Gone Medieval - The Monastery That Held Back the Vikings

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

For monks and monasteries in Anglo-Saxon England, obliteration by Vikings was a constant threat. Like Lindisfarne - first raided in 793 AD - religious houses were frequently preyed upon by marauding Danes searching for rich and easy pickings. But just how devastating were these raids? And were some monasteries capable of survival?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr Cat Jarman talks to Dr Gabor Thomas from the University of Reading about his research into Lyminge, a monastery in Kent that adopted genius defensive strategies to hold back the Viking menace.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight, and produced by Rob Weinberg.Read more about the latest research into Lyminge Monastery here >If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to God Medieval. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. Vikings brutally attacking Anglo-Saxon monasteries is probably one of the best known images that people have over the Viking Age. There's absolutely no doubt that these attacks happened and that they could be devastating for the monastic communities. But exactly how devastating. were they? Were the monasteries actually able to endure them?

Brand new research from the University of Reading suggests that actually they could through effective defensive strategies. And as this is a topic I'm really interested in researching myself, I'm so excited to be able to take the opportunity to invite back to the podcast Dr. Gabor Thomas, who is an associate professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading,

and who led this new research, focusing on a specific monitor. Street in Kent. So, good board. Thank you for joining us and welcome back actually to gone medieval today. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. This does relate a little bit, I suppose. So similar sort of context to some of what we talked about last time, another monastic site. But now we're going to focus in really on what happens with the Viking attacks. And I think one thing I really liked about reading your new work and you research on this is you're really tackling something that's very very persistent in our beliefs about what happens when the Vikings attack England.

Yeah, so I guess in traditional accounts, Anglo-Saxon monasteries are the classic sitting ducks, and we're led to believe that these are the places that experienced most of the raping and pillaging that we hear about in contemporary historical sources, and that ultimately monastic life was just eradicated after sustained attacks of that kind. leaving the English church completely destitute. And it had to be rebuilt from scratch by Alfred and his successors. So that's the traditional image. And I think it's one that historians and archaeologists have been questioning in recent decades,

trying to find evidence for the sort of realities, the lived experience of monasteries at this date, and what the realities behind that actually were. Yeah. And as we'll get back into a little bit when we talk about your specific work and how you've approached this and trying to solve that question, There are some really quite specific challenges, things like dating, and we'll get back to that a bit later on. How do you really pin something down to happening in a specific period of time?

So you all focused your work, especially on Kent, so south-eastern part of the country. And I'm hoping you could tell us a little bit about the context there, first of all. So if we're talking about when these Viking attacks start, so late 8th into the early 9th century, what's Kent like? What's the political situation that we're looking at at the time? Okay, so by this point, Kent was no longer an independent, autonomous kingdom in the way that it had been in the latter part of the 7th century, an earlier part of the 8th. For a period at that time, it was the most powerful of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. And under one particular rule at Ethelbert,

it became the bridgehead for English Christianity with the arrival of Cent Augustine. So it's really the kingdom where Christianity, English Christianity starts. But by the period of the period of the Viking raids, it's been subsumed within Mercia, within greater Mercia. This is under a series of very powerful Mercy and Kings from the second half of the 8th century. They expand their territory southwards and eastwards, and Kent falls within their hegemony by that point. So its political status is somewhat different to what it had been previously.

But it's still an immensely wealthy and important part of England at this period. and Mercy and Kings are really exploiting its wealth, its power, including its monastic wealth, for their own purposes. So is there the reason why this part of the country was particularly vulnerable to Viking attack, or did it seem to be in the sort of beginning of the Viking Age? Well, yes, it was highly vulnerable, and that's down to geography, the basic fact that it's more or less a peninsula sticking out into the English Channel stroke North Sea.

That put it really in the front line of all this Viking. activity in raiding that we hear about from historical sources from the end of the 8th century. So we know from historical accounts that it was raided successively over the earliest phases of Viking raiding. And we've got to account for there being perhaps unrecorded attacks and raids on Kent maybe going back earlier than the classic raid on Lindisfarne in AD 793. And so your work has been very specifically focused on one monastic community or one monastic, Tell me about that work that you've been doing there. Yeah, so the site I've been involved in researching is a place called Liminge, which is in

South East Kent, about 10 miles south of Canterbury. And I guess what makes the archaeology that I've been doing there distinctive is that it's been undertaken within the core of a currently occupied village. If you go and visit Limish today, it's this really quaint, beautiful village in the North Downs, with a stunning historic core, with a wonderful Norman church. And what we've been doing over it, it was over a 10-year program, is excavating large open areas in green spaces around the churchyard within the historic course. So doing that on the large scale. And that's quite unusual because most large-scale excavations that take place in the UK are linked to commercial archaeology.

So in advance of developments and so forth. But this was very much taking that methodology and applying it to the kind of place that doesn't experience development. And in the process, producing a wonderful range and array of evidence for its early medieval development. And what do we know about the monastery that was there at this point in time? So it's actually a well-documented monastery in the sense that we have a whole series of charters dating back to around about the turn of the 7th century. So these are kings of Kent and subsequently Mercia, granting this monastic community, lots of estates, and other resources. We don't know precisely when, but it was probably established in the final third of the 7th century as a distinct community, a nunnery, or this branch of early monasticism called a double monastery. So a monastery comprising both monks and nuns. So this is a type of monasticism that's,

imported from the Frankish continent. The Frankish aristocracy founded these so-called double monasteries in some number. And then it's imported to Kent, where there are close ties, aristocratic ties, between the two regions. So Liminge is one of a tight cluster of nunneries that's established by the rulers of Kent in that final third of the 7th century. And we almost see them acting in unison. We hear about the abesses of these institutions, for example, attending synods together. So they're regarded as almost like a family or a monastic family. And do we have any written records of this monastery being attacked by the Vikings? Anything of really pinning that down specifically? Yeah, we have an absolutely wonderful charter dating to 804 AD. And by this point,

Liminge is being ruled over by an abbess called Selifrith, who is a proxy of the Mercy and Kingdom. So she's a member of the Mercy and Aristocracy that's implanted in Limingge. And we also think she may have ruled over the very important monastery of Minstrandt family at around the same time. So she's almost a proprietor of both of these monastic institutions. So she's implanted to take control of these key monastic assets in Kent. And she's granted a refuge for her and her nuns, a refuge within the walled circuit of Canterbury. So there's a very explicit act there. You can see that arrangements are being made to move the monastery or the community into a defensive and defendable area.

That's really quite unique, actually, isn't it? Because we don't see that response. We hear about some of the, like Lindisfar, the actual attack itself, but we don't see the ongoing response. So, yeah, I like quite a lot. Just to give people an idea what these sites were like, I think we quite often tend to think of these monasteries as a church and a cloister, the sort of thing we think of as a much later monastery. But they're not.

They're communities, aren't there? What would you expect? What was there, you know, if a Viking came to attack? What would they see in the late 8th or early 9th century at one of these sites? That's a really good question. I think the first thing to say there is you have to cast from your mind the classic conception of a later medieval monastery with a very four. formalised layout, church, cloister, series of buildings laid out in quite a structured way around the cloister.

This period, monasteries had much more diffuse and unstructured layouts. They were quite sprawling entities. And I think the word that I would use, or the expression I would use to describe monasteries and thinking about monasteries in physical terms, they're not just places or sites, their entire landscapes and quite complex landscapes. They sprawled over considerable areas. They had different fokey, so they were multi-foky. They might have had multiple cemeteries in different places, sometimes spread hundreds of metres apart.

The settlement elements of them were also quite diffusely organised. There's not really evidence for large communal buildings. Things are much more atomised and spread across the landscape. And that's precisely the kind of evidence that we found from excavations at Liming. there is an amazing 7th century stone-built church or church build-out of reused Roman building materials right at the center of the site. But then you've got this sprawl of domestic occupation, industrial activity, agricultural infrastructure that expands and spreads over acres outside that. So you have to think about monasteries at this date serving a number of roles, some being very religious. but also they're playing a very central role in the economy, in trade, in production,

and all that evidence is found within their precincts. Presumably, they would have had quite a lot of wealth as well for the Vikings to attack at this point. I mean, that image and that idea that we have is that they go and raid and carry away all this loot. Is that true? Would they have had all that wealth? Absolutely. Within the churches themselves, I mean, there would have been the turtical vessels, highly decorated objects made from precious metals. They're essential for the liturgy. So we're talking things like chalises.

We hear about processional crosses. And we have excellent evidence for objects like these being made out of precious metals from places like the Staffordshire Horde. We should imagine things like tapestries, perhaps, within churches. So certainly lots of portable wealth would have been located in these places, which is why they are such important targets for them. those rates. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on not just the Tudors from History hit, I'm dusting down my magnifying glass to investigate some of history's most notorious murders

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completely ruined the sort of ongoing monsoon monsoon. that's not what your work has shown. So talk me through how you've been able to show that at this particular site. What would you expect if that was the case? What would the evidence have been to support that? And what did you find instead? Okay. So the thing to say here is that in ideal circumstances, what you would hope to find is real smoking gun evidence. You'd hope to find a major destruction horizon across the site and then everything just stops and you just get total abandonment. Now, there are one or two sites where you do get evidence of that kind linked to a presumed Viking raid. So I'm thinking here about the Pictish monastery at Port Mahomac.

And there they found human remains with pathology, evidence that they had been violently attacked and died. The ready-combedating of those skeletons, places within periods of known Viking raiding in that area of Britain. You get smashed up religious sculpture. You get lots of burning events and so forth. Now, that's very, very rare. The nature of the evidence at Liminge is different. What we've been able to do at Limingge is to, through large-scale excavation on the one hand, and through radiocarbon dating on the other, we've been able to build a very refined settlement chronology. What that tells us is that over a several hundred year period, the site shifts to new locations. And each time,

it moves to a different location in the landscape. That follows an abandonment, if you like, phase or period within the settlement. So we've been able to build this settlement chronology and then link it or contextualize it with historical sources for the 8th and 9th centuries. And that dating, I mean, that's so brilliant to see that you've been able to do that quite well because actually dating is actually really quite hard over time. We quite often get broad date ranges and you have objects. artefacts and things that will tell us early 8th century, 9th century, and even things like coins.

The coins themselves might be specific, but we don't know how long they've been around for. So if you're trying to narrow something down to really within a few decades, then that's really, really difficult. And especially in a site like this, that's being reused. So it's this sort of radio carbon dating you've been able to use, build up a chronology as well, isn't it here? Yeah. And I just want to come back on that point that you made, that very good point, in that chronology

is associated with artefacts that one finds on settlements of this period can be quite imprecise. The other factor that one needs to bear into mind are quite strong regional variations in the amount of coinage and metalwork that one finds on sites, because these are often relied on to date settlements of this period more precisely. Now, down in Kent, and in southern England, more generally, one finds relatively small quantities of coinage and metalwork on sites. Certain in comparisons to places like East Anglia or going north of the Humbera into Northumbria, as to why we get these distinctions. Basically, you have different regional economies at work. But the implications are that settlements in southern regions of England are much more difficult

to date by traditional means. So often you have to rely on pottery, and much of the pottery of this date, you know, you can't narrow down to within maybe 100 years or 150 years. So that's why radio carbon dating is so crucial for investigating the dynamics of monasteries in this particular area of England. And this is what we're able to do at Liminche. And basically what we're able to show is that occupation and activity on the site continued beyond that reference of 804 AD where the community is resettled within the defended enclave of Canterbury. We still have evidence for domestic life continuing, houses being built, rubbish being discarded, in some cases wealth continuing as well. So we have evidence along with the radio carbon dating for things like

coins of the second half of the 9th century being deposited within those settlement context or lost within those settlement context as well. So clearly, monastic life has been re-established on the site at some point beyond that recorded event. when land is given in Canterbury as a refuge. But then, as you move into the latter stages of the 9th century, then it finally does actually peter out. This site that's formerly been occupied from the final third of the 7th century just stops.

And it stops quite dramatically. And we can see that in the settlement record in the radio carbon dating. And that's quite interesting. Why does it stop? There's a gap. And then Liminge is reestablished again, but on a completely different site.

So that then implies that there's a difference in whatever challenges they are facing. So I'm going to have to prod you on that. What happens? What is it that changes at that point in time? Well, again, because we've got this refined settlement chronology, we can look to what the historical sources are saying and relate the archaeology to them. So what we know from sources like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, you move into the 880s and 890s, And by this period, you've got substantial Viking armies occupying Kent and occupying its key political centres, places like Canterbury, for example. So the Vikings had first started overwintering in Kent from the 850s. We hear about Shepi being used as a sort of overwintering base.

But things are still relatively sporadic. But by the 80s, 890s then the nature of the Viking threat and Viking activity, has changed. We're talking about occupation by substantial Viking armies. And we think this is probably why at this point we see that Liminjort, the site of the monastery, what had been the monastery, is finally abandoned. I think that's such a brilliant way of being able to use the archaeology to show that, because in my own work on the Viking Age as well, that early phase is very, very different of what happens in the late 8th century. The way they are treating the attacks and the way they are treating these sites is completely different because if you look at the rest of the country from the

to 67th, Great Union Army. You know, this is political conquest and settlement, and it's not hit and run. It's not just getting wealth and taking it back home. It's a completely different sort of approach, isn't it? And it's really nice that you're seeing that in the archaeology essentially as well. And I think another point that somebody else, I think that was talking about Lindisfarne, actually, which again, as a similar thing, even after that early attack, the use of the site continues. It doesn't stop after the first attack that we hear about.

And I think somebody made the point that it's not really a good incentive for, all those raiding Vikings to completely obliterate it, because actually they could come back. If they leave some of it, then perhaps they can make a repeat visit later on. So there's no incentive in that early phase, whereas in the second later stage, having that political control over such a big part of the community is perhaps more important, as opposed. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's really important that we take a more sort of nuanced view of Viking activity

and it's changes in character over time. And I think that earlier phase, things are much more messy and, and contingent. They're not polarised in the way that they're often projected in the early sources, which of course are coloured by various things going on there in terms of the way that the Vikings are portrayed. Kent has some brilliant evidence for this. I mean, we hear about gospel books being ransomed by Vikings at this period. That's again, it adds really interesting colour and insight into the negotiations involved at this period. Yes, I love that. one can imagine similar things happening in relation to liminege,

which almost certainly would have possessed its own gospel books, richly adorned with gold and silver fittings and bindings and coverings and so forth. So, yeah, it's really interesting that we can relate the archaeology and what's happening to the archaeology to the changing character of the Viking activity. Also relating it back to the parts of the country again, and my own work at Repton, where again we've got an Anglo-Saxon monastery that we know quite a lot about, and we know that it was attacked. Certainly in the 873, we've got the Anglisaxon Chronicle telling us that the Vikings come and take over. We've got

destruction of stone sculpture, but it's actually only partial destructures. It's not obliterated the sites. We know that it keeps being used as burials, continuing around it, and it's still in existence hundreds of years later. So there's something else going on there, which isn't that traditional perspective. That's right. And I think Kent provides some interesting perspectives on that. What's clear is that Vikings aren't all about just destruction for the sake of it. And really the churches and the legacy of the early churches, the heart of monastic communities, provide excellent evidence for this. So, for example, Asser describes visiting the really important church and monastery at Minster in Shepi.

And he talks about the grandness of the church there that was constructed in the 7th century at that period. So he's visiting the site in around about 860 or thereabouts. Similarly, at Liminge, we re-excavated the 7th century monastic church, or the church first built in the 7th century at the heart of the community. So this was a structure that was first revealed by antiquarian researchers in the 1850s and 60s. We re-uncovered it and got to analyse it and record it really carefully. And what we know is that that building stood until the time that the Norman successor, the current parish church, was constructed just next to it. So it's still functioning and providing parochial duties right down into the 11th century. So clearly if they'd wanted to, the Vikings could have destroyed that building and others like it,

whether at Repton or numerous sites where we have wonderful Anglo-Saxon church buildings of an early date that still survived right through in some cases to the present day. So clearly their motivations were different. Absolutely. And I think also it shows that it's not a religious thing. I get questioned that quite a lot, you know, are these pagan Vikings, are they targeting them for religious reasons? Are they trying to destroy these religious sites? And I don't think it's about that at all, really.

I think it's pragmatic getting, as you said, this wealth is certainly in the early stages. But they realise the functions and you put it to that very well, how these are sort of big communities. They've got so many different functions. We know a lot about craft work taking place. They're not these sort of little cloistered separate communities. There's something much bigger as a part of the society, both religiously, politically. And I guess that's showing that that's essentially what they also realize and then find ways of taking advantage of, I suppose. Absolutely. I mean, I think then that later phase,

we have to see the Vikings being almost parasitic. They recognize that these monasteries at the heart of extensive estates where wealth and surplus is being gathered and centralized, and they tap into that. So there's a rationale for keeping these places going to some extent, which is why their sites ultimately perhaps do survive, although what we've been able to show at Liminge, that while Liminge continues, it's reconfigured. So by the time that Norman Conquest comes along and you get fresh investment in Limage by the Archbishops, it's on a completely different and new site. There is continuity at broad level, but at a more micro level, there are these very distinct transformations in how the settlement is configured and the way it's operating. And

We very rarely get to date those reconfigurations as accurately as we've been able to at Limit. That's absolutely fantastic. And I was so pleased to see that. As I said before, so hopefully we can take this approach and apply it to others as well and really sort of get that understanding. And is there more work for you to do at Limit or is this is now? Well, we completed the excavation phase. The last thing that we did was back in 2019. So that was re-examining the monastic church that I mentioned earlier. What we're doing now is we're doing, all the fine, grained analysis on the results. So drawing upon the radiocarbon dating, some of the other sort of scientific analysis

that we've applied to the excavated materials, and then ultimately working towards a publication that will draw all the strands together. Fantastic. Well, I can't wait to see that. So fantastic. Well, Gabor, thank you so much for sharing all of that and joining us again here today. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

And that brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History. hit. But don't forget that if you want to know more about Viking attacks on monasteries, you can go back through our back catalogue and find the episode that I recorded a while back on Lindisfarne with Dr David Pets. Just search for The Raid on Lindisfarne wherever you find this podcast. And while you're there, don't forget to subscribe both of the podcast if you haven't already and to our Medieval Monday's newsletter, which will bring you brand new medieval information straight to your inbox every Monday morning.

Just look in the episode notes wherever you found this podcast. I hope you will join us again next time. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Saturday and I will be back again next Tuesday. Until then, goodbye.