Egbert may in fact have been there

As teaching fell upon me like a soaked-through ceiling in October 2019, somehow I came across a news story about a medieval object, and it was the kind of news story that made me stub a blog-post of objection. But, since I knew I would be writing this up at some remove – and look, here we are, removed – I also left myself a note hoping that some better coverage would have emerged, and man, has it ever. So what I thought would be a post about a silly news story, in which experts were coaxed into conjecturing further than I think I would have – though my record’s not great, I know – is now become a post whose main purpose is just to invite you, in the words of William Shatner, to “ponder the mystery.”¹ And in the end, I have to conclude that the story may have been right all along. But let me walk you through my steps to this conclusion, because the path is really intriguing.

Flattened and folder silver arm-rings from the Galloway Hoard. Illustrating this post has been more difficult than it could have been because the National Museums of Scotland have a crystal-clear and very restrictive image use policy, which could be paraphrased as ‘pay up or lump it’. Happily, they do appear to have agreed the release of a few images to Wikimedia Commons, where they are free for reuse as long as copyright is stated. Unhappily, this doesn’t include a clear image of the actual bent silver strip with runes on that I was originally caught by, although there’s a good licensed image in the article which first showed it to me. This image, meanwhile, is by National Museums Scotland, copyright to National Museums of Scotland but licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

So, in case you’d rather read me than follow that first link, in which case thankyou, I’d better explain the story I first found. It was the first I’d heard of a 2014 find which we were by 2019 calling the Galloway Hoard, which came up on Church land – not, as far as I can see, a church yard, but land belonging to the Church of Scotland, who are indeed in the process of suing the finder – near Balmaghie in Galloway.² The story doesn’t say much about the actual hoard, but focuses on a silver strip within it, originally part of an arm-ring, which is one of four such in the hoard which bear Old English runes. In this case, they spell the name ‘Ecgbeorht’, Egbert, also pretty solidly Old English. The article is at pains to stress that there were even in 900 English-speaking people in Galloway—”‘it is even possible that these were locals'”—however odd that might seem, and seemed keen to make the person here named not just the owner of the arm-ring but the person or one of the people who had buried the hoard: “a message left by one of the people who may have deposited the Galloway Hoard 1100 years ago.” And that was the point at which I baulked.

A combination of various items from the hoard, including two of the flattened arm-rings, a silver brooch, a gold pin in the shape of a bird, two complex glass bears, a disc brooch and some gold wire. Image by National Museums Scotland, copyright of National Museums Scotland, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I still think that, on the basis of that information only, my scepticism was not unreasonable. What was unreasonable was my not looking for more information, and indeed, some might say, not having yet heard of the hoard given my job and so on. But my thinking was thus: point 1, even from the few illustrations in that article it was clear to me that this was a Viking-style hoard, with cut-up silver bullion in it and artefacts from all over the map bundled in together.³ Point 2, Galloway circa 900 was kind of an uncontrolled space whose inhabitants were infamous for banditry and plunder across the whole northern Irish Sea area.⁴ If, therefore, point 3, there was stuff in this hoard with English connections, it seemed surpassingly likely to me that it had been stolen from somewhere in England and brought here. In that scenario, Egbert was very unlikely to be a local, rather than a victim of the locals on their latest cruise into Northumbria or the Borders-to-be. And that, in very short form, was the post I thought I was going to write.

An assemblage from the hoard, including most of the ingots and arm-rings, under inspection by a cropped-out Dr Martin Goldberg. Image by National Museums Scotland, copyright of National Museums Scotland, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But, because of that note, when I sat down to start writing this after a day of computerised monkey-work with reading lists and postgraduate admissions, I did do at least a bit more looking, and the whole thing very rapidly went fractal bloom, if you will: every part of it I poked up opened up into something even more complicated. For a start, the hacksilver bundles were curious. There was among them a rather fine silver pectoral cross which had not been cut up or damaged, for a start.

The cross; it was found wrapped in chain as it is seen here, and has been conserved that way too. Image by National Museums Scotland and copyright to National Museums Scotland, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 viaWikimedia Commons.

Also, one slightly separate bundle comprised four intact arm-rings, bound together with a fifth, twisted into a kind of fastening that bundled up a small wooden box, now decayed, with three tiny bits of gold inside, the bird, an ingot and a ring. And this was interesting not least because the other arm-rings, which had been flattened out, folded and buried with ingots, had been folded in four different ways, and within each group of rings folded in a certain way, one, only, was marked with Old English runes. Ecgbeorht’s name was the only one which seemed to be complete, but the others were ‘Ed’, ‘Til’ and ‘Ber’, all of which could begin Old English names, and in general it seemed possible that all four groups had someone’s name on, which made the repetition of four together with the intact arm-rings look like more than coincidence.

The copyright-free images I can get at don’t include the bundle of arm-rings, though you can see it in the Current Archaeology webpage I just linked, but here are the three bits of gold from within them. Image by JvL on https://www.flickr.com/photos/-jvl-/42588660484/, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

So by this stage, too much already seemed to have been staged and arranged at this point of deposit for this to be an ordinary hacksilver hoard. But the fractal bloom had not yet finished opening. Beneath all of this, only discovered because of a final sweep with metal-detectors after the archæologists thought they had cleared the site, was a further cache, even more carefully concealed, comprising a silver jar with its lid sealed on, surrounded by the remains of what had been three layers of textile wrapping. This was carefully lifted, taken to a lab, x-rayed and finally – after caution running into years – opened to reveal two ornate silver brooches, several silver strap-ends, several miniature bits of goldwork, two rolled-up balls of dirt peppered through with tiny gold-leaf fragments, and (among still more) two small rock-crystal jars in gold framework. One had been smashed in, perhaps before deposit; but the other, probably Roman in origin before some English goldsmith put it in its frame and equipped it with a spout, bore on the underneath an inscription proclaiming ‘Bishop Hyguald had me made’. The brooches are also helpful for dating, as they are of the fairly late style known as Trewhiddle after a different hoard we once discussed here, which should make them early tenth-century if we accept a stylistic date. But all of this stuff had been very carefully wrapped, placed and arranged to keep it intact. Both jars had been wrapped in silk, then linen, then leather, for example, which we know because it has partially survived. And the silk, when carbon-dated, came out 150-200 years earlier than the stylistic date for the brooches. Just to complete the picture, no-one of that Old English name and Church rank is known from our surviving sources.

Again, there is no copyright-free image of the jar, which is frustrating because its iconography seems mainly to be Sasanian, or at least post-Sasanian; but the web-page I linked to for it includes an absolutely amazing 3D virtual replica, so go play with that is my advice. There’s also one for the rock-crystal jar. These two brooches are part of the trove that was within along with it. Image by National Museums Scotland and copyright of National Museums Scotland, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The reading of the archæologists and curators, therefore, was that the items in the jar were Church treasure, wrapped in prized Church vestments – not unreasonable – with the dirt balls perhaps being earth or dust from a saint’s shrine or reliquary, flakes of whose gold leaf might have been picked up with the dust – I don’t have a better answer and there are parallels for the practice – and that the jar, once buried with great care and attention, was meant to be protected from discovery by the ‘camouflage’ hoard above it, which would hopefully send any prying excavator away well satisfied without further investigation.⁵ This was easy for the archæologists to theorise because it had so nearly worked on them; obviously whoever was hiding this stuff didn’t expect metal-detecting, and fair enough.⁶ And from there it got (more?) fanciful, with the four arm-rings bound together perhaps representing a compact made by the four men named on the silver strips. I mean, yeah, OK, why not? It could be other things too, just a fastening indeed. But it’s certainly not usual and merits some explanation. And it would already seem necessary to admit that, with so much of this kit being identifiably English and apparently buried to be preserved, the names on the arm-rings may indeed be those of people concerned with the deposition, not the original owners, because all of this is matter out of place, including them, so it seems most likely that they moved together and that the preservation purpose was theirs. So maybe, indeed, Egbert was there. But it’s still complicated.

For me, the key aspect is something the write-ups I have so far found don’t say, which hangs on the idea of the camouflage deposit.⁷ If that’s right – and the different character of the deposits do seem to suggest it – then several things follow.

1. The depositors were afraid that this hoard would be found; they thought people would come looking and locate it. That suggests either that they were being silly enough to bury it in an obvious place, or that they thought people would come looking so soon that the disturbance of the earth would still be obvious, i. e. that whoever would come was very close behind them; but not so close that they needed to panic and just stuff the treasure in a hole. They had time to plan.
2. On the other hand, they were obviously not under observation, except by each other, because they expected the trick to work; so whoever was pursuing them didn’t know all of what they had to hide, only that there was something. Ergo, whoever was pursuing them were not the original owners of the treasure.
3. Also, more speculatively but also more ugly, the depositors presumably didn’t expect everyone to survive. If they were certain of escape, they wouldn’t have buried anything. If they could have been sure any one of them could get clear, they could have given it to him and then held the pursuers off, created a false trail or something. But this strategem means, I think, that they had decided to split up and that no one person could be sure of keeping the goods safe. And in the end, presumably none of them made it…

But the inscribed arm-rings and the intact ones bound together were buried deep too; they were not meant to be found except by the people who put them there. So the hope, however faulty it proved to be, must have been that they would get back to it, and the binding perhaps symbolised agreement that only all four were entitled to claim it, or something like that? I mean, they must have hoped to recover it, the care taken over the deposition of the Church treasure suggests a strong desire to conserve it. But then what were the three, not four, gold objects in the arm-ring bundle to do with it?

To that, I add the following. Knowing that this was the ‘Galloway’ hoard, when an unexplained English bishop came up I thought of the sometime Anglian see at Whithorn, supposed shrine of Saint Ninian and Northumbrian colonising outpost in the lands of the Strathclyde Welsh and perhaps Scots.⁸ But putting things on a map makes it clear that it’s not exactly ‘far’ Galloway; the location is halfway back to Dumfries. If these people had come from Whithorn they had come some way north and a long way east, and inland. This perhaps means that the sea was barred to them, but it may also mean that their destination – if we assume that they were indeed in transit – was inland. The nearest bishopric in the other direction from the site would have been Hexham, just off Hadrian’s Wall. But, to the best of our knowledge, neither of those sees had had had bishops since early in the ninth century, though that is not a simple thing to claim since, after about that time, our only good narrative source for Church history in the English north for a while is Symeon of Durham’s History of the Church of Durham. This, as you’d expect, is primarily about the claims of Durham and among the claims it lays, as part of its narrative of the exiled wanderings of the monks of Lindisfarne (who would eventually end up at Durham, you see), are some to lands around Whithorn and Hexham.⁹ What I’m saying is, if there had been bishops at those sees in the early tenth century, I wouldn’t expect Symeon to want to tell us.

The landowner as Symeon saw it, or at least his present earthly location; this is Saint Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral. Photo taken by J.&nbs;B. A. Hamilton in Durham Cathedral, 11 September 2010, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

On the other hand… if one were writing the historical novel that this story clearly could source, I might note that Simeon also says that there was a team of seven monks given special care of the shrine of St Cuthbert which the exiles were carrying around with them. But, by the time of a story he tells of them trying to take ship for Ireland, getting miraculously swamped and only just making it back to shore, and therefore deciding Cuthbert didn’t want to go, that seven was down to four, because the others had ‘dropped off’.¹⁰ And as it turns out, because Symeon returns to the story so that those four are miraculously able to recover a gold-bound Gospel book which the sea claimed during the attempt, the attempt was made from Whithorn. Four exilic Englishmen, again, hanging out with a dead bishop at Whithorn. (Unfortunately, their names don’t match, though one is called Edmund.¹¹) Furthermore, a bishop of Lindisfarne, Eardulf, died during this exilic progress, in 899. He was succeeded by Cutheard, under whom the monks found temporary refuge at Chester-le-Street.¹² Obviously a stylistic dating of metalwork to around 900 doesn’t mean your date has to actually be the year 900; but if you were trying to put an unknown bishop in this area into a sequence, as it happens there’s room for a schism and disagreement exactly then… But that seems like two plots for a novel already, which suggests that I should stop. I might even want to try writing one of them myself! But assuming that you yourself don’t, still: ponder the mystery…

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1. I should probably make it clear that that song is not in any way about hoards or archæology. In fact, being William Shatner, it’s only questionably a song rather than a recital. But there he is anyway! Meanwhile, I should also say that there is no academic publication as such that I can find about the Galloway Hoard, which is the subject of this post. There is a museum book which I haven’t yet got, Martin Goldberg and Mary Davis, The Galloway Hoard: Viking-Age Treasure (Edinburgh 2021), but otherwise I’ve been restricted to magazine-level stuff I can find online. This includes stuff by the actual conservators of the objects, such as Martin Goldberg, “Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard: secrets of a Viking Age collection from south-west Scotland” in Current Archaeology no. 376 (London 27 May 2021), pp. 20–27, and stuff deeply informed by their press releases, such as and especially Jason Urbanus, “Secrets of Scotland’s Viking Age Hoard” in Archaeology Vol. 75 no. 3 (Boston MA June 2022), pp. 22–29, so it’s still very useful, but because all that can be linked – and I have – I haven’t cited these for a lot of what follows, and they aren’t always my source. My source is always linked, however.

2. Why are they suing, you may ask, and the link does explain somewhat, but the case was still in progress as of late 2022, so it’s all still sub judice; see Mark Macaskill, “Friendship is biggest casualty in battle for Viking gold” in The Sunday Times (London 25 September 2022), Scotland, p. 5, quite the mess of a story…

3. See “The Silver Hoards of the Vikings” in National Museum of Denmark, online here, for short, or James Graham-Campbell, ‘“Silver Economies” and the Ninth-Century Background’ in James Graham-Campbell, Søren M. Sindbæk and Gareth Williams (edd.), Silver Economies, Monetisation and Society in Scandinavia, AD 800 – 1100: Studies Dedicated to Mark Blackburn (Aarhus 2011), pp. 29–39, for more detail.

4. For the background here see Alex Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 789– 1070, New Edinburgh History of Scotland 2 (Edinburgh 2007), esp. pp. 122-144.

5. Sources for this supposition are linked, but as to the balls of dirt, as well as the old post linked see for parallels Julia M. H. Smith, “Relics: An Evolving Tradition in Latin Christianity” in Cynthia Hahn and Holger A. Klein (edd.), Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond (Washington DC 2015), pp. 41–60, online here. The classic case of people raiding dust from a saint’s shrine is Bede’s report of the practice at the shrine of Saint Chad, which you can find in his Ecclesiastical History in your preferred version at Book IV Chapter 3; if you have no preferred version, I used Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edd. Judith McClure and Roger Collins, trans. Bertram Colgrave (Oxford 1990).

6. And they clearly didn’t expect dowsing either, just to make that point.

7. Which itself I got from Urbanus, “Secrets”.

8. On which see now most importantly Thomas Owen Clancy, “The Real St Ninian” in Innes Review Vol. 52 (Edinburgh 2001), pp. 1–28, and James E. Fraser, “Northumbrian Whithorn and the Making of St Ninian”, idem Vol. 53 (2002), pp. 40–59.

9. The Historical Works of Simeon of Durham, trans. Joseph Stevenson, Church Historians of England 3.2 (London 1853), online here, pp. 621-791, here esp. capp. XXV-XXXI.

10. Ibid., cap. XXVII.

11. Ibid.. The others were, supposedly, Hunred, Stitheard and Franco. But what if Cuthbert wasn’t the only bishop who got a cadre of four men to carry his body to safety, eh?

12. There must be something more up to date than this now, but what I know that tries to get sense out of Simeon’s story, itself scarcely disinterested scholarship, is C. F. Battiscombe, “Introduction” in idem (ed.), The Relics of Saint Cuthbert (Oxford 1956), pp. 1–114. Woolf, Pictland, threads Simeon through a wider narrative.

Seminar CLXXXIX: buddy bishops in Bernicia

Returning to the decreasing (yes! actually decreasing!) seminar report backlog takes us up to the 13th November 2013, when I was at the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar of the Institute of Historical Research as part of my grand project of accurately imitating a professional Anglo-Saxonist for the year, and also because I was interested to hear Trevor Morse give a paper entitled “Cuthbert and Wilfrid: parallel lives(?)”. This found us all looking more closely at late seventh-century Northumbrian history than I think anyone has done for a while, in a way I like to encourage everywhere, with as many of the operative personalities in it as possible considered at once.

St Cuthbert’s final final resting place, in Durham Cathedral

The starting position here is the reputation of the two saints of the title, both bishops in the early Northumbrian Church, both much described by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People and, in Cuthbert’s case, his two Lives of the man, while Wilfrid had a follower called Stephen who wrote up his Life for him.¹ If you know this, you will also know that Wilfrid was an extremely controversial figure, expelled from his bishopric three times, an exile hosted at the courts of I think four different kings, with the pagan one of whom he nonetheless organised the conversion of the Isle of Wight; he also rejoices in the title of the Apostle of Sussex. Where Trevor brought us in to the debate was therefore with Walter Goffart’s controversial book The Narrators of Barbarian History which argues of four classic early medieval historical works that they are far more about contemporary politics than the events they purport to recall, and in Bede’s case that one of the big issues hiding in his work is the reconciliation of the various parties in the aftermath of Wilfrid’s divisive career, something that Bede did by developing Cuthbert as an alternative figure of that age suitable for veneration.² To this, having made it clear at the outset how tricky and partisan the sources are, almost all at that dangerous remove from events where it’s still not possible to be neutral, Trevor wondered what we can learn by taking a closely chronological approach, putting the two men’s careers against each other and asking: were they in fact rivals in life?

With somewhat less certainty, this is probably where Wilfrid finished up, near or under the high altar of Ripon Cathedral, if that stayed in the same place during its later rebuilding. By Andrewrabbott (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.

I love chronological approaches anyway, but I did feel that this one was particularly revelatory. If, for example, one abstracts Cuthbert’s career from the various praiseworthy contexts in which his hagiographers paint him and try and put together a bald career summary, one of the things that becomes clear which certainly I hadn’t realised is that Cuthbert got booted out of office or fired upwards almost as much as Wilfrid did, driven out of Wilfrid’s foundation of Ripon with the then-Abbot Eata after Wilfrid’s move the Lindisfarne, moved to Lindisfarne from his subsequent appointment as Prior of Melrose after Wilfrid’s first restoration as bishop but retiring from there very soon afterwards, returning to the political fore as Wilfrid’s star began to rise again after his second deposition, then becoming Bishop of Hexham then swapping (with Eata) to be Bishop of Lindisfarne and dying before Wilfrid could get expelled again, whereafter Lindisfarne apparently nearly dissolved and there was a big argument over where Cuthbert’s body should go.³ It suddenly got hard to see him as a figure of peace with all this put together, and it also looked much more as if his spells in the sun coincided with Wilfrid’s than the way the Lives are built would lead you to spot.

“For I know that, although I seemed contemptible to some while I lived, yet, after my death, you will see what I was and how my teaching is not to be despised.”

This is not something a successful peacemaker needs to say on his deathbed, even less something a hagiographer should need to say of such a person thirty years later... Nonetheless, they are the words Bede gave Cuthbert in his Prose Life, c. 39.

That then raises the issue of what on earth was so divisive about him, and there Trevor’s answer was that one of the things the various Lives do say about Cuthbert, usually as praise but in this light now looking different, was that he was a champion of a fairly strict monastic lifestyle; when he ran into trouble with his various communities, this is how his hagiographers explain it, Bede indeed making this out as a trait going back to his youth when even training for war as a child he would outdo, outrun, out-strive his contemporaries. If you wanted to, then, you could see Cuthbert’s career as a long series of annoying people by over-achievement, but Trevor framed it mainly in terms of Roman and Benedictine observance. In that framework Cuthbert, despite his roots in the ‘Irish’ Church of early Christian Northumbria (roots that Wilfrid of course shared), appeared as a more Romanising figure than was found useful by his subsequent biographers.

As long as tombs is the theme… this is where the mind that we’re substantially seeing all this through finished up, the tomb of St Bede the Venerable, also in Durham Cathedral

At the end, I was still a bit unclear as exactly how sincere Trevor thought the reform agenda had been (though setting it out involved a description of a whole group of Northumbrian churchmen as ‘Whitby grads’, which I enjoyed). Bede seems to want Cuthbert to have been just a bit too ascetic for his charges to cope with; his earlier hagiographer (who Trevor suggested might have been the eventual Prior of Lindisfarne Æthelbalda Ripon priest then Lindisfarne hermit by the name of Oiðilwald, in the right places at the right times) seems to have wanted him as a Benedictine figure, but which of these, if either, was the ‘safe’ historiographical position by which someone writing up this somewhat explosive career might defuse it? Was ‘reform’ more a matter of factional competition than anything really about how to be a good monk? Still, having reason to believe we can see even that far back through the mess of writing that tangles up the history of the Northumbrian Church was further than any of us might have expected to get with such well-studied material, and even if some of the connections are still difficult to understand, Trevor managed to use them to explain things anyway, no mean achievement.

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1. Almost all the materials in play here were at one point or another edited, translated or both by Bertram Colgrave, and in most cases his versions remain the standard ones: B. Colgrave (ed./transl.), The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge 1927); idem (ed./transl.), Two Lives of St. Cuthbert. A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life (Cambridge 1940, 2nd edn. 1985); idem & R. A. B. Mynors (edd./transl.), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford 1969); Colgrave (ed./transl.), The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Cambridge 1985). Bede also wrote a Verse Life that is only translated in a forthcoming volume of Bede’s Latin poetry by Michael Lapidge, and we also had several other bits of Northumbrian hagiography in play, all of which you can find in D. H. Farmer (ed.) & J. F. Webb (transl.), The Age of Bede (London 1983).

2. Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A. D. 550–850): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (London 1988), pp. 235–328.

3. One interesting sidetrack here that I prolonged in questions is how Bede describes the difficulty at Lindisfarne after Cuthbert’s death in the Verse Life. Trevor’s handout has it thus:

“The insistent north wind, trusting in its snowy weaponry, strikes the Lindisfarne monastic buidlings on all sides with such spiteful blast, that the noble progeny of our brothers was hanging by the precarious thread of events, and would choose to abandon the site rather than undergo these extremes of danger.”

This all sounds weirdly like Vikings avant la lettre. Bede kept the storm metaphor in the Prose Life but dropped the reference to the north, but that actually makes a lot of sense at the time he was writing the verse life because of the resurgent threat of the Picts, so some people present wondered if that, rather than internal trouble, could be what was threatening the island monastery. Trevor agreed that Melrose and Abercorn, two of the Northumbrian Church’s now-Scottish outposts, were in trouble at this time, and that led me in turn to remember that some of Bede’s informants on Pictland were clerics exiled from there at this point in time. If they had found refuge at Lindisfarne, that might have changed the balance of opinions there quite suddenly and sharply, but unlike the Pictish military threat, it wouldn’t have been so much of an issue by the time Bede was writing his Prose Life in the early 720s…

The first Viking raid on England or Francia

Here’s a little thing that narks me every now and then. This comes up occasionally in teaching, where I can set it straight, occasionally someone is wrong about it on the Internet (which never ends well) but I was quite surprised to find a related version in a certain large book I’m still sporadically making my way through, and that has me worried enough to set out my thinking. The thing in question is a supposed fact, the dates of the first Viking attacks on the kingdoms of Western Europe.

Church of St Mary and the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory, Holy Island, Lindisfarne (from Wikimedia Commons)

[Edit: a very cogent point from Julia Barrow in comments has meant I’ve seriously overhauled this paragraph and the next. Further edit: there has also developed in the comments a very erudite dispute about what exactly Alcuin was thinking when he wrote the letters I mockingly pastiche in what follows, and if that is likely to matter to you you should have a look below.] For England, canonically, it was Northumbria that was first to be attacked, with the sack of the monastery Lindisfarne in 793. Now, OK, let’s be quite clear, Lindisfarne in 793 was not a good place to be. However much the famous letter of Alcuin about it may work it up into eschatological froth, people surely died or were kidnapped and the monastery plundered.¹ The only problem is that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that the first Viking attack was in the reign of King Beorhtric of Wessex, which we put from 786 to 802, when a boat hauled up on Portland sands, the king’s reeve Beaduheard went down to tell them, I suppose, the contemporary equivalent of “you can’t park that there” and they killed him. That, I grant you, could still put Lindisfarne first, but the Chronicle‘s compilers (working around 892) explicitly said the Portland attack was “the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race”.² So, at the least, if you want to ignore what the Chronicle says you need to make that argument or one like it before you go and take Alcuin’s words (which have their own moral purpose, as no doubt did the letter that must have been his source) instead.

Schematic stemma of the manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and related texts (from Wikimedia Commons)

Now in fact that argument is not hard to make, because the earliest manuscript, known as A or the Parker Chronicle, of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn’t mention the sack of Lindisfarne. In fact it doesn’t have an annal for 793 at all. Notice of the sack only occurs in three later manuscripts (known as D, E, and F), all of which had, one way or another, incorporated parts of a set of northern annals that we no longer have, except via these manuscripts and the twelfth-century Historia Regum, written at Durham, whose author Simeon also seems to have had them to use.^2bis Can it be that the Chronicle‘s compilers didn’t know Lindisfarne had been sacked, a hundred years on? It seems unlikely, so perhaps they were just keen to make sure that the real first attack clearly happened in Wessex, where the Chronicle was being compiled and where King Alfred was fairly keen on getting people on board dealing with the massive threat that Viking attacks had by that time become. In which case, of course, they may have adopted the vague dating for exactly the reason that they were aware that Lindisfarne was attacked first. But there are good reasons to suppose that if they thought that, even so, they were wrong.

Charter of King Offa of Mercia for the Kentish abbey of Lyminge, done at a synod in Kent (Sawyer 123), sadly not the right synod or charter but at least illustrative

You see, there’s a charter of King Offa of the Mercians (and also, he claims in it, now awarded the sceptre of government of the people of Kent by God), that he issued at a synod at Clofesho (which was apparently a vastly important place then and is now unknown) in 792.³ Offa seems to have been in generous mood, or perhaps really urgent to pacify Kent, as the document is a blanket confirmation that all the churches of Kent were to be exempt from various services and dues. There were however some things they still had to pay when necessary. This was a classic Mercian strategy, indeed since the 1970s it’s been thought of as one of the things that made Mercia great, but usually it extended only to providing soldiers on royal demand, repairing fortresses and maintaining bridges.⁴ On this occasion, however, the first thing these churches still had to stump up for was, “an expedition within Kent against seaborne pagans arriving with fleets, or against the East Saxons if necessity compels”. Now, against this, it must be admitted that the charter as we have it is not an original. It was once preserved at St Augustine’s Canterbury but now survives in two thirteenth-century cartularies in London. So it could be, shall we say, improved, but if so, the bit about attacking Essex would be a very odd thing to add! Mind you, it looks odd in its day’s terms as well, it’d been a while since Essex had a separate political existence, but all the same I’m not inclined to dismiss it straight away. If it’s not some scribe’s over-active imagination, anyway, in 792 Offa was expecting pagan sea-raiders in Kent, which rather suggests that there had already been some. Once again the sources are awkward, but one has to at least explain why one trusts one and distrusts another before stating things as fact. There just aren’t any safe facts here.

Silver denier of Emperor Louis the Pious from Dorestad, hit by the Vikings even more often than Lindisfarne

The same debate can be had about the Continent. On page 587 of that certain large book for example, we are told, “the first Viking raid on Francia, from neighbouring Denmark, was in 834, in the context of Louis [the Pious]’s 833-4 conflict with his sons”.⁵ Now, I’m not going to say this is wrong, you must realise; I believe that if you stuck the word “documented” in there somewhere it would be cast-iron true, and the actual point, which is about how quickly enemies of a kingdom might capitalise on its political problems, is perfectly valid. But, as with Offa, we may suspect there was more going on already behind the scenes, because in 800 King Charles of the Franks and Lombards, as he still then was, spent some of the earlier part of the year touring “the coastal region adjoining the Gallic ocean; he created a fleet upon this sea because it was infested with pirates at that time [and] organised defences”.⁶ There’s really only one likely set of pirates out there at this time, and whereas the attack in 834 was a political one, we know that, well, by 802 and likely earlier there were also presumably-independent Danish raiders in the English Channel, see above.

Alcuin, being patronising as usual (from Wikimedia Commons)

What we are facing here is that no-one realised this whole Viking thing was going to be the theme of the century when it started. Even Alcuin, who is all “OMG it’s like the sack of Rome all over again, nothing as bad as this has happened in English Christian history, are you really sure you guys weren’t being sinful because you know God does nothing by chance“,⁷ did not go on to say, “I bet this isn’t the last we see of this; run to Chester-le-Street!” and predict the First Viking Age. The people compiling the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle however, with a century’s bitter hindsight, did know when they came across some note of the Portland attack, in whatever sources they had to build the Chronicle out of, that that was the story of which that attack should be seen as part, and so do we. But that doesn’t mean that whoever had written it down first recognised it as such, and that they knew it was the first such attack; it just means that the Chronicle compilers thought they could make the case that it was. The earlier attacks on Kent that Offa seems to have been providing against, likewise, were not recognised as the beginning of a centuries-long society-changing war; he made no special provision other to than ensure that the regular military response would not get smaller. How could they have known, after all? So the first Viking attacks, in either England or Francia, are almost certainly not recorded, but there is good reason to say that anyone who gives you the canonical dates for them without a crucial word like “known” or “recorded” or similar is, well, probably talking about something else really.

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1. Alcuin’s letter is actually two letters, printed in Ernst Dümmler (ed.), Epistolae Ævi Karolini II, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Epistolae) IV (Berlin 1895), Alcuini sive Albini epistolae nos 20 & 21 (pp. 57-59), one of about ten letters he immediately sent to people in England trying to drum up help and support for the beleaguered monastery. No. 20 is translated in full in S. Allott (trans.), Alcuin of York, c. A. D. 732 to 804 (York 1974), pp. 72-73, whence repr. in Paul Edward Dutton (transl.), Carolingian Civilization: a reader, Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures 1, 2nd edn. (Peterborough ON 2004), pp. 123-125, probably in the first edition as well and I expect several other places, but those are the ones I have on the shelf so that’s the reference you get.

2. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle s. a. 787 for 789, here cit. from Michael Swanton (transl./ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London 1996).

2^bis. A brief discussion of the manuscripts can be found ibid., pp. xxi-xxix, and a much more thorough one in D. Whitelock (ed./transl.), English Historical Documents I: c. 500-1042, 2nd edn. (London 1979, repr. 1996), pp. 113-131, but I don’t know as I write how well that now stands up against the latest scholarship.

3. Now best ed. in Susan Kelly (ed.), The Charters of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, and Minster-in-Thanet, Anglo-Saxon Charters 4 (Oxford 1995), no. 15, but of course also available via Sean Miller’s ASCharters.net here, whence the Latin: “nisi expeditione intra Cantiam contra paganos marinos cum classis migrantibus uel in australes Saxones si necessitas cogit“. I would, of course, like to cite it from the supposed replacement for that site at King’s College London but as usual it’s down so I can’t. Plus ça change.

4. Discussed classically in Nicholas Brooks, “The Development of Military Obligations in Eighth- and Ninth-Century England” in Peter Clemoes & Kathleen Hughes (edd.), England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge 1971), pp. 69–84, back when CUP still printed Festschriften, repr. in Brooks, Communities and Warfare 700–1400 (London 2000), pp. 32-47 and in David Pelteret (ed.), Anglo-Saxon History: Basic Readings (New York City 2000), pp. 83-105.

5. Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (Oxford 2005), p. 587.

6. Royal Frankish Annals s. a. 800, printed in Friedrich Kurze (ed.), Annales regni francorum inde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829. Qui dicuntur Annales laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores rerum germanicum in usum scholarum separatim editi) VI (Hannover 1895); here cit. from P. D. King (transl.), Charlemagne: translated sources (Lancaster 1987), p. 92.

7. I paraphrase, obviously; this is not Alcuin’s style really. I realise he was a famous teacher and a moralist and theologian of the first order and so forth, and yes, at the same time as questioning his old acquaintances’ morality he was also trying to kick an international (or at least interregnal) relief effort into action, but I can’t help feeling that Alcuin was not very much fun, you know? I would have been in Theodulf’s camp, or more likely waiting for Walahfrid and Eriugena to arrive.