Links like it’s 2009

This week has piled up into the weekend rather and I can’t put the time into a blogpost that I managed with the previous two. But the last post arose out of a random thing I found on the Internet, and I remember when this used to be the primary matter of the blogosphere (back when we still called it that). You could have not just whole posts, but entire blogs, whose sole purpose was to communicate the locations of things elsewhere on the Internet to your readers. (And to be fair, the two I used to rely on most, Anglo-Saxon Archaeology and Archaeology in Europe are still out there and posting and looking useful.) So let’s this week go back to those halcyon days: I’ve been piling up random links against such a moment since December 2019, it seems, so I’m ready!

Machtszenarien – Scenarios of Power – 无处不在的权力

Firstly, here’s something some friends of mine in faraway places did in a closer one, which as you might guess involves coins.

https://www.medievalmemes.org/
Next, this seems to be what, in 2009, we would still have been calling a macro generator, but it has been sourced with quite a lot of medieval manuscript images. Now, given how some archives protect their image rights, it’s surprising that any have contributed to this, but it’s interesting, isn’t it? Is this a good way to publicise the Middle Ages and your archive, or a bad one?

https://www.thenational.scot/news/15576654.scientists-are-baffled-by-medieval-link-between-scotland-and-india/
Then, this news story almost got a post of its own, because it made me quite cross at the time I saw it: it seemed to me to ignore some basic requirements of the form of land transactions and the fact that Latin is an Indo-European language and so, yes, shares some root words with Sanskrit. Moreover, I was pretty sure the researchers in question knew these things and were therefore selling old rope to the national newspapers to drum up press for their project. But, on the other hand, I personally would love to do a project comparing European and Indian charters, and they put a book of essays resulting from the project out for free download here, so an alternative view is that I should shut my trap and admire the scholarship and the salesmanship…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-57304921
This story caught me personally in a different way, because only a year earlier I’d been to the relevant place (as the blog will soon enough record) and of course hadn’t seen the amazing prehistoric deer carving. No-one modern had at that point, indeed, and that turns out from the article to be because to find it you have to be the kind of person who slides into subterranean Neolithic tombs at night with a torch just to have a look. But give him his due, he found and reported it…

https://www.livescience.com/cargo-shipwreck-germany-river
I would have had even less chance of making this discovery, given it was fairly deep in a German river-bed, but still, it’s always pretty cool to find a medieval ship.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-62794761
This one, on the other hand, when it came up in September this year, I almost wished they hadn’t discovered, as when I found the story I’d just written the Ardnamurchan boat burial that we discussed here ages ago into a lecture I was giving that week as the only mainland British viking boat burial. Still technically true, I guess, but now it looks as if it wasn’t a one-off, and I am agog to see more when they actually are able to dig the others.

https://www.livescience.com/maya-rubber-balls-cremation
Then lastly, one always loves a story that looks bats enough that even the reporters want to stress scholarly disagreement, doesn’t one? And bats turns out to be an operative word, because we’re talking Maya rulers playing their equivalent of lawn tennis with the cremated remains of their predecessors. This struck me as being far enough off the map of the humanly probable that I went looking and wasn’t at all surprised to find that the webpage had already been taken down. But that turned out to be a mean suspicion, as it had just moved on its host website as it came off the front page. You need to read Spanish to see what the actual proponents think; but as the original news story has as its subtitle, “Not all scholars are convinced by the claims”…

That must do you for today but I hope at least one of them is entertainment enough!

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.

Visiting the dead king at Driffield

We edge towards the end of the backed-up blog material from 2019 by now, which is something of an achievement given where we’ve been, but just now we’re still there and one of the things I was doing in later 2019 was constructing a review of a book for Northern History, a journal that’s edited from my institution and to whose review editor’s plea I’m thus physically vulnerable. It was one of those things I was only just fitted to review, namely this:

Cover of Tony Abramson, Coinage in the Northumbrian landscape and economy, c. 575-c. 867, British Archaeological Reports (British Series), 641 (Oxford 2018).

Of the book as a whole, you can see the actual review, which came out almost immediately after I’d submitted it, in volume 56 over pages 162-165, and here I’ll just say that it was such a work as I couldn’t review properly without begging for more words, which is why that runs over four pages.¹ But there were loads of interesting things in there, and this post is about one of them, an analysis of the early medieval coin finds from Driffield in North Yorkshire where I don’t think Abramson quite goes all the way to the end of his logical thread.

Abramson’s method in the book is to characterise sites by their coins profile as compared to the profile of their other material culture. The statistical interpretation he does with this is one of the reasons my review was so long, but Abramson is a man full of curiosity and he tries to resolve individual cases where possible as well as fit things into a bigger pattern. And Driffield is one of a couple of sites which have a particular profile, sites with a known élite status, not very much recovered material culture to match that, and not very many coins but of those coins a surprising proportion either rare or foreign.² In Driffield’s case the élite status derives from it having been a royal vill of the Northumbrian kings, especially King Aldfrith (685-704 CE), who was there when he died and may be buried in the church there, although the most recent excavator thinks we may not actually have found the vill.³ This implies that what we are actually seeing is the material culture profile of the church site around which the later village coalesced.

Reused tombstone in the exterior wall of Saint Mary’s Little Driffield, perhaps Viking-period; photo by Robert Andrews via Historic England, linked through. I was after a photograph of the memorial to King Aldfrith inside the church but the only one I can find firmly states its copyright

So, in coin terms, that profile includes at least eleven foreign coins, and while most of those are Low Countries sceattas that got all over England, some are southern English, which is less usual, and one is a Lombard tremissis, unusual both for being Italian and gold, not a thing anyone commonly lost in the Yorkshire Wolds. Moreover, several of the local ones are types with fantastic animals on the reverse, occurring by themselves or of what Abramson calls ‘unusual style’, or both, as if they were being selected for the site somehow.⁴ Overall, the sample of coins at Driffield has well over the average level of rarities.

Lombard pseudo-imperial tremissis in the name of Emperor Maurice Tiberius, perhaps struck at Pavia 582-602, MEC 301-04, found at Driffield; Abramson, Coinage in the Northumbrian Landscape, p. 45 fig. 6

So what’s the explanation? As close as Abramson gets is to say, with suitable caution:

“With all the caveats and constraints on interpretation, that this location is so rich in rare coinage, implies that Driffield was a site of special, not merely economic, significance, as would be expected for the final resting place of Aldfrith.”⁵

Now, to that my initial reaction was, “Would it? He’s not a saint or anything. Considered holier than most kings, yes, but that’s partly because he had the good luck to be around when Bede was and to have been hauled from the monastery at Iona to replace a man Bede deplored (Aldfrith’s half-brother Ecgfrith).⁶ But he wasn’t a monk, though he may have been a scholar. And besides, have we any sign at all that any Northumbrian king other than Oswald was culted after his death?”

St Alkmund’s Sarcophagus, from St Alkmund’s Duffield, Derby, now in Derby Museums; the image is copyright to Derby Museums but use is allowed

But then I remembered this, dear reader, as you also may do if you go back far enough on this blog. What this is fairly solid evidence of the cult after death of a Northumbrian ruler, King Ealhmund; it’s just that because we suspect that cult was set up deliberately by a king of Mercia for political reasons about 150 years later than this, it doesn’t necessarily spring to mind as a comparison. But also, I then remembered, after Aldfrith died the kingdom of Northumbria was riven by civil war, succession struggles and then eventually Vikings (one of whose victims, King Edmund of East Anglia, struck one of the southern coins that has turned up at Driffield, really very late for a Northumbrian site).⁷ In general, dark times followed him. Was it in fact not possible that at least some people might have looked back to the scholarly Adlfrith as the last Good King?

Obverse of silver penny of King Aldfrith of Northumbria, struck 685-704, found at Driffield, EMC 2006.0119

Reverse of the same coin, with one of the aforesaid fantastic beasts on it

That seems, anyway, to be what Abramson is implying by that last statement quoted: that the weird coins here are actually the consequence of numerous visits to Aldfrith’s grave. If that’s right, though, there are two further implications to be teased out, which I’m not able to do fully here but which seem at least worth indicating. Firstly, this all kind of does mean Aldfrith was being considered as a saint, in the simplest sense of being a soul in Heaven; not much point making an offering at the grave of someone whose ultimate destination means they can’t help you…⁸ But secondly, the fact that especially rare coins seem to have been selected for this probably needs thinking about. To someone who has the whole picture of the coinage, the implication is almost that so did its average user, that we would have here a bunch of historical collectors who, having saved this unusual specimen from the usual pell-mell of circulation, thought it a fitting gift to the royal maybe-saint. This, when actually set out, seems a bit unlikely, you may agree.

Silver penny struck perhaps at London 730-65 CE, from the Beowulf Collection, CNG sale 76 lot 1848

But why are those coins so rare? Is it not perhaps easier to read the logic the other way round and say: this is the kind of thing those coins were struck for, they’re rare because they were small-issue, special-purpose coinages that didn’t ordinarily circulate. There are more than a few issues, in this sceatta period of multifariously issued small silver penny coinages, which seem to have some connection with the Church; they have helpful indications like having an named archbishop on the reverse (one of which was found at Driffield) or the legend Monita scorum, as you see above, which we take to be what we’d normally spell and expand as moneta s(an)c(t)orum, ‘money of the saints’. But as our esteemed commentator Rory Naismith, who has studied these coinages, has observed, they are also rare, and they don’t seem to have had much connection with actual church sites.⁹ He concludes that they’re not evidence for the church as a major driver of the coinage in this period, and I think he’s right.

After this, though, I find myself wondering if their existence instead forms part of a larger pattern of special-issue coinages whose purpose would have been to be used as offerings to holy or significant sites. Should we even see the Church as competing, with its few issues, for space in an iconographic tradition happier with fantastic beasties? Odder suggestions have been made about the art of these coinages!¹⁰ But for now I have gone far enough, I think, and probably too far by many standards, so I’ll stop here.

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, ‘TONY ABRAMSON, Coinage in the Northumbrian Landscape and Economy, c. 575–867, BAR British Series 841 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2018. £59.00 xxi + 207 pp., inc. 161 figures, 13 graphs and 10 plates, plus 2 databases and 20 datasets online, ISBN 9781407316536)’ in Northern History Vol. 56 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 162–165, DOI: 10.1080/0078172X.2019.1678288.

2. Tony Abramson, Coinage in the Northumbrian Landscape and Economy, c. 575-c. 867, British Archaeological Reports (British Series) 641 (Oxford 2018), pp. 141-142 and pp. 145-146 figs 118-124; the other site of this type is Garton-on-the-Wolds, covered p. 142 and pp. 146-147 figs 125-128.

3. Chris Loveluck, “The Development of the Anglo-Saxon Landscape, Economy and Society ‘on Driffield’, East Yorkshire, 400‒750 AD” in Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History Vol. 9 (Oxford 1996), pp. 25-48, cited by Abramson, Coinage, p. 141, as ‘Lovelock’ passim though with the author spelt correctly in the Bibliography. Aldfrith’s burial somewhere here is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, however: I find it in Michael Swanton (transl./ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London 1996), E sub anno 705 (p. 41), though the location detail is not in the A Manuscript (cf. p. 40).

4. I should add at this point that one of the great things about this book is that his datasets are all freely available online, so you can if you like click this and get all his files in a ZIP, and find the coins yourself. I was in a hurry this time so didn’t, but I had a good prowl round in the review and the claimed information was always there.

5. Abramson, Coinage, p. 142.

6. For the messy background here see Barbara Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London 1990), pp. 79-86.

7. Ibid., pp. 86-98.

8. If this makes early medieval piety seem uncomfortably transactional, immerse yourself in either or both of Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: triumph and diversity, A.D. 200-1000, 2nd edn (Malden MA 2003), pp. 145-165, or Julia M. H. Smith, “Relics: An Evolving Tradition in Latin Christianity” in Cynthia Hahn and Holger A. Klein (eds), Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond (Washington DC 2015), pp. 41–60, online here, for more fully textured takes on the spirituality of the age as it involved saints.

9. Rory Naismith, “Money of the Saints: Church and Coinage in Early Anglo-Saxon England” in Tony Abramson (ed.), Studies in Early Medieval Coinage 3: Sifting the Evidence (London 2014), pp. 68–121.

10. I think specifically of Anna Gannon, The Iconography of Early Anglo-Saxon Coinage, Sixth to Eighth Centuries (Oxford, 2003), but it should be said that she reads most of these coinages as one way or another referring to Christian imagery, so by some lights her interpretations are less weird than mine just now.

Unexpected early English sculpture

This gallery contains 11 photos.

Here’s something slightly lighter of tone for the holiday period, which I will then follow, honestly, with the Barcelona thesis examination I’ve been mentioning for so long, just so that we can move on. But right now, here’s something I … Continue reading →

Venice II: Further Down and Further Out

This gallery contains 16 photos.

After a post as heavy as the last as bonus content, I hope you’ll forgive me if the regular one is more medievalist tourism pictures. If that’s annoying, then you may be reassured to know that these are the last … Continue reading →

A sixth-century Swedish mass murder mystery

Quite the turn out from the three trade unions @leedsucu @UoLUnison @LeedsUniUnite today!

Staff are quite clearly in need of better pay and conditions @UniversityLeeds!

And the students support us 🙏 pic.twitter.com/ekPOUZviMs

— Simon Moore (@Simon_C_Moore) November 24, 2022

Yesterday and today, dear readers, I have been and am on strike again, because in short none of the promises that were made to stop me and my comrades striking last time have in the end been fulfilled, so we have had to come out again to try and get across that this will keep happening if the people in charge don’t in fact deliver some kind of reasonable attention to their staff’s problems. Indeed, it is not just keeping happening, it is escalating! Last time there were sixty-odd universities; today, and tomorrow and next Wednesday, every university in the UK has picket lines up, we are all out, and not just the academics but also the other two staff unions; the whole show is stopped. Admittedly, so is every school in Scotland, so we’re struggling for attention a bit; but it’s all the same disease, public-sector workers being asked to do more than we can for less than we used to be paid and much less than we deserve for the work we put in. So today that work stops, and you get an extra blog post.

Reconstruction of fifth-century Sandby Borg, Öland, from ‘Viking Murder Mystery’, in Ancient Mysteries, Series 4, episode 2 (London, 15 Dec. 2021), on freeview here

So this is all based on a bit less knowledge than I’d like, and some of that is my own unwillingness to find out more, which I’ll explain. But you might just remember that in November 2019, still a few months before the pandemic deluge, I briefly posted that I was going to be on television. That did happen, in the USA on the Smithsonian Channel, and much much later it seems that it did also come out in the UK on Channel 5, though no-one warned me so I couldn’t tell you. I’m still not sure when it was screened here – IMDB and Channel 5’s own site disagree – and I’ve no idea how many people saw it; all those I dealt with at the relevant company, who were all pleasures to work with, seem to have gone and I can’t get answers from the new ones. The previous incumbents did at least early on send me a video link, but I confess I haven’t ever dared look at it in case I came across like a buffoon (or worse, perhaps, a ‘boffin’), and the link is in my University e-mail which, because of the digital picket, I’m not opening. So I don’t know how much I was in it or what selection of what I said they used. A couple of people have mentioned seeing me on TV, and that must be this, but they couldn’t remember anything much about it, which doesn’t bode well… But I can tell you what it was all about, and that is a story worth telling.

Our location, then, is a place on the Swedish island of Öland, a place called Sandby borg, and the date is, well, that’s a question but let’s say after 425 and before 600 CE, and we can narrow it down in a moment. Sandby borg was not really known about until 2011, when it was first dug by a small Swedish archæological team, and what they found proved quite surprising.¹ The place had been a fortress settlement, and whatever it was defending against, it had failed: the place had been breached and ruined, and there were slaughtered bodies aplenty. Some, even, had apparently been placed deliberately across the thresholds of houses before the dwellings were torched. But what had not happened was looting; though smashed, scattered and what-have-you, the material treasures of the site, weapons, ordinary belongings, metalwork, had been left where they fell, and then fires set. And then, apparently, the attackers left and no-one ever came back to it again. It’s really something like the murder and burial of a place. It disappeared under the sands and was left as it had been left at the point of the sack, until found again in “our times”.²

Drone photo of the dig under way, from the team’s Facebook site, linked through

Now, you may imagine that at that point the archæologists involved realised that they were sitting on something hot, and the press got involved and so, at some remove or other, did a company called Blink Films who, among many other things, do or did content for series about historical mysteries. Most of what they do is more esoteric, shall we say, than this, but when you have actual mystery any publicity may be good publicity, I guess, and so Blink Films picked this up and went looking for experts. And, because among the finds left to lie unstolen at the site were two Roman solidi of Emperor Valentinian III (r. 425-55), or so it seemed (more on this in a moment), one of the experts they needed was a numismatist, and they found me. So I agreed to be involved, and roped in the Barber Institute, where the now-Curator Dr Maria Vrij very kindly let me and a film crew back into my old workplace and we got out some more such solidi and I tried to sound like an expert about how the ones at Sandby borg might have come there and what it meant that they had.

I did have pictures of the coins, but I seem to have filed them somewhere ‘safe’; instead, here is one of them, and I think it’s the imitation, in its state of discovery (or a plausible reconstruction thereof), again from the team’s Facebook site

Now, at that point I’d had about four days to read up, and that during term, so I did not know all I wanted. But I had already learnt that, firstly, late Roman coins are not uncommon finds north of the Baltic, or indeed in the northern lands beyond the Empire in general, and that they are usually explained as payment for military service, brought home by the successful soldiery.³ I’d also learned, however, that apparently this set up a sufficient demand for such gold coin in at least what’s now Sweden that it became worth making your own, because a good part of the ones which we have are imitations.⁴ Whether that means that there were was a circulating economy of gold coin in Scandinavia this early, or that people outside the Empire were hiring Geats as soldiers and paying them in knock-off coin when the real stuff ran short, I didn’t have time to consider; but I could say that the likely context of these coins was military service, probably under Rome, and that one of the two finds here was probably an imitation, and I got to wave real ones at the camera and talk about the differences I saw and I hope, I hope, that that’s what’s in the programme. I think I also offered a theory about what had happened to the fort, but at this remove I can’t remember what I knew and what I only found out later, so can’t safely guess what that theory would have been. I can tell you what it is now, though.

Both sides of a real gold solidus of Emperor Valentinian III struck at Ravenna 426-430 CE, Barber Institute of Fine Arts LR0540

The important difference between what I knew then and what I came to know, you see, is a book by one Joan Fagerlie called Late Roman and Byzantine Solidi Found in Sweden and Denmark.⁵ I had started it, I had it with me and I think that’s where I had the idea of imitations from, but at point of filming I’d had no time to do more than open it and check some lists. It was sufficiently interesting, though, that I read all through it and realised that whatever I’d said on camera probably wasn’t wrong but could have been a lot better, because actually Sandby borg, both in its having these coins and in its untimely murder, turns out to have been part of a bigger phenomenon and it’s all, as my inner hippy still sometimes says, pretty heavy, man.⁶ These are the things I learned from Fagerlie and the other reading I also did:

1. This coin flow was a long-term affair; even when Fagerlie was writing there were nearly 800 known coins (and of course there are now more), and their dates of issue ranged from 395 to about 600 CE, Theodosius I to Maurice, but with a very sharp falling-off after Emperor Justinian I (r. 527-565). After that, indeed, Scandinavia was more or less the same as the rest of Western Europe, which basically stopped seeing imperial coinage in the troubled reigns of Phocas and Heraclius.⁷ But before that, it had something specific going on.
2. Fagerlie then did a bunch of very clever deductions from the 726 of the 800-odd coins she had been able to look at. First she observed that the coins largely came from Constantinople, but also from some western mints, suggesting a flow from both halves of the Empire, and secondly she thought that it began under Emperor Leo I (r. 457-474), with anything earlier being stuff picked up from circulation (including lots of Valentinian III). And she noted that this period of maximum flow, from around 461 to about 550, pretty much coincides with when the Ostrogoths were a military quantity in the Roman Empire and then their own, but kind of not their own, kingdom of Italy. So the first clever deduction was that somehow the Ostrogoths were feeding this coin, which they perhaps obtained in tribute or salaries from the Empire, northwards, and that seems hard to dismiss.
3. Secondly, she worked on distribution and die-links, that is, sets of coins which were struck using the same dies. This corpus is actually busy with die-links, which can only easily be explained by the coins involved having got to the north almost direct from the mint; they must have been shipped, received, paid out again and transported (apparently not through Italy but the Balkans and points north, scatters of incidental finds along the route suggest) and finally redistributed almost without being mixed with anything else. That’s interesting in itself, and tends to confirm the idea that these were state payments of some kind. Furthermore, the die-links start with the coins of Leo I, which also tends to confirm that that was a threshold of some kind and that earlier coin only came there from his time onwards. But this also lets one do something quite serious with distribution, because when you find coins with die-links that are a bit scattered, in this situation you can reasonably hypothesize that they arrived together. But where? And that’s where our stories recombine.
4. You see, the die-links and distribution together, as Fagerlie saw it, paint a clear pattern of successive, single points of distribution into Scandinavia. The last, where the flow of coinage petered out in the 560s, was Gotland, now more famous for hoards of Islamic silver coin but apparently starting early; but the previous one, up till about 480, was Öland. And everywhere else which was getting these coins, including another island focus, Bornholm in Denmark, which has lots too, was getting them from one then the other of those islands.

Now, there is a lot here, and it’s all known just from the coins, which may explain why I’ve seen so little use of this corpus in more conventional histories. The Ostrogoths were, at least in the sixth century, apparently prone to claiming ancestry in Scandinavia: Jordanes’s Getica, which he wrote around 550 in Constantinople alongside a history of the Romans in order to prove that the two peoples had equally honourable and ancient backgrounds, claims to have this from an earlier history by Cassiodorus which no-one but him seems ever to have seen, and he only for three days; but it doesn’t matter where he had the idea from, it was there to be had.⁸ Now, these coins obviously don’t prove anything about a deep Gothic prehistory in Sweden; but they do show pretty sharply that there was by the sixth century a strong connection between the political entity of ‘Ostrogoth’ and the place that was by then being claimed as their homeland. And we really don’t know what that connection was, just that it was worth a lot of gold. Military service is a possible, even a likely answer to that question, but only a hypothesis even so.

One of the oldest (fragmentary) texts of Jordanes, Lausanne, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, Ms 398, fo. 1r, which was probably written at Fulda around 830, itself raising questions I can’t look at here; licensed under CC BY-NC via e-Codices, linked through and here

Secondly, the other end of the connection must have been something quite specific, or perhaps someone quite specific, because apparently the peoples of these islands were the Ostrogoths’ sole agents in the area, and that must have put them in quite a powerful position, since apparently everyone else was having to come to them for this imperial gold coin which was getting everywhere around southern Scandinavia, but getting there only from Öland and then Gotland. There’s a power structure there about which we just know almost nothing, but which is required to explain the coin finds.

Now, there is one more part of this context I’ve not yet mentioned, which is that Sandby borg is not alone in its sudden destruction. In fact, pretty much every coastal fortification of this early period in either Öland or Gotland which has been investigated met a messy end, and even when Fagerlie wrote it was recognised, largely because of the coin find threshold indeed, that this must have happened in the late fifth century in Öland and in the middle-to-late-sixth for Gotland, presumably in some associated fashion each time. The latter of these waves of destruction has been tentatively explained, when at all, in terms of the takeover of the people from whom Sweden takes its name, the Svear, chasing out the Gotlanders from a previously dominant position in eastern Scandinavia, and one could therefore guess at the former wave being how the Gotlanders got that position in the first place, apparently at the expense of the Ölanders.⁹ In both cases, while I might not now want to endorse these pseudo-legendary peoples’ existence, it’s tempting to see that stranglehold the populations of the two islands apparently had on imperial prestige goods as being too much for their power-hungry dependents to stomach, and episodes like Sandby borg the messy and unpleasant result.

The investigation under way at Sandby Borg, again from their Facebook site

So at this point, had we learned anything from the Sandby borg dig? If I’d already done my reading when I did that excited piece-to-camera in summer 2019 in the dark of the Barber’s coin room, would I have been saying confidently that this happened all the time, wasn’t unusual, in fact wasn’t even the only such coin find in Sandby or the most important one even if the actual borg hadn’t been found before, and that it told us nothing new? I don’t think so, because firstly, in terms of coin finds the finds here seem to say something different from the hoards; they were both early, separate and one’s an imitation. If Fagerlie was right then they should have arrived here maybe forty years after they were struck; and maybe they did, but I wonder if what we see here is actually the type of place these coins were going all over Scandinavia, perhaps heirlooms from service with a foreign army that it was worth having because it marked you as member of a kind of élite; and if I’m being properly fanciful, maybe the reason they stayed here was because for some reason Sandby borg’s defence included two very old soldiers who, in the end, lost their last battle, but whose status was recognised in death in so far as they got to keep their coin-badges. There have been hoards of Fagerlie’s types found nearby; but these two didn’t get hoarded, they stayed with their owners, and that might be important.

And then secondly, of course, there’s the macabre picture of how one of these settlements, apparently a casualty in a much bigger war, was not just destroyed but almost ritually ended, bodies across thresholds, buildings literally closed by the dead, and everything left where it had fallen, forever, never again to be visited. Or at least that was the plan, it seems. And that’s telling us about something more than a commercial power-grab; it’s telling us something about what that power meant and how it was explained, and if some day we figure that out properly, this site will be part of the explanation. But until then, it may remain at least mostly mystery, even though we apparently know more than many people think about the times in which the mystery was set.

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1. The academic publication of these finds, until the full report at least, is Clara Alfsdotter, Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay & Helena Victor, “A Moment Frozen in Time: evidence of a late fifth-century massacre at Sandby borg” in Antiquity Vol. 92 no. 362 (London 2018), pp. 421–436, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2018.21.

2. Andrew Curry, “Öland, Sweden. Spring, A.D. 480” in Archaeology (Boston MA March/April 2016), online here; “The Sandby borg massacre: Life and death in a 5th-century ringfort” in Current World Archaeology (London 25th July 2019), online here.

3. For the data see Arkadiusz Dymowski, “Roman Imperial Hoards of Denarii from the European Barbaricum” in Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology Vol. 7 Supplement 1 (Bucharest 2020), pp. 193–243; for some interpretation see Svante Fischer and Fernando López Sánchez, “Subsidies for the Roman West? The flow of Constantinopolitan solidi to the Western Empire and Barbaricum” in Opuscula: Annual of the Swedish Institutes at Athens and Rome Vol. 9 (Rome 2016), pp. 249–269.

4. See n. 5 below.

5. Joan M. Fagerlie, Late Roman and Byzantine Solidi Found in Sweden and Denmark, Numismatic Notes and Monographs 157 (New York City NY 1967).

6. Those that know me may be wanting at this point to suggest that the hippy is not in fact inner, and I who am currently sitting in a stripy woollen jumper that would fit in fine on the pampas and listening to Os Mutantes’s debut album would, I admit, have few arguments against that position. But it is pretty heavy, all the same.
7. See Cécile Morrisson, “Byzantine Coins in Early Medieval Britain: a Byzantinist’s assessment” in Rory Naismith, Elina Screen and Martin Allen (edd.), Early Medieval Monetary History: studies in memory of Mark Blackburn (London 2014), pp. 207–242.

8. If you want to read it, the oldest translation is helpfully online, as Jordanes, “The Origin and Deeds of the Goths”, transl. Charles Christopher Mierow in Texts for Ancient History Courses, 22nd April 1997, online here; for (competing) study of him and his project, try Lieve van Hoof and Peter van Nuffelen, “The Historiography of Crisis: Jordanes, Cassiodorus and Justinian in mid-sixth-century Constantinople” in Journal of Roman Studies Vol. 107 (London 2017), pp. 275–300, DOI: 10.1017/S0075435817000284 or Robert Kasperski, “Jordanes versus Procopius of Caesarea: Considerations Concerning a Certain Historiographic Debate on How to Solve ‘the Problem of the Goths'” in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies Vol. 49 (Berkeley CA 2018), pp. 1–23, DOI: 10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.116872. For the kind of work which you’d think would love this stuff, but doesn’t use it, see Herwig Wolfram, “Origo et religio: Ethnic traditions and literature in early medieval texts” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 3 (Oxford 1994), pp. 19–38, reprinted in Thomas F. X. Noble (ed.), From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms, Rewriting Histories 22 (London 2006), pp. 70–90; but against it, see Walter Goffart, “Does the Distant Past Impinge on the Invasion Age Germans?” in Andrew Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity: critical approaches to ethnicity in the early Middle Ages (Turnhout 2002), pp. 21–37, also reprinted Noble, From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms, pp. 91–109.

9. For the wider background see Bjørn Myhre, “The Iron Age” in Knut Helle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, volume I: Prehistory to 1250 (Cambridge 2003), pp. 60–93; the end of the Gotland system is passed through on p. 84, but for specifics I had to go back to Alfsdotter, Papmehl-Dufay & Victor, “A Moment Frozen in Time”.

Revisiting Sant Pau del Camp

I promised something more academic than holiday photos for this week, but my first option, a post about the probably-legendary Battle of Baltarga at which Count Ermengol I of Osona, elder brother of Borrell II, was supposed by some three hundred and fifty years later to have died, will not work. You can tell even from that how it was meant to go, but in order to do it properly I’d first have to read a recent article on the subject and then find a way to consult all three volumes of Ramon Ordeig i Mata’s recent Diplomatari del Monestir de Ripoll, which as far as I can see you can only do in Catalonia, and the result would be a proper article.¹ Since that article is probably necessary for me to write in order that I don’t have to cover it in the book, it then becomes work someone is paying me for, which I don’t do at weekends any more, and thus I cannot blog it. It’s a funny situation into which we unionised UK academics have got ourselves…

Interior of the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona (from Spanish Wikipedia)

But the reasons I’d had the idea in the first place was because of reading that thesis I mentioned which I was examining in 2019.² I will, as promised, write about that in short order, but not today. Instead, today I want to say something about another academic thing I did on that trip. In fact, there were two of those things: firstly, I used as much time as I could on reading things I can only get at in Catalonia, evidently a theme for this post, in the Biblioteca de Catalunya, my favourite research library of all so far and a place to which, of course, given subsequent events, I’ve not since been able to go back.³ But I did pop out to have a look around during its lunch hours, and the nearest and best thing for a medievalist to look at nearby the Biblioteca de Catalunya, other than than the erstwhile medieval hospital in which the Biblioteca is itself housed, is the erstwhile monastery of Sant Pau del Camp.

A Wikimedia Commons image of the building, which unlike every time I’ve been there they managed to find not covered by repair works; image by TenOfAllTrades, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons as I said

It had been a few years since I was last there, and actually a few things had changed. They had a new entry facility set up—the previous time, it had just been a woman at a table in the doorway—and working disabled access, loos and so on, and they had also got a new set of leaflets. Unfortunately for them, in a tiny way, since my previous visit I’d also done slightly more research into the place, and so I have expert-level quibbles with the interpretation, which I hope just about make a blog-post. This is the relevant text from the English-language leaflet I picked up that day (found after about ten minutes’ burrowing in my personal archives…), all typos authentic:

Front page of the leaflet, large version linked

“It is not known exactly when the monastery was built. Unfortunately there is no document to confirm this. The archaeological excavations left uncovered some remains of buildings that could be dated between 8th and 10th centuries. The discovery in 1596 of the tombstone of Wifred II (911), Count of Barcelona, outside the monastery, has led some historians to attribute him the foundation of the monastery.

Inner pages

“Due to the archaeological investigations in the area, have also been found som graves from the Romano-Christian era (4th-5th centuries). There are also visigothic carvings in the principal door to the churuch that could reveal that a former church existed here at that period (5th8th centuries). All this evidence proves that Sant Pau del Camp is one of the most ancient Christian sites in Barcelona. It was built far from the city walls, between the walled city and the hill of Montjuic -hence its name, Saint Paul-in-the-fields.

And the back

“In 985 the monastery was destroyed during the Almanzor attack against Barcelona. The rebuilding was slow; the church is mentioned several times during the XIth century. At the beginning of the XIIth century the nobleman Geribert Guitard and his wife Rotlendis restored the monastery. In 1117 the foundation was placed under the protection of the Bishop of Barcelona. The Benedictine community was never too large; it oscillated between three and five monks.”

Now, let us set aside the fact that a monastery of three to five monks is uncanonical and technically, it must if that was so have been a cell of some larger community. (Let us also set aside, if we can, the joyful image of a Benedictine community oscillating between teams of three and five monks like some unbalanced monastic Blind Man’s Buff.) Let us also ignore the easy slip from the chronology of the building and its purpose to that of the site in a grab for extra antiquity; what person billing their site wouldn’t try it? But there is stuff here that merits at least a quiet alternative putting.

You see, it was news to me from my previous research on this place, if we can call it that, that there had ever been any archaeology done here, and in Catalonia, these days, even the unpublished reports from archaeological interventions are usually on the web. I couldn’t find them all, but I found two, one of which reports on most, I hope even all, of the foregoing work.⁴ And so what I would write of this place’s history from that would look more like this…

The earliest signs of occupation in the immediate area are Neolithic and Late Bronze Age, but settlement seems to have coalesced only in the third century CE, when a Roman villa, whose proportions have not yet been established, was set up here. Before that, we might assume this was open or waste land for most of the prehistoric and ancient period, though by then within sight of the walled city of Barcino. The villa seems to have been shortlived; by the late fourth or early fifth centuries CE it had been replaced by one or more burial grounds; this context has been struck by every dig that’s happened at the site, as far as I can tell, but because they have been disparate, we don’t know if all the burial grounds were one. If they were, it was a decent size. The religion of burial is not evident, but the Roman Empire was by then mostly Christianized and it seems unlikely that a new burial ground for pagans would have been established at that time.

Timpanum and surround of portal at Sant Pau del Camp, taken by me on my previous visit

At some point after this, the area was partly flattened as the foundations for a new structure. Only one end of this structure has been recovered, but it seems to have been an apse, i.e. the semi-circular end to an early church or basilica, and with that and the funerary context of the site beforehand it seems reasonable to assume that a church is what was built here, not least because such a building would provide a home for the supposedly-Visigothic tympanum that now sits above the portal and seems, as I said the last time I visited, to indicate a dedication to both Peter and Paul, not just Paul. But dating it is hard. The oldest datable artefact found at the site so far has been a fragment of a type of Late Roman amphora which was not imported after the mid-sixth century, which was stuck in the foundation layer, suggesting that the foundation of the building must date from after that point; and the horizon in the other direction is the rebuilding of the place into what is mostly its current form in the early twelfth century.⁵ However, the view of various people the archaeologists consulted on the structure as it could be perceived from what had been found was that it belonged to a point in the seventh to ninth centuries.⁶ Now, on the one hand that amphora fragment could go equally back to the late fifth century , but on the other hand it’s probably disturbed matter from one of the graves and gives us really no idea of how much later than its deposition that disturbance might have taken place; it could have been centuries later. The tympanum probably belongs closer to the early end of the sixth-to-twelfth-century gap rather than the late one, but that’s an art-historical judgement, not an empirical one, and as with it and the tombstone of Guifré II Borrell, we don’t know that it started its life here rather than arriving on the site later because something or several things nearby were being demolished. I can’t see any hint in the reports of the leaflet’s buildings “between 8th and 10th centuries” unless they are actually this apse, which implies that the anonymous redactors of the leaflet either think there were two phases of the church’s building, one early for the tympanum and one later for the apse – though they don’t say that – or that there were two churches here; or, they’re trying to have it both ways. The reports both seem clear that the archaeologists themselves found nothing certainly datable between the sixth and twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Otherwise, we have nothing archaeological to go on but the current standing fabric.

Light and darkness inside Sant Pau del Camp, photograph by me on my previous visit

So, the path of least resistance here, though it is more than part guesswork, would seem indeed to be that there was a villa which fell into disuse or was perhaps even given over to the local church, as was happening at about the same time with Barcelona’s first cathedral site, and turned into a burial ground. There was, most likely, some wooden chapel or oratory there, but no sign of it remains. At some point after the late fifth century, however, probably quite a bit after but probably before the Muslim occupation in 711, someone decided a better church was needed and built one, partly by flattening the existing cemetery site. If the tympanum does come from that church, it may have been quite fancy, but still fairly small. And we could probably stretch as far as suggesting that it was still there, maybe even reasonably new, in 911 for Guifré II Borrell to be buried in it, but we really can’t be sure.

On the other hand, what there is no sign of at all is the supposed destruction of the place in 985, even though that’s in every secondary reference to the site I can immediately bring to bear, including, for what it’s worth, Wikipedia.⁷ There’s no archaeological destruction layer, and there’s no reference in any of the sources for the attack to Sant Pau having been one of the targets.⁸ If there are eleventh-century references to it as being in a state of ruination—and I don’t have the means to check between 1000 and 1079 here, unfortunately—I don’t know of them. But neither, I might point out, did Paul Freedman when in 1993 he studied a papal privilege to the place from 1165 on the basis of all the then-available secondary literature; the best he can cite is a reference to works (opera) at the site in 1035.⁹ The place’s own documentation doesn’t survive, so it’s hard to say more, but it doesn’t seem as if anyone medieval that we can still access ever said this place was destroyed by the Muslims. If it really was a sixth-century church, or even an eighth-century one, it might not surprise if at age 300-500 it needed some light opera. And then, from about 1101 onwards, a couple called Guitard and Rotlendis started pouring real resource into the site, definitely involving a thorough rebuild, and in the end set it up as a monastery.¹⁰ And that, plus a thirteenth-century cloister, is what we have.

I guess the assumption here among historians has been that, as an extra-mural site like the monastery of Sant Cugat, Sant Pau del Camp must have been in the way when al-Mansur’s army arrived in 985, and since a nunnery inside the city was certainly destroyed, how could this one have escaped? But at that stage it was only an old church, and in any case it’s no longer clear that Sant Cugat was destroyed in the attack either, rather than claiming to have been much later in order to explain why it didn’t have certain documents any more.¹¹ At which rate, why would this much smaller place have been? So I think we might reasonably delete that sentence from this leaflet, and the idea from the historiography. But I’d still recommend the visit…

Lobed arcades in the cloister, photograph by me on the previous visit

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1. Specifically, I need to read Oliver Vergés Pons, “La batalla de Baltarga en el joc de la política comtal del segle X: la mort d’Ermengol d’Osona i la successió del comtat d’Urgell” in Anuario de Estudios Medievales Vol. 48 (Barcelona 2018), pp. 901–923, and at least consult Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Diplomatari del Monestir de Ripoll, Estudis Històrics: Diplomataris, 8-10 (Vic 2015-2018), 3 vols, and those definitely make that paid-for work.

2. Xavier Costa Badia, “Paisatges monàstics: El monacat alt-medieval als comtats catalans (segles IX-X)” (Tesi doctoral, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2019).

3. Specifically, I was reading Antoni Pladevall, Tona: mil cent anys dʾhistòria, LʾEntorn 16 (Vic 1990), and Albert Benet i Clarà, Història de Manresa, dels orígens al segle XI (Manresa 1985), neither of which you find in the average UK library, or actually any at all.

4. Albert Bacaria, Emília Pagès & Ferran Puig, “Excavacions arqueològiques a l’entorn del monestir de Sant Pau del Camp” in Tribuna d’Arqueologia 1989-1990 (Barcelona 1991), online here, pp. 149–151; “Memòria de la intervenció arqueològica al C/ Sant Pau 99, Horts de Sant Pau del Camp” by Oriol Achón Casas & Andrea Lages Tonet, Memòria d’excavació (Barcelona 2010), online here. Previously I’d been going on Antoni Pladevall & Francesc Català Roca, El Monestirs Catalans, 4th edn. (Barcelona 1978), pp. 204-207. Achón and Lages, “Memòria”, pp. 17-22, provide most of the information for what follows, but the villa, specifically, is covered in Bacaria, Pagès & Puig, “Excavacions arqueològiques”, pp. 149-150.

5. Achón & Lages, “Memòria”, pp. 56-57; the amphora type, for those who care, was Keay 62B.

6. Bacaria, Pagès & Puig, “Excavacions arqueològiques”, p. 150; Achón & Lages, “Memòria”, pp. 57-59 & nn. 10-11 & p. 78-81.

7. Pladevall & Català, Monestirs catalans, p. 204; and Paul Freedman, “A Privilege of Pope Alexander III for Sant Pau del Camp (Barcelona)” in Archivium Historiae Pontificiae Vol. 31 (Rome 1993), pp. 255–263 at pp. 255 & 257, which is what Wikipedia cites. Achón & Lages, “Memòria”, p. 14, is much less sure, associating the sack only with the lack of documents for the place.

8. Gaspar Feliu i Montfort, La presa de Barcelona per Almansor: història i mitificació. Discurs de recepció de Gaspar Feliu i Montfort com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 12 de desembre de 2007 (Barcelona 2007), lays out all the sources for the event and takes a suitably critical view of some of them. But none of them mention Sant Pau del Camp.

9. Freedman, “Privilege of Pope Alexander III”, p. 257, citing Philip Banks, “The Topography of Barcelona and its Urban Context in Eastern Catalonia from the Third to the Twelfth Centuries” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, 1981), which is online here, in 5 vols and we want vol. II, p. 528. That sends you to his notes, vol. III pp. 1361-1362, where you find that he is borrowing three citations from Jordi Vigué, El monestir romànic de Sant Pau del Camp (Barcelona 1974), “with a historical section by A. Pladevall” (p. 1361), and Pladevall apparently, at p. 20, cites three documents from Josep Mas, Antigüetat d’algunes esglesies del Bisbat de Barcelona, Notes historiques del Bisbat de Barcelona 13-14 (Barcelona 1921), 2 vols, vol. I. That is online here, and at its pp. 167-168, not clear in Banks’s citation, you finally get the source references. Phew! But Banks, “Topography of Barcelona”, p. 1361, believes that at least one of them is actually about the monastery of Sant Pau del Maresme, so that leaves one reference in 986 and one in 1048 and that’s it until the rebuild. Now, the 986 one at least I can get at, in Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí & Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols, doc. no. 859 where it is now printed, and that just refers to the ‘house of Saint Paul’, domus Sancti Pauli, with no indication at all that it was ruined or anything; but it’s a boundary clause, so you wouldn’t necessarily expect that detail. Still, it’s negative evidence where there’s no positive evidence…
But Mas doesn’t mention the 1035 document. For that we have to go back up to Freedman’s citation of Banks, “Topography of Barcelona”, p. 528, and he there (or rather at vol. III p. 1362 n. 79) cites a table in his own vol. IV. Strike a light! But ibid. vol. IV p. 1988 gets you that table and a reference to Montserrat, Arxiu Monàstic, Pergamins Sant Benet de Bages, no. 1360. Now it’s possible I even own an image of that, but if I do it’s on microfilm (remember this story?) so I can’t check. But even so, as Banks cites it it’s just a gift of five mancuses ad opera, to pay for works, which presumably implies a working community there who could receive and spend that money. In short, still no positive evidence, and if it were there, I think one of these fine scholars would have quoted it…

10. Pladevall, Monestirs catalans, seeing the couple’s gifts from 1117 onwards as a response to a possible but undocumented sack of the place by Almoravid armies in 1114 – for heavens’ sakes, sometimes buildings just get old, it doesn’t always have to be hostile Muslims! –; Freedman, “Privilege of Alexander III”, pp. 257-259, using a different piece of Banks’s I’m not now going to track down to show activity renewing at the site before 1114. Banks, “Topography”, vol. II pp. 528-529, however points out that those two were not the only donors, because another couple’s donation of cash was actually inscribed over the tympanum, so you only know about it if you go and look! (I didn’t work out that’s what it was; I’m a bad epigrapher.)

11. Gaspar Feliu, “Al-Mansur, Barcelona i Sant Cugat” in Acta Historica et Archæologica Mediævalia Vol. 3 (Barcelona 1982), pp. 49–54.

Seminars CCLXIX & CCLXX: From opposite ends of the Mediterranean

I’ve just had a look through my seminar notes from March 2019 and decided that two still bear the telling. As ever, it is good of those who still read here to bear with my efforts to reduce the backlog in the face of the fact that things continue to occur meanwhile… But back then when my backlog is, at the beginning of the month I was present on the 4th when Professor John Moreland addressed Leeds’s Institute for Medieval Studies Medieval Group with the title, “Sheffield Castle: archives, excavations, and augmented reality, 1927-2018”, and then I was around again on the 27th when Dr Helen Birkett addressed the IMS Medieval History Seminar with the title, “News, Current Events, History: The Preservation of News Texts from 1187/8”. I’ve got no way to tie these together except that they were in the same month in the same university and I saw them both, but why should we need more, eh?

Seminar poster by Thomas Smith

So to begin with Professor Moreland’s paper, I have to admit that I did not previously know that Sheffield had had a castle. But there was one, and a recent bequest had enabled the University’s then-untroubled archaeology department to start a partnership up with the contract organisation Wessex Archaeology (who for reasons unexplained have an office in Sheffield) and the university’s department of Computer Science, to go over the work that had been done on it and try to synthesize the results of old and new digs. The castle has been dug quite a lot, apparently, being located, under what was between the 1960s and very recently the city market, by an amateur archaeologist in the 1920s and then dug for a decade, with some more work on its perimeter in the 1950s and new work just beginning at the date of this paper. The paper was as much about why what had been done had been done as what it actually was, but the basic story was that some kind of castle was probably put here in the 12th century by one William de Loyelote, built up rather with a gatehouse after license was given to crenellate in 1258, and then possibly burnt in a sack of the city of 1266 by a man really genuinely called John De Eville. There was some rebuilding thereafter and it was still a going concern in the 16th century, and indeed in the English Civil War though perhaps not going enough as it fell to siege in 1644 and 1646 and was slighted in 1649-1650.

Archaeological digging at the site of Sheffield Castle in the 1920s, 1930s or 1950s – sadly, Sheffield’s website doesn’t say which

The question that now arises is what bits of this actually survive. The 1920s-30s digs found lots, and some of that was photographed in situ, very luckily for such old archaeology, but that archaeologist, Leslie Armstrong, tended to date what he found from known history, such as the 1266 burning, so that various wooden structures showing destruction by fire he considered to be pre-1266 and everything above them to have been the 13th-17th-century building, which Professor Moreland though would likely prove wrong given the relative depths of stratification. In that case, this fire must have happened earlier and the 1266 sack of the city may not have hurt the castle at all. Another point of difference was over the material that Armstrong considered to have been ‘Saxon’, an alleged cruck-built building in the central courtyard and some of the material culture. Professor Moreland, however, thought that there was no pre-Conquest material at all, and that Armstrong was just after pushing his native city’s origins back to when it could be ‘Germanic’ rather than ‘French’, this mattering rather more in the atmosphere of the 1930s, though not always that way round… The oldest remains Professor Moreland had been able to date were late 11th-century, at which point there seems to have been a Norman motte with maybe a wooden gatehouse. But by this stage he had five minutes left to talk, so we didn’t get all the details of that I might have wanted, and the promised ‘augmented reality’ ironically never materialised, then or now. However, you can find out more! Wessex Archaeology have a good web-page on the digs, including their 602-page site report which, I admit, I didn’t read for this post (or at all), and a video by Professor Moreland explaining what the augmented reality stuff would have been like.¹ Also, not very long after this paper, there emerged a book, so it is certainly possible for you to learn more.²

Dr Birkett’s paper was a very different sort of thing, not just because it completed within the time allowed but also because it was a proper old-fashioned text-mining medievalist study, which as I only now find out, had already been published at the point when she gave it to us.³ The object of the search was to find out how people in the West found out about the recapture of Jerusalem by the forces of Islam, under the famous Saladin, in 1187. We know that it created enough of a furore that eventually King Richard I of England, King Philip II Augustus of France and Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa all went out to try and get it back – but how did the news actually get to their royal ears?

Poster again by Thomas Smith

Obviously, the answer was probably letters, but what I hadn’t expected was firstly that we would have any such letters surviving, and secondly where they turn up. These were surprises because actually, there are 13, but none are actual autographs by people of 1187; instead, such texts were later copied into chronicles and histories, or just copied; we have some loose copies which got used as bindings, and one rather mystifying copy of a letter from Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem (the Latin patriarch, despite his name) that now survives in the Arxiu Parroquial of Cardona, of which town we heard only a couple of posts ago so you know it’s in Catalonia. In fact two such letters made it to Catalonia, but it doesn’t seem to have raised the same response as other places… But from the image I was pretty sure it was a local copy – I know the scripts! – so there was a kind of response even so.

But that is a whole book’s worth of study and for someone else. Better questions to ask might be, as did Alan Murray, of course present, whether multiple copies of such letters were being sent, or whether one was sent and then copied for dissemination, and Dr Birkett thought the latter. There is a particular one by a Templar called Terricas (apparently) which exists in more copies than any other, and Dr Birkett thought that the actual man’s journey westwards to seek help could be tracked. I don’t, myself, see why that precludes him fetching up in, say, Genoa, and then writing his letter and having copies sent hither and thither; but of course, I haven’t seen it, and either solution does explain why what we have is not the original letters, and reminds us that in this era (and to be honest, our one too) a letter only arrives because someone or a chain of someones physically brings it; that process also attracted questions, but answers are hard to provide. Dr Birkett herself was more interested in why these texts were still being copied up long after they were ‘news’, because outside the chronicle texts the preservation rarely seems to have been part of a plan; their homes were often blank folios in manuscripts made for other purposes. It is possible that, since Jerusalem was never recaptured (unless we count Emperor Frederick II’s attempt, which because the Church judged him to be a bad guy we seem never to do), this was ‘news’ that never got old. But the samples are very small, and I was myself wary of any generalisation of plotting trends of 2-4 manuscripts. But the questions are still interesting to ask, and maybe there are more answers to be found.

That will have to do you for this week. Next post will be some more current news and then I have an old musing that never before got written up about the role of the blog in/as scholarship, so please stay tuned for those, and if that’s not enough I hope to have more critique of a certain historian of early medieval military matters ready to go after that, surely therefore something for all tastes. Stay well and safe till then!

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1. It is Sheffield Castle, Sheffield, South Yorkshire: Final Archaeological Evaluation Report, by Ashley Tuck, 201540.05 (Sheffield 2020), online here.

2. John Moreland, Dawn Hadley and Ashley Tuck, Sheffield Castle: Archaeology, Archives, Regeneration, 1927–2018 (York 2020), online here.

3. Helen Birkett, “News in the Middle Ages: News, Communications, and the Launch of the Third Crusade in 1187–1188” in Viator Vol. 49 (Turnhout 2018), pp. 23–61, DOI: 10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.119573.

Dead Vikings in Carlisle

This gallery contains 16 photos.

Sorry for the absence: despite working to contract at the moment, it turns out life fills up blogging time with work for other people sometimes. In order to get something out for the Bank Holiday weekend, however, here is a … Continue reading →

Seminars CCLIII-CCLVI: Friends and the Famous Speaking at Leeds

There is a lot of unpleasantness going on just now, he says in a classic understatement. I had most of a series of angry posts about the state of the English university done when Russia invaded Ukraine, something I’d barely seen coming and which is starting, as people break out the word ‘nuclear’, to sound a lot like the bad dreams of my Cold War childhood over again. Now it seems a bit selfish to complain about having secure if worsening employment while others are losing their homes and lives. The Ukraine conflict has also got some pretty deep and obvious medievalist resonances, but with fighting going on at this moment, I cannot look at that now. Instead I’m staying safe around the turn of 2018/2019, when because I was not on Action Short of Strike and being threatened with total pay deduction because of it, I was still going to seminars. I cannot get to many seminars down south any more, so it is always important when people come north (or in one of these cases, east), and in normal circumstances I try to be there whoever’s speaking. But for these four I was there because I knew or knew of the people and was glad to have them visiting us, and so they each get a short report despite this having happened three years ago plus, sorry.

Real Royal Protection for the Carolingian Church?

First up, then, and coming from least far was my sort-of-opposite number in Manchester, Dr Ingrid Rembold, who on 28th November 2018 was in Leeds to address our Medieval History Seminar with the title, “Widows, Orphans and the Church: protection and virtue signalling in the Carolingian world”. Here, Ingrid was looking at the three categories of society whom Carolingian Western Europe considered it a royal duty to protect, and asking why and what it actually got them. For the Church we mainly had monasteries to talk about, and she had some good critical things to say about the legal category of ‘royal’ monastery, which I have myself also always struggled to find expressed in the actual sources; and her general argument that these obligations (which the previous royal dynasty don’t seem to have felt anything like as keenly) mainly sprang from the Old Testament and the idea of the Church as the bride of Christ, temporarily ‘widowed’ by His absence from Earth, I thought was new and sounded right.¹

The Torhalle of Lorsch monastery, supposedly a ‘royal’ house but whatever that means, this is a building through which Carolingian kings almost certainly passed. Image by Kuebi – Armin Kübelbeck – self-made with 36 single shots (Lens: 1:1.8 85 mm; 1:5.6; 1/500s; ISO 100; manual focus and manual exposure) made by stitching with Hugin, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Where there was more disagreement, however, although mainly between me and Fraser McNair, then of this parish, was about what this protection meant and how it was delivered. Ingrid had quite early on argued that Carolingian local power was so reliant on the local powerful that its legislation of this kind could only be exhortatory, without real force except as those locals cared to enforce it, which for her presented the problem that monasteries sometimes sought royal protection against exactly those locals, which makes no sense if they were the ones who would have to deliver it. If, after all, they actually did behave differently because the king told them to, even if he couldn’t coerce them, that is arguably a more powerful king, not less, than if he had to send the boys round. And that does seem to have happened in Catalonia, I will admit, with royal grant after royal grant coming south from kings who could not appoint, remove or direct anyone there; but I have explained how I think that worked, and it’s not universal.² I just think there was more use of force available to the Carolingian state than Ingrid does, apparently. She fairly asked whether it counts as state power if a local person does it, too, and this was where Fraser and I disagreed. I think the Carolingians mostly could send someone else into a local area with legitimate power to act, if they needed to, because of the three-legged structure of counts, Church and vassals they maintained, whereas Fraser argued that their trick was to recruit the locals into the wider power ideology of ministerium, so that yes, it absolutely did count as state enforcement if a local man did it, as long as he was the right local man.³ I just think that, optimally at least, there were plural right local men, and maybe the lengthy conversations between myself and Joseph Brown in comments on my old posts at the moment are partly about what happened once there was only a singular one in many areas.

Middle-Age spread in the English village

Then, on 4th December, no less a celebrity than Professor Carenza Lewis visited to deliver one of the Institute for Medieval Studies’ open lectures, with the title, “Triumph and Disaster: new archaeological evidence for the turbulent development of rural settlement”. This was showcasing a then-new project of which she was leader, which was seeking to redress the fact that we have a pretty skewed and partial sample of medieval rural settlement in England from archæology, mostly either deserted sites or along a belt from Hampshire to Lincolnshire and then up the Eastern Pennines. To remedy this, her team had been digging dozens and dozens of test pits of a meter square or so in people’s gardens, which was excellent for public engagement as well as data, and what they had mainly discovered was change. Thinly-documented phenomena like the ‘Middle Saxon shuffle’ (a general but not well understood shift of early English villages) showed up well, but the starkest two phenomena were, most of all, desertion of sites after the Black Death, to levels like 40-45% of sites with a concomitant implication of moves into towns as well as, you know, ‘Death’; and, secondly, the long period of high medieval growth before it. Those, perhaps, were not surprises, but they are often assumed from a small sample, so anything that puts such generalisations on firmer footings is probably worthwhile. What was weird to me then and remains so now, however, is that the Roman period, when we suspect settlement in lowland Britain to have been at its densest really until quite recently, showed up very poorly. Professor Lewis didn’t offer an explanation for this, but it made me wonder whether the method was somehow missing an object signature that would be significant. Since Roman ceramics are usually both plentiful and easy to recognise, however, as are Roman coins, I can’t imagine what it would have been! The Saxon period is usually poorer in material remains…⁴

Making Manuscripts under the Conquistadors

Then, finally ticking over the clock in 2019 and bringing this blog close to only three years behind at last, on 28th January 2019 Dr Claudia Rogers, then of Leeds and as we’ve seen a valued teaching colleague, presented some of her work in a workshop for the Medieval Group under the title of “Encountering Pictorials: a a workshop on sixteenth-century Meso-American manuscripts”. I know that this is not medieval on the usual European clock, but in the first place we have the debate about whether that counts outside Europe – but of course it’s kind of patronising and colonial to assert that, outside Europe, other places were ‘medieval’ for longer, so that’s not my justification here. Instead, I’ll argue that these manuscripts are some of our windows on the pre-Columbian time before, which is medieval on the European clock at least, and also that they’re just really cool.

Page from a Matrícula de Tributos showing just some of the stuff which the Aztecs had previously claimed in tribute every 80 days from their dependencies, México City, Biblioteca Nacional de Antropologia, MS 35-52 fo 5r

They are, however, wickedly complex to interpret. They are mostly on bark-paper, and come in three broad categories, organising knowledge by place (being, roughly, figured maps of significant things, people or events), events (iconographic treatments of single themes in detail, as here the tributes paid at conquest) or, to me most intriguing, by time, these being calendrical, cyclical, year-by-year chronicles with one image only per year to sum up everything in it. Obviously, one of their primary topics is the ‘Qashtilteca’ (‘Castile-people war’), but their reactions to it and involvements with it are quite complicated, and implicated: one group who produced several of these texts, the Tlaxcalans, had been in rebellion against the Aztecs when the Spanish arrived, and gladly accepted help against their overlords from the conquistadores, who, however, then turned on and subjugated their erstwhile allies. Tlaxcalan artist-scribes thus had a lot to explain. Smaller themes of the conquest can be picked up as well; apparently dog attacks on people became a new theme of depiction, for example. And these texts were produced in a world where the Spaniards were the new élite, and some were glossed in Castilian so we know that they were sometimes being explained to the conquerors. Are they therefore colonial or indigenous, collaborative or critical? Complications also arise when you compare these texts with solely-written ones of the same period: they seem to focus on different things, including giving more prominent roles to women. Was that a genre convention, or was one mode of discourse closer to (someone’s) truth than the other? And so on. And then there’s the question of what gets assumed or put back in the restorations that are making these texts increasingly available. Basically, you have to have a 360° critique going on at all times when trying to do history with these. Claudia did not necessarily have answers to these questions then, but even explaining the complexity of her questions was quite a feat, to be honest…⁵

Exemption by Whatever Means

Lastly for this post, a mere two days later I was back in probably the same room, I don’t remember, to hear then-Dr Levi Roach present to the Medieval History Seminar with the title, “Forging Exemption: Fleury from Abbo to William (997-1072)”. This was a paper dealing with no less fiendish, but much more focused, questions of source critique, revolving around the French monastery of Saint-Bénoît de Fleury (a ‘royal’ monastery in theory, but as we shall see and as Ingrid had already told us, that didn’t necessarily mean much). At the very end of the tenth century, Fleury found itself caught between a new dynasty of kings and their client, Bishop Arnulf of Orléans, Fleury’s local diocesan bishop, both of which were a problem for them (for reasons my notes don’t actually record). As well as Fleury’s own rights, they were in contention over the much bigger issue of who should be the Archbishop of Reims, a long-running fracas I will let someone else try and explain instead of me. For all these reasons, the monks found they needed extra support, and Abbot Abbo (or, I suppose, Abbo Abbot) went to Rome to get it, at that stage not yet a normal thing to do. Pope John XV apparently charged too much, but Pope Gregory V was more amenable and Abbo allegedly came back with a document detailing lots of things bishops could not demand from them.⁶ The problem is, however, that it’s not confirmed, and there is a nest of associated forgeries for other monasteries, and Levi’s work for about half his paper was to disentangle those from whatever the source of the copy of this document we now have actually was. Those who know my work well will realise that this twitched several of my interests, because only a few years before, I have argued that a count of Barcelona also went to the pope, on this occasion John XIII, to get a privilege which was not in fact awarded, and came back with the unconfirmed documents they’d presumably tried to get him to sign and pretended they were legit; but no-one believed them.⁷ Both that and the resort to the pope only when the king couldn’t or wouldn’t provide therefore looked quite familiar to me.⁸ I did raise these questions with Levi, indeed, and he defended his position by saying that when Fleury’s privilege was challenged, which it was, it was challenged on the basis of being unprecedented – quite literally uncanonical – rather than on being faked. To which I say, OK, but that doesn’t actually tell us what was going on. I need to check in on Levi’s subsequent work and find out what he now thinks, I guess! Had I but world enough and time, and did it not look like labour for my bosses when I’m on strike…⁹

But there you are, four good papers and only a selection of what I attended in November 2018 to January 2019 as well. Some of us clearly do find time to do research, or did! And I’m glad that they then come to Leeds when they have.

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1. My picture of what the Carolingians did with monasteries probably relies principally on Matthew Innes, “Kings, Monks and Patrons: political identities and the Abbey of Lorsch” in Régine Le Jan (ed.), La royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne (début IX^e siècle aux environs de 920) (Villeneuve de l’Ascq 1998), pp. 301–324, online here, which I still think is excellent, as I do most of Matthew’s stuff, but may still take that category of ‘royal monastery’ somewhat for granted.

2. Jonathan Jarrett, “Caliph, King, or Grandfather: Strategies of Legitimization on the Spanish March in the Reign of Lothar III” in The Mediaeval Journal Vol. 1 no. 2 (Turnhout 2011), pp. 1–22, DOI: 10.1484/J.TMJ.1.102535.

3. The odd thing is that I think we are both here channelling Matthew again, in the form of Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: the Middle Rhine Valley, 400-1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 47 (Cambridge 2000), just apparently from different directions.

4. When reporting at this distance, it’s always wise to check if something has actually come out that would represent a more up to date presentation of the same research, and in this case it seems to have, as Carenza Lewis, “A Thousand Years of Change: New Perspectives on Rural Settlement Development from Test Pit Excavations in Eastern England” in Medieval Settlement Research Vol. 35 (Leicester 2020), pp. 26–46.

5. In Claudia’s case the subsequent publication is newer media, John Gallagher, Nandini Das and Claudia Rogers, “New Thinking: First Encounters”, MP3, BBC Radio 3, Arts & Ideas, 23rd October 2019, online here.

6. This must be Maurice Prou and Alexandre Vidier (edd.), Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Documents publiés par la Société archéologique du Gâtinais 5-6 (Paris 1907-1912), 2 vols, online here and here, I, doc. no. LXXI.

7. Jonathan Jarrett, “Archbishop Ató of Osona: False Metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München 2010), pp. 1–42.

8. I can’t take any credit for noticing people from the Catalan counties heading for Rome like they’d used to head to the king; that observation goes back as far as Ramon d’Abadal, Com Catalunya s’obri al món mil anys enrera, Episodis de la història 3 (Barcelona 1960).

9. It’s at least easy enough to find out that is, because Levi has since been all over the web about a book he’s published, Levi Roach, Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton NJ 2021), DOI: 10.1515/9780691217871, where pp. 113-152 look very much like a version of this paper.