Gone Medieval - The Walls That Made Wales

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

For thousands of years, the building of walls has played an essential role in shaping the world as we know it; from being used to monitor populations to controlling trade, they have often acted as borders of entire nations. In this episode, Howard Williams takes us through some of the most famous walls in medieval history and explores how two of the best-known linear earthworks in western Britain, Offa's Dyke and Wat's Dyke, have served to separate England and Wales. Howard Williams is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Chester. 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, I'm Dr Kat Jarman and this is Gone Medieval from History Hit. For millennia, walls have been built to mark out territory, to control movement, to keep people out and to keep them in. And here in Britain, people may be well familiar with something like Haydain's Wall, which was built to guard the northwest frontier of the Roman Territory. But that's not the only wall or linear earthwork, as we've

them as well that we have here. So in fact, if you move towards the western boundaries of what is now England, we find a few others. And these turned out to play a vital role in shaping the kingdom of Wales. Today, we're going to be hearing about this from Professor Howard Williams from the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Chester. Thank you for joining me today, Howard. That's great to be here, Kat. Hello. Hi. So Howard is a specialist in early medieval archaeology, and especially death, burial and commemoration. But he's also involved in the research and promotion of the history of these particular earthworks,

especially through a number of new initiatives, such as the Offerstike Collaboratory, which is a research network for Offerstike, Wadsdyke, and early medieval Western Britain more widely. So we're going to get into the details of those particular earthworks quite soon. But just to start out with, Howard, I was hoping that we could go a bit broader

to get a bit of the sort of wider context. first of all, in terms of walls and linear earthworks. Could you tell me something about when, really, people start making these sort of earthworks in the early medieval Europe? And the sort of related question, really, of why? Okay, it's a really complex question. No one has an answer, because almost all of these have very few and very far between historical sources associated with them. We often don't know for sure, because these earthworks and walls were built over millennia. and we often don't have historical sources associated with who built them and why. And often there are explanations that come much later and they're very implausible.

They're very stereotypical explanations written by authors looking with hindsight hundreds of years later. So across Eurasia from the first millennium BC through to the first millennium AD, we have lots of massive linear earthworks. And in early medieval Europe, we find them used in a whole variety of different, ways, but only in specific areas. And they seem to be, and in shorthand, they are about walling people out and walling people in, but they're also about controlling movement across their line in times of peace and wartime. And also, there seems to be another key function that links many of them together is they control trade and movement along their line. So they

follow arteries, rivers or isthmuses. And in that regard, these, linear earthworks serve a whole variety of functions. And so it's also important to say that their functions weren't fixed. And many of these earthworks have multiple stages to their development. So it's a mixed and messy problem to start with, with few historical sources and actually monuments that may be built for very different reasons on different scales by different agents, maybe local elites or merchants, but also rulers. And so while you'll often see, oh, states build these wars against nomads and barbarians. The Romans did it, early medieval kingdoms did it. Actually, there may be a lot more nuance. Many kingdoms could be very effective and successful

without needing to build frontier earthworks. And some of these earthworks, when they are built by kingdoms, don't seem to be on frontiers or borders, but they seem to become frontiers and borders because an earthwork was built there. So we often don't know the chicken and egg causation of the relationship. So, yeah, you'll see a simplified view, but actually we seem to have a lot of messy complication to why people wanted to build these earthworks and how they were used.

So, yeah, not a simple picture, as I was hoping, you're going to give me a simple answer there. Absolutely not, yeah. If we think about early medieval Europe, well, we'll go to Britain, but Europe, can you give some examples of some of the notable walls that we have? Right, so we have from late prehistory in the island of Britain

and also Ireland, you know, linear earthworks, and we seem to see this tradition pick up after the end of the Western Roman Empire. The most famous ones on the continent that we know about is the Danverker, which is a multi-phase earthwork cutting across the base of the Jutland Peninsula in what is now northern Germany, but historically was on the southern edge

of the emerging Danish kingdom. And that seems to have been built and rebuilt over 8, 900 years from at least the 5th century AD, right up to the 12th. century and of course it saw activity again in the wars of the 19th century. So, you know, that is an earthwork that have many different phases. So it's often called a Viking earthwork because it becomes associated with the important Viking sort of trading side and an early town

of Hedeby or Hidabu. But it had already many stages are being built. And what it's doing is cutting across that peninsula, linking the river systems east-west, the links from the Baltic to the North Sea, but also stopping people freely moving up and down that peninsula. From Bruehers, from Britain, the best ones known are the Cambridgeshire dike systems, some of which seem to be Iron Age, some of which seem to be early medieval, such as the Devils Dyke and Flem Dyke. We also have the Wandsdyke, West Wandsdyke in East Wandsdike, which has often been seen as either built by Britons against Saxons in the 5th century, or more recently, it's more plausibly understood as a earthwork built by the West Saxons against the Mercians in the 7th or

early 8th centuries. And then in the Western Britain, the most famous, big peasant, amongst many other smaller linear earthworks are Watts-Dike and Offers-Dike. These are the two bigons, but we also have lots of small little ones, little tidlers, little small short dikes, as they're called, in this Western British zone of what it's going to become England and Wales. And these may have been built by lots of different times and by different individuals, many of them have been dated to the 6th and 7th century AD, and then we have the big ones, Watts-Dike and Offers-Dike. Excellent. Okay, so let's go on to these two now then.

And I think Offer Steak is probably the one that most people are, well, people are more likely to have heard of, even though I think these will be new to a lot of people. So let's just start with that. And I know there's some very good reasons to give Whatstike more attention than it has had so far. But tell us about Offer Stike and whether it was actually associated with Offer at all. Yeah. So the most famous one people all know about is the monument, but perhaps they'll also be aware of the long distance national trail, the walking trail, Offer's Dyke Path. and there's a blessing and a curse of that fame is that people often get them confused and think that they're walking on the path, they're actually on Offers Dyke,

and sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. And the other thing is people will be aware of is Offers Dyke is often used now as a shorthand for the border of England and Wales, which in very small sections is right, but large stretches of Offersdike are in England and other large stretches of it are in Wales. And there's also lots of areas where we don't know if it went there at all. But yeah, in short, Offersdike is known because the biologist of King Alfred the Great of Wessex in the late 9th century, Asser, records in his biography that there was a king of old called Offer who built a wall from sea to sea. And this is the only early medieval reference we have associating a king offer of Mercia of the late 8th century, therefore a hundred years before Assas' time, with this great bank and ditch earthwork that, according to Asa, went from sea to sea.

in other words, went from the 7 and Y confluence down where the 7 spews out into the Bristol Channel right up to the D estuary. And so Offersdyke is preserved well over about 85 miles, and there are a whole debate about whether it actually did extend from sea to sea. But this is the major earthwork everyone's heard of, because it's our biggest ancient monument. It's longer than Hadrian's wall. It's huge.

And where it survives well, it's a massive. massive, sometimes even four meter tall bank and a two to three meter deep ditch to its western side and there's other features associated with it too. So everyone's heard of Offersdike, but actually do we know it was built only by offer or by offer at all? We're still not sure. We've got some radio carbon dates by Cluidat Pyrois Archaeological Trust and they've shown that it, for sure, it is an early medieval monument. We have radiocarbon dates from Offersdyke now confirming it was built after the Roman period, and indeed, frankly, we knew that already because Sir Cyril Fox excavated a Roman settlement at Frith in Flintshire and found that Offersdite was built over Roman layers.

So we kind of already knew it was post-Roman. But, you know, it's looking definitely like an early medieval earthwork. You know, we don't know for sure whether it was built in one phase by King Offer at a commission by King Offer. He obviously didn't dig it all himself. Or it was built by multiple rulers who were augmenting to a conventing to a converse. common scheme, these western frontiers of this central English kingdom. And remember, Mercia in the 8th century, was the greatest power in these islands. A kingdom that stretched from London

to the Wash, to the D and Mersey estuaries, to the southern. So the four great sort of river estuaries of the island were controlled by Mercia. It was a great trading power. They had connections with the Frankish Empire and with Italy, King Offer and his successors, but also his predecessors were seeing themselves as kings of all Britain long before they had the military and socio-economic and political whack to actually take on that role. Obviously, something that was going to come only far later with the emergence of England in the 10th century in the wake of the early Viking Age. So yeah, these kings had aspirations and one of the things they wanted to do was build big earthworks. And there's been a whole debate about, you know, was offer, if he was the person

building this massive earthwork? Was he building it just as a prestigious thing to show off his ideology, his inheritance of Roman imperial aspirations. The mercy in kings and the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were aware of the ruins of the Antonine frontier and Hadrian's wall in Northern Britain. Was he trying to bring back the Golden Age? Make Mercy great again, as people have been long joking in, well, joking for the last couple of years anyway. Was he trying to actually emulate the glories of Rome and this was more of a vanity project? Or was he actually facing real problems with his Western frontier, with the rival Welsh kingdoms, and this was about military dominance of an area which he really had trouble sort of controlling

raids of the Welsh deep into mercy and territory. And in between those two extremes, a symbolic ideological interpretation and a kind of military one, there's a whole raft of other factors. And I've already hinted that trade and commerce would have been key. And by controlling that zone to the West, he's not only controlling and managing raids from his enemies, not only is he able to militarily strike out westwards over this frontier at will and carry and dominate areas to the west of the dyke, but he's also able to control the trade. So it could be an economic as well as a political and an ideological aspect. And I think we shouldn't perhaps try to pretend we can work out

exactly the weighting of that with the evidence we have. We only have that one historical source and all the rest of the evidence comes from archaeological investigation. Hi, I'm Susanna Lipscomb and in my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, I'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Belethkeh to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Excellent. So can you say that a little bit just about what is happening to the West? what's actually happening for those like myself

whose knowledge of early medieval whales is a little bit sketchy. What's going on that he might be sort of dealing with? So, yes, from the late 6th and 7th centuries we see in Lowland Britain, Germanic-speaking kingdoms coming to the fore as territorial entities on a big scale.

And these kingdoms are at least seven in number by the end of the 7th century and the biggest of them were Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, who by the Viking Age, you know, those horrible Vikings came and ruined it all, you know, the Northumbrians, the Mercians and the West Saxons were really the predominant forces. And they were increasingly pushing westwards, particularly the Mercians and the West Saxons, and gobbling up territory and becoming in control of areas that previously had been British-speaking,

Welsh-speaking kingdoms, in areas that had been part of the former Roman provinces. Because remember, Wales and Western Britain was all part of the... the Roman province of Britannia, and after the fall of Rome, very small British-speaking kingdoms are developed during the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries. So Mercia was slowly building its strength by not only fighting and absorbing smaller Anglo-Saxon rival kingdoms, but also smaller British kingdoms. And so by the 8th century, we see a really prosperous and powerful kingdom of Mercia with a network of routeways, river systems, market sites, ecclesiastical centres, trade networks across the North Sea, long-distance contacts, but also really expanding westwards.

And how they did that seems to be through raiding, as they were recipients of raids. They were raiding too. But it seems to be increasingly, they were using these linear earthworks to control territory and control movement. And in times of both peace and war, I think this is a way of dominating the landscape and dividing it up. And in Western Britain, in the line that it's going to become, offers Dyke and very close to the modern English-Welish border, remember people were still British-speaking and large parts of Mercia were British territories in the 7th, 8th century. So you're not dividing between peoples. This is often the cliché. You know, you're walling in the Welsh. Wales hasn't been invented yet. You're creating the Welsh by dividing the British-speaking peoples to the west of the dyke from the lost lands, as the Welsh would call them, from the lands that had formerly been British to the Welsh.

East and Offersdike seems to do this in a really avert, almost arrogant way. And in some places, it's cutting through and across river valleys just to the west of historically attested big Welsh monasteries whose lands must have been some of the great sort of focus of spiritual and economic power in the Western British landscape. And they're by saying, we're having those. And by the way, we're building our earthwork just to the west of it. So you can still come and visit them under our control. And you can still see them. You can see the lands. you've lost. So if you go bits of Offers-Dike in Northwest Shropshire, you can look one way

and you can see the Welsh Uplands, but you can only see about a kilometre that way, but you look Eastram Offers-Dyke, and you can see stretching over the plains of Shropshire and Cheshire, you can see all the lands that, you know, only in perhaps your grandfather's time, if you were Welsh-speaking, Britain, would have been yours, would have been part of an early

medieval kingdom of British control. But we don't know too much about them, and we don't have much historical sources, but we get a sense that there were powerful rivals to the Mercians, and by the century they were being gobbled up. So this is partially a land grab, but it was also about trying to then install a frontier system that allowed the dominance of that territory. Okay, so they're very much a match of just controlling territory, their political statements,

they're doing an awful lot of jobs. So we've focused on office dyke so far, but let's go to the one that's a bit more overlooked, Wattstike. Tell me about that. One important thing to say about what's dyke is that it's a linear earth worker, massive bank and ditch, and indeed it's long been recognized where it survives well to be just as big as Offersdyke. In contrast to Offersdyke, Watts Dyke runs further to the east in much lower-lying landscape and it follows the tops of ravines but also cuts over relatively rich agricultural land between those river systems. And the thing about that is that it's probably doing a very important job in the early Middle Ages but it survives in a much more poor condition. Farmers have knocked it down for over

a thousand years people have built over it. So we actually don't have many places where it survives as well as perhaps the more famous sections of Offersdyke that people might have seen in TV documentaries or aerial photographs of it dramatically sweeping over the Klan Forest and so on. So that's another reason why I feel it's a bit of a neglected monument. But that's an interesting thing too because the recent excavations of Wattsdyke have shown that even in places where it's really heavily damaged where the bank has been destroyed, where the ditch has long been filled in, the excavation showed that it was once a huge earthwork. So when Cecil Fox did his survey in the 1930s, he thought it was an intermittent monument. There had been huge stretches that were

just dense woodland, or maybe they didn't need to build it. Actually, everywhere we dig with modern methods, we find the traces of this massive earthwork. So really, those are the places where it's most damaged, where actually we might get the best results from future fieldwork. Watts Dyke is in the shadow of Offersdyke all the time. In fact, I've gone to parts of Watts Dyke with students and been talking about them and a bloke has come out of his house and I say, oh, I'm just showing my students Watts Dyke, which runs right next to your house and he goes, yeah, it's Offersdyke. And so actually, there's a lot of local confusion between Offersdyke and Watts Dyke. In fact, that confusion goes back to the Middle Ages. So, yeah, Watts Dyke is the sort of the little sister, or if you want to gender, a little brother of Offersdyke.

and it runs almost parallel with Offers Dyke in the northern stretches. So it's basically a monument that was surveyed by Cyril Fox in the early 1930s. It's been excavated over 70 times in different places, but without conclusive results until very recently. But it's been really overlooked. It's not really in the national consciousness of either Wales, England, or indeed in the borderlands itself, in the same way as Offers Dyke is. And partly that's because we're not really in the national consciousness of either Wales, England, or indeed, in the borderlands itself, in the same way as Offers, Dike is.

And partly that's because we're We don't know who what was. Who was what? In the same way as we have Watling Street. Is this a reference to a people called what? Is it a reference to a late 8th, early 9th century, mercian or Northumbrian lord called what, which is one idea? Or is it a mythical character, the father of Whalen the Smith,

who comes down to us as Wade in later medieval sources, in a very vague figure that people have often assumed with some kind of Germanic Anglo-Saxon legendary giants. that we have Wade's Causeway in Yorkshire. So is this another, you know, legendary name or even a mythological name attributed to this monument because no one knew who had built it? Or is this legendary name given to this monument because people knew who built it, but they wanted to make it sound like it was so impressive.

It's of a scale that could have been built by a giant, you know, or a greater smith or artisan. So, you know, we don't know. And that's really crazy. So part of the reason why it's kind of obscure is we don't know who what was or Wade, or as it's in later sources, Gado, and we don't have a like Offersdyke, we're still sketchy about the dates of Watts Dyke. A lot of people have assumed that What's Dyke,

because it's shorter, is earlier than Offers Dyke. It's perhaps a first experiment in long-distance landscape management and control, perhaps by Mercy and rulers who are predecessors of Offer in the late 7th, early 8 centuries. But excavations at Goboen in Shropshire, a decade ago,

suggested, based on radiocarbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence dating, that we may be looking at a later date in the early 9th century, the successors of Offer, who obviously a kingdom is still very powerful, but not perhaps at its apogee, perhaps over the peak of its power, yet to be knocked out of the power games by the Vikings,

still influential, still wealthy, but was trying to consolidate and sort of retrench against powerful new Welsh rivals. and 50 to 60 years after Offersdyke had been built. So maybe in that scenario, the king who may have built it would be Kenwolf, who we know actually died at Basing Work, which is the northern end of Watts Dyke. Yeah, but we still don't know. And I'm aware of forthcoming optically stimulated luminescence dating

and radiocarbon dates for other stretches and new excavations that pushed date back earlier. But it's really not clear. So we don't have a name, we don't have an historical figure, and we don't have a precise date for Watts-Dy. but I think in many ways it's a crucial monument. It's our third longest ancient monument. So yeah, it's shorter than Offersdike,

but it deserves our attention. And what's shocking is that in 100 years of scholarship, there are only a handful of academic studies of this monument. And if you're thinking of other major monuments in the British landscape, Hedron's Wall or Stonehenge, and I had to try and synopsize the academic research on those monuments in five minutes, it'd be impossible. But I can honestly tell you,

Cyril Fox surveyed it in the third. 30s, Margaret Worthington Hill did an M-Phil thesis at Manchester on it in the 1980s and published a paper in the 90s based on that. And then there's the excavation reports at various points by various people up and down its line. So really a handful of studies have been produced on this enigmatic but major linear earthwork. So you've mentioned some new dates and things like that that could be done to help. But what can we really do to improve knowledge about it though? It's a much hope if we haven't managed to in the last 100 years? Is it just because we haven't really tried? Or is there stuff we can do to try and understand it better? In terms of archaeology happening in the

early 21st century, we have to think of this as a two-pronged thing. We have to actually agree what we need to know about this monument and trying to convince even heritage specialists and archaeologists this monument deserves attention is an uphill climb. It's so big it almost escapes attention. Many narratives, many of the history books, many of the archaeology books about early medieval Britain don't even mention what's Dyke, even when they mention Offersdyke. So it's shocking how it's neglected even by scholars. So firstly, we have to agree that there's questions we need to ask. And thankfully, as part of the Office Dyke Collaboratory

and working with Clue Pousaerkeletal Trust, but also others, we're hopefully building not only the momentum to the justification to do the work, but also CPAT, Cluipa's Archaeological Trust, have been doing these new excavations. So we're starting that journey. The other prong is to try and convince people that this monument is in their landscape to make them aware of it. Because often people don't know that linear earthwork is there that Watts-Dyke is running right by their house or indeed right by their primary school. Because it's in a lowland location compared with Offers-Dike.

Large parts of the suburbs of Wrexham and actually a lot of villages near Mold actually have been built over Watts-Dike. And so you have a Watts-Dike way or a What-S-Dyke lane or whatever it might be and people go, oh, I wonder why it was called that. And it's because they've destroyed when they were building the housing estate in the 70s or 60s, a major linear earth worker. But there are also sections where it's really well protected. There are National Trust properties where at Ervig near Wrexham, where you can go and visit a wonderful example of late 17th, early 18th century landscape gardens and hall. But you also have impressively well-preserved sections of what's like. But the heritage sites don't tell you it's even there. So I suppose there's those two prongs.

Firstly, we need to agree what we need to know and start doing fieldwork surveys and excavations to investigate the monument in a rigorous way and take scientific datings so we can build up a picture of its date and its scale and its character. But also, we need to make local people aware that it's there because how can you expect people to be interested in something they don't even know exists? That's a very good point. And actually, I want to just point out that you've been involved in making a really brilliant comic book type heritage trail.

haven't you, which is available freely online for people to have a look at. So if you're listening to this and you want to go and check it out, which I absolutely recommend that you should. Where can you find that online? Yeah, so we have an Offers Dyke Collaboratory website and we're hosting on that the brilliant work of Archaeological Illustrator John Swagger, who's collaborated with me. We've created a 10-panel comic trail, so you can go to 10 points around the Welsh town of Wrexham, and each panel tells a story about Wattsdyke and the local landscape. It's called What's-Wats-Dike. So if you Google that or you go to our Collaboratory website, you'll see the links. Fantastic. Well, I'll definitely recommend people if they're stuck at home for a little bit longer, as we might be in 2021. Who knows? Then, yeah, go and have a look and give Wastike some more love. Howard, thank you so much for joining me and sharing all that today. That's a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. So this has been Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman.

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