song for the volunteers', and H. J. Daniel followed it up in 1862 and 1863 with new books of poems entitled Mirth for "One and All;" or, Comic Tales and Sketches and Mary Anne's Career (continued) and Cousin Jack's Adventures, which included items with the titles 'Cousin Jack and the sun-dial', 'Cousin Jack at Summercourt Fair', 'Cousin Jack and the Piskies', and 'Cousin Jack and the Gipsy'.(17) In the front of The Cornish Thalia, Daniel has the following to say, which suggests that 'Cousin Jack' was being used by him at least partly in the West Cornwall sense of 'a fool', as documented by M. A. Courtney in 1880 for 'Cousin Jacky', in addition to being a commonplace term for a Cornish miner: 

In the following pages, merely to illustrate the mode of thought and expression amongst a certain class of the mining population of Cornwall. Whatever surprise the uninitiated reader may experience from the exaggerated and bizarre observations of Cousin Jack, they are strictly in accordance with fact. This arises from an ignorance of the world at large; at the same time there is no race of men possessed of better natural abilities. Shrewd, quick, and discriminating, they may be deceived once, but seldom twice; besides this, a rich vein of originality frequently runs through their remarks, which affords considerable amusement.(18)

This sense is confirmed by Daniel's first poem in The Cornish Thalia, 'Cousin Jack and the London barber', which begins thus:

About a dozen years or so
                                          Ago,
A Cornish Miner (let the truth be written)
Was walking through the streets with wonder smitten—
His eyes wide open, staring at the shops. 

Subsequently, Cousin Jack, as he wanders around London, spies a barber's shop and declares 'There's nething down to Camebourne like this here' and goes in for a shave. He then becomes confused by a bar of soap and a basin of suds and water ('What es it here?'); taking it for broth with potatoes in, Jack consumes it entirely to the shock of the London barber, declaring that he:

lapp'd it in a moment like a cat...
I dedden mind for spoons, or sives [=herbs], or bread;
I liked your brath oncommon well I ded...
[but] I cudden bear the tetties[=lumps of soap], no my dear!(19)

Needless to say, the poem seems rather mean-spirited, but it does at least once more add weight to the case for 'Cousin Jack' being a well-understood phrase in 1850s Cornwall, and one that Daniel, a Cornishman born at Lostwithiel in 1818, could freely use both as a generalised term for a Cornish miner and to make a mock of such men without worrying that it would need explaining. In this context, it is worth pointing out that the similar use of 'Cousin Jacky' as a name for both a miner and a fool seems to underlie the following passage on a mine captain from T. R. Higham's A Dialogue Between Tom Thomas and Bill Bilkey, Two Cornish Miners, printed at Truro in 1866: 

Tom: "What soort of Cappen es he down to thy Bâl, Bill" 

Bill: "Well, I b'lieve he's so good a heart as ever took a mug in hand; but we dooan't knaw what to maake of un sometimes, caase he do git 'pon his jokes so often; he do think we are oall Cousin Jackies, but we arn't so bad fools as he do think we be, for we do knaw a passel moore 'bout copper an' tin than he do..."'(20)

John Tabois Tregellas, a Cornishman born in St Agnes in 1792, seems to use 'Cousin Jacky' in this manner too in his The St Agnes Bear Hunt, published at some point in the 1840s, a tale concerning a group of St Agnes miners taken in by a hoax about a yellow bear loose in the countryside: 

So off to Dirtypool the throng
Of Cousin Jackies went,
Up to Wheal Kitty, where they stopped,
As if by one consent.(21) 

Cousin Jack and the London barber, from Henry John Daniel's The Cornish Thalia, published in the late 1850s or 1860; Cousin Jack has just drunk the barber's bowl of soap-suds and soap, thinking it broth and potatoes (image: Internet Archive).

If the date by which Cornish miners started to be known as Cousin Jacks/Jackies is somewhat uncertain (although the term would certainly seem to have been in use in Cornwall by the 1820s and Australia by the 1840s, if not before), the same is true for the question of quite why they were called this. Much of the literature on 'Cousin Jacks' and the Great Emigration seems to pass over these questions or address them only briefly, frequently suggesting that it may result from the oft-cited 'clannishness' of the Cornish emigrants. For example:

The term “Cousin Jack” is believed to have originated from the fact that Cornish miners were clannish. It was very typical for a miner to assist his skilled countrymen in finding work in the mines of Grass Valley [California]. The tight relationships that formed amongst the Cornish led to criticism by outsiders that they all seemed to have a cousin named “Jack” with whom they were willing to work to the exclusion of everyone else.(22)

‘Cousin Jack’ is an informal term for a Cornishman, apparently originating with regard to labour migration during the 19th century. Several theories as to its development exist, but the most popular suggests that upon gaining employment at a mine, Cornish miners would lobby the management for the employment of fellow Cornish miners, stating that a newcomer was his ‘cousin Jack’.(23)

In the early days “Cousin Jack” evoked envy, jealousy and even hatred, for it seemed that every position in the mine was reserved for yet another “Cousin” from Cornwall.(24) 

Certainly, the 'clannish' Cornish miners seem to have often been commented upon in contemporary and near-contemporary reports. For example, in an article entitled 'Cornishmen on the Rand' about South African mining, published in the West Briton and Cornish Advertiser for 14 May 1908, the following passage occurs: 

The Witwatersrand has proved a happy hunting ground for large numbers of Cornish miners, and at one time there were large mines here that employed only Cornishmen as skilled labourers... Often the manager was neither a Cornishman nor a mining man, and he found the Cousin Jack mine captain indispensable. A Cornish mine captain invariably meant Cornish shift bosses, and that, in turn, means Cornish workmen.(25)

A view of Cornish Town, also known as Cousin Jack Town, Inangahua County, New Zealand, with working men's huts, a narrow railway line running through the centre, and native forest behind; photograph taken by William Archer Price c. 1910s (image: Flickr/National Library NZ).

Whilst there is thus clear evidence that the Cornish miners in South Africa, Australia and America were indeed perceived as 'clannish' and could dominate mines in the manner suggested above, the idea that Cornish miners overseas suggesting their mine managers employ their supposed relatives could offer a full explanation for the origins of the term 'Cousin Jack' is certainly open to question. Not only does such an 'origin story' have the distinct feel of folk-etymology about it, but it is worth noting that whilst 'cousin' nowadays usually carries with it some sense of a claimed direct kin relationship, in the past it could also be used 'as a familiar and friendly term of address among non-kin', and it was apparently especially so used in this manner in Cornwall.(26) Perhaps most importantly, such a scenario also seems out of accord with the fact that the terms 'Cousin Jack' and 'Cousin Jacky' were not restricted in use to Cornish miners overseas, but were also known and used in the same period in Cornwall too, back at least as far as the 1820s, as discussed above. This is not to say that the 'clannishness' of the Cornish miners overseas might not have played a very large role in popularizing the wider usage and longevity of this phrase, but the idea that the term 'Cousin Jack' actually had its origins in Cornish miners overseas claiming to have a supposed 'cousin named “Jack” with whom they were willing to work to the exclusion of everyone else' seems unlikely to be strictly true in light of the evidence we have.

How, then, might the names 'Cousin Jack' and 'Cousin Jacky' be explained? A potentially more plausible scenario may be that the term 'Cousin Jack' or 'Cousin Jacky' actually had its roots in England, not overseas, as Sharron Schwartz has indeed suggested, perhaps being used originally of Cornish miners from West Cornwall working in Devon and/or East Cornwall in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some of the Cornish references would certainly suggest that it was a familiar and well-known local nickname for a Cornish miner by the mid-nineteenth century, with no obvious indication that it meant someone who had been overseas. Of particular interest here may be the apparent 'mocking' tone of some—though by no means all—of the references: this is explicit in Daniel's Cornish Thalia and related poems of the late 1850s/1860s, and probably also underlies Thomas Quiller Couch (1826–1884) of Lansallos and Bodmin's apparent youthful memory of the fun to be had by mimicking 'the talk of Cousin Jacky from Redruth or St. Just'. The negative connotations are made particularly clear in Margaret Ann Courtney's West Cornwall Words, where 'Cousin Jacky' is defined as a local dialect word for a fool, the same sense as it clearly has in Higham's A Dialogue Between Tom Thomas and Bill Bilkey, Two Cornish Miners. Moreover, another dialogue of Higham's—entitled The Billy Goat and the Pepper Mine, published prior to 1870—makes it clear that 'Cousin Jacky' was considered to be a word used by people in England of Cornish miners:

Good hevening to 'ee, Zur... you'm a Straanyer en these here paarts, I blaw, by yer ways of spaikin'!... you cudn't 'ave cum'd to a keenlier boddy fur to tell 'ee oal 'bout we "Cousin Jacky's," as you Lunnoners [=Londoners] do caal us! S'pose you'm a Doctur, maakin' so bould? How ded I come fur to thenk like that theere? Why, Zur, ef we been Cousin Jacky's we do kaip out gunnin' eye opun, an' we do knaw Tin an' no mistaake!(27)

All of the above suggests that the name may not have been entirely appreciated by some Cornish miners, at least at first, and may well have originated from outside of the Cornish mining communities, i.e. it was applied to them by those whom they encountered outside of West Cornwall (the use of 'Cousin' could be a further element in this, referencing and/or mocking the apparently particularly West Cornish usage of 'cousin' as a term of friendly endearment for non-kin).(28) In this light, it is interesting to note that two of the handful of other compounds of the form 'Cousin X' in English are also negative in tone. Thus, Cousin Betty and Cousin Betties occur from at least the first half of the eighteenth century as a generic name for one or more female beggars or itinerant prostitutes, whilst Cousin Tom occurs from the 1740s as a name for a male beggar. Be this as it may, the name 'Cousin Jack' or 'Cousin Jacky' seems subsequently to have been 'reclaimed' and adopted by the Cornish miners both at home and, especially and increasingly, abroad, losing its negative/mocking connotations. As Sharron Schwartz notes, the term “Cousin Jack” became one 'used to express an “otherness”', with the Cornish overseas particularly leveraging it to promote their claimed identity as a 'distinct people with specific mining skills that they jealously guarded'.(29) Certainly, by the mid- to late nineteenth century it was being used as a self-designation by Cornishmen both at home and abroad, with people signing letters to newspapers in this era as either 'Cousin Jack' or 'Cousin Jacky'.(30) 

Nonetheless, all of this does still leave open the question of why, specifically, 'Cousin Jack' came to be a nickname applied to Cornish miners and used by them, and not some other name. There is no sense that 'Jack' is a specifically or typically Cornish name, being rather a common English personal name (a by-name for John), despite occasional claims to the contrary. Jack might, of course, be being used in 'Cousin Jack' simply as a word for an 'everyman'. The OED 2 notes under Jack, n.¹ that 'Jack' was generally used in English as a term 'for any representative of the common people' or for any 'lad, fellow, chap; esp. a low-bred or ill-mannered fellow' back to at least the sixteenth century, if not before, so this is not an implausible suggestion.(31) Yet such a case would still not tell us why this specific nickname became so exclusively associated with the Cornish miners, initially perhaps being used of them by people outside of these communities who felt threatened by them and/or were mocking them before being adopted as a badge of ethnic identity and pride. There may, however, be a potential answer to this in the name and story of one of the most popular fictional Cornishmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, namely Jack the Giant-Killer.

A woodcut of Jack killing the giant of St Michael's Mount, Cormilan (aka Cormilion/Cormelian/Cormoran), from a chapbook version of The History of Jack the Giant Killer published in c. 1820 (image: Wikimedia Commons). Jack, a farmer's son from the Lands End district, dug a pit 24 foot deep in a single night with a shovel and pick-axe, into which he tricked the giant the next morning, whereupon Jack finished him off with his pick-axe.

The History of Jack and the Giants seems to have been first published in the early eighteenth century, with the earliest reference to it being sold coming from 1708 and the earliest surviving text having been published in 1711.(32) The tale proved to be incredibly popular and went through multiple print-runs, adaptations and revisions over the next century and a half, and Jack's origins in far west of Cornwall remain a strong thread throughout these. The chapbook tale begins as follows:

In the reign of King Arthur, near the Lands-End of England, namely, the county of Cornwall, there lived a wealthy Farmer, who had one only Son, commonly known by the name of Jack the Giantkiller.(33)

Jack's initial enemy is the giant Cormilan who lived at St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, and who Jack tricks by digging and disguising a hole, then rousing the giant and finishing him off with a pick-axe when he falls into the trap. Jack's reward is the giant’s treasure and he is named by the worthies of Marazion "the Giant Killer," a title that carries with it a sword and an embroidered belt, which read: 

Here’s the right valiant Cornish Man, Who slew the Giant Cormilan.(34)

Jack subsequently leaves Cornwall for overseas, in this case Wales, where he encounters further giants in need of his special skills. In one encounter, he holds the following important conversation and so tricks a Welsh giant into hiding in his dungeon whilst Jack and King Arthur's son feast in the monster's hall:

Jack rides full speed, when coming to the Gates of the castle, he knock’d with such force, that he made all the neighbouring hills resound. The Giant with a voice like thunder, roared out; who’s there? He answered, none but your poor cousin Jack quoth he, what news with my poor cousin Jack? He replied, dear uncle, heavy news; God wot prithee what heavy news can come to me? I am a Giant, with three heads; and besides thou knows I can fight five hundred men in Armour and make them fly like chaff before the wind. Oh! but (quoth Jack) here’s the King’s Son coming with a thousand men in Armour to kill you, and so to destroy all that you have. Oh! Cousin Jack, this is heavy news indeed; I have a large vault under the ground, where I will immediately hide myself, and thou shalt lock, bolt and bar me in, and keep the keys till the King’s Son is gone.(35)

Jack the Giant Killer gives the finishing blow to the giant of St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, from J. Corner, Favourite Fairy Tales (Edinburgh, 1861), p. 79 (image: Internet Archive).

Needless to say, this is arresting. We have here a very well-known hero of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular tales who was named Jack, who grew up in West Cornwall, who achieved fame through the excavation of the Earth (digging a hole which the giant Cormilan could fall into and be finished off with a pick-axe), who travelled overseas—here Wales—to pursue his calling, and who, whilst there, was at least on occasion known by the name 'Cousin Jack'. This tale was adapted variously and frequently as, for example, a farce, a ‘musical entertainment’, a ballet, a 'burlesque extravaganza', and multiple times as a 'favourite Serio-Comic Pantomime' and similar.(36) It also became a popular nursery and children's tale, being issued variously with lurid woodcuts, tinted pictures, or grouped in collections with Jack and the Beanstalk (itself arguably a variant of Jack the Giant-Killer), Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood.(37) As The Illustrated London News opined in 1848, Jack the Giant-Killer was:

the hero dear to all boys who have a particle of generosity and imagination in their souls. Does there exist a man who never envied Jack his seven-league boots and his invisible coat, and who never laughed at that inimitable trick by which he made the gluttonous, false-hearted Welsh giant commit suicide? If there do exist such a man, he is like the man who hath no music in his soul... Let no such man be trusted... The man who did not, when a boy, admire Jack the Giant-Killer... is a hard, dry man, with no poetry in his composition; and does not deserve to see Jack reproduced even in a magic lantern.(38)

In other words, the immensely popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fictional Cornish hero Jack, aka 'Cousin Jack', would clearly be a natural reference point for anyone encountering a person from West Cornwall. In such circumstances, it seems quite credible that the widespread knowledge of Jack's adventures might have led to people from West Cornwall, especially those who dug holes(!), being jokingly—and perhaps somewhat mockingly—nicknamed 'Cousin Jack' after him in the manner hypothesised above, with the nickname being subsequently reclaimed and adopted as a badge of ethnic identity and pride by the Cornish, particularly those living overseas. Certainly, such a scenario seems to offer the only really plausible explanation thus far advanced for why miners from West Cornwall were specifically nicknamed 'Cousin Jack', rather than any other name.

In conclusion, although the nickname 'Cousin Jack' is often thought to have emerged overseas and to reflect the 'clannishness' of the Cornish emigrant mining communities and their desire to have mine-owners employ only other Cornish emigrants, claiming them to be their supposed 'Cousin Jacks', the evidence does not really support this. Instead, the term seems to have been used from at least as early in Britain too, if not earlier, and it appears to have additionally been thought by the nineteenth-century Cornish to have had some sort of mocking connotations. One potential explanation for this situation is that 'Cousin Jack' was originally a joking or mocking nickname applied to miners from West Cornwall by those outside of this community who encountered them, perhaps initially in Devon or East Cornwall in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. This name is most plausibly explained as a jovial reference to the immensely popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hero Jack the Giant-Killer, whose tale tells how he came from West Cornwall, killed a giant by excavating a large hole into which he fell, and was known on occasion as 'Cousin Jack' when away from home. At first, the nickname would seem to have been seen with some ambivalence by Cornish miners, but it would subsequently appear that 'Cousin Jack' was reclaimed and adopted by the Cornish, especially by those taking part in the 'Great Emigration', who used it to express their 'otherness' and promote their own distinctive identity.

An Australian Cousin Jack cartoon by Oswald Pryor, 1945; the caption reads '"An' what part do 'ee com' from, Maister?""Gahd's own country, Boy.""Well, tha's funny, I should NEVER 'ave tak'd 'ee for a Cornishman." (Image: The Wonderment of Illustration).

Footnotes

1.     See especially P. Payton, The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall's 'Great Emigration' (Fowey, 2005), and P. Payton, Cornwall, A History (Fowey, 2004), chapter 10. For earlier scholarship see, for example, A. L. Rowse, The Cousin Jacks: the Cornish in America (New York, 1969).

2.     John H. Forster, 'Life in the copper mines of Lake Superior', Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, 9 (1888), 175–86 at pp. 183–4.

3.     '"Cousin Jack" and "Cussing Jack"', Cornubian and Redruth Times, 4 June 1908, p. 3.

4.     Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition, 1989), s.v. Jack, n.¹, sense I.1.c.

5.     'Court of General Sessions for the District of Buninyong and Ballarat', report, The Star (Ballarat, Victoria), 19 March 1857, p. 2; Oxford English Dictionary (Third Edition, December 2019), s.v. Cousin, n.

6.     J. Wright (ed.), The English Dialect Dictionary (London, 1898), vol. 1, s.v. Cousin, 5.2, p. 750; J. Ruano-García, 'On the colonial element in Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary', International Journal of Lexicography, 32 (2019), 38–57 at p. 43. 

7.     'Coroner's inquest.—manslaughter', South Australian (Adelaide), 30 May 1848, p. 2.

8.     T. Q. Couch, East Cornwall Words, in Glossary of Words in Use in Cornwall (London: English Dialect Society, 1880), pp. 70–1.

9.     C. Childs, 'The social and moral improvement of the working miners of Cornwall and Devon', West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 28 March 1862, p. 8.  

10.     M. A. Courtney, West Cornwall Words, in Glossary of Words in Use in Cornwall (London: English Dialect Society, 1880), pp. 14–15.

11.     S. P. Schwartz, ‘Creating the cult of “Cousin Jack”: Cornish miners in Latin America 1812–1848 and the development of an international mining labour market’, The Cornish in Latin America Project, online paper, p. 33.

12.     G. Verrall, writing as Elfin, A Cornish Ghost Story, a Night's Adventures at the Devil's Stile, or, Jack Trevose and Mary Trevean, 2nd edn (Truro, 1862), pp. 3–5.

13.     W. B. Forfar, The Bâl, or, 'Tes a Bra' Keenly Lode, Cousin Jan's Story (Helston, 1850), reprinted in Cornish Tales, in Prose and Verse, by Various Authors, With a Glossary (Truro, 1867), pp. 55–6, and see OED 3, s.v. Cousin, n., under 'Cousin Jan'. This collection includes a number of other tales of Cousin Jan, including Cousin Jan's Courtship and Marriage (Truro, 1859); for the original publication dates, see W. W. Skeat (ed.), A bibliographical list of the works that have been published, or are known to exist in MS., illustrative of the various dialects of English. Compiled by members of the English Dialect Society (London, 1873), pp. 21–2. Note, 'Cousin Jenny' isn't treated further here; Rowse, The Cousin Jacks, p. 9, suggests it is a 'later addition', and the newspaper records seem to confirm this, the first instance I have come across coming from 1868 in The Brisbane Courier, 25 July 1868, p. 5: 'Cousin Jacks and Cousin Jennies (a nick-name given to miners and their wives coming from the Burra Burra mine, being mostly Cornish) have a barbarian custom belonging to an unenlightened era...'.

14.     'Local Intelligence: exhumation of a miner', The Cornish Telegraph, 27 September 1854, p. 3.

15.     'Inquest on a body, twenty six years dead', Royal Cornwall Gazette, 22 September 1854, p. 5.

16.      H. J. Daniel, The Cornish Thalia, Being Original Cornish Poems, Illustrative of the Cornish Dialect (Devonport: W. Wood, n.d.). This was advertised in the rear of C. Mansfield Ingleby's The Shakespeare Fabrication (London: John Russell Smith, 1859), p. 32 of the 'Catalogue of books published or sold by John Russell Smith' appended to the volume, and is mentioned in an advert from 28 July 1860 in the Cornish Times, when it was described as 'just published'; as such the notional date of '1870?' assigned to it in J. Milroy & L. Milroy (eds), Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 326, can be disregarded. 

17.     H. J. Daniel, Mirth for "One and All;" or, Comic Tales and Sketches (Devonport: W. Wood, n.d.), advertised in the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 7 February 1862, p. 8, and H. J. Daniel, Mary Anne's Career (continued) and Cousin Jack's Adventures (Devonport: W. Wood, n.d.), advertised in the Cornish Times, 13 June 1863, p. 1.

18.     Daniel, The Cornish Thalia, p. 3.

19.      Daniel, The Cornish Thalia, pp. 20–2.

20.      T. R. Higham, A Dialogue Between Tom Thomas and Bill Bilkey, Two Cornish Miners (Truro, 1866), reprinted in Cornish Tales, in Prose and Verse, in the Cornish Dialect (Truro, 1890), pp. 51–2.

21.     J. T. Tregellas, Tremuan; and the St Agnes Bear Hunt. Two Cornish Tales (Truro, n.d.), published at some point in the 1840s—see Skeat (ed.), A bibliographical list, p. 25, for the date—and reprinted in I. T. Tregallas, Cornish Tales, in Prose and Verse (Truro, c. 1870), p. 17, from which this quotation is taken. Note, 'Cousin Jackies' is footnoted as a 'Local term of derision' in some editions e.g. I. T. Tregallas, The Adventures of Rozzy Paul and Zacky Martin; the St. Agnes Bear Hunt; and the Perran Cherrybeam: Three Comic Cornish poems (Truro, 1856), p. 28, although not in the c. 1870 edition.

22.     F. G. Wolf, B. Finnie & L. Gibson, 'Cornish miners in California: 150 years of a unique sociotechnical system', Journal of Management History, 14 (2008), 144–60 at p. 150. 

23.     E. K. Neale, Cornish Carols: Heritage in California and South Australia (University of Exeter and Cardiff University PhD Thesis, 2018), p. 37. See also, for example, Rowse, The Cousin Jacks, p. 9, who says 'When men were wanted for the mines, or a job was going, they always knew somebody at home for it: Cousin Jack. So they became known all over the world as "Cousin Jacks"; "Cousin Jennies" for the womenfolk seems to be a later addition'. J. Rowe, in The Hard-Rock Men: Cornish Immigrants and the North American Mining Frontier (Liverpool, 1974), p. vi, similarly comments that "The most common explanation is that when a job fell vacant there would be a Cornish worker ready to tell the boss or foreman that he would send home for his "Cousin Jack" to fill it', although he also notes a Northern Michigan theory that, due to the profanity of the Cornish miners, they were called 'cussin' Jacks'! The same 'folk-etymology' for the name Cousin Jack has also been, interestingly, attributed to a Californian context, as follows:

A Cornishman who was familiarly known as Jack, reached a mining camp in the western state in 1848, and being profuse in his use of profanity, soon won himself the name of "Cussing Jack." In time other Cornishmen arrived in the Californian camp and naturally they associated themselves with their erstwhile countryman, "Cussing Jack." The cosmopolitan mining population, not knowing the names of the newer arrivals, dubbed them all "Cussing Jacks," which was soon changed to "Cousin Jacks." ('"Cousin Jack" and "Cussing Jack"', Cornubian and Redruth Times, 4 June 1908, p. 3)

24.     Payton, Cornish Overseas, p. 225.

25.     'Cornishmen on the Rand: the past and the future', West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 14 May 1908, p. 8.

26.     N. Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), p. 160; OED 3, s.v. Cousin, n..

27.     T. R. Higham, The Billy Goat, and the Pepper Mine (Truro, n.d.), which is advertised in the rear of the British Library's copy of Tregellas's Cornish Tales, dated c. 1870 (General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store X.907/2143), and is reprinted in The Billy Goat and the Pepper Mine, and Six Other Cornish Tales (Truro, 1882), p. 3.

28.     Courtney, West Cornwall Words, p. 14; Tadmor, Household, Kinship, and Patronage, p. 160 n. 285; OED, s.v. Cousin, n., sense 2a.

29.     Schwartz, ‘Creating the cult of “Cousin Jack”’, p. 33. 

30.     To give some examples, a Cornish correspondent signed a letter critical of a local Cornwall MP in the Western Morning News in 1884 that was reprinted in the Royal Cornwall Gazette on 3 October 1884, p. 8, with a follow-up letter written under the same pseudonym to the Royal Cornwall Gazette being printed on 10 October 1884, p. 5. Likewise, someone signing himself 'Cousin Jack' wrote a letter about how well the men of Newlyn were doing in terms of joining up to fight the First World War in the Daily Mirror for 7 May 1915 (p. 5), and another correspondent, commenting on mine policies at the Providence Mines, Carbis Bay, wrote to the The Cornish Telegraph in December 1869 and had their comments summarized in the 22 December 1869 issue on p. 2. Overseas, a correspondent signing as COUSIN JACK is mentioned in The South Australian Advertiser, 21 February 1860, p. 2, whilst a letter signed by COUSIN JACK entitled 'A hint to mining managers' was printed in the Mount Alexander Mail (Victoria, Australia), 28 December 1860, p. 5, and the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser carried a letter signed by A COUSIN JACKY from British Columbia on 26 September 1862 (p. 6).

31.     OED 2, s.v. Jack, n.¹, senses I.1.a and I.2.a, https://www.oed.com/oed2/00122699. For the suggestion that it was a peculiarly Cornish name, see for example 'Why are the Cornish "Cousin Jackies"?', Western Morning News, 13 April 1939, p. 3.

32.     C. Green, 'Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant-Killer: two Arthurian fairy tales?', Folklore, 118.2 (2007), pp. 123–40 at pp. 129–35; C. Green, Arthuriana: Early Arthurian Tradition and the Origins of the Legend (Louth, 2021), pp. 143–4.

33.     I. Opie & P. Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford, 1974), p. 64.

34.     Opie & Opie, Classic Fairy Tales, p. 66.

35.     Quotation taken from the 1787 chapbook printed in Falkirk and housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, transcribed in Green, Arthuriana, pp. 148–65 at p. 156, my emphasis; the text is almost identical, albeit slightly modernized, in the 1711 text published by James Halliwell and included in Green, Arthuriana, at pp. 170–1.

36.     For example, Jack the Gyant-Killer: A Comi-Tragical Farce of One Act (London: J. Roberts, 1730); An English Musical Entertainment, called Galligantus (London, 1758); the 'New Grand Mock-Heroic Serio-Comic Ballet of Action, called Jack the Giant-Killer', advertised in The British Press, 14 August 1810, p. 2; H. Byron, Jack the Giant Killer; or, Harlequin King Arthur, and Ye Knights of Ye Round Table: A Burlesque Extravaganza (London, n.d., first performed 1859); and the 'favourite Serio-Comic Pantomime of Jack the Giant-Killer', as advertised in The British Press, 27 June 1803, p. 1. Other instances of The History of Jack and the Giants being adapted into a pantomime are advertised or reviewed in, for example, the Caledonian Mercury, 8 March 1800, p. 1, and the Morning Advertiser, 14 January 1829, p. 2 ('a splendid Comic Pantomime, called Harlequin and Jack the Giant-Killer'), and the Morning Post of 31 December 1831, p. 3 ('The new Christmas pantomime, Jack the Giant-Killer promises to have a run... through the holidays. Some of the tricks and scenery are very good. To-morrow evening the performances will be honoured with the immediate patronage of Prince George of Cambridge').

37.     As advertised as a series in, for example, the Illustrated London News, 10 January 1846, p. 15, or a separate series in the London Daily News, 30 May 1846, p. 7.

38.     Uncle Tom, 'Christmas sports', Illustrated London News, 23 December 1848, p. 22.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2021, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following brief note is concerned with the so-called 'bluestones' and the 'Bluestone Heath Road' of eastern Lincolnshire. In origin, the stones themselves seem usually to be glacial erratics—non-local boulders carried here from northern Britain by the ice-sheets—that were used as focal points for their communities, for example functioning as meeting-stones, court-stones, judicial stones, or boundary markers, although earlier antiquarians suggested that some had more sinister roots. The following piece discusses the history and use of some of the more notable examples of 'bluestones' in eastern Lincolnshire, including the 'Louth Stone' and 'Haveloks Stone', as well as some examples further afield, before briefly considering the potential etymology and meaning of 'bluestone' in this context. Finally, a list of the various recorded Lincolnshire bluestones is given, with further details of both these stones and the evidence for the Blue Stone Heath in the central Lincolnshire Wolds. 

The Louth Stone or Bluestone/Blewstone, first mentioned in 1503 and weighing four to five tons. Now located outside Louth Museum, in all of the early references it was situated at the junction of Mercer Row and Upgate in the centre of town, although some unwarranted nineteenth-century antiquarian speculation that it was originally located in the Julian Bower maze outside of the town has found its way on to the museum's plaque describing it.

An old lady, born in 1819, told me that in her childhood the village fair of North Thoresby (Lincs.) was held near the church, in a field which had a large blue stone in the middle. Around this stone games were played. Villagers born a little later, say 1830–40, could tell nothing of the custom... the jury of the manorial courts formerly met at this stone, within 'an old enclosure'...(33) 

The site of the Blue Stone at North Thoresby to the north of St Helen's Church; note the street-name Stanholme Lane, aka 'the gate [road] that comes from Stainholme' (1664), around the field in question, which preserves the fifteenth-century name Stayneholme, probably referring to the meeting-stone in this field. The third side of the field is marked by 'Bond Croft Drain', which matches the later-recorded name for this field, 'Boundel's Croft' (image: imagery © 2021 CNES/Airbus, Getmapping plc, Infoterra Ltd & Bluesky, Maxar Technologies; map data © 2021 Google. Click here for a larger, zoomable version).

8.     The West Ravendale Blueston

My grandmother lived at 7 Bluestone Lane from the 1930s to the 1990s and my mother from when she was born in 1930s to marrying my dad in the late 1960s. I spent every summer of my childhood there. The stone is a glacial erratic and no-one knew for sure where it came from. It was originally further up Bluestone Lane, about half way up on the right hand side going towards the church. In this location it was laid on its side and kids used to play on it, sliding down it. It was a well known meeting place in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. It may have been taken from a field at the top of the Lane and placed there... When the Bluestone pub was built in 1961 it was moved to the corner of Habrough Road and Bluestone Lane and set on a plinth in its current upright position. The locals did not want it to be moved and there was a belief that moving it would bring bad luck, but as far as my mum can remember nothing bad happened after it was moved. Bluestone Lane has always been called that, even before any houses were built there and it was just a lane through the fields leading to the church (the first houses, including no.7, were built in the 1920s) and the bluestone has always been there, hence the name of the Lane.(36)

10. The 'blue coggul' at Risby 

The aim of the following draft is to offer some thoughts on a local name from thirteenth-century Lincolnshire, Macamathehou, that involves a version of the Arabic name Muhammad (Middle English Makomet/Macamethe, Old French Mahomet). Whilst it has been plausibly seen as an instance of a variant of the name of Muhammed being used to mean 'heathen', 'pagan idol' or similar (based on the false but common medieval Christian belief that the prophet Muhammad was worshipped as a god), here in reference to a barrow that was considered to be a pre-Christian site, it is worth noting that there are a small number of people with names and surnames derived from Arabic Muḥammad apparently living in twelfth- to fourteenth-century England.

Figure 1: the location of Macamathehou between Spridlington and Faldingworth parishes in Lincolnshire; click the image or here for a larger version (image: C. R. Green/OpenStreetMap and its contributors).

The existence of the intriguing local name Macamathehou in the parish of Spridlington, Lincolnshire, was first noted in 2001 by Kenneth Cameron, John Field and John Insley in Place-Names of Lincolnshire VI (PNL), with both attestations of the name dating from the thirteenth century (the reign of King Henry III, 1216–72).(1) They identify the two elements of the name as being Old Norse haugr, 'mound, barrow', and Middle English Makomet/Macamethe, which derives from the name of the prophet Muhammad (Medieval Latin Machometus/Mahumetus, Anglo-Norman Mahumet/Mahomet/Machomete, Old French Mahomet< Arabic Muḥammad, probably via an Arabic regional form Maḥammad).(2) Needless to say, this solution is most intriguing and has, moreover, found favour with other place-name specialist, including the Vocabulary of English Place-Names (VEPN) and Richard Coates.(3)

As to the import of this name, the easiest conclusion—and the one endorsed by PNL, VEPN and Coates—is that the first element, Macamethe/Maumate etc, is not functioning simply as a normal Middle English rendering of the name Muhammad/Mahomet, but rather as a word indicative of heathen or pagan idolatry, based on the false but common medieval Christian belief that the prophet Muhammad was worshipped as a god. So, PNL describes the name as meaning 'the heathen mound', with the first element being 'a corrupt ME [Middle English] form of the name of the prophet Mohammed, for which v. MED [Middle English Dictionary], s.v. Makomete, also used to denote a pagan god or an idol'.(4) This is taken up by Richard Coates, who says that it has been suggested, 'with great plausibility', that Macamathehou in Spridlington parish 'is a Middle English name meaning "Mahomet mound", i.e. "heathen mound"', and points to 'the repeated compound of OE hæðen + byrgels "heathen burial"' as a potential comparison.(5) Likewise, the VEPN's draft section on M includes the following discussion:

makomet ME, 'idol, pagan god', an application of the name of the Arab prophet Mohammed (commonly though mistakenly believed by medieval Christians to have been worshipped as a god)... It occurs early in Macamathehou (f.n.) 1216–72 L:6·211 (haugr), presumably to be interpreted as 'heathen mound'.(6)

On the whole, this interpretation is probably the safest option. There are certainly a handful of references to 'heathen' barrows in Old English charter bounds, for example of leofwynne mearce to þam hæþenan beorge, 'from Leofwine's boundary to the heathen barrow', in the charter S956 relating to Drayton, Hampshire, and dated AD 1019, although none are recorded from Lincolnshire.(7) It has also been suggested that the Lincolnshire names Bloater Hill (North Willingham) and Blod Hou (Barrow-on-Humber) derive from Old Norse blóthaugr, 'a sacrificial mound', whilst other names involving haugr certainly refer to supernatural/demonic creatures—for example, Gasthehowe/Gastehowe, Ashby Puerorum (Lincolnshire), recorded in the thirteenth century and deriving from Middle English gast/Old English gāst, 'ghost, dead-spirit', or names like Scratters (Scrathou, in Hayton, East Riding of Yorkshire) and Scrathowes (Scrathou, in Osmotherley, North Riding of Yorkshire), which derive from Old Norse skratti, 'devil, wizard' + haugr.(8) Furthermore, the Old English compound hæðen + byrgels, 'heathen burial', does indeed recur frequently in Late Saxon charter bounds, with these names often said to be identifiable with barrows in the landscape.(9)

On the other hand, there are some possible issues with this explanation, and other interpretations are possible of Spridlington's Macamathehou. First, the comparison with the many instances of the OE compound hæðen + byrgels, ‘heathen burial’, is perhaps not as convincing as it might seem. Not only is a link between this term and barrows only demonstrable in a handful of instances, but Andrew Reynolds has also suggested that the sense of the term was primarily not ‘pagan’, but rather ‘unconsecrated’, and that it denoted burials of executed offenders and other social outcasts, which renders the proposed value of these names as support for interpreting Macamathehou  as meaning ‘heathen mound’ open to significant debate.(10) Second, if the above is correct, then this would be the only known instance of a derivative of the Arabic name Muhammad being used in a place-name to indicate a 'heathen mound' or similar, which is potentially concerning—the other elements noted above all recur in multiple names. Third, the element identified by PNL and VEPN as being present in Macamethehou is Middle English Makomet(e). The Middle English Dictionary (MED) on Makomet(e)/Macamethe etc, however, makes it clear that the primary use of this word in Middle English is as a form of the name Muhammad, not as a word referring to an 'idol'/'pagan god', with the vast majority of quotations provided by the MED referring either the prophet Muhammad or people named Muhammad; the only exceptions are a single quotation from Layamon's Brut (c. 1200, mahimet, lacking the -c-), and three from two later texts.(11) The form of the name Muhammad that was primarily—although not exclusively—used in the sense 'pagan deity, idol', is rather Maumet/Maumate, mentioned above, deriving from Anglo-Norman Maumet, a reduced form of Mauhoumet, Old French Mahomet/Mahommet.(12)

In this light, it is worth considering whether it is possible that the name Macamathehou could somehow be named from a person named Makomet/Muhammad or similar living in medieval England. Certainly, it should be noted that multiple local names relating to mounds/barrows do seem to be named after people who owned estates or land in the area. For example, Andrew Reynolds draws attention to the bounds of a mid-tenth-century charter for Swallowcliffe, Wiltshire (S468), that records the burial site of a seventh‐century woman whose grave had been cut into an existing mound as Posses hlaew, noting that 'Poss is a male name, and thus the mound is apparently not named after its Anglo‐Saxon occupant', implying that it was instead named after a later estate owner.(13) As Irene Bower long ago pointed out, such a situation can be credibly paralleled in Lincolnshire, with a number of Lincolnshire names involving haugr seeming to contain the same personal-name as is found in the same or a neighbouring parish-name—so, Scalehau (Skalli + haugr) was located near to Scawby (Skalli + bȳ), with Kenneth Cameron commenting that the two were 'no doubt named from the same man'; Leggeshou (Leggr + haugr) was located on the boundary of Legsby parish (Leggr + bȳ); Katehou/Catehowe (Kati + haugr) was located in South Cadeby (Kati + bȳ); and a Grimaldeshawe (Grimaldi + haugr) was recorded in the neighbouring parish to Grimoldby (Grimaldi + bȳ), perhaps on the boundary between the two.(14)

Figure 2: Section from the Pipe Roll Society publication of The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Seventh Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1160–1161 (London: Wyman & Sons, 1885), p. 10, dealing with Mahumet of Wiltshire (image: Internet Archive).

As to the likelihood of someone named Muhammad or one of its Anglo-Norman/Middle English variants (Mahumet, Makomet and similar) actually living in medieval England, this is perhaps less far-fetched than might be assumed. Katharine Keats-Rohan and John Moore have directed attention to the Wiltshire entries of five consecutive Pipe Rolls of Henry II (1160/61–1164/65), which refer to a man named Mahumet, whose name-form Moore considers very difficult to explain as anything other than a rendering of Muhammad and which is accepted as such by the OED and MED. This Mahumet is recorded in the Pipe Rolls only because he was fined for his part in an unlicensed duel with a John de Merleberge, probably in or near Marlborough Castle, and it seems he was not an especially wealthy man, as he was pardoned the last mark of his fine due to his poverty.(15) Furthermore, Mahumet of Wiltshire was not the only man with this name for whom we have evidence from medieval England. For example, a Theobald filius Mahumet (or filius Mahomet) is recorded from early thirteenth-century Hampshire in the Pipe Rolls of Henry III for 1222–24; another man named Mahomet is recorded in 1327, when Edward III issued him and six others a pardon at Newton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire, for 'offenses in Ireland'; and a Mahummet Saraceno occurs in the Close Rolls of Henry III for 1254. Furthermore, a number of people surnamed Mahumet and similar are recorded in documents of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for example a Humphrey Mahumet in a charter of Southwick Priory, Hampshire, a Herbert Maumet who was sergeant of Portsmouth in the mid-thirteenth century, and a Radulphus Maumet who is recorded in the reign of King John.(16) Moore also notes the presence of someone bearing another 'apparent Arab name' in twelfth-century Hampshire, a certain Paucamatus, a name that he considers to probably reflect Bakmat, who is recorded in Winchester from 1159/60 until 1183/4 and who is associated with a man named Stephanus Sarracenus, both of whom may be of some relevance here.(17)

Looking more generally at the question of the presence of people who were Muslims or of potential Muslim ancestry in medieval England, and so who might bear names like Mahumet/Makomet and similar, Richard of Devizes in his description of London from c. 1192 certainly implies that there were 'Moors' in that city then, when he writes that:

You will arrive in London... do not mingle with the throngs in the eating-houses; avoid dice and gambling, the theatre and the tavern. You will encounter more braggarts than in the whole of France. The number of parasites is infinite. Actors, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, Moors, flatterers... All this sort of people fill all the houses.(18)

We do need to be careful here, however. The word translated ‘Moors’ here is actually garamantes, which may indicate an origin for this section in a classical or literary source, rather than reality, especially as influence from Horace’s Satires has been identified in the subsequent sections of Richard’s description of London.(19) More certainly relevant may be recent archaeological excavations at the medieval cemetery of St John’s Hospital, Lichfield, which revealed the burials of between two and five people of African ancestry, some of apparently high status, and at Ipswich, where nine people out of a total of a total of 150 excavated from a cemetery there appear to be of 'sub-Saharan' African descent, spread across thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, with the earliest having oxygen isotope results consistent with an early life spent in North Africa/Tunisia.(20) Likewise, recent work on burials in a mid-fourteenth-century cemetery at East Smithfield, London, indicated that 29% of a sample of 41 people buried there were of ‘non-White European ancestry’.(21) 

In the above light, it may also be worth noting that both Henry II and his son Richard I seem to have had 'Saracen mercenaries' in their employ, the latter having as many as 120 such mercenaries and apparently including at least some of them in the garrison of Domfront, Normandy.(22) Similarly, it is intriguing to note that knowledge of the location of medieval Lincoln on either side of the River Witham and the existence of the Foss Dyke as a waterway between that city and the River Trent seems to have reached the great Muslim scholar Muhammad al-Idrisi, who included these facts in his geographical encyclopaedia Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq, written for Roger II of Sicily and completed in 1154—indeed, it has been suggested that al-Idrisi probably travelled to England himself during the first half of the twelfth century, which is a point of some significance.(23)

Figure 3: Al-Idrisi's mid-twelfth-century Arabic map of Britain, from a late sixteenth-century copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the map is split across three different drawings which have been combined together here so that the whole island can be seen (Bodleian Library MS. Pococke 375 folios 281b-282a, 308b, 310b-311a)—click the image or here for a larger view. Lincolnshire is on the left hand side, as the map is orientated with north at the bottom; the river flowing nearly horizontally from the left to right is the Witham, with Boston near the sea and Lincoln upstream, where the river flows through the town, just as it did in the medieval period when it divided the old Lower City from its medieval southern suburbs (image: Bodleian Library)

Finally, attention might also be directed to the evidence for at least some 'Saracens' having been unwillingly brought into England in the medieval period, although this is perhaps less directly relevant to the current enquiry. So, the Flores Historiarum under the year 1271 makes reference to Thomas de Clare having returned to England from the Holy Land with 'four Saracen prisoners',(24) and the Calendar of Patent Rolls for 1259 includes a mandate for the arrest of a runaway 'Ethiopian... sometime a Saracen' who had apparently escaped his master:

Mandate to all persons to arrest an Ethiopian of the name of Bartholomew, sometime a Saracen, slave (servus) of Roger de Lyntin, whom the said Roger brought with him to England; the said Ethiopian having run away from his said lord, who has sent an esquire of his to look for him: and they are to deliver him to the said esquire to the use of the said Roger.(25)

In sum, whilst we can point to no specific man named Mahumet/Makomet/Macamathe/Maumet (< Muhammad) present in twelfth-/thirteenth-century Lincolnshire after whom Macamathehou in Spridlington might be named, it seems clear that it is not entirely impossible that someone bearing such a personal name or something similar could lie behind this mound-/barrow-name, rather than it simply being a folkloric name intended to convey the meaning 'heathen barrow' or similar. Although such a usage of the name Muhammad might parallel names such as Scrathou and Gastehowe and be reflected in the usage of the medieval form Maumet and similar to mean 'pagan deity' or 'idol' in Middle English, there is significantly less evidence for the form Makomet being used in this way. Furthermore, not only are there no other instances of Makomet or Maumet being used in local names to indicate a perceived 'heathen' or 'pagan' character for landscape features such as mounds and barrows, but there is evidence for at least some people named variants of Muhammad living in medieval England between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Additionally, there is also a small amount of textual evidence for Muslims and people of potential Muslim origins being present in England and Normandy in this era, some being clearly captured or enslaved, but others potentially living in cities such as London, Ipswich and Lichfield, and some even perhaps being relatively high-status or in the employ of the king. Such people were probably not present in England in great numbers, but the evidence we have for this is not insignificant, and it may at least give us further pause for thought when considering just what the meaning of Macamathehou might be. 

Footnotes

1.     K. Cameron, J. Field & J. Insley, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire: Part Six, The Wapentakes of Manley and Aslacoe, Survey of English Place-Names LXXVII (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2001), p. 211; the name appears as both Macamathehou, which they treat as primary, and Mornmatehou.
2.     Cameron, Field and Insley, Place-Names of Lincolnshire VI, p. 211; Oxford English Dictionary, 'Mahomet, n.', OED Online, third edition, Oxford University Press, September 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/112410, accessed 10 November 2020; 'Makomet(e), n.', in S. M. Kuhn & Reidy (eds), Middle English Dictionary: Part M.1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1975), p. 83. On haugr, see M. Gelling & A. Cole, The Landscape of Place-Names (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2000), p. 174.
3.     R. Coates, 'Azure Mouse, Bloater Hill, Goose Puddings, and One Land called the Cow: continuity and conundrums in Lincolnshire minor names', Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 39 (2007), 73–143 at p. 85; VEPN, The Vocabulary of English Place-Names: M, draft version, online edition at www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/ins/documents/vocabulary-of-english-place-names-m-draft.pdf, accessed 10 November 2020, p. 14.
4.     Cameron, Field and Insley, Place-Names of Lincolnshire VI, p. 211.
5.     Coates, 'Lincolnshire minor names', p. 85.
6.     VEPN, The Vocabulary of English Place-Names: M, draft version, p. 14.
7.     A. Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 274.
8.     Coates, 'Lincolnshire minor names', p. 85; K. Cameron, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire: Part Two, The Wapentake of Yarborough, Survey of English Place-Names LXIV/LXV (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 1991), p. 24—note, a similar name, Blodhowfeld/Blodhowgate, also occurs in Thurmaston parish, Leicestershire. On gastehowe/gasthehowe, see I. M. Bower, The Place-Names of Lindsey (North Lincolnshire) (University of Leeds PhD Thesis, 1940), pp. xviii, 200; for Scratters and Scrathowes, see, for example, A. H. Smith, English Place-Name Elements, Survey of English Place-Names XXVI (Cambridge: English Place-Name Society, 1956), Part 2, p. 126.
9.     Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs, pp. 274–7.
10.     Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs, pp. 219–22.
11.     Middle English Dictionary, 'Makomet(e, n.', in Robert E. Lewis, et al. (eds), Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), online edition in F. McSparran et al. (eds), Middle English Compendium (Ann Arbor, 2000–18), quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED26593, accessed 10 November 2020.
12.     Middle English Dictionary, 'Maumet, n.', in Robert E. Lewis, et al. (eds), Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), online edition in F. McSparran et al. (eds), Middle English Compendium (Ann Arbor, 2000–18), quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED27106, accessed 10 November 2020. For the use of Maumet and similar as a surname, see below and MED sense 2(d).
13.     Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs, pp. 203–04.
14.     Bower, Place-Names of Lindsey, pp. xviii, 253–4, ; K. Cameron, A Dictionary of Lincolnshire Place-Names (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 1998), pp. 26, 80, 107. See also Hawardeshou, the meeting-place of Haverstoe Wapentake, which was almost certainly a barrow in Hawerby (Hawardebi) parish, both names involving the Scandinavian personal name Hāwarth, and Calnodeshou, the meeting-place of Candleshoe Wapentake, which was probably on Candlesby Hill, named from Candlesby, Calnodesbi: Cameron, Dictionary, pp. 27–8, 61. Likewise, the meeting-place of the wapentake of Wraggoe was presumably a Wraghehou (Wraggi + haugr), which may well have been at Wragohill in Wragby (Wraggi + bȳ): Bowers, Place-Names of Lindsey, p. 250; Cameron, Dictionary, pp. 143–4.
15.     K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, 'Queries', Prosopon, 9 (1998), p. 6; J. S. Moore, 'Who was "Mahumet"? Arabs in Angevin England', Prosopon, 11 (2000), pp. 1–7; D. Thornton, K. Keats-Rohan & R. Wood, 'Mahumet', COEL Database: Continental Origins of English Landholders, 1066-1166, [data collection], UK Data Service SN: 5687, doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-5687-1; OED third edition, 'Mahomet, n.'; Middle English Dictionary, 'Makomet(e, n.'. See The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Seventh Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1160–1161, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society IV (London: Wyman & Sons, 1885), p. 10; The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Eighth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1161–1162, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society V (London: Wyman & Sons, 1885), p. 13; The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Ninth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1162–1163, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society VI (London: Wyman & Sons, 1886), p. 46; The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Tenth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1163–1164, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society VII (London: Wyman & Sons, 1886), p. 14; and The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Eleventh Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1164–1165, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society VIII (London: Wyman & Sons, 1887), p. 57.
16.     K. S. B. Keats-Rohan in Moore, 'Who was "Mahumet"?', pp. 6–7; The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Sixth Year of the Reign of King Henry III, Michaelmas 1222 (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1999), p. 96, and The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Eighth Year of the Reign of King Henry III, Michaelmas 1224 (London: Pipe Roll Society, 2005), p. 12; Calendar of Patent Rolls: Edward III, A.D. 1327–1330 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1891), p. 123; Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III: A.D. 1253–1254 (London: HMSO, 1929), p. 211; K. A. Hanna (ed.), The Cartularies of Southwick Priory: Part 1 (Winchester: Hampshire County Council, 1988), pp. 16–17, and K. A. Hanna (ed.), The Cartularies of Southwick Priory: Part 2 (Winchester: Hampshire County Council, 1989); Middle English Dictionary, 'Maumet, n.', sense 2(d), as surname, and Rotuli de oblatis et finibus in Turri Londinensi asservati, tempore Regis Johannis, ed. T. D. Hardy (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1845), p. 455.
17.     Moore, 'Who was "Mahumet"?', p. 3.
18.     Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First, ed. and trans. J. T. Appleby (London, 1963), pp. 65–6, with modifications by W. Johansson, 'London's Medieval Sodomites', in History of Homosexuality in Europe and America, ed. W. R. Dynes & S. Donaldson (New York and London: Garland, 1992), pp. 159–63.
19.     J. Scattergood, ‘London and money: Chaucer’s Complaint to his Purse’, in Chaucer and the City, ed. A. Butterfield (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 162–76 at pp. 171–2.
20.     Ipswich: BBC, History Cold Case: Series 1, Episode 1—Ipswich Man (broadcast 27 July 2010); 'Skeleton of medieval African found in Ipswich sheds new light on Britain's ethnic history', BBC Press Office, 2 February 2010, online at www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/05_may/02/history.shtml, accessed 18 November 2020; K. Wade, Ipswich Archive Summaries: Franciscan Way, IAS 5003 (Ipswich: Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service, 2014), pp. 9, 10, 12, online at archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/ipswich_5003_2015/downloads.cfm; and Xanthé Mallett, pers. comm.. Lichfield: C. Coutts, 'St John’s Hospital, Lichfield: a Black and White Medieval Cemetery', talk at the Market Hall Museum, Warwick, on 24 July 2017, online abstract at www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/listings/region/west-midlands/st-johns-hospital-lichfield-black-white-medieval-cemetery/, accessed 18 November 2020; Jasmine Kilburn, pers. comm..
21.     R. Redfern and J. T. Hefner, ‘“Officially absent but actually present”: bioarchaeological evidence for population diversity in London during the Black Death, AD 1348–50’, in Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People, ed. M. L. Mant and A. J. Holland (London: Academic Press, 2019), pp. 69–114.
22.     Moore, 'Who was "Mahumet"?', p. 1; F. M. Powicke, 'The Saracen mercenaries of Richard I', Scottish Historical Review, 8 (1911), 104–05.
23.     C. R. Green, 'Al-Idrisi's twelfth-century map and description of eastern England', blog post, 28 March 2016, online at www.caitlingreen.org/2016/03/al-idrisi-twelfth-century-map.html, accessed 18 November 2020; 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; C. Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. AD 600–1150: A Comparative Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 323 ('Al-Idrisi... had visited England prior to his arrival in Sicily in c. 1138')
24.     C. D. Yonge (trans.), The Flowers of History (London: Bohn, 1853), vol. 2, p. 453.
25.     Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry III: Volume 5, 1258–1266, ed. H. C. Maxwell Lyte (London: HMSO, 1910), p. 28, and see further M. Ray, 'A Black Slave on the run in Thirteenth-Century England', Nottingham Medieval Studies, 51 (2007), 111–9. Note, ‘Ethiopian’ here probably means simply someone of ‘Black African ancestry’, rather than someone from modern Ethiopia, given Late Antique and medieval uses of this term.

The text content of this post and page is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2020, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The following short piece was originally published in the Lincoln Record Society News Review, 18 (2021), pp. 2–4; the version presented below is the fully-referenced version of this text.

The aim of the following note is to direct attention to an often-overlooked Arabic account and map of Lincolnshire found in the Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī khtirāq al-āfāq, ‘The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands’, of the Muslim scholar al-Idrīsī, composed c. 1154 for Roger II of Sicily.(1)

The North Sea and the east coast of England on al-Idrīsī’s mid-twelfth-century Arabic map, from a mid-thirteenth- to early fourteenth-century copy. Note, north is at the top and south at the bottom; the river running across the centre of the image is the Witham with Boston on the left and Lincoln on the right, whilst Grimsby is shown on the coast to the north of the river (Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Arabe 2221, f. 338v–339r; Public Domain)

Al-Idrīsī was a descendant of the eleventh-century Ḥammūdid dynasty of Málaga in al-Andalus (Spain), a distant branch of the Idrīsid family that ruled Morocco from the late eighth to late tenth centuries, and his Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī khtirāq al-āfāq is one of the great geographical works of the medieval period.(2)  Preserved in ten manuscripts dating from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, this work was written in Sicily for Roger II (1112–54) and gathered together a vast array of information on the various regions of the world known to its author and was illustrated by a series of 70 maps. As part of this, al-Idrīsī included a brief description of eastern England that runs as follows:

Herein is the second section of the seventh climate, containing a portion of the Ocean wherein lies the island of lnqlṭrh [England, l’Angleterre]… From the town of ǧrnmūdh [Yarmouth, Gernemutha/Gernemuda] to the town of nrġīq [Norwich, Norwic] is ninety miles. The town of Norwich is distant ten miles from the sea, and from there to aġryms [Grimsby] is a hundred and fifty miles by sea. From the said town of Yarmouth the sea[-coast] curves round in a circle, but still tending northwards. From the said town of Grimsby to the town of afrwīk [York, Evrvic] is eighty miles. The latter lies at a distance from the Ocean, and on the border of the peninsula of sqwsyh [Scotia], which is contiguous with the island of England… From the town of York to the estuary of the river of bskh [Boston] is a hundred and forty miles, and Boston is a fortress (ḥiṣn) situated on this river twelve miles upstream from the sea. From the aforementioned of Grimsby to the town of nqwls [Lincoln, Nicolas] 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 Lincoln to the town of York is moreover ninety miles, and from thence to the town of dūnālma [Durham, Dunelme] eighty miles northwards.(3)

Al-Idrīsī was by no means the first author of an Arabic text to discuss and describe this island, as I have discussed elsewhere, but he was the first to name it Inqalṭāra, England (Angleterre), rather than Britain and the first to leave us a description of places in Lincolnshire.(4) In terms of his knowledge of this area, which has been considered to derive either from one or more informants or even from a visit to England by al-Idrīsī himself,(5) we can highlight several points of interest.

First, Lincoln appears as Nqwls,(6) reflecting the French name for the city, Nicole, that is recorded from early twelfth century through to the late fourteenth and which shows the Anglo-Norman interchange of n/l arising from dissimilation.(7) Lincoln is described in the text as being located on both sides of the River Witham, something that accurately reflects the twelfth-century situation with the old walled city to the north and the medieval suburb of Wigford to the south, and this is replicated on al-Idrīsī’s accompanying map of England, where Lincoln is the only city depicted straddling a river (see Fig. 1). Al-Idrīsī’s claim that this river both flows into the sea to the south of Grimsby and ‘flows through the midst of it [Lincoln] and flows out of it towards the town of Grimsby’ is similarly of interest. This has been described as ‘a major error’ and a result of confusion, but this need not be the case.(8) Rather, it could again reflect a degree of genuine knowledge of the Lincoln region in the first half of the twelfth century, as Lincoln and Grimsby 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.(9) That al-Idrīsī (or his informant) was indeed aware of this route is confirmed by his statement that ‘from the inland Lincoln to the town of York is moreover ninety miles’, something that is certainly not true via road or sea, but is almost exactly true if one travelled to York by boat via the Foss Dyke, the Trent and then the Ouse.(10)

Second, Boston appears as Bskh/Bska(11) and is shown situated just inland of the sea and located on the same river as Lincoln on al-Idrīsī’s map of the east coast (Fig. 1). Interestingly, Boston is described as a ḥiṣn, a ‘fortress, stronghold, entrenchment’,(12) in contrast to Lincoln and Grimsby, which are each described as a madīna, a ‘town, city’.(13) The reason for this description is open to question, but it is worth noting that the Barditch around the town is thought to date from the eleventh–twelfth centuries and has been interpreted in the past as a ‘defensive ditch’; needless to say, al-Idrīsī’s comment may well add further weight to this interpretation.(14)

Third and finally, it seems clear from both al-Idrīsī’s text and his map that the area from Yarmouth to York, including Lincolnshire, was the part of the east coast of England in which he was most interested. 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. Quite why the Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī khtirāq al-āfāq was particularly interested in this area of England is unclear, but we might tentatively wonder whether Lincolnshire’s well-known role in the medieval wool trade from the pre-Conquest period onwards might not have somehow motivated this interest.(15) Certainly, the early fourteenth-century Taqwīm al-buldān, ‘Survey of the countries’ (1321), of Abū l-Fidāʾ, which makes explicit use of a thirteenth-century Arabic description of England by Ibn Saʿīd al-Maghribī (1213–86), praises the quality of English wool, noting that in England ‘is made the fine scarlet cloth from the wool of their sheep, which is fine like silk’.(16) The fame of English wool and the regard in which it was held in medieval Europe is well-known, but this reference and two further ones in the early fourteenth century from Rashīd al-Dīn and Banākatī to ‘exceedingly fine scarlet cloth’(17) from England imply that the renown of English wool products reached well beyond Europe and the Mediterranean in the medieval period.

'Plan of Boston, England', by Thomas Moule, 1837, slightly cropped, showing the Barditch around the town (Source: The Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library; licensed for reuse under a Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence via Flickr).

Footnotes

1. The only reference to it by a modern Lincolnshire historian that I am aware of is in Stephen H. Rigby’s Boston, 1086 –1225: A Medieval Boom Town (Lincoln, 2017), pp. 8, 19, 61, who encountered it via an earlier version of this paper posted on my academic blog at <https://www.caitlingreen.org/2016/03/al-idrisi-twelfth-century-map.html>.

2. For al-Idrīsī, see J.-C. Ducène, a'l-Idrīsī, Abū ʿAbdallāh', in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas, and E. Rowson (Leiden, 2018), consulted online on 25 February 2021 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_32372>.

3. 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, with minor modifications; note, I have included the transliterated Arabic names as read, discussed and identified by Beeston, pp. 273, 275–7. Grimsby is mentioned by name in the previous section by al-Idrīsī, although without any further details, see Recueil de Voyages et de Mémoires Publié par la Société de Géographie: Géographie d’Édrisi, ed. P. A. Jaubert (Paris, 1840), vol. 2, p. 374.

4. On the name of England in Arabic works, see also D. G. König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2015), pp. 277–8. For an earlier Arabic text that mentions Britain and gives more than just names, see C. Green, 'Britain, the Byzantine Empire, and the concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’: Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s ninth-century Arabic description of Britain', in Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England, ed. K. L. Jolly and B. Brooks (Woodbridge, 2022), pp. 94–114. See also D. N. Dunlop, 'The British Isles according to medieval Arabic authors', Islamic Quarterly 4 (1957), 11–28.

5. For the latter suggestion, see C. Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. AD 600–1150: A Comparative Archaeology (Cambridge, 2013), p. 323, who accepts that al-Idrīsī ‘had visited England prior to his arrival in Sicily in c. 1138’; for the former, see Beeston, 'Idrisi’s Account', p. 280.

6. Beeston, 'Idrisi’s Account', pp. 269, 277.

7. K. Cameron, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire: Part One, The Place-Names of the County of the City of Lincoln (Nottingham, 1982), pp. 2–3, and see, for example, A Survey of the Antiquities of the City of Lincoln (Lincoln, 1848), pp. 23–4.

8. M. Ferrar, 'Al-Idrisi; The Book of Roger The description of L’Angleterre', Cartography Unchained, website, December 2020, consulted online on 25 February 2021 <https://www.cartographyunchained.com/pdfs/cgid1.pdf>, p. 10.

9. F. M. Stenton, 'The road system of medieval England', Economic History Review, 7 (1936), 1–21 at p. 20; M. J. Jones, D. Stocker and A. Vince, The City by the Pool: Assessing the Archaeology of the City of Lincoln (Oxford, 2003), pp. 116, 241; Simeon of Durham, Historia Regum, s.a. 1121: ‘In the same year, king Henry cut a large canal from Torksey to Lincoln and by causing the river Trent to flow into it, he made it navigable for vessels’, trans. J. Stevenson, Simeon of Durham: A History of the Kings of England (Felinfach, 1987), p. 188.

10. Interestingly, the distance given from Grimsby to Lincoln is approximately correct too, in this case if one sailed down the east coast of Lincolnshire and up the Witham via Boston.

11. See Beeston, 'Idrisi’s Account', p. 277 n. 55 and Arabic text at p. 269, line 55; Géographie d’Édrisi, ed. Jaubert, vol. 2, p. 425. The form here suggests that the name encountered may have been one in which the town’s name had already been shortened to Boston or similar, rather than the original Botuluestan etc., although according to Victor Watts this form is only recorded in England from 1235: V. Watts, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (Cambridge, 2004), p. 71. With further regard to the name as given by al-Idrīsī, it may also be worth noting that Boston was ‘established within lands belonging to Skirbeck’, just to its south, which derives from Old Norse skirr + bekkr, ‘the clear stream’: K. Cameron, A Dictionary of Lincolnshire Place-Names (Nottingham, 1998), p. 111; N. Grayson, Lincolnshire Extensive Urban Survey: Boston, Historic England/LCC project no. 2897 (Lincoln, 2019), p. 4; Rigby, Boston, pp. 4, 20. The name ‘Boston’ does, of course, appear in a variety of forms on early maps—for example, on the map of England attributed to the Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte in Marino Sanudo Torsello’s Liber secretorum fidelium crucis of c. 1321, Boston is Sanbetor whilst the Wash is labelled as the Gulffo de Sanbetor (British Library, Additional 27376 f. 181).

12. H. Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J. Milton Cowan, 4th edn (Wiesbaden, 1979), p. 214.

13. Wehr, Dictionary, p. 1055.

14. D. M. Owen, 'The beginnings of the port of Boston', in A Prospect of Lincolnshire, ed. N. Field and A. White (Lincoln, 1984), pp. 42–5 at p. 43; Grayson, Boston, p. 5; Rigby, Boston, p. 14.

15. On the early medieval roots of the Lincolnshire wool trade, see for example R. Faith, 'The structure of the market for wool in early medieval Lincolnshire', Economic History Review 65.2 (2012), 674–700. Note, in about 1200 Boston was second only to London in the scale of its overseas trade, with its trading activity being initially largely based around the wool trade, for which it was England’s most important port at that time: Rigby, Boston, pp. 1–2; S. H. Rigby, Boston and Grimsby in the Middle Ages (University of London PhD Thesis, 1982), pp. 175–6, 195–6.

16. Dunlop, 'The British Isles', p. 25; M. Reinaud, Géographie d'Aboulféda, 2 vols (Paris: A L'Imprimerie Nationale, 1848), vol. 2, p. 266.

17. Dunlop, 'The British Isles', p. 26.

The text content of this post and page is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2022, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The Land on the Edge project was commissioned by Historic England and Lincolnshire County Council as part of the wider Inns on the Edge project (Historic England project number 8398). The long, low-lying coastline of Lincolnshire has changed dramatically and repeatedly over the centuries and millennia, and one of the key aims of the Land On The Edge strand was to produce a detailed academic report analysing the landscape history of the 75 mile-long stretch of coastline from Grimsby to Boston. Once the high ground on the westernmost edge of the now-drowned Doggerland that connected England to the Continent, the Lincolnshire coastal zone saw a dramatic inundation by the rising tide that began around 8,000 years ago and continued on and off right through to the medieval period and beyond. This has resulted in a complex and intriguing coastal landscape that still bears the traces of multiple large-scale shifts in both its character and the way that it has been used by its inhabitants. 

The results of this project were presented in two reports written by me in 2023: a full, academic report of about 110,000 words entitled Land on the Edge: The Landscape Evolution of the Lincolnshire Coastline, and a shorter piece offering a summary of the results of the project for wider dissemination, entitled Land on the Edge: Headline Stories. Both of these reports have now been made available online (along with the other reports from the wider HE/LCC project) and, as a result, they are now presented here for download too. The first link of the links below is to the Full Report and the second is to the summary Headline Stories:

Land on the Edge: The Landscape Evolution of the Lincolnshire Coastline (2023) — Full report, 109,784 words, click to read online or download at Researchgate or Academia.edu.

Land on the Edge: Headline Stories (2023) — summary report for dissemination, 20,666 words, click to read online or download at Researchgate or Academia.edu.

The text content of this post and page is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2024, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.