Gone Medieval - The Origins Of Scotland

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

The Medieval period saw the advancement of many countries, evolving to the provinces in Europe that we know today; Scotland is no different. In this episode, Cat is joined by Dr. Adrian Maldonado, an Archeologist and Glenmorangie Research Fellow at National Museums Scotland. With the birth of kingdoms such as Alba, Strathclyde, Galloway, and the Norse Earldom of Orkney, what can the artefacts and materials tell us about the emergence of Scotland?Adrian Maldonado is the author of 'Crucible of Nations: Scotland from Viking-age to Medieval kingdom', published by NMSE - Publishing Ltd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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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 Gone Medieval by History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. And the medieval period saw the rise of so many of the modern countries of Europe that we recognise today, usually from smaller groups or entities to more established and centralised kingdoms. Scotland is no different and that's what we're going to be talking about in this episode. And I'm really delighted to be joined today by Dr. Adrian Maldonado, who is a research fellow at the National Museums of Scotland.

And you have written a book that's out very, very soon, called The Crucible of Nations, Scotland, from Viking Age to Medieval Kingdom. First of all, congratulations, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Kat. I'm genuinely excited to be here. Fantastic. Now, just before we started recording, we talked a little bit about your job and about the actual full title, and who sponsored that. And I think our listeners do really need to know that because it sounds like a very Scottish thing to me. Be happy to. So the official job title was Glenmorengy Research Fellow. And that is Glenmorengy the distiller. They're a Scottish whiskey company.

But they've always had a sort of close link to the early medieval past in that this great big stone, Pictish carved stone that presents itself to you when you walk into early people in the National Museum is the Hill of Cadd-Bowstone, and that happens to be on the Glenmorengy estate near Tane. And around the time of the excavations at the Monastery of Port Mahomac, not far away, there was more interest in the Pictish heritage of that area. They local community commissioned a replica of the Hilton of Cad Bullstone in its original fine spot. And in 2008, when the Glen Moranji Company was rebranding, they chose a panel of this Pictish

stone as their logo or their signet. And at the same time, they decided to sponsor research onto the Pictish period and the early medieval period at the National Museum, founding the Glenmorengy Research project. So my project was actually the fourth phase of that since 2008. That's absolutely fantastic. So we'd love more of that, wouldn't we? That's really great. Now, I just want to ask, first of all, so your book, you're talking about this period's formation of Scotland, and you've called it the Crucible of Nations. Can you explain that title a little bit? Sure, sure. We can sort of go backstage a little bit, see how the sausage is made, you know. When the project began, it was called Creating a Nation, singular. And, you know, as soon as you

start looking into Scotland, the entity at this period, the 9th to the 12th centuries, you realize very quickly, Scotland the entity didn't exist at the beginning of that period. And by the end of that, in the 12th century, Scotland was just one of several kingdoms in northern Britain, in what we now call the modern nation of Scotland. North of the border where it is now, you had fragments of the kingdom of man and the aisles, which would become the lordship of the aisles later on. You have Murray, which is actually a separate kingdom in the north of Scotland. who were occasionally enemies with the kings of Scots themselves. Galloway in the southwest is also this entity that is separate.

And then, of course, you have Norway. You have the Orkney Earldom and all of the lands that belong to the kingdom of Norway, which is a lot of northern and western Scotland as it is today. So even by the 12th century, you couldn't tell a single story of the creation of one nation through the objects in our museum, all you can do is talk about the different nations that took shape in this period. And I found that to be so much more stimulating. It seems to have many more stories that you could spin out. So I thought that was more of a sort of guiding metaphor for the project.

And of course, a lot of our evidence is bound up in these bronze, gold, and silver objects, which are not forged but cast using crucibles. there you are, crucible of nations. Now you know. Yeah, I like that. I like that sort of metaphor and direct relation to the objects. So we're going to get back to some of these objects and some of these things later on. But can you just say, so if we don't have a Scotland as we now know it by the end of the time that you write about, what sort of point in time would we recognise that entity, sort of today's Scotland? How late does that really come in?

Yeah, so the word Scotland is an English word, or I should say an old English or Anglo-Sah. And that word appears in Anglo-Saxon sources as early as the 10th century. But at that point, it means the land of the Scots, which in this case is people who speak the Scottish, i.e. the Gaelic language. By the 10th century, that's only part of Scotland. Generally the West, but increasingly the Eastern Midlands as well are speaking Gaelic. So at that point, it just means the land of the Gaelic speakers. if you like. By the 12th century, there is a kingdom that is being referred to externally as Scotland, the kingdom of Scotland, and increasingly from the 12th century, the kings of Scots and sources within

Scotland begin to use that term as well. In other words, they pick up the English word for their kingdom because Scots is an offshoot of the English language and that is one of these languages that is increasingly being used in the 12th century. So it's definitely not an easy answer to that question, which is fair enough. But I wanted to go back a little bit more to the beginning, really, just to start in that earliest part that you write about and the sort of early part of the medieval period. If we go back to the 8th century, for example, what's the political situation? I mean, you mentioned quite a lot of groupings here already. What really is the political situation at that point in time?

That's right. So at that point, in the early medieval period, you have these really. regional kingdoms. In the documentary sources, they're defined by the main language group, or if you like, the ethnic group that lives in that area. So the largest entity is the kingdom of the Picts. The Pictish people are a group that is first attested in Roman sources. They're enemies of Rome at that point, but they're kind of an amorphous body. By the 7th, 8th, 9th century, they are a big player in the north. They're one of the biggest kingdoms. and they're expanding out. They're a group of people who speak the Pictish language, which is closely related to the British language or an ancestor of modern-day Welsh. Alongside the pigs, you have the Scots,

and they're speaking Gaelic, that is the old Irish language. If you've ever been to Scotland or looked at a map, it's very rocky and there's lots of inlets in the west coast. It's actually much easier to get by sea, and so they're actually in closer contact across the water with Ireland than they are with their neighbors geographically, the Picts. And so they have been speaking Gaelic, just like they are in Ireland. So they are called the Scots in the sources. In the rest of Scotland, in the southeast, you have Anglo-Saxon speaking areas, the Kingdom of Northumbria,

which extends in various times up to around where Edinburgh is today and even further at some points. and then in the West you have the Britons and they are again British speaking people they are speaking a language that is close to old Welsh Okay so we really do have this quite complex picture right at the beginning and you can see how that develops quite you but in terms of what you've been looking at them

so you've been looking at the objects in the museum especially and are these identities also clear in the artefact material or is it more written source that gives us that information That's the interesting thing. Right off the bat, you see some things that are tied to certain areas. But in actual fact, the Picts, the Scots and sometimes the Britons are using the same kinds of broaches. So there are some categories of evidence which cross over these language boundaries and these political boundaries. And then there's some things like Pictish stones, which I've mentioned already, and Pictish symbols which are usually found carved on those stones, which are specific. to certain kingdoms. You know, so there are things that are locally specific, specific to one area, and there's things that cross over these boundaries.

It's just never as clear as you'd like. No, it's always the case, isn't it? Wherever you go, you have these very straightforward written sources, and then the material on the ground is quite a lot more sort of blurry. But talking then, if we're in the 8th century, of course, I have to ask you about the Vikings and the Viking raids and attack. So this really begins then. The raids started in the late 8th century,

and Scotland was quite, I'm using obviously the modern term today, it was quite heavily targeted by the Scandinavians. Can you say a little bit about what that looks like for Scotland in that very sort of early period of raiding activity? Absolutely. So the book kind of opens with this sort of a survey of these names and places and it basically says we need to turn to the archaeology. You look at the archaeology and you have these great,

Pictish stones. And the thing that kind of opens the Kingdom of Scott's Gallery in the museum is the Forteviot arch, this great big monolithic stone with a large figure of a man in a toga with his lovely curled hair, huge mustache, you know, dramatic. And there's three lesser figures and a cross in the middle. This seems to be the arch for a large stone church, maybe a palace. And we know it's found at Fortiviot, where there is a mention of a palace in the 19th. century. So for Tevi, it is this very important place. It's the residence of the kings of the Picts. And this stone and the other carved stones around it, you look at them and you say, these are people who are definitely on top of their game, you know? But then what happens? In 793, the raid on Lindisfarne, so they're going straight to the center of the church in Northumbria. And two years later, 795, there's a raid on Iona, the most important monastery for both the Scottish and the Pictish kingdom by this point. You know, so they're going straight to the heart.

They're going right to where it hurts. It means that the Vikings kind of know what's up. They know where to go, they have informants, and you know, there's a sense that they're not just some sort of uncontacted alien race, that they are doing something that is political from the start. You know, you could say, maybe they've gone to these places because they've heard that's where the most money is. But I think it's a little bit more than that.

I think it's that they're going to these places because that is where it'll have the most impact. And certainly within a couple of generations, you know, the kings of the Picts are struggling to hold on to power. At the beginning of the Viking Age, they held territory all across much of what is Scotland now. And by the middle of the 9th century, they're struggling to hold on to their bit of power in the northeast of Scotland. There are now Viking settlements at least in the Hebrides, in the Northern Isles as well, and the Scots are losing grip on their power as well. So within the first 50 years of those Viking raids, it looks like politically Scotland is up for grabs.

So that's basically a very effective strategy, I suppose, to go for those targets. We're not just looking at those sort of hit-and-run raids, getting something valuable and taking it back, which I think it's often pictured as. But the one thing I wanted to ask about that is what really do we have as evidence, apart from those written sources, that we have those attacks are known about because they're written down. But sort of on the ground in the archaeology, do we have much evidence for attacks on monasteries and churches? That's right. So we have this great seam of indirect evidence, which is so obvious when you look at it all together.

And that's the evidence of relics, reliquaries, shrines that are chopped up into fragments, ripped apart sometimes, and remade into things like brooches and pins. And we find them in Viking graves. We find them in Viking graves in Scotland and Ireland, as well as back in the homelands, if you like, in Scandinavia. And there's hundreds of them. So there is the sense that a lot of sacred material was being chopped up and reused in this fashion. So that seems to be clear evidence for raids. On the ground in Scotland, there's been several monasteries and several of these monasteries with recorded raids that have been excavated pretty well over the last few decades. And only at one at Port Mahomac in the northeast of Scotland in the Pictish kingdom, is there any evidence for a catastrophic?

burning event and two skulls with blade wounds, all of it radiocarbon dated to this period. In fact, it was such a great sort of archaeological project over 20 years, led by Martin Carver, formerly of the University of York, that they were able to refine their radiocarbon dates to a single generation for this burning event. It was around 780 to 810 or 8.20, so they can narrow down to the very beginning of the Viking Age. and Port Mahomac was never documented. It doesn't show up in any of the Irish sources, so we only know that there was a catastrophic burning event there from the archaeology.

But it's an outlier because it's the only one of these monasteries, documented or otherwise, that has anything like that clear evidence for a big burning event. Now, that doesn't mean that it was a Viking raid, of course. Other people were committing violence and atrocities, even against monasteries. We have that well documented in Ireland from the late 8th. century especially, and I'm sure Scotland is no exception. But in terms of the archaeology of a raid, Port Mahomac seems to be it. So there's a question there about what was the usual way that a monastery was attacked, you know? Are you always expecting a burning layer or is it something different?

So on Iona, there's not any evidence of that burning or any of that catastrophic activity that you see at Port Mahomac, but you have historical references saying there was a raid in 7.5. 95. There was one in 802. There was one in 806 and 825. Multiple people killed, and some of those, at least. And so the more realistic sense to me is a Viking raid usually consists of a bit of violence, but mostly the threat of violence, taking people away and expecting some payment for ransom, selling people off into slavery. But you don't destroy the monastery because that's a golden goose. You want to be able to come back and do it again. And that seems to be. be what happens on Iona. And so there's an expectation of a Viking raid looking a certain way, but maybe we've got it all wrong. Yeah, that is such a good point, isn't it? And also it just demonstrates how many of them that we haven't got information about. So I think that timeline creating it just based on the written sources is actually, it can be quite misleading, which I think why, as your book so nicely demonstrates, we need to look at all the other evidence that we've got.

Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, not just the Tudors, we talk about everything, from sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. So moving on a little bit then, about all these kingdoms are forming. What sort of happens next after that? What new kingdoms start to emerge in this period? So, I mean, for me, there were certain periods of time

where the historical sources get really problematic for Scotland. They're not really hugely abundant to begin with in the early medieval period. But there's enough recording of where Pictish kings are and where kings of Scots are in the 8th and 9th century that you can kind of track their movements a little bit. But in the late 9th century, things kind of blink out for almost a generation. You know, we almost get no events recorded in Scotland. And when they come back in the year 900 and they begin to report events, they're no longer referring to the Picts. or the kingdom of the pigs, the kingdom of Fort True, which was their main kingdom. That word doesn't get used anymore after about 900, 904, I believe is the last mention of either one.

And instead, you get this mention of a new entity called Alba. And Alba is a Gaelic word. It's the Irish word. It just means Britain, or just used to mean Britain. But from 900 or so, Alba means specifically this kingdom of Gaelic. Gaelic speakers in what used to be picked land, the northeast of Scotland. So something has happened in that generation or two in between the 870s and 900. The pigs disappear, it seems, and they're replaced by this new kingdom speaking a different language called Alba.

And for me, that as an archaeologist, that's where you want to go. Where the sources blink out, this is where we might step in and figure things out. So I really looked at the evidence in the museum that anything that dated to the late 9th century. And what you have is lots of material actually coming in not from Viking Scandinavia in Northeast Scotland, but you have a lot of Anglo-Saxon material. You get Anglo-Saxon coins, Mercian coins, you know, coins of Wessex that are miles away from where they would have normally circulated. You get pins that you don't usually get and balance scales for weighing small amounts of silver or other precious metals. And you just don't get these kinds of things.

They seem to be something brought in externally. But not from Norway and not from Dublin where the Vikings are. They're coming from somewhere else. As you well know, and as listeners to this podcast well know, in the 860s and 870s, the time of the Viking Great Army that are rampaging through England and knocking out kings. They're going straight to the seats of power, extracting money. And if they don't have enough money to pay, well, things go south. And there are knock-on effects to that that I've been able to see, thanks to, you know, the work of people like yourself, Kant.

Don Hadley and Julian Richards' work on the Great Army and their footprint, the archaeological signature, is something that you are now beginning to see in Scotland to a certain extent. Those coins seem to be a marker of Great Army war bands, or at least people who are trading with the Great Army. And that is what you're getting on the ground in the 860s and 70s in hordes. You're beginning to get sort of echoes, rather than the archaeological footprint of the Great Army. You're getting sort of hints of people interacting with them.

So rather than Viking, as in Norse Scandinavian activity in northeast Scotland, the archaeology tells us that the Vikings, we know, are raiding in this area, are those that are linked to what becomes the Dane law. And there's a lot of work still to be done about who we actually mean when we talk about the Vikings, especially in Scotland. It's all a bit messy, but I think that's what's exciting about it. I think that's such an important point because really what you're talking about with all this with the Great Army, that stuff that happens in the 870s. There's that point where that Great Army sort of stops us an entity, isn't it? And then these people who are associated with it, we don't quite know what happens to them. And we're talking, you know, thousands of people and we know some of them settle, some of them go north, some of them go all over the place. And so to trace that with the objects and the artefacts, I think it's absolutely brilliant.

So I was so happy to see that. And I also have to point out, I did spot in your book a bead, a very particular, a Cornelian bead. And as you might know, I've looked at one of those associates with the Great Army. They're very rare in Britain. I think there's only about four, possibly five from the whole of Britain. And in my book, River Kings, I traced that back. And that's very strictly associated, I think, with this group. So the fact that you've got one too, I believe, is quite a nice little link.

Yeah, that was almost my favourite object in the whole time. that I spent in the museum. When I first came to the museum, you know, you kind of have the entire collection. These are thousands of objects to play with, really. And, you know, so you kind of get shown around the collections and say, well, these are well-known assemblages. These haven't really been registered yet, but we've had them for a while. So you could probably look at those. And it was one of those latter ones that I opened up first. This was an assemblage from excavations led at Coldingham Priory. Now, Coldingham is in the Scottish borders, and it's mentioned in Bede, you know, in the 8th century. So it goes back quite a long way.

There's been a Northumbrian monastery and a double house. That means monks and nuns at Coldingham since at least the 7th century, certainly into the 8th century. So it's no surprise that there's early medieval stuff there. Metal detecting activity has also found lots of Northumbrian strap ends, which might date to the 9th century. So the picture of Coldingham in this period has been building up slowly for a long time. So I thought, let me have a look at this old excavation assemblage and see if there's anything there. Well, there was mostly sort of modern bits and pieces, later medieval bits and pieces, you know, a bit of ironwork. You always get that nails and things like that, things that are not really diagnostic of any time period, but are still important and still need to be sort of looked at.

One thing jumped out immediately, and it was that little bead. And it was marked on the paper, Carnelian bead, but nothing else. And I had to go back to the interim reports, which were luckily published in a local journal. And they did kind of mention the seasons of excavation where they were. They're around the priory. They're in structures, which are 12th century buildings, but they're getting underneath them at this point. So there's no surprise to find something early medieval there. Well, I thought that was interesting.

I put it away, and I didn't come back to it. A few years later, River Kings comes out. And by a famous person you may have heard of, Kat Yarmin. And the issue of this Carnalian bead, the importance of that Carnalian bead and all of the international links that it sort of carries within it from maybe as far as India or the Indian Ocean area, you know, it tells us that the trade routes in this area are not just expanding out to the North Atlantic and into Britain and Ireland, but very crucially and probably, more importantly, expanding out east where the silver eventually is coming from, which is such an iconic part of the Viking Age. And so this Carnelian bead, potentially, if it comes from that time, it's effectively unstratified, unfortunately. But as you said, it's one of only five known from anywhere in Britain. And all of the other sites that they have been found are associated with Viking settlements or Viking activity. So at Coldingham, there, potentially, you have an unrecorded, maybe a stopover or some link with that great army.

And if you go back to episode one, I believe, of this very podcast, there's this great update on fieldwork, finding more and more evidence of the Great Army pushing further inland up those river systems. You know, so I think there's a lot more work to be done in the Scottish borders. There's more Viking Age there than people have ever realized. I think that's so absolutely fantastic. And I just love the fact that we can have all these objects, these things that have been lying around for, you know, decades in some cases. and actually it's now that we can pit them together and actually answer some of these blanks that you were saying earlier on that this period

really is a big blank and we don't know from the source of what's happening. So it just shows how important the archaeology is really. Just to pick up on something you said there about these international connections and you mentioned earlier as well, this idea that really is the water routes and that transport around to Ireland

and the Irish Sea region is really, really important. And I think especially for those who are based down in South West England and we sort of feel like this, the north is very, very remote and very inaccessible. But that's really not the case, is it? I mean, this is very connected to so many places. It's actually a bit like a sort of central hub in some ways, isn't it?

That's absolutely right. I mean, the more you look at the archaeology, the more that you see that everything is linked together over great distances and never more than in the Viking Age. You know, in the Roman period, you wouldn't bat an eye to see things from Algeria showing up in Scotland because they have these roads and these shipping lanes and all of the infrastructure to take these things across great distances.

No problem. But for hundreds of years in Scotland, you don't get anything close to that. You get the occasional exotic imports, but nothing along those lines of sort of regular trade, if you like, or regular shipments of material coming in from far off lands. Only in very short blips of time do you get that in Scotland. In the Viking Age, you begin to get very exotic things, that Cornelian. bead from Collingham is just one example. The most iconic example is, of course, these coins minted in the Islamic caliphates. And we have these Durham silver coins in Scotland that are

minted as far as modern-day Uzbekistan in Central Asia, making their way across these riverine routes up through the Baltic and via Scandinavia, eventually coming to Scotland. To get a coin like that intact all the way from Uzbekistan to the Isle of Sky, where one of these is found in one of the Hebridean islands on the west coast of Scotland is a mind-blowing thing. But we have several of these Durham coins now from the almost invariably the northern and western seaways. So these are where those international shipments of material are being brought to Scotland. If you live on the water and you have a good harbor at this time, you are kind of on top of the world. you know, and in this couple of hundred years, the islands of Orkney, the islands of Shetland, and the Hebrides on the West Coast, and even the islands of the Clyde Firth, inland, close to Glasgow, these places begin to show a kind of wealth that they haven't experienced at that point in history for a very long time. They become central rather than peripheral. If you are on the coastline on a good harbor in Orkney, you are at the center, certain

by the 10th century, you're at the center of an international sort of motorway system that stretches to the Baltic and to Central Asia in one direction, to Scandinavia, to the North Atlantic, which is now being colonized and settled by the Scandinavians, by that time, off to the north and to the new world. And then down south to the Irish Sea, where the silver coins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom and the silver arm rings being minted by the Kingdom of Dublin are all swimming together, You know, so if you live on one of these Scottish islands, you're actually at the centre, rather than at the periphery of these major transnational routeways.

I think that's such a powerful image and just sort of shifting that attention is fantastic. Now, I know that you and I could talk about this particular point in time for hours, probably, but I think we have to just move on a little bit. So I wanted to go more towards the end of this period, then, to what happens later on. If we go to the 11th century, now the Viking Age, looking at England, and we have this very nice and convenient end point, 1066, normal innovation, Viking Age ends into the next stage. Now, I think the situation isn't quite as simple as that, if we look at Scotland. What's sort of happening there then in the 11th century and at that same sort of point in time?

This was, for me, one of the most exciting parts of the research. One of the things I started looking at almost right away, because again, as an archaeologist, I was actually drawn to these periods where there are, Fewer historical sources are less reliable historical sources. And the 11th century has been called by very good archaeologists, the darkest of the dark ages, you know, for Scotland. The sources that we have are quite unreliable. They're a little bit late.

And they cover this time period, but they were written later on by the winners, you know. And so a lot is left out. And a lot is tidied up in those sources. So the 11th century seems to be forgotten. Meanwhile, in the earldom of Orkney, people who work on Scandinavian archaeology in Scotland are in their element. In the Norse earldoms, my goodness, they are building churches of mortared stone, you know, cut stone, lovely towers, the first in Scotland. Probably one of the earliest tower bells in Scotland comes from a place called Kullivow in Shetland, you know. And so the Norse earldom is on top of its game.

They are commissioning these great works, big palaces are mentioned in the sagas, and we have the foundations of those structures that we can still walk on today. St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, the first and best surviving complete Romanesque building, really, in Scotland. You know, other cathedrals survive from this period, but they've been done up and changed over the years, where St. Magnus is a 12th century sort of time capsule. So you see, and they're sponsoring Scaldic poetry, they're reading these tales and these sagas in their halls, and they're getting written down for the first time. So if you study Scandinavian Scotland, great, loads of material. And for everyone else, it's really the case of, well, there's the Norman conquest going on further south, and that kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the room. There's this great volume called the Archaeology of the 11th century, and every chapter is about the Norman conquest. And there's one chapter about Scotland specifically, which is great.

But there is a sense that the 11th century is kind of forgotten about by archaeologists. Historians have been working through those sources in amazing ways, and they've created these great new insights. The important thing is that there is a period here in the 11th century where there's a lot of new stories to be told archaeologically. And you begin to get this sense of, especially in Eastern Scotland, a reappearance of archaeology in a way. We didn't have burials in the 9th and 10th centuries in Eastern Scotland in the area of the Pigs.

We don't have settlements. We don't have hill forts and halls, or at least very few of them compared to what was there before. So there's a sense of a gap. But in the 11th century, begin to get more carved stone crosses. And these carved stones, these high crosses have biblical imagery. And they look very similar to the high crosses that are being cut in. Ireland at this time. And of course, Alba is an Irish speaking, I should say Gaelic speaking. So Gaeldom as a whole extends into Ireland and Scotland at this point. So there's no surprise

that they're carving Irish-looking crosses. But we tend not to really study them because people who study carved stones tend to study these Pictish carved stones, which are more famous and more abundant. And the later ones are kind of difficult to date and problematic. So they've been understudied. You begin to get the first coin hordes. While we have all these great silver hordes deposited from Galloway in the Galloway hoard around 900, the scale horde in Orkney, the heaviest by silver weight horde in Scotland and almost anywhere is deposited in Orkney in the middle of the 10th century. In Alaba, in eastern Scotland, there's none of that activity. There's no silver hordes. And so the 10th century is kind of a blip archaeologically there. In the 11th century, you begin to get the first

silver hordes again. And what do they consist of? Coins of canute, minted probably in London. So you're getting these coins of canute in some places and you're getting coins now minted in Dublin in other places. And sometimes they're cheek by jowl. Sometimes you get coins of both in the same area, you know, for instance. And so you get a sense of these people in Alaba in Eastern Scotland kind of in a position now to play both sides. They are cultivating relationships with the Orkney Earldoms. The Kings of Scots are cultivating relationships with the Orkney Earldoms at the same time as they are sort of cultivating relationships with their co-language speakers in Ireland, as well as playing, sometimes invading, sometimes accepting exiles of the Anglo-Saxon

and increasingly the Anglo-Danish kingdoms down south. So you get a sense of alba kind of biting its time and becoming more powerful by kind of playing both sides, or all three sides, really. And I think there's a lot more interesting stories to tell there, but the 11th century has more to say artificially than people realized before. I think that brings you back quite nicely

to what you were saying about the beginning, actually, as well, about the title for the book, this idea of a crucible, things sort of happening. and as a sort of melting pot. So you have so many different elements sort of all coming together and all those contacts and networks.

I think that sort of illustrates that really beautifully, doesn't it? But we're going to have to sort of finish off a bit, but what's missing now? You know, obviously you've got to the end of that project. You've written the book, but that's never the end of it, is there? What else is there?

If you were going to be given, you know, if some other distillery was going to come along and give you another three years worth, what is the next step? What else should we find out about? There's so many ways you could go. One thing that I'm really interested in that I've been pursuing for a couple of years now is, well, I've looked at the artifacts and the artifacts have all this evidence of blending of influences, you know, of coming together of Irish and Scandinavian motifs into one object and that kind of thing. And you have all these hyphenated terms for this period.

You have hibernon Norse objects. You have Anglo-Scanadian objects. But none of those terms actually includes Scotland, if you think about it. Hiberno and Norse, Irish and Scandinavian, characterizes much of what is now Scotland. Anglo-Danish, Anglo-Scanadian, again, kind of doesn't leave any evidence, any space for that big chunk in between. So the artifactual things, they take you to a certain point where you see a lot of influences coming together, but the movement of people is what's really going to bring that home. And there's been only very few isotope analysis done on Viking burials, that is burials with grave goods.

What I'd like to do a lot more of, though, is take that sort of a full set of a population from the 9th of the 12th centuries, with grave goods or not, and subject them to the same kind of techniques. We tend to focus on very few and very special and different burials when we test them for DNA and isotopes, because we assume that those. probably have good evidence of being migrants. And so let's see if they have evidence of being migrants. So we test them. But we don't often test everybody else. So how would you know who lived there before and who stayed there after? I would hope that more DNA and more isotope analysis was done across the board. And then we can truly begin to map out who is moving and where. and where that has been done, the evidence is so interesting. You know, so you have clear evidence of people coming in, according to isotopes, from Scandinavia.

A lot of your work has focused on this, of course. And in addition to that, we have a lot of evidence for people of non-Scanadian descent, or at least according to their isotopes, not born and raised in Scandinavia, who ended up being buried in Viking fashion. And invariably, in Scotland so far, it's been women or people buried as women in the female costume of the time that have had isotopes whose signal is insular, that is British, Scottish, Irish, English. Basically, there are women who are insular dressed as Vikings and men who are probably from

Scandinavia in these early Viking Age cemeteries. Is that a pattern that holds up throughout the entire Viking Age? Are we getting a sense of, you know, men moving around more than women? Not really. The women who have been tested so far are insular, but they are not local. They're moving around as well. So they're buried on Orkney and Lewis, the people who have been tested so far, but they are not from Orkney or Lewis. So everyone's moving around at this time. So I'd like to find out more about how many people are moving. What are the population dynamics? Is there internal migration between Eastern and Western Scotland? Those kinds of dynamics. And until we figure that out, we're not going to be able to tell a real clear story about migration at this time. And it's such a relevant issue now that I think it really behooves us to pursue this further. That sounds fantastic.

And I really hope that that's something they can go ahead because I completely agree. That's absolutely what's going to help us answer some of those stories. Adrian, that's been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much. and I would highly recommend people check out your book, The Crucible of Nations Scotland from Viking Age to Medieval Kingdom. And where can people buy it? Is it going to be available for many shops?

Yes, it's going to be available wherever you buy books, but right now you can pre-order it on the National Museum Scotland website. Just go to the shop link, and the link to pre-order the book is live now. Fantastic, and I can guarantee you that's going to want to travel up to the museum and actually look at the objects themselves as well. Thank you so much everyone for listening and thanks again, Adrian, for joining me. So this has been Gone Medieval by History Hit.

I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and I will be back again next Tuesday and my co-host as always Matt Lewis will be back with one of his episodes on Saturday. Have a great week.