Gone Medieval - Vikings in Britain: New Evidence

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Archeological evidence of the Vikings as far north as Northumbria has practically been non-existent. On Gone Medieval in May 2021, Dr. Cat Jarman reported on a brand-new Viking site in Northumberland, 15 years after metal detectorists started carefully documenting their finds in the area. In this edition of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman is joined by Dr. Jane Harrison and Dr. Jane Kershaw who report on new discoveries at the site which reveal more fascinating details about life and industry at the settlement in the ninth century.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Rob Weinberg. For more Gone Medieval content, 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 Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Now today I'm very excited to bring you an update on my very first podcast episode that I recorded. That was on the Vikings in Northern Britain and any loyal listeners out there might have heard this episode. I was joined by Dr Jane Kirshore from the University of Oxford. and we had just stepped out of the trench up in Northumberland. We were in the Koke Valley where we were working on some test pits on a brand new site associated with the Viking Great Army.

These campsites, these locations that were used by the Vikings, we know that they spend the winter there. So some of it is literally somewhere you can shelter and you can settle. They need to be defendable essentially, you need to be able to make sure you keep people safe. It used to be thought that these were fortifications because sometimes in their records they talk about fortifications. We don't have any evidence or any sign of fortifications here, do we? And instead, they are taking advantage of something else. The site is a naturally defensive site. It's an area of high ground with quite steep falls on at least three sides. Easy access to the river, which is great for looking out and keeping an eye on potential enemies.

And it also gives you access if you need to get out to the coast to get away. So we're not necessarily looking for built structures, the supports or ditches necessarily, but we're more looking for a prominent position in the landscape that takes advantage of the natural features. Because these sites are temporary sites. These are very short-lived, probably a year or so. Maybe they come back after a little while, but these are not permanent settlements. So we need to understand these as not sites that people are going to invest a great deal in terms of more permanent structures. Now, that was back in spring, 2021.

We were just starting to work out what that site was about. And now I'm very excited to have Jane back with me here with an update because since that time, she's also been joined by a colleague, Dr Jane Harrison, who works at the University of Newcastle and the University of Oxford. And together they've done two more excavations and they have some brand new and some really very exciting and slightly unexpected results from what is turning out to be a hugely exciting site. So first of all, Jane and Jane, welcome back and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. So so brilliant to have you both here to talk about this, especially because I actually don't know all the details yet, so this is the update for me as well. So Jane, can you just quickly do a little bit of a recap and summary for me? Can you explain to our listeners, what is this site about? What's there? Why did you go there in the first place?

Yeah, we were drawn to this site because we noticed a lot of metal detector finds being reported to the portable antiquity scheme that looked a lot like metal work coming out of documented Viking winter camps like Torxie, like Old Warc. And we thought it would be great to do some archaeological investigation to find out a bit more about the site and the background to these exciting finds. So the idea then was that this was an unknown winter camp of the Great Army because actually we have no evidence, do we really, of where the Vikings were in Northumbria, if they were even there in that time period? No, most maps of the Viking Great Army movement, they stop at the time. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Half Dan was on the Tyne, we're not exactly sure where, and then it doesn't really report any more about the Viking activity in Northumbria

until they go around and they settle in the area of York a bit later on. But actually some other sources do say that the Vikings went up to Scotland and they fought there in the mid to late 870s. And so actually we can expect that the Vikings were travelling further north and I think that's likely what our site relates to. But there wasn't really anything there. So when we went up there the first time, we were looking at sort of a hill up in a valley,

they're so river running past it. But up on that hill, it's just a plain big field. there was nothing. So we did some geophysics. We found some little blob, did some test bits, maybe something there, but not really that much. But then you went back in the autumn. And I wonder, Jane, if you could give us a little bit of summary. So when you went back in the autumn, what did those excavations reveal? What were you trying to find that time? As you said, the geophysics wasn't enormously helpful. There were things that suggested there was archaeology, but nothing that gave us shapes of structures or any sort of idea of what the age of

the site might be. But we thought there was enough to try opening bigger trenches after our test pits. So we opened two big trenches in autumn 2021. And essentially what we found were some big pits, some big ditches and some post holes, and a big spread of intercutting pits and rubbish, what we call midden. And those... produced some very interesting pottery, really thick and rough handmade wares, some finer ones, very difficult to date. A lot of evidence for metalworking and some iron artefacts. And we had enough from these features to go and get some scientific dating. And what we found was that the majority of these features, and one of the big pits, was really

interesting. It was over a metre deep and nearly three metres wide. But inside it, there had been layers where a cattle skull, for example, was laid on burnt stones and clay, so it was popped upright, so deliberate deposits of things in these pits, but they were dated to the early Anglo-Saxon period, so the late 6th into early 7th centuries, for which there is so little evidence, particularly in North Northumberland. And our spread of midden with lots of metalworking evidence in it also had some of those early Anglo-Saxon dates, then some later eight-scent century and then on the very top, later 9th century, so bang in that Viking age that we were interested in and from which those metal detected finds had come. So with that difficulty of physics,

it was a bit of a kind of, can we do it, shall we not? But we were really pleased with those results. Very exciting to have the early Anglo-Saxon site, but also linking that up to those metal-detected finds as well. Yeah, and that's what's really exciting to us. But maybe it is a little bit difficult to understand why we get excited about that, because one of the issues obviously with what we were there to look for in the first place, this Great Army presence, is that we have these camps, or we have objects, we have loose artefacts and things, but we don't really have structures, we don't really have anything else. And that's quite normal. You find the objects and things. The part of what we're trying to find out as well really is why did they

choose those sites, what was there already? And in this case, so one thing, obviously you had confirmed that somebody was there, somebody was doing something in the 9th century. It was exactly when we know that these artifacts of the Great Army were there. But actually, you also had something much earlier. So did that then suggest to you that this was a site that had been used consistently really for quite a long period of time? Yeah, we suspected that from the metal detector find. To start with the site itself topographically, it looks like an Iron Age Hillfort site. We had lots of Roman material, possibly Roman material of a military nature, potentially in connection with the construction of the Antonine wall. Then we had this early Anglo-Saxon material

coming through, then a bit of a gap, then some Viking Age material, and also after the Viking Age, lots of medieval artefacts coming out of the site as well. So we knew it was very long-lived. This was a site to which people were returning over a thousand-year period longer. And you can see that in the landscape, as Jane has touched on. It's on a raised area, It's got a very light soil, it's surrounded by water, and the sort of place where, particularly before we've got the sorts of plows that can deal with heavy land, where people would like to gather, but also it's well connected in terms of river communications, road communications. So as Jane said, it's a central place.

And what we had already, by the end of the first excavation, was the indication that people had gathered there that there'd been a lot of eating. Despite the acidic sand, a lot of bone survived. and there had been metal working because we had evidence of both primary working of metal and smithing to create artefacts on the site from the first excavations. So it all added up to a deep time picture and something quite complex too. So that was in the autumn last year. And then you've just come back now, literally, from a brand new season, continuing that work.

And you've found some really beautiful and quite spectacular things this time. So tell me then what happened this season? Okay, perhaps if I can talk a bit about what we found in our two new trenches, and then Jane can contextualise it in terms of the things that we found with renewed field walking and metal detecting in the field. So we opened two more trenches, again, always feeling slightly as if we were taking a bit of a leap of faith, because the geophysics was so complicated, difficult.

In one trench, we found the bases of little haths, probably used for metalworking, a possible grain dryer, which is a place where after you've harvested, you can put the drain in to dry it out before you store it. So lots of lovely burnt stone and bits of slag from metal working, but not surviving terribly well because it had been ploughed in the medieval period and later, and not coming up with much pottery,

but we did get lovely spindlewills from that area as well. So that was one trench. Now, in the other trench, which looked when we opened it, as usual, like a lot of different shades of brown sand, what we found was actually the complete plan and the building had burnt down. So that burning down of this building had preserved a lot more than you normally get if that sort of destruction hasn't happened.

And this building was one of a sort called a sunken feature building by archaeologists. We love acronyms like the police, SFBs. But a sunken feature building essentially is a building where they have dug down into the soil to help create height. And that's the essence of it, essentially. And they have been associated most the time with really quite small things. They're three metres by four meters. They have just a little sort of wooden tent roof on them, and they're used for storage or perhaps as workshops. The one we found was six metres by six meters in a bit. So it was much bigger, sub-square, sub-rectangular. It had been dug down, and is being dug down into our lovely sand on the site, lined with clay. And then there

were short walls. Because it had burnt down, we had the wattle and door that had been used to create these low walls burnt and preserved. So we had the burnt clay of the door and in it the wattle marks of the wattles that were used to build the wall. And we had the remains of the clay lining. And there were big post holes at either end. So it was a sunken featured building, but it was something a little more than that. It was a little more developed and a little more, maybe higher status perhaps. And the students and volunteers digging are absolutely brilliant. I kept saying, this is what we've got. It's a whole building. They're looking at me like, yeah, it's a lot of different coloured sand. Do really? And then finally, towards the end of the dig, it always happens then.

We've been coming across lots of fragments of loom weights, big clay loomweights, but there in the corner a line of loom weights which had dropped off the burnt threads of an upright loom. As the building burned, they'd literally just dropped off and they were in a neat little line, 24 of them with a few more tumbled down and then next to them, some slightly larger weights that had been stored in a box and we found the burnt bits of box and its metal corner clasps and bits of burnt loom. So that was absolutely thrilling. We had their court in the corner of the building the collapse of a loom and stored loom weights. And I've seen photos of these and they're absolutely spectacular. It's difficult to get this across, I think, when you did through our listeners, but actually to have such

a well-preserved building and the actual loom, so somebody was sat there weaving, and so this must have just burnt down and it's literally just been left where it was. Is that what happened? I suspect what had happened, because the whole fill was very uniform. I talked about the rubbish we'd found in the earlier season, where you get lots of different fills, and you can tell that different things have been put in at different times. This was very uniform. So I think what they'd done was they pushed all the burnt remains of the building into the dug-down part of it and levelled it off. And that would have actually left behind a nice fertile soil. They may have used it for a cabbage patch or something subsequently.

Who knows? But I think that's what happened. And we were just lucky with the way in which that occurred that what went in were a lot of burnt material with broken loom weights, but that it had preserved that moment of collapse of loom and stored weights in the corner of the building. And do you have a date for it? I mean, what do we think the age of it is? We don't, yeah, because you haven't got the radio carbon dates. But the other Jane might like to talk about a find that was made in the building, which might point to a date for it. Yeah, we also discovered this little disc brooch or possibly a mount that had been turned into a brooch to later date because the pin fittings on the back of it had been secondarily fitted. So it's re-using something as a broach.

And this had a very distinctive style of animal decoration that's known to archaeologists as style too, lots of abstract animal legs and hips and faces. And this is quite a distinctive art style. We date it to the late 6th, early 7th century. So that's the time period we're likely to be in. And there is a suggestion that the larger sunken-featured buildings are more a feature of the 7th century rather than the 6th.

So whilst we await the scientific dates, I think we're likely to be in the 7th century. This is actually quite rare, isn't it? These do not just pop up every day. They're quite unusual to find, aren't they? They are particularly rare in Northumberland. But what's really exciting is to have the complete plan and to have fines in it. Because most of these supposed sunken feature buildings could be large pits. And so there's nothing really to prove that they've been used as buildings. but this clearly has and everything supports that. And to have one that is so complete, so undisturbed, and has in situ, archaeology is pretty spectacular, yes. Fantastic.

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Wherever you get your podcasts Okay, so you got this building You know that there was a loom in there So clearly it was being used for textile work But apart from that, I was just wondering What other finds did you have? Or do you have any more information That can tell you was there somebody

Private Home, that they just happened to do A bit of weaving or was it more like a workshop? Do you know anything else about the function of it? There is an awful lot of debate about Sunken Future buildings. They were thought, originally some time ago to be the kind of humble, grottie dwellings of the lower orders. But I think all the evidence that has been associated with them of late

has pointed towards workshops or storage places. But essentially, there are practical building. They're like your shed, and in this case a very superior shed or workshop, where you do the things you need to do practically. And this one, almost certainly, everything we found suggests it was used for weaving. There are so many loomweight fragments. because as well as the 52 that we found in situ, we found lots of other great big fragments

and near complete loom weight throughout it. And we found two or three fine iron knives. They might be used for cutting threads or doing other practical things associated with textile manufacture. What's interesting about the weights is we had three distinct sizes. All the ones that were dropped off the loom were the same size.

All the ones stored beside it were a slight. larger size, a different weight of cloth being made, and we found some little fine ones as well. So it suggests that it's actually almost like a weaving production. They've got different sizes of weights, and maybe it's quite well organised and it is quite big. So I think there's debate about them because they're used for all sorts of things. There are some other finds, aren't there? We also had, from across the site, spindle wells coming up again, used for spinning yarn. And so again, there's text our work going on. And we need to make. sure we get the dates on those. But this appears to be one of the main activities of the site.

So could that suggest that there's sort of general economy around there's got to do with sheep farming? Is that one of the conclusions we can make, do you think? Most of the animal bones that were retrieved from the first year of excavation, cattle, and that's typical for early medieval settlements and then sheep come in second. So they're probably eating beef, most of it, I'm sure wool is a secondary product. We were originally there looking for the Great Army and this is something really quite different. Did you find any more information or evidence

about the Great Army at all? Or are the Vikings out of the picture now? Yeah, don't worry. We did do that as well, not from the trenches, but we did because we're working with the metal detectorists there collaborating with them as we have been doing over the past few years. There was also field walking.

So we do, we have three more gaming pieces. There's more lead weights. We have another stiker. This is the base Northumberian coinage, which we can date to the mid-ninth century. That's really nice because now we can tie it into the radiocarbon dates that we have from the first year of excavation. So we can link up the excavation results with the small finds that are coming out. So yes, there is definitely a presence there in the late 9th century, like we thought. What we would love to do next time is to be able to tie that archaeology and small finds together, find the context,

and the small finds in one trench. And we're more positive and hopeful about that because the metal detecting that we've done this year was all done with the help of a really high-grade global positioning system. We've got really good planning of all the locations, and we're getting clustering. And although, as I've said, the geophysics wasn't very helpful in terms of picking out structures or anything,

if we can tie clusters of fines to things in the geophysics, then it's getting easier to try and focus in on areas that we might look at next time. So just to sort of summarise a little bit, so we've got this citing earlier use of the site, and then it continues and then becomes used by the Great Army. With this new information, how is that adding to the overall interpretation of the site? And can you tell us anything about why the Vikings and the Great Army would have gone there? I think it absolutely does. And on the surface, you might think that Sunken Featured,

buildings are low, humble status, not really related to anything important going. But as Jane says, this is not just an average sun confuted building. This is something a bit different. We have this evidence for the organisation of textile production. This might be something more than a household economy. And when we look at the pattern of other places that the Great Army occupies, we see that they deliberately choose importance places pre-existing. places in the landscape. They go to ecclesiastical centres, monasteries, nunneries, Roman walls, cities. So they're not going into just any old fields that might offer a convenient place to stay. These are strategic locations. And they need those locations because they need to take over

stockpiles of food. They need to plug into existing systems of tribute. They need to feed their troop they need to get resources in for repairing boats and the general craft activities that go on within a Viking Great Army. So this is essential. So the choice of sight is really important. And whilst we've got this evidence of a sunken featured building, my prediction would be that this is actually part of an estate centre of some sort that leaves no trace in the written record, the archaeology is showing us was a long-lived and important place that the Vikings must have spotted, taken over for their own benefits? Yeah, and perhaps just to add a bit to that, in that first year, we found so much evidence for metal working. So we're not just looking at

the evidence for textile production. We're looking at a lot of evidence for the production of metal objects. And I suspect that those haths that we found will be linked to that. And certainly what we found in the first year underpins that. So just adds to the picture that Jane's been outlining that what the Vikings who came would have been doing is plugging into a site where they didn't just have the communications on the roads and the river, but they had that access to things that they needed that were being made and to the knowledge and the interactions that would provide them with the food and the resources they needed to support the group of Vikings. So this could really be quite a significant site that is completely lost for written records.

That's one of the things to me that's so exciting that we might quite often still think that any significant sites would have left a mark on the written records and the historical records. But actually, this is showing that that's absolutely not the case. We can still discover these new sites, can we. Yeah, we can do that through archaeology. That's the great thing about it. And I think especially for this area of the far north, it's not uncommon that there's no written records relating to this area. But I think it's fantastic both from the perspective of the Viking Great Army and looking at earlier sites from what's going on. It's also really important for the Anglo-Saxon period as a whole in this region.

Archaeologists speak of a golden age of Northumbria, which is about bead and monasteries and Roman culture and important senses of learning. And it's very ecclesiastical nature. And this is showing a very different side potentially of that. So it adds to the complexity of the Anglo-Saxon period as well. Yeah, and it's worth saying in relation to that, that for the local people who are really interested in what's going on and for a number of people digging, we're all local volunteers. It's really fascinating for them because, as Jane said, this is adding to their

understanding and appreciation of the place that they live in. And that's a huge gift. And we were very appreciative of their help and they were very appreciative of finding out so much more about the place they lived in. And I think this project and what you've done with it is so wonderful because you're bringing in so many different groups and people, you're working with the metal detector when he was discovered in the first place based on the portable antiquities scheme. So this voluntary database of registering metal detecting fines, and that's how we spotted it, and then bringing in universities and volunteers and local community groups.

So it's just such a good example, I think, of the sort of impact that these sites can have. So well done, and congratulations. Thank you. I think that's brilliant. And I know you will be going back, so hopefully we'll be able to bring more updates in the future as this continues. At the moment, though, if people want to, to try and find some of those photos of the Lomways and things.

They can go on social media. I know there are some on Twitter especially. So please do follow. Actually, all three of us will all be tweeting about it. So I'm at Kat Jarman. Jane Kershow is at JK underscore Viking. And Jane Harrison is at Jane Harrison 865. So do look up all of those.

And also look for the hashtag Gone Medieval. We'll make sure we put some links to them there. So you can follow it as it happens. But Jane and Jane, thank you both. so much for coming back and sharing all of this with us today. Thank you. Thanks a lot. It's fun. So this brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. Just click that subscribe button. And you can also catch up on all your medieval news if you want to. Just look in the episode notes where you found

this podcast for our Medieval Monday's newsletter. And finally, please do leave us a review if you enjoy this because it really helps other people find the podcast. I'm Dozer Kat Jarman. My colleague Matt Lewis will be back again on Saturday with another episode and I will be back next week. Have a great week.