Feudal Modes

The trend away from ornamented brooches, rings, and swords that demonstrates changing social pressures and expression during the eleventh century was maintained in the first half of the twelfth. The Anglo-Norman aristocracy had considerable wealth for its castles and churches, but the spending power of the Anglo-Saxon majority was very much diminished by the impositions that followed the Conquest. Social relations among the former were based primarily on land, and although sentiments of personal loyalty were defined by oaths of fealty, there is no record of gift-giving from lord to retainer other than the increasingly formalized bestowal of arms. Towns were growing both in size and number, but only a few merchants were really rich, and the peasantry in the countryside was increasing in number but had decreasing opportunity for individual advancement. Excavations at castles and other baronial residences generally yield the evidence of martial appearance and activity that would be expected, like spurs, and slightly more evidence of wealth, with coins a little more profligately lost, than at other sites. There are also luxuries like gilt strips, from caskets of bone or wood, and evidence of leisure activities, such as gaming-pieces; chess was being introduced into western Europe, and appealed to the aristocracy because it was a complicated pastime that only the educated would have time to learn and indulge in. Furthermore, it could be played by both sexes, though ladies were expected to show their inferior skill and intelligence by losing to the men; it echoed feudal society and its courts; and it could be played for stakes. An occasional urban chess-piece find, not always well dated, shows that a few burgesses might seek to emulate the aristocracy. Other predominantly castle finds include small bone and copper-alloy pins with decorated heads that have been interpreted as hairpins, as at Castle Acre, attesting a female presence, but other personal ornaments are infrequent. Some pictures in manuscripts suggest that in the early twelfth century the highest ranks of the aristocracy were wearing brooches. These were probably conventional representations, however, as there are no valuable brooches or finger-rings in the archaeological record, as there had been earlier.

Alfred et al.

A distinguishing feature of the ninth century is the amount of precious metal that has survived from it. Some of this comes from hoards, for in contrast to the eighth century there are several with both coins and objects, as well as some only with coins and some only with objects. The latest coin in a hoard provides no more than the earliest possible date at which it could have been deposited, but at least that is a fixed point in one direction, and its owner was unlikely to keep a store of coins for long without occasionally taking some out or putting others in. Objects in hoards, of course, may always include some treasured heirlooms, as may furnished graves, but at least perceived similarity to works in other media is not their only dating criterion. A few objects can be dated because they have an identifiable name on them. A gold and niello ring inscribed Ethelwulf R[e]x at the bottom of the bezel associates it with King Aethelwulf, ruler of Wessex from 839 to 858 (Fig. 4.1, right). The ring was not necessarily made for him to wear himself, but for him to give to a follower as a permanent reminder of the service owed to its donor, though a Beowulf seeking a ‘generous ring-giver’ might not have thought its inscription sufficient compensation for its modest weight. Alternatively, it could have acted like a seal, to accompany a royal messenger and validate that his news or instructions came from the king; or have been used as a guarantee of a land donation and a physical reminder of the event at which the grant had been made. That might have been the reason why the name of Queen Aethelswith was added to the back of another gold ring, thus associating it with Aethelwulf’s daughter, who was queen of Mercia from 853 to 874 (Fig. 4.1, left). The inscription may have been an afterthought, needed when the ring was used for an unanticipated purpose. A third explanation is that both rings were baptismal; above Aethelwulf’s name are two birds at the Fountain of Life, and the bezel of Aethelswith’s ring has the Lamb of St John the Baptist.

Adapting to Life Without the Legions

If gold and silver are a measure of wealth, late Roman Britain was very rich. Hoards of coins, jewellery, and plate buried in the late fourth and early fifth centuries show that their owners’ lifestyle was coming to an end as central imperial authority broke down, troops were withdrawn from the island, villas fell into disuse, and towns lost their markets and trade. Raiders threatened by land and sea: Irish from the west, Pictish from the north, Frisian, Saxon, and others from the east; and as civic order broke down, the likelihood of robbery by people living south of Hadrian’s Wall grew worse. The hoards’ owners were right to worry, and their subsequent failure to retrieve their valuables must testify to many personal catastrophes. Hoards containing dishes, bowls, and spoons as well as coins and jewellery have been found on the east side of Roman Britain from Canterbury, Kent, in the south to Whorlton, Yorkshire, in the north. Further west, coin-hoards are quite plentiful, although none has any plate. Some contain jewellery, like one found in 1843 at Amesbury, Wiltshire, that included three silver finger-rings; in the same area, another hoard with eight gold coins and one of silver was found in 1990, apparently concealed in a pot around the year 405, to judge from the date of the latest coin. But as with plate so with jewellery, the contrast with the east is still considerable; Thetford, Norfolk, has gold finger-rings as well as ornamental chains, bracelets, and a buckle; Hoxne, Suffolk, has gold bracelets, and again chains, these with elaborate mounts. Some of the craftsmanship shown in these pieces is of a high order, that only well-off patrons could have afforded. The plate suggests displays of tableware by a society that set great store on being able to offer lavish feasts and entertainment. These late Roman treasures may be giving a slightly false impression of Britain’s prosperity. Silver was probably extracted from the same native deposits that yielded lead, so would have been more available than in most parts of the Empire. Some may also have entered Britain from Ireland, where evidence of Roman intervention is accumulating.

Envoi

The significance of material culture, and the portable objects that are part of it, is dictated by people’s economic and social power, and their need to give physical expression to their status and aspirations. As in any society, the ability and wish to acquire, display, and use metals, glass, gems, or pots depended in the Middle Ages upon the supply of raw materials and finished products, and the demand that their availability might meet or create. The island of Britain had never been united by the Romans, and different reactions to their army’s withdrawal were only to be expected. Generally, however, power-seeking leaders establishing petty and impermanent fiefdoms relied largely upon being able to demonstrate their success by the acquisition of booty that could be profligately consumed, shown off, or distributed to families and supporters. Swords, brooches, or drinking-vessels symbolize how these social affinities were created and maintained, whether recorded in graves, hoards, and other deliberate deposits, or in accidental loss or intentional jettisoning of what was beyond reuse. The precise meanings that were given to gold and silver, glass and garnets, changed according to their contexts; some gave physical expression to an ambition to inherit the prestigious authority of Rome, others gave credence to stories of descent from far-travelling heroes, while others stressed a person’s place within their own immediate society. Yet artefacts such as pottery show that even people whose priority was subsistence were part of a wider network of contact. External factors influenced behaviour: no leader of a group in Britain could negotiate directly with the Byzantine emperor for the subsidies that brought gold into western Europe, so none could take action to ensure its continuing availability during the seventh century. Its relative value changed as it became rarer, so that it had to be used sparingly if at all; consequently, for some people the display of access to it became even more important. Contemporaneously, however, Christianity’s infiltration changed beliefs about what happened after death, and how people should use and dispose of their worldly goods. In bigger political units, using symbols to show origins and allegiances mattered less, but the large numbers of artefacts now known show that prosperity was not confined in the eighth and ninth centuries to the royal families.

Kings and Christianity

New discoveries play a major part in archaeological research, but coincidence can also have a role. When four copper-alloy scabbard-studs with Style II ornament were excavated in the smith’s grave at Tattershall Thorpe in 1981 (Fig. 2.18), they were the first of their kind to have been found in England, despite being well known on the continent, where they are dated to between 640 and 670. Within a couple of years, however, another set turned up, on a scabbard in a cemetery in Buttermarket, Ipswich, Suffolk. Then, in 1999, yet another set was found, in a grave at the new football stadium in Southampton, Hampshire (Fig. 3.1). These studs adorned scabbards that were not for double-edged swords, but for the single-edged long seax, not a very practical weapon, but one that was probably used in hunting and was therefore redolent of aristocratic practice. At Tattershall Thorpe the studs were not attached to anything, and were presumably going to be shown to a prospective patron with a view to reuse. At Ipswich and Southampton both sets were in cemeteries at what were about to become major trading-places, Gippeswic and Hamwic. These wic sites had continental counterparts and suggest new ways of organizing and systematizing exchanges of goods; others in England were London, Lundenwic, and York, Eoforwic, both former Roman towns, with the wics outside the walls but episcopal churches inside. Neither Ipswich nor Southampton had a major church, so there was no reason for important burials at either unless they were of people involved in the places’ emergence as commercial centres. One explanation is that some of the graves were for kings’ ‘reeves’ and their families, royal agents placed to oversee merchants and to ensure that tolls were paid, who were buried slightly away from where the commerce was to take place. The Southampton cemetery had other signs of an elite presence, such as a woman’s grave that contained a gold pendant with garnets and Style II animals in filigree gold wire on it (Col. pl. C.2), which seems likely to be mid- to later seventh-century.

Expressions of the Elites

Because both Gildas and Bede wrote of mutual antipathy between Britons and Anglo-Saxons, it used to be thought self-evident that their hostility was expressed by the cultural differences that appear so obvious in the formers’ Christianity, Celtic speech, hillforts, and unfurnished graves, and the latters’ cremations, furnished inhumations, sunken-featured buildings, great squareheaded brooches, and the like. Different ideas about the adaptations that had to be made to meet changing circumstances have led to reappraisals of extreme positions about racial exclusiveness, however, and emphasis is now placed on the ways that people created new identities rather than on how they inherited one of two alternative dichotomies. The spread of furnished graves westwards and northwards in the second half of the sixth century could be taken as evidence of further waves of immigrants from the continent, but at least as likely is that existing populations were changing their practices as new conditions developed. In the west and north, the most visible change in the archaeological record after the middle of the sixth century is the disappearance of Mediterranean imported pottery from hillforts and other sites, replaced by southern French wares, implying that wine and olive oil shipped in wooden casks from the Loire valley and Bordeaux replaced Greek and African supplies sent in clay amphoras. As with the earlier bowls and dishes, the assumption is that much of the pottery was ‘associative’, sought after because it was seen as appropriate to use at feasts when luxuries were offered by a host. Unlike the earlier imports, however, in the seventh century there were also open-topped jars that seem to have been used as containers, presumably for dry goods as liquids would have slopped out. Some were used for cooking. The French seventh-century pottery, now called E-ware, is a little more often found than are the earlier wares; its absence from South Cadbury is good evidence that that site went out of use c.600, despite its former importance—a sign of the continued instability of the period. Just as none of the Mediterranean imported pottery had reached places far from the west coast, so too the French wares did not pass inland, or up the English Channel. Imports of glass have a broadly similar distribution, although dating is more difficult.

The Wars and the Posies

The problems of the second half of the fourteenth century continued to affect the fifteenth. Sudden death remained a constant threat, and population levels probably did not begin to recover much, if at all, until the 1540s. Instability in England was briefly restrained by the century’s first two Henries, but thereafter losses in France soon began to prove expensive, the Wars of the Roses were resumed, and uprisings in Wales added to the uncertainty. Nor did the new Stewart dynasty bring internal peace to Scotland. Commercial profits could still be made, especially in the cloth trade, but exports rose and fell with alarming rapidity. Population reduction led to much restructuring, not least in widespread abandonment or shrinkage of rural sites and of urban back areas and suburbs. For archaeology there are some compensations; stone-lined rubbish-pits were one response to fears of smell-spread disease, and their final fills are less often mixed up with residual material than those left unlined. But in London the establishment of the stone waterfront means that the dump deposits peter out, so that the place of the capital in setting standards for the rest of the country becomes even more difficult to assess. Although there was enough bullion to sustain a silver currency in England and Scotland and to allow at least intermittent minting of gold coins, sometimes in quite large numbers, the site-find record is an indicator of decreased overall usage. Both silver and gold became available from new sources after 1460, some compensation for the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the consequent extra difficulty of trading with the Near East, but the maritime route that opened up for bringing gold from West Africa may not have increased the quantity coming into Europe as a whole, as trans-Sahara caravans were fewer. Use of the sea, however, put first Portugal and later England in the middle of commercial flow-lines, rather than at their ends. After the fifteenth century gems began to come round the Cape to enter Europe by the same western route, and emeralds even crossed the Atlantic, to be followed by new supplies of gold.

An Epoch of New Dynasties

The Wessex kings’ conquest of the whole of England during the first half of the tenth century created conditions that led to a nation-state being recognizable by the end of the eleventh. In Scotland this was a much longer process, and Wales remained fragmented. The differences between them are mirrored by coinage; increasingly regulated and systematic in England, but not even produced in Scotland or Wales. The nation-state remained focused upon kings, however, elevating their status but exposing society to the haphazard behaviour and ambitions of an individual. They might still be seen as leading their ‘people’, English, Norman or whomsoever, but in reality they depended upon the support of a military elite and legitimization by the Church, rather than upon an efficient bureaucracy, let alone upon popular acceptance. Physical expression of royal supremacy was provided by increasingly elaborate inauguration rituals, and by crown-wearing ceremonies held on major feast-days at Gloucester, Winchester, and elsewhere, when the king represented his elevation by displaying himself with his emblems of power. A crown had been used as an image on coins by King Athelstan in the 930s, though his immediate successors stuck mainly to the traditional diadem. Ethelred (978–1016) added a staff, symbolizing a king’s pastoral duties to his people, and was occasionally shown wearing a round cap, usually taken to represent a helmet based on Roman coin images rather than on contemporary armour. The ‘hand of Providence’ on the reverse of some of his coins implied God’s blessing on an anointed king (cf. Col. pl. F.2). Cnut (1016–35) began his reign with a coin showing him crowned, as though to emphasize that his usurpation of power was legitimized by God through his coronation; the crown was a new type, an open circle surmounted by gold lilies. He followed it with a coin that has him wearing a tall, pointed helmet, this time a form that was in contemporary use. The lily-circlet crown had already been shown in a manuscript picture being worn by King Edgar in c.966, and a domed version was drawn being brought down from Heaven to crown Cnut in a painting that commemorates his donation of a gold cross to the New Minster at Winchester.

Material Culture and Social Display

The trend towards increasing secular interest in jewellery was probably maintained throughout the thirteenth century, though precise dating of individual pieces remains difficult. With only small amounts of gold to be found in the south of France and Hungary, western Europeans continued to depend upon both gold and gems coming by overland routes from or through the Arab world, with Italian merchants acting as intermediaries. In 1257 Henry III was able to attempt to imitate continental kings by issuing gold coins, not to facilitate trade but to attract gold into the mint to back up his loans and pledges, and to use as alms. The care that went into the coins’ design shows that they were thought of as having prestige value, and the decision to represent the king carrying the orb and sceptre was most probably made in homage to one of the issues of his revered predecessor Edward the Confessor; the royal seal was also changed, to a design that adapted Edward’s image of an enthroned king ruling as a judge like Solomon rather than as a military leader with a sword. Henry’s gold coins were only produced in small numbers and for a very short time, but they show that the importance of the symbolism of a currency was still understood, though no more effort was made with the designs of everyday silver coins than in previous reigns. The amount of coinage in circulation is shown both by single finds and hoards, not only in England but in Wales and Scotland as well. Excavation of the church at Capel Maelog, Powys, produced coins of Henry III, Edward I (1272–1307), and Richard II (1377–99), suggesting that the use of English money had spread into Welsh culture. The Welsh kings did not mint their own coins, however, unlike the kings of Scotland, whose coins were allowed to circulate in England just as English ones did north of the border. Presumably exclusion of a rival’s image was no longer a matter of pride. No hoard in Britain hidden during the middle part of the thirteenth century has objects in it to help to establish a chronology for jewellery.

Introduction

The aim of this book is to examine some of the ways in which people in medieval Britain presented themselves. It is primarily about small artefacts, especially jewellery. It says little about costume, although that provided the immediate setting for many of the objects discussed; nor is it a study of buildings, although those provided the backdrop for the people wearing the costume. Nor is it a catalogue. Instead, it considers the reasons for people’s decisions to acquire, display, conceal, and discard some of the things that were important to them, and examines how much the wish to acquire, retain, and pass such things on to heirs explains behaviour in the Middle Ages. The book’s approach is chronological, to explore the changes and the reasons for them during the whole of the Middle Ages. It is not restricted to the study of a single group of people, but explores the significance to the whole of society of some of the things available at various times, and the restrictions that limited their acquisition and use. Many of the objects considered and the documents cited relate to the richest or most powerful people, but one of the aims of the book is to consider whether theirs was an example that others invariably sought to follow, or whether at different times different aspirations were expressed, showing social disharmony and disunity. Because the emphasis of the book is on the artefacts that people used in order to show their affiliations and status, it says little about such things as household items. Locks and keys, for instance, were in most periods primarily functional; important as they are for showing the need for security in medieval buildings, they were rarely made with an eye on what people were going to think of those who turned them—except in the early period, they do not seem to have been regarded as things that served to define their owners’ social place or aspirations. Details of weapons, armour, and horse trappings do not get much attention either, since their finer points would have mattered only to a very privileged few. On the other hand, drinking-vessels and tableware are included, because they were very often used in ways that made them visible and a direct reflection of social standing.