assemblage 11 (2011): 15-33

Land or Gold? Changing Perceptions of Landscape in Viking

Age Lincolnshire
by LETTY TEN HARKEL
This paper looks at the relationship between political conflict and changing perceptions of landscape
in England between the ninth and early eleventh centuries AD, focusing on the modern county of
Lincolnshire. The period between the ninth and early eleventh centuries AD was a period of
continuous conflict, characterised by the Viking raids and subsequent Scandinavian settlement,
followed by the unification of England as a result of the West Saxon expansion, and its subsequent
conquest by the kings of Denmark. Using different types of material culture, including settlements,
metal dress-accessories and funerary sculpture, this paper addresses the relationship between
foreign settlement and/or territorial expansion, and the commoditisation of land and its effect on
landscape perception.
Keywords: Lincolnshire, Viking, conflict archaeology, landscape archaeology, material culture.

Introduction
The Anglo-Saxon period witnessed some major
changes in the structure of the English
landscape. Many boundaries that still exist in
the landscape today can be traced back to at
least the late Anglo-Saxon period. Place-name
evidence can provide a historical context for
the emergence of individual settlements, which
in many cases can also be traced back to the
late Anglo-Saxon period. This article argues
that such developments in the structure of the
English landscape were inherently related to
changing perceptions of land and landscape,
which, in turn, were related to contemporary
political conflict. After a brief outline of the
main political events that occurred in
Lincolnshire between the ninth and early
eleventh centuries, a working definition of the
terms landscape and land will be provided.
The main body of the paper will be divided
into four sections. The first section will discuss
the evidence for the development of towns in
Lincolnshire, whilst the second section will
take a closer look at the process of rural
settlement development. The production of
metal dress-accessories will form the topic of
another section, which will consider the
transition from a gift-exchange based society
to one whose social organisation was grounded
in the control of territory. A brief
consideration of the production and use of
funerary sculpture in the tenth and early
eleventh centuries will close this paper.
The period between the ninth and early
eleventh centuries is often referred to as the
Viking Age. In popular imagination, this term
conjures images of ruthless pagan pirates who
employed hit-and-run tactics to steal portable
wealth from monasteries and towns, and those

Letty Ten Harkel lettyth@gmail.com

initial Viking raids that were documented by

ecclesiastical chroniclers indeed fit this profile.
The first recorded Viking attacks on England,
which was then still divided into a number of
independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, occurred
in the last two decades of the eighth century.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (A: 787) records
that during the reign of King Beorhtric (786802), there came for the first time three ships;
and then the reeve rode there and they killed
him. Those were the first ships of the Danish
men which sought out the land of the English
race1. More famously, in AD 793, a group of
Scandinavian raiders miserably devastated
the monastery at Lindisfarne in the AngloSaxon kingdom of Northumbria by looting
and slaughter (ASC D, E, F: 793)2. This second
attack prompted an outraged response from
Alcuin, a resident scholar at the court of
Charlemagne who was originally from
Northumbria himself, who considered the
attack as Gods punishment for the sins of the
Anglo-Saxons (Lapidge 2001: 24; Hadley
2006: 16). Subsequent Viking attacks focused
on the southern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, in
particular Mercia. The first recorded attack on
Lincolnshire, which was part of the kingdom of
Mercia, occurred in AD 841, when in Lindsey
many men were killed by the raiding army
(ASC A: 838; Hadley 2006: 10).
The phase of hit-and-run tactics in England
was, however, relatively short-lived. By the
middle of the ninth century, the Viking
campaigns were becoming longer. In AD 85051, a Viking army overwintered for the first
time in Kent, then part of Wessex (ASC A: 851;
Kelly 2001: 270). In AD 865, an unusually
large Viking army (the micel here or great
army; ASC A: 866) arrived in East Anglia and
made peace with the locals, who provided
them with horses3. Throughout the next
Ten Harkel 2011
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TEN HARKEL

Lapidge 1983: 295 n. 6), and, amongst other

things, proposed a large-scale educational
reform to cure the problem once and for all
(Keynes and Lapidge 1983: 124-27). The
writings that originated under his patronage
(and which supposedly included the now lost
first version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)
can be read as political propaganda that
promoted the sense of an England that was
united against a common enemy, the Vikings
(Keynes and Lapidge 1983: 41). Whether
Alfred believed in his own propaganda is
impossible to say, but it did provide him with a
legitimate excuse to expand his territory, and
unite the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under his
own rule, a goal that was only achieved on a
permanent basis under his grandson Eadred
(946-55) in AD 954 (ASC D, E: 954).
The expansionist aspirations of the AngloSaxon kings were not a new phenomenon, but
dated back to the conversion period of the late
sixth and seventh centuries at least. In the
pagan early Anglo-Saxon period (c. AD 410650), kingship was supposedly peripatetic, and
power relations were based on the personal
relationship between a king and his followers,
which were typically maintained through giftexchange (Blair 2005: 8-9, 49-51; Webster
1998). The sources for this period are few and
difficult (Campbell 1982: 20; Stenton 1971: 13; for Lindsey, see Foot 1993: 128; Yorke 1993:
141), though literary sources such as Beowulf,
which was written down in its present form
around AD 1000 but found its roots in the preChristian period, retain a memory of this
earlier time. Especially the use of words such
as goldgyfa meaning gold-giver (lord:
Beowulf 2652) or goldwine meaning goldfriend (prince: Beowulf 1171, 1602, 1476,
2419, 2584) serves to illustrate the importance
of portable wealth to maintain a social
hierarchy. How and why this changed is harder
to say. Blair (2005: 49-50) has argued that the
success of the conversion, which penetrated
society from the top downwards, was the
result of the changing ambitions of the AngloSaxon kings as they moved towards a more
political, less tribal organization and
reoriented themselves towards the Christian
world. In any case, it seems that by the
seventh century, as Christianity spread across
the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, power was
increasingly rooted in the possession of
territory5. This point is further confirmed by
the fact that the introduction of the concept of
bookland land that was granted by a charter
also dates from this period. Unlike folkland,
which referred to land held by a kin group that
could not be alienated from the kin group
except under special circumstances, bookland

Figure 1 Places mentioned in the text

decade continuous raids occurred across the
various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, eventually
culminating in the permanent settlement of
the majority of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms,
with the exception of Wessex and the
southwest of Mercia. In AD 872-73, the micel
here overwintered at Torksey in Lincolnshire4,
and the Mercians made peace with the raiding
army (ASC A: 873). In AD 874, they drove the
king of Mercia, Burgred, into exile, and
conquered his kingdom (ASC A: 874). In AD
875, part of the army settled in the kingdom of
Northumbria, and they were ploughing and
providing for themselves (ASC A: 876), whilst
in the harvest-season of the following year they
went into the land of Mercia, and some of it
they divided up (ASC A: 877). Finally, in AD
879 the raiding army went from Cirencester
into East Anglia, and settled that land, and
divided it up (ASC A: 880). Whatever had
prompted the change in tactics on the part of
the invaders, it is clear that these
developments represent a profound change in
their perception of wealth, which now placed
the conquest of land over the accumulation of
portable wealth.
The Vikings were not the only ones who were
intent on the conquest of territory. The early
Scandinavian raids had invoked an intense
response from a number of contemporary
figures, including King Alfred the Great of
Wessex (871-99). Like Alcuin, Alfred regarded
the Viking invasions as Gods punishment for
the sins of the Anglo-Saxons (Keynes and
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assemblage

could be alienated at will. It was therefore

more suitable for the purposes of the Church,
which did not have a place within existing
patterns of land tenure (Stenton 1971, 307309; John 1964), whilst it also facilitated the
importance of land as a commodity that could
be granted to ones followers as a means to
maintain power relations. In the course of the
following centuries, as Christian notions of
kingship gained a hold on Anglo-Saxon
society, a process of territorial consolidation
began to take place that was still ongoing when
the Scandinavian invaders began to settle in
the ninth century.

there is, but not what it is like, whereas you

can ask of a landscape what it is like, but not
how much of it there is (Ingold 1993: 153-54).
It is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt
to devise a conclusive definition of landscape
and land, but it is nevertheless necessary to
define the terms, as they will be used within
the context of this article. Whereas Ingolds
(1993) distinction between landscape and land
may hold truth to an extent, the two concepts
are also inherently related. For example,
during the period of Scandinavian settlement
in the 870s, land became something that could
be possessed and controlled. Those who
struggled for control over this commodity
would have travelled through the landscape
assessing the quality of the land, thereby
acknowledging its heterogeneity. Simply put,
there was good land and not so good land,
and this distinction affected the desirability of
a particular piece of land for settlement, and
thus, eventually, the structure of the
landscape7.

The West Saxon expansion continued until the

middle of the tenth century, in the face of
continuous resistance from the inhabitants of
the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, in particular
those of Northumbria, which was finally
conquered in AD 9546. During this period, the
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were spared any more
significant Viking attacks, but these resumed
again in the 980s (Keynes 1997: 73-74). The
same process, whereby land gradually replaced
wealth as the commodity the invaders tried to
obtain, is visible in the chronology of events
that happened subsequently. In the 980s and
990s, the various Viking armies campaigned
across England and caused destruction
wherever they went in order to demand everincreasing amounts of tribute, which was
presumably paid in gold and silver. In the
eleventh century, however, their tactics
changed. When Svein Forkbeard, King of
Denmark and a Christian himself, and his son
Cnut arrived in AD 1013 AD, their aim was
apparently not to obtain tribute, but to
conquer England and to add it to their own
territory (Keynes 1997: 75-76).

The driving force behind the commoditisation

of land was a change in existing perceptions of
wealth. Once commoditised, the landscape
itself became something that people actively
tried to (re)structure and control. Land became
the cause of political conflict, and certain
landscape features such as roads and rivers
became political boundaries. Ingold (1993: 152)
has stated that the landscape is an enduring
record of and testimony to the lives and
works of past generations who have dwelt
within it, and in so doing, have left there
something of themselves. Although this is true
to an extent, it regards landscape as a reflection
or relic of human activity, rather than the cause
of human activity. This paper regards
landscape as an agent (for a definition of
agency, see Gardner 2008; Gell 1998: 16). As
Knappett (2002: 100, 115) has demonstrated,
agency can only exist and be perceived in the
relationships that exist between agents, be they
human or non-human. In other words, it is in
the interaction between people and the
landscape that the significance of the landscape
to its past inhabitants becomes apparent.
Likewise, it is in the active transformation of
the landscape that changing perceptions of
landscape can be discerned.

Landscape and land

The introduction has summarised the ongoing
political conflicts of the ninth to early eleventh
centuries,
emphasising
the
increasing
importance of land rather than portable wealth
as a medium for the negotiation of power. And
as land became increasingly commoditised,
elite perceptions of landscape must have
changed. But what is the difference between
land and landscape? The terminology has been
the cause of much academic debate. For
example, Ingold (1993: 154) has argued that
the two concepts are diametrically opposed
and that the difference between land and
landscape lies in the fact that the former is
quantitative and homogenous, whilst the
latter is qualitative and heterogeneous. In
other words, you can ask of land how much
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TEN HARKEL

Settlement development in ninthto eleventh-century Lincolnshire:

the emergence of towns

At the beginning of the ninth century, Lincoln

was a largely deserted Roman colonia with
some evidence for a limited ecclesiastical
presence, but no significant domestic or
economic
activity.
According
to
the
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
(II: 16), written by Bede in the eighth century,
the settlement was the location of an early
church, founded by Paulinus in the 620s, after
the reeve of the city had become the first
person in the region to convert to Christianity.
Although the location of this church was never
determined archaeologically, excavations have
confirmed the presence of two possible early
church foundations, at St. Paul-in-the-Bail in
the Upper City (Fig.2) and, in the shape of a
few possibly middle Anglo-Saxon skeletons,
along Silver Street in the Lower City (Vince
2003: 154-56)10. No other structural remains
of middle Anglo-Saxon date (c. AD 650-850)
have been found in Lincoln: in most cases the
late Anglo-Saxon layers are separated from the
Roman deposits only by a layer of dark earth,
a homogenous type of garden soil that was
probably the result of agricultural activities
and general build-up of plant material (Vince
1990).

The ninth to early eleventh centuries

witnessed a number of changes in existing
settlement patterns in Lincolnshire, as
elsewhere in England. These include the
development of towns as well as various
changes in rural settlement patterns, and the
transition of large incoherent minster church
territories into parishes whose boundaries
were to have a lasting effect on the landscape.
To an extent, these changes were rooted in the
social unrest that followed the Scandinavian
raids and settlement. At the same time, they
give a clear indication of the changes that the
perception of the English landscape
underwent. The following two sections discuss
town formation and rural settlement
development in Lincolnshire in the context of
the Scandinavian settlement, and their
relationship with the changing structure and
perception of the landscape.
The distinction between urban and rural is
problematic, and has given rise to significant
and ongoing debate (Biddle 1976b: 99-100;
Perring 2002: 9-11; Reynolds 1987: 296;
Roskams 1996: 264; Wickham 2006: 591-96).
This article will not return to this issue, but
accepts the definition proposed by Susan
Reynolds (1987: 296), which argues that a
settlement could be classed as a town when it
was perceived as such by its contemporaries.
There is one late eleventh-century written
source, Domesday Book, which provides an
insight into how individual settlements were
perceived. Domesday Book, which provides a
list of landholdings across England, was put
together for taxation purposes some two
decades after the Norman Conquest, but the
origins of the situation it describes lie in the
pre-Conquest period (Roffe 2000; 2007). It
sets three Lincolnshire settlements apart from
the long list of rural landholdings. These
include the civitas of Lincoln, the burgum
regis of Stamford, and the villa of Torksey8.
The development of these three settlements
differed greatly, although some common
factors can be identified. They may all have
fulfilled certain central-place functions during
the middle Anglo-Saxon period, and
experienced a period of growth contemporary
with the Viking settlement, presumably as the
result of elite intervention, when they obtained
an increasing monopoly as regional production
centres, in particular of wheel-thrown pottery,
and obtained mints9.

Figure 2 Lincoln. Redrawn after Jones et

al. 2003 (figure 1)
The nature of occupation in Lincoln changed
in the middle of the ninth century AD, around
the same time as the Vikings settled in
England. First, the south-eastern quarter of
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assemblage

the walled settlement of the Lower City was reoccupied.

Evidence
for
manufacturing
activities can be identified, including wheelthrown pottery based on Frankish prototypes,
and non-ferrous metalwork with Scandinavian
stylistic influences. One of the most significant
excavations that has taken place in the Lower
City, at Flaxengate, demonstrated that a
number of dwellings in which metalworking
activities took place were centrally controlled,
because several buildings were periodically
levelled and re-built during single construction
events (Perring 1981). In the tenth century, the
pottery and metalwork produced at Lincoln
found a relatively widespread regional
distribution
across
the
surrounding
countryside (Symonds 2003; Ten Harkel 2010:
ch. 6). Coin production also took place at
Lincoln from the late ninth century onwards,
and at the beginning of the eleventh century,
Lincoln was one of the most prosperous towns
of Anglo-Saxon England, its mint ranking
amongst the three most productive in England
(Blackburn et al. 1983).

been suggested that this location was chosen

because Torksey had been a significant preexisting middle Anglo-Saxon settlement
(Brown 2006: 13-17; Jones et al. 2003: 143).
This would fit a pattern identified by Williams
(2008), that many Viking winter camps were
indeed located in or near pre-existing estate
centres. It is possible that its development
should be placed in the context of the nearby
settlement at Marton, less than 23 miles
further north, which has yielded evidence for
an early market and whose church has
produced a collection of tenth-century
funerary sculpture (Everson and Stocker 2006:
218-20). In either case, Torkseys economic
growth resembled that of Lincoln and
Stamford. Excavations in the 1960s and 1990s
revealed a number of ninth- to eleventhcentury pottery kilns, which Sawyer (1998:
197) has directly attributed to the Viking
settlement. A cemetery was also uncovered,
which probably had tenth-century origins, and
may have been associated with the now-lost
parish church of All Saints (Buckberry 2004:
405-06). However, very little evidence for
settlement activity has been excavated to date,
and the settlement does not seem to have had
any defences, which has led to the suggestion
that Torksey was an undefended trading post
(Barley 1981: 264; Brown 2006: 9-10). By the
middle of the tenth century, it housed one of
the most important pottery industries in the
region, and production continued well into the
twelfth century (Barley 1964: 172; 1981; Brown
2006: 10; Symonds 2003. For a brief period
during the late tenth and early eleventh
centuries, Torksey also possessed a mint.

The early history of Stamford is less well

understood. The settlement itself does not
have Roman origins, but may have found its
roots as a middle Anglo-Saxon estate centre
with an associated church dedicated to St.
Peter, situated on the north bank of the river
Welland (Hadley 2006: 158-59; Sawyer 1998:
194). The settlement was fortified in the late
ninth or tenth century, following the
Scandinavian settlement (Mahany 1982: 9;
Sawyer 1998: 94-95). At roughly the same
time, a pottery industry was established
(Mahany 1977: 177; Sawyer 1998: 195;
Whitwell 1967: 45), but it is unclear whether
this pre-dated the construction of the defences
(Mahany 1982: 10). Based on documentary
references, it is sometimes argued that the
settlement was extended into a double burh,
also encompassing a fortified settlement on
the south bank of the river, after the West
Saxon conquest of the area in AD 918 (Mahany
1982: 3, 10; Sawyer 1998: 194-96). By the early
eleventh century, Stamford had a flourishing
pottery industry with a widespread regional
and inter-regional distribution, as well as a
flourishing mint (Mahany 1982: 4; Symonds
2003).

The development of the three Lincolnshire

towns was characterised by economic growth.
In all three cases, the nature of the economic
activity that took place was predominantly
non-agricultural. This is in accordance with
the definition of towns as proposed by
Reynolds (1987: 296), who argues that
When we talk of a place as a
town, or as urban, we
assume without thinking
about it that we are talking
about a permanent human
settlement
in
which
a
significant proportion of the
population is engaged in nonagricultural occupations A
town therefore normally lives
off
the
food
of
the
surrounding countryside
and supplies this countryside
with other goods and services
in return.

The development of Torksey has remained

even more of an enigma (Hadley 2006: 155-60,
167). No structural remains of Roman or early
to middle Anglo-Saxon date have been found
at Torksey (Barley 1964; 1981; Brown 2006: 15; Sawyer 1998: 197). However, in the winter
of 872-73, Torksey was the location for a
Viking winter camp (see above), and it has
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TEN HARKEL

The development of towns can thus be seen as

a process whereby peoples daily activities
were increasingly restricted to the production
of an industrial surplus in an urban
environment, in some cases separated from
the rest of the landscape by a visible boundary
in the shape of town defences. As a result,
peoples daily experiences became increasingly
divorced from the rural landscape, and from
the people who inhabited that landscape. Or,
to quote Reynolds (1987: 296) once more,

the pagan invaders (Keynes and Lapidge 1983:

24-25; also see Astill 1991; Biddle 1976a;
1976b; Hodges 1982; 1988). A passage from
Assers Life of Alfred (ch. 91), lamenting the
tribulations that befell Alfreds life, views the
burhs constructed during Alfreds reign as
towns, as he exclaims: And what of the cities
(civitatibus) and towns (urbibus) to be rebuilt
and others to be constructed where previously
there were none? Town construction,
however, is a literary motif associated with
great kings in the Classical and Christian
tradition (see, for example, Procopius account
of the deeds of the sixth-century Byzantine
emperor Justinian) and archaeological
investigations have revealed that these burhs
were essentially military foundations that did
not obtain urban characteristics (in terms of
economic activity) or sizable populations until
the later tenth or eleventh centuries (Astill
2006: 236, 243, 254). In fact, recent research
in the region that formerly was the Kingdom of
Wessex suggests that burhs like Wallingford,
Lydford and Cricklade remained mostly empty
spaces until after the Norman Conquest (Astill
2006).

Because of the distinctive

functions of towns their
inhabitants normally regard
themselves, and are regarded
by outsiders, as a different
sort of people. However
deeply they are divided
among themselves they tend
to be united at least in
regarding
themselves
as
united in their urbanity
against the country bumpkins
around.
It is interesting to note that this process took
place at the same time that an unknown
number of people with no previous
relationship to the Anglo-Saxon landscape, i.e.
the Scandinavian invaders, settled in some of
the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In the case of
Lincoln, the presence of Scandinavian-style
dress-accessories such as ringed pins and socalled Norse bells (Ten Harkel forthcoming)
and the use of Norwegian soapstone for
metalworking moulds (Bayley 2008: 20)
furthermore suggest that at least a proportion
of its population was of Scandinavian descent.
In Torksey, which is documented as a Viking
encampment in the 870s, the ninth- and tenthcentury metalwork that has been retrieved is of
even more explicit Scandinavian character
(Brown 2006). The pottery produced in both
settlements was inspired by Frankish
prototypes, leading to the suggestion that
Frankish
potters
accompanied
the
Scandinavian settlement (Vince 2005). The
same has been argued for the pottery produced
in Stamford, which displayed links with
contemporary
northern
French
wares
(Kilmurry 1980).

In Denmark, some of the earliest settlements

that could arguably be classed as towns, the
emporia at Hedeby and Ribe and possibly
rhus, were fortified during the later tenth
century. This is usually attributed to King
Harald Bluetooth (c. 958-86), who was
responsible for the erection of the famous
Jelling-stone that proclaimed himself as the
king who Christianized the Danes (Lund
1997: 160). In addition to a defensive purpose,
these fortifications facilitated control (and
therefore taxation) over goods entering and
exiting the emporia. It is interesting to note,
however, that many of these goods attested to
overseas trade, and that it is likely, therefore,
that the populations of these emporia included
a foreign element.
Although the economic success of towns seems
to have been more rapid in areas where a
sizable part of the population had no existing
relationship with the rural landscape, the
intention to build towns seems to have been a
shared characteristic of rulers who were intent
on establishing their reputation as defenders
of the Christian Church. This also holds true
for two of the Lincolnshire towns. As discussed
above, the earliest post-Roman archaeological
evidence from Lincoln was indicative of an
ecclesiastical presence, and the earliest
settlement core at Stamford may have found
its origin as an estate centre with associated
church. Blair (2005: 246-90) has argued that
the most important forerunners of the tenth-

But was the increased alienation of people

from the rural landscape merely the result of
the settlement by a foreign people? In
contemporary Wessex, situated outside the
area of Scandinavian settlement, a number of
burhs were constructed under the patronage of
the West-Saxon king Alfred and his successors
as part of their policy to protect England from
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assemblage

and eleventh-century towns were not middle

Anglo-Saxon wics, but middle Anglo-Saxon
minster sites. Although the evidence from
Lincolnshire
does
not
support
a
straightforward linear development from
minster to town, there is evidence that two of
the three Lincolnshire towns, as they were
perceived at the time of the Domesday survey,
were associated with, or grew out of, a preexisting settlement core with an ecclesiastical
element, be it a possible monastic foundation
or a manorial church. The economic impetus
for their growth in the late ninth century,
however, was the arrival of foreign immigrants
who had no previous connection to the
Lincolnshire landscape, and members of rural
communities who had been uprooted by the
social disruption caused by the Scandinavian
settlement. It was these two groups who
constituted the first inhabitants of developing
towns like Lincoln, Stamford and Torksey, the
latter of which may have had an entirely
foreign population during its initial economic
growth.

eleventh centuries (Reynolds 1999: 135-36;

also see Everson et al. 1991: 13). More recent
investigations have revealed that many of
these organised late Anglo-Saxon settlements
overlay
earlier,
middle
Anglo-Saxon
settlements, which led Reynolds (2003: 131;
also see Jones and Page 2006) to state that
instead, village origins (with regard to
individual settlements) can be found across a
period of at least 400 years.
The process of village formation was not
restricted to a specific period in Lincolnshire
either. Many late Anglo-Saxon settlements in
Lincoln had early to middle Anglo-Saxon
origins. One example of this is the settlement
at West Halton (Grenville and Parker Pearson
1983; Hadley et al. 2003; 2004; 2005; 2006;
Hadley and Willmott forthcoming), which has
been identified as a possible seventh- to ninthcentury minster church site (Blair 1988: 1-2;
Hadley et al. 2003: 2). Excavations by the
University of Sheffield have revealed two
separate early to middle Anglo-Saxon
settlement cores, which gradually grew into
one settlement in the late Anglo-Saxon period
(Hadley et al. 2004: 24; Hadley and Willmott
forthcoming). Likewise, the settlement at
Barton-upon-Humber in North Lincolnshire,
which has been postulated as the site of a
monastery founded t baruwe (Bede, HE IV:
3) in the seventh century (Leahy 1998: 16),
also had middle Anglo-Saxon origins (Bradley
2002; Rodwell and Rodwell 1982; Tibbles and
Steedman 1990). During excavations at the
church of St. Peter in the centre of the present
village, it became apparent that the site had
originally been occupied by a number of sixthto seventh-century buildings with gravel
footings, which may represent a settlement
that was associated with the nearby early
Anglo-Saxon
cremation
cemetery
at
Castledyke, Barton-upon-Humber (Drinkall
and Foreman 1998; Gardner and Bunn 2006:
4-5; Rodwell and Rodwell 1982). A substantial
eighth- to ninth-century boundary ditch with a
timber palisade and earthen bank was
identified as the enclosure ditch of a middle
Anglo-Saxon manorial centre (Bradley 2000:
28; 2002: 24; Rodwell 2007). It was originally
held that an inhumation cemetery just outside
the enclosure dated to the ninth century, but
recent dendrochronological and radiocarbon
dating of several coffins and skeletons pointed
to a date for the earliest cemetery phase
between 950 and 1150 (Waldron 2007: 29).
The present church of St. Peter, whose tenthcentury fabric still partially survives, is
stratigraphically later than this graveyard as
several graves that would have been cut by the
foundations were excavated and reburied

Rural settlement development

and parish formation in ninth- to
eleventh-century Lincolnshire
This section investigates the relationship
between rural settlement development and
changing perceptions of landscape in
Lincolnshire. The number of rural excavations
in Lincolnshire is limited, and even where
Anglo-Saxon settlement remains have been
uncovered the scale of the (mostly developerfunded) excavations is often small11.
Nevertheless, in recent years a picture of rural
settlement development has begun to emerge.
Traditionally, it was held that during the early
and middle Anglo-Saxon periods, rural
settlement was mostly (if not exclusively)
dispersed. The formation of villages, in
particular of the type of settlement that
combined a high-status dwelling with a small
church and cemetery, often associated with a
number of regular house plots for peasants,
would have occurred primarily from the later
ninth
and
tenth
centuries
onwards,
contemporary with the development of towns
and the Scandinavian settlement in the region
(Hadley 2006: 115; Reynolds 1999: 111, 130,
134). In this context, Reynolds (1999: 135) has
argued that the development of the AngloSaxon kingdoms is directly reflected in the
development of rural settlements, which
evolved from the loosely grouped farmsteads
of the fifth and sixth centuries, to the
organised communities of the tenth and
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TEN HARKEL

(Bradley 2002: 6; Everson and Stocker 1999;

Tibbles and Steedman 1990: 3; Rodwell 2007).

site.
The late Anglo-Saxon period also witnessed
the development of new rural settlements. One
example is Waterton on the Isle of Axeholme,
whose pottery profile suggests an eleventhcentury origin (Foreman 1996: 23)12. The Isle
of Axeholme, as well as the lower-lying regions
of Holland, remained largely unoccupied until
the eleventh century in general, and it has
been suggested that their re-occupation may
be the direct result of the second wave of
Scandinavian colonisation following Englands
political conquest in the 1010s (Fenwick et al.
1998: 168; Head et al. 1998: 277; Young et al.
2001: 3).

Whereas West Halton and Barton-uponHumber showed little sign of decline in the
later Anglo-Saxon period, other Lincolnshire
villages that found their origins in the early to
middle Anglo-Saxon period were abandoned in
the late Anglo-Saxon period, demonstrating
that not only village origins, but also village
decline occurred throughout the entire AngloSaxon period. The 2001 developer-funded
excavations at Belton revealed a few sunkenfeatured buildings and, interestingly, one of
the few assemblages of production evidence of
Maxey-type ware in the form of wasters
from Lincolnshire (Young 2001). The absence
of late Anglo-Saxon pottery from Belton,
however, suggests that the site was abandoned
in the early ninth century (Young 2001).

Elsewhere in Lincolnshire, new settlements

also developed as late as the tenth century.
One such example is the settlement known as
Goltho, although there has been considerable
debate over its precise dating (Beresford
1975a; 1975b; 1981; 1987; Stocker 1989)13. A
number of farmsteads were constructed in the
early tenth century (Beresford 1987: 24;
Stocker 1989: 628; Symonds 2003: 51). Some
fifty years later, the site was cleared for the
construction of a fortified high-status dwelling
(Beresford 1981: 16; 1987: 3, 12-14, 23), whilst
a planned lower-status settlement was also
laid out, arranged along a central track-way
leading to the fortified manor (Beresford 1987:
23)14. The manor was situated just to the
southwest of the sixteenth-century church of
St. George (Beresford 1975b: 1; Whitwell 1967:
50), and although the site of the church was
not investigated, it is possible that the original
church was of similar date as the construction
of the manor. In that case, the village at
Goltho fits in with a type of nucleated
settlement that combined a high-status
dwelling with a small church and a number of
regular house plots for peasants (Hadley 2006:
115; Reynolds 1999: 111, 130, 134). This type of
settlement is typically associated with the
beginnings of parish formation, as it has
become clear that the boundaries of secular
and ecclesiastical jurisdiction often coincided
(Bassett 2006: 117; Reynolds 1999: 134). The
later phases of the settlement at Barton-uponHumber, which likewise combined a highstatus dwelling with a church, may also have
belonged to this type.

Investigations at Flixborough in the late 1980s

and 1990s revealed a settlement sequence that
began in the late seventh century AD and
continued into the tenth century (Loveluck
1998; 2001; 2007). Part of the earliest phase
was a building that has been interpreted as a
chapel, associated with a high-status
aristocratic centre (Loveluck 2001: 115-16).
The discovery of a number of styli in the early
ninth-century layers, as well as an inscribed
lead plaque and numerous fragments of
window glass, which at that time was usually
restricted to high-status minster churches,
suggest that the site continued to have
ecclesiastical significance, and Loveluck (2001:
100, 116; 2007) has even suggested that for a
period the site may have functioned as a
minster. In the later ninth and tenth centuries,
contemporary with the emergence of the urban
sites at Lincoln, Stamford and Torksey, and
the Viking settlement in the region, the
evidence for craft production decreased
significantly, until the site was abandoned and
the settlement shifted eastwards onto the
limestone escarpment of the Lincoln Edge in
the course of the tenth century (Loveluck
2001: 100; Loveluck and Atkinson 2007: 97104). Loveluck (2001: 90; also see Loveluck
and Atkinson 2007: ch. 7) argues that the
driving force behind this shift was the desire to
construct a stone church (possibly a postulated
precursor to the church of all saints in the
deserted medieval village of Conesby), which
required a harder ground (i.e. limestone) than
the windblown sands underlying the
settlement remains at Flixborough. Based on
the place-name evidence (Conesby meaning
the Kings manor), Loveluck (2001: 117;
2007) furthermore views this phase as the
emergence of an Anglo-Scandinavian manor

It may be clear from the preceding discussion

that rural settlement development was often
inherently related to the presence of
ecclesiastical foundations be they minster
churches, monastic foundations or parish
churches in the Lincolnshire landscape. In
some cases, as at Goltho, the process of parish
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assemblage

formation may have had an effect on the

nature of rural settlement development,
whereby the occupant of the high-status
dwelling may have been the founder of the
parish. Blair (2005: 369) and Hadley (2006)
have argued that the majority of medieval
parish boundaries found their origins in the
late ninth and tenth centuries as the result of
the subdivision of larger territories, which had
been associated with minster churches, into
smaller units. As the average size of the new
parishes in the areas of Scandinavian
settlement were generally speaking smaller
than in the south, Hadley (2006) has
furthermore
proposed
that
these
developments represent a process of
consolidation between the Church and the new
Scandinavian landowners, many of whom had
recently converted to Christianity. The
cooperation between Scandinavian settlers and
the Church was mutually beneficial. The
Church provided the necessary legitimisation
for the invaders newly obtained power, whilst
the new landholding elite assisted the Church
in the collection of taxes and dues in return.

the north of Lincoln, most of which indeed

find their origins in the period between the
later ninth and early eleventh centuries, are
arranged in a ladder form, situated on both
sides of the old Roman road known as Ermine
Street, which ran along the top of the Lincoln
Edge, and stretched down the slope on either
side towards the more fertile low-lying ground.
Their arrangement ensured that each parish
had equal access to different resources and
communication routes (Everson and Stocker
pers. comm.; for an earlier discussion of parish
formation, see for example Fox 1989). The
relatively small size of these units, each of
which was more or less self-sufficient,
furthermore rendered the experience of the
landscape increasingly static. It is worth noting
that this process of landscape fragmentation
on economic grounds, itself a symptom of the
increased commoditisation of land, was
contemporary with the economic growth of
towns, which, likewise, required a degree of
separation from the rural landscape in order to
take place.

The process of parish formation can be seen as

a process of secularisation of the Church.
Looking at it from this perspective, Carver
(2001: 17) has explained the involvement of
the new Scandinavian elite in the
establishment of new parishes in the following
terms:

The significance of gold in Viking

Age Lincolnshire
The previous sections have discussed the
evidence for settlement development in AngloSaxon Lincolnshire, with attention on the
increased commoditisation of land. The
following sections look deeper into the
possible reasons behind this change through
an analysis of two types of material culture
that were produced and used in Lincolnshire,
metal dress-accessories and monumental
funerary sculpture. These types of material
culture will be analysed using the theoretical
concept of materiality, or [the] style of
enquiry that engages with the unavoidable
qualities of a material (Taylor 2008: 297).

Perhaps the Scandinavian

hostility was not to Christianity
but towards state control,
taxation and the alienation of
land to non-wealth creators.
The Vikings, by dissolving the
monastic
system
and
substituting
a
secular
alternative, had succeeded in
effecting a conversion of their
own.

As stated previously, early Anglo-Saxon society

was essentially a gift-based society. The
abovementioned terminology from Beowulf,
which highlights the importance of rulers as
distributors of wealth, serves well to illustrate
this point, as do the majority of high-status
grave goods from the pre-Christian period,
which, like the dress-accessories found at
Sutton Hoo (Carver 1998), were often
produced of solid gold. The nature of the
Viking raids of the ninth century as well as
those of the later tenth century, which were
intent on the accumulation of portable wealth
in the form of loot or tribute, suggests that
gold and other precious materials played an
important role within ninth- and tenth-century

Although Carvers observations are correct in

terms of the effects of the settlers involvement
in parish foundation, the driving force behind
their
actions
was undoubtedly
their
commoditised view of the landscape that they
were restructuring. Blair (2005: 370) has
identified the period between the middle of the
ninth and the eleventh centuries AD as a
period of more systematic apportionment of
peasant settlements and field-systems that
was related to the growing power of local
landholders. This apportionment was driven
by economic concerns, and provides evidence
that the landscape was becoming increasingly
quantitative and objectified. The parishes to
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TEN HARKEL

Scandinavian society. This is further

confirmed by the composition of Viking hoards
from this period, which were often composed
of objects of solid gold and/or silver, either in
the shape of coinage or hack-metal (Blackburn
1986; Gunstone 1981; Kilger 2006; Walker
1945; Williams 2007).

kingship was instead grounded in the

possession of territory, metal dress-accessories
were no longer used to create a social
hierarchy, and therefore gold and silver were
no longer appropriate materials for their
production.
Interestingly,
tenth-century
written sources now increasingly express the
value of land in gold (Blackburn 2007). It is
unlikely that gold ever actually changed hands
during those transactions. Instead, it was
probably used as a measure of value, a
figurative translation of the value of the new
commodity (land) into a known quantity
(gold).

By contrast, there is little evidence that

precious metals were as important to the
Scandinavians who settled in the Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms in the second half of the ninth
century. Metal dress-accessories and related
artefacts,
some
of
which
displayed
Scandinavian stylistic influences, as well as
production
evidence
for
non-ferrous
metalworking activities, were found in the
earliest post-Roman occupation layers in
Lincoln. The artefacts were entirely made of
base metals, including copper- and lead-alloys
(Ten Harkel forthcoming) (Fig.3). The
exclusive use of base metals for these dressaccessories has alternatively been regarded as
a decline in workmanship, evidence that the
lower classes could now also afford to wear
dress-accessories (Leahy 2007: 148; OwenCrocker 1986: 206), or the result of a lack of
available gold (Blackburn 1993; Williams
2007). The first explanation does not provide
an answer to the question why the elite would
also be wearing sub-standard jewellery, and
although there may indeed be reason to
assume that the gold supplies in western
Europe had dried up (Williams pers. comm.),
there is no indication that a similar fate had
befallen the silver, which was still used in large
quantities for the production of coinage, but
not for dress-accessories. The only regions
where dress-accessories made of precious
metals still occurred were the Scandinaviancontrolled regions of England, most noticeably
on sites with a Scandinavian character, such as
Torksey. This suggests that high-status dressaccessories were still used for the maintenance
and establishment of a social hierarchy
amongst part of the population, although here,
too, base-metal dress-accessories, which did
not fulfil such functions, were increasingly
common.

Figure 3 Typical examples of late ninth- to

tenth-century metalwork produced and
used in Lincoln. Copyright photographs:
the author, with thanks to M. Jones and J.
Mann. (a) Copper-alloy Norse bell from
Flaxengate, Lower City (iron clapper in
situ); b) unfinished copper-alloy finger
ring from Holmes Grainwarehouse,
Wigford; c) lead-alloy pendant from St
Marks Station, Wigford (similar to
miscasts from Viking-Age layers at
Coppergate, York, and to silver pendants
from Birka, Sweden); d) copper-alloy
hooked tag with ratchet-decoration from
Flaxengate, Lower City; e) copper-alloy
ring with twisted ends from Flaxengate,
Lower City; f) copper-alloy and enamel
mount with raised inner part and
moulded
rope-like
border
from
Flaxengate, Lower City.)

A different explanation may be suggested by

reference to the theoretical concept of
materiality, which allows for the possibility
that different types of metal were perceived to
have different qualities, and thus a different
social function. In the early Anglo-Saxon
period, when kingship was peripatetic, and
power relations were maintained through giftgiving, dress-accessories, if they wanted to
fulfill this role, had to be made of precious
materials. By the tenth century, however, when
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assemblage

Again, the instigator behind these changes

seems to have been the Church. In a
publication discussing the development of
Lindsey, Leahy (2007: 148) has commented on
the gradual disappearance of the use of gold
and gilding for dress-accessories in the course
of the eighth and ninth centuries. Analysis of
the metalwork finds from Lincolnshire as a
whole as listed on the Portable Antiquities
Scheme by the current author added further
detail to Leahys conclusion. It revealed that
there was a marked decrease of the use of solid
gold in the course of the seventh century,
following the conversion of the area by
Paulinus in the 620s, whilst the use of gilding
disappeared in the course of the eighth
century. Solid silver was used only very
occasionally for dress-accessories after the
seventh century. Although silvering, in
particular of strap-ends, was still used in the
eighth and ninth centuries, this came to an end
in the tenth century.

AD c. 800. The smith was buried on the

boundary between two territories, suggesting
that he was a travelling craftsman who did not
form part of the local community (Hinton
2000; 2003). He was accompanied by a large
number
of
grave
goods,
including
metalworking tools and a box of scrap metal
containing iron, copper and lead alloys and
small quantities of precious metals (Hinton
2000; 2003). Hinton has suggested that the
careful manner in which he was buried is
indicative of the respect and the fear that his
craft inspired in the members of the
community where he had accidentally died,
and serves as a reminder of the period when
kingship was still based on gift-exchange.
As there is evidence that metalworking
activities frequently occurred on Church lands,
Hinton (2000: 115; 2003: 273) has suggested
that the Church was directly responsible for
the decrease in the importance of giftexchange to maintain power relations, and the
changing status of the smith in Anglo-Saxon
society, from a travelling craftsman with
magical powers who existed outside normal
communities, to a socially accepted craftsman
in the service of the Church. In Lincoln, the
two only fully excavated church sites, at St.
Paul-in-the-Bail in the Upper City and St.
Marks in Wigford, have indeed yielded
evidence for metalworking activities (Ten
Harkel forthcoming). The different position of
the smith within Anglo-Saxon society did not
necessarily involve a decrease in status15. The
use of Weland- and Sigurd-imagery on late
ninth- and tenth-century Yorkshire sculpture
(Lang 1976; 1991; 2001), and the fact that the
only profession explicitly mentioned on the
Viking Age stone crosses from the Isle of Man
was that of a smith (Kermode 1907) suggest
that the profession was still held in high
esteem16. Several references to Weland also
occur in Beowulf, and he is the subject matter
of the first two stanzas of the Anglo-Saxon
poem Deor, written down in the Exeter Book,
which has been dated on palaeographical
grounds to the second half of the tenth century
(Bradley 1982: 201). Yet the changing role of
the smith reflects the same process that has
been identified in the context of settlement
development in Lincolnshire: under the
influence of the Church, society was becoming
increasingly static, and in some cases divorced
from the rural landscape.

In an article on the use of gold in late AngloSaxon England, Blackburn (2007) has drawn
attention to the fact that the use of gold in this
period was increasingly restricted to the
Church and to kings. The monopoly of the
Church on gold may partially be related to the
act that gold was one of the three gifts that the
three kings from the east presented to the baby
Jesus as he lay in his crib, together with
incense and myrrh, whose use was also largely
restricted to the Church. The continued
prerogative of kings to wear and use gold may
be related to their position as Gods anointed.
At the same time, the increased monopoly of
the Church on the use of gold may be seen as a
shift in existing power relations, with the
Church replacing the kings secular retainers
as his most important ally.
The changing role of metal dress-accessories
during the middle and late Anglo-Saxon
periods was also reflected in the changing role
of the smith within Anglo-Saxon society. The
ninth and tenth centuries saw an increasing
monopoly of the emerging urban centres, in
particular Lincoln, Norwich and York, on the
production of non-ferrous metalwork. In
Lincoln, the metalworking workshops were
centrally organised, and situated in the heart
of the settlement in the Lower City. The
circumstances of metalwork production in
Lincoln contrast sharply with the organisation
of the trade in the preceding, middle AngloSaxon period. The discovery of a seventh- or
eighth-century smiths grave in Tattershall
Thorpe in Lincolnshire has provided an
important
insight
into
the
different
organisation of metalwork production prior to
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TEN HARKEL

Scandinavian-controlled regions of England,

suggesting that a greater need was felt in these
areas to express the relationship between the
new secular landowners and their newly
acquired source of wealth. The relationship
between the Church and the new landowners
was mutually beneficial, but the Church had
another vested interest in the promotion of
land as an alternative to gold and silver. The
Viking raids in the first half of the ninth
century were aimed at the accumulation of
portable wealth, which meant that the Vikings
posed a particular threat to the Church, where
often significant quantities of silver or gold
were stored. The most practical solution to the
problem was to convince the invaders, like the
Church had previously convinced the native
Anglo-Saxons, that land was a much better
alternative to gold. The fact that this resulted
in the Scandinavian settlement of large parts
of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was not an issue,
as it did not endanger the position of the
Church, but strengthened it through the
formation of numerous new alliances. At the
same time, the West-Saxon kings took
advantage of the situation by treating it as a
legitimate excuse to conquer the north.

Figure 4 Examples of tenth-century

sculpture
produced
at
Lincoln.
Photographs by P. Everson and D. Stocker;
reproduced with permission of D. Craig,
Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture.
(a) Lincoln St. Mark 16: Lindsey-type grave
marker from St. Marks church, Lincoln;(b)
Miningsby 1: Lindsey-type grave cover
from Miningsby, Lindsey.

The erection of stone sculpture in

Viking Age Lincolnshire

The suggestion that the commoditisation of

land was inherently related to a Christian
worldview is confirmed by the changing nature
of the Viking incursions of the later tenth and
eleventh centuries. Harald Bluetooths selfproclaimed reputation as the king who
converted the Danes was somewhat optimistic,
as it seems that the conversion of the
Scandinavian homelands was still underway.
The late tenth-century poem The Battle of
Maldon, which gives an account of the defeat
of the English by the Vikings in AD 991, which
resulted in the payment of a large sum of
tribute, refers to them as hthene (heathens;
line 55). However, the Danish king Svein
Forkbeard, who arrived in England in 1003,
was a Christian, and interestingly, his objective
was the conquest of territory rather than the
accumulation of portable wealth.

The increasingly sedentary experience of the

landscape also found expression in the
erection of stone sculpture in Lincolnshire,
which occurred from the tenth century
onwards. There was no local tradition of
marking burials with stone sculpture in
Lincolnshire prior to the tenth century, nor
was stone generally used in a monumental
sense at all. From the mid-tenth century
onwards, however, funerary sculpture was
produced at Lincoln on a significant scale
(Fig.4). Everson and Stocker (1999) have
suggested that their production took place
under the patronage of the Bishop of Lincoln,
who was reinstated in the mid-tenth century
after his last predecessor had supposedly fled
the area because of the Scandinavian raids.
The products of the Lincoln workshops were
distributed all across Lindsey.

The question how and why the conversion of

the Anglo-Saxons, the Scandinavian settlers
and eventually the Scandinavians at home was
successful must, for the moment, remains
unanswered. Yet the influence that it had on
the structure and perception of the AngloSaxon landscape was far-reaching. The
erection of sculpture made of stone a very
durable material can be seen as an attempt
to lay a permanent claim to that part of the
landscape, significantly enough through ones
ancestors, which would make perfect sense in
the context of the Viking settlement. The fact

As there is usually only one funerary

monument per parish, Everson and Stocker
(1999) have argued that the majority of these
funerary monuments were created for the
founders graves of the parishes. As mentioned
above, the process of parish formation, which
occurred at the same time as the Scandinavian
settlement, can be seen as a process of
consolidation between the Church and the new
Scandinavian landowners. The erection of
funerary sculpture to mark the founders
graves of the parishes occurs only in the
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assemblage

that practically all recognised sculpture

fragments in Lincolnshire have been found in
the centre of villages, often incorporated into
the fabric of the village church, suggests that
these graves became focal points in the
development of rural settlements.

particular Dawn Hadley, John Moreland,

Gareth Williams and Andrew Reynolds.
Thanks must go as well to the two anonymous
peer reviewers who commented on an earlier
draft of this paper. Responsibility for the
opinions expressed in this paper, however,
remains with the author.

Conclusions
All translations from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
follow Swanton 2000. Where possible this article
only uses the A-version, also known as the
Winchester-manuscript, because this is the oldest of
the surviving manuscripts, which was copied from
the now-lost original at some point in the late ninth
century, and continued until the eleventh century
(Swanton 2000: xxi-xxii).
2 This passage does not occur in the Winchestermanuscript, which had a strong southern focus.
Manuscripts D-F were three closely related versions
of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that were all copied
from the same example, which is known as the nowlost Northern Version. Manuscript D, also known
as the Worcester-manuscript, was started in the
middle of the eleventh century, probably at
Worcester, whose diocese was closely connected to
York during the period 972-1016 (Swanton 2000:
xxv-xxvi). Manuscript E, also known as the
Peterborough-manuscript, is the latest of the
surviving Chronicle manuscripts, and was copied
from a Kentish original in the early twelfth century
(Swanton 2000: xxvi-xxvii). Finally, manuscript F
or the Canterbury Bi-Lingual Epitome was a bilingual (Latin and Old English) version started
around AD 1100, which drew from the lost
Northern Version as well as from the Winchestermanuscript (Swanton 2000: xxvii-xxviii).
3 Hadley (2006: 10) has questioned whether there
was any intention on the part of the invaders
already at this stage to settle permanently, although
she does acknowledge that the involvement of the
raiders in the internal politics of three Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms marked a change in tactics from the hitand-run raids of earlier periods and paved the way
for subsequent Scandinavian rule and settlement in
parts of northern and eastern England.
4 In recent decades, the presence of the raiding
army at Torksey has been confirmed through
numerous discoveries by metal-detectorists, which
this article will return to at a later stage.
5 Blair (2005: 49) has drawn attention to the fact
that our archaeological data are consistent, to put it
no more strongly, with the proposition that some
radical changes occurred in social hierarchies, and
in means of controlling resources, at the end of the
sixth century. Nevertheless, the causal relationship
between the spread of Christianity and the
increased importance of landed wealth is unclear.
This is largely due to the fact that the practice of
writing did not arrive in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
until their conversion in the very late sixth and
seventh centuries. Prior to the spread of
Christianity, Anglo-Saxon literature had been
entirely oral. The first surviving written source that
provides an insight into the structure of Anglo1

The theme of this paper has been the

relationship between conflict and the
transformation of landscape in middle to late
Anglo-Saxon England. It has argued that the
restructuring of the landscape was the result of
the active interference of the Church, which
promoted land as a viable alternative to gold as
the medium through which social hierarchies
were constructed and maintained. The
influence of the Church was most directly
visible in the development of rural settlement,
which bears witness to the increased blending
of ecclesiastical and secular power on one
level, and, on another level, resulted in a more
static experience of the landscape to those who
inhabited it. This permanence was reinforced
by the erection of stone sculpture (and the
subsequent transition to stone architecture
following the Norman Conquest).
The transformation of the early Anglo-Saxon
landscape, where the concept of territory was
fluid, into the late Anglo-Saxon landscape,
with its rigid and organised division, was, of
course, the result of an ongoing conflict itself.
The term conflict, in this context, refers to the
gradual replacement of the old pre-Christian
worldview with the new Christian order. In the
context of this paper, the conflict that stood
central to the arguments was the conflict
between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons,
but this can be placed entirely in the same
light, as a conflict between pagan and
Christian. The transformation of the landscape
that took place in its wake was the outcome of
a change in the way the landscape was
perceived within this new Christian order.

Acknowledgements
This article is loosely based on two different
versions of a twenty-minute paper presented
at the Department of Archaeology, University
of Sheffield, in January 2009, and at the third
Early
Medieval
Archaeology
Student
Symposium (EMASS), held in Sheffield in May
2009. Many thanks must go to the audiences
on these two occasions for their feedback, in
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TEN HARKEL

Saxon society was the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis

Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English
People) written by Bede in the 730s, but as the title
suggests this was written from a thoroughly
Christian perspective, and it is debatable to what
extent his perception of Early Anglo-Saxon society
was accurate.
6 The inhabitants of these other kingdoms are often
characterised as Anglo-Scandinavian as they now
included the Anglo-Saxon natives as well as the
Scandinavian settlers, and their offspring.
7 This qualitative assessment of land is also reflected
in the varying size of hides (a unit for land
measurement used in the Anglo-Saxon period),
which seem to have differed depending on the
productivity of the land (Stenton 1971: 279).
8 The different status of these three settlements is
further reinforced by a tenth-century entry in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (A: 942), which refers to
Lincoln and Stamford as two of the five boroughs
in the Danish territories, also including Derby,
Nottingham and Leicester. Torksey is sometimes
added to this list, together with York, on the basis of
a single reference from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
(E: 1015) to the seven boroughs (Hadley 2006: 159;
Stenton 1971: 388 n. 2).
9 The evidence for elite involvement in the
development of these settlements is evident from
the construction of defences in Stamford, the
periodic rebuilding of the metalworking workshops
in Lincoln as a centralised event, and the presence
of a mint.
10 The Upper City is the walled area of the former
first-century Roman fortress, situated on top of a
steep slope on the highest point in the surrounding
landscape, and the Lower City refers to the walled
area of the second-century Roman town that was
constructed to the immediate south of the fortress,
on the slope leading town into the valley of the river
Witham.
11 To name a couple of examples, at the Anglo-Saxon
settlement at Bottesford in Lindsey, which amongst
other things yielded a significant Middle AngloSaxon ditch, time constraints only allowed for the

excavation of a limited number of features (Carlyle

et al. 2003; Morris and Holmes 2002; Tibbles
2001). Likewise, the Middle Anglo-Saxon
settlement remains at Belton (see below) were
limited to the size of a pipe trench (source: North
Lincolnshire SMR records), whilst the excavations
at Waterton (see below) were limited to the
construction trenches for a number of new pylons
(Foreman 1996: 3, 12). The general lack of rural
excavations in the area is a result of the largely
agricultural nature of the region, with little or no
building development to create a need for
archaeological excavations.
12 Unfortunately the area of excavation was limited
to the size of the construction trenches for pylons,
which meant that the spatial and chronological
development of the settlement could not be
determined (Foreman 1996: 3, 12).
13 Goltho is referred to in quotation marks
throughout the text because the excavated remains
that have entered the published record as Goltho
should probably be identified with the Anglo-Saxon
settlement of Bullington as recorded in the
Domesday Book (Everson 1988; 1990). The dating
presented here differs from that proposed by the
excavator (Beresford 1987), and is instead based on
a re-assessment of the site chronology based on the
pottery data (Stocker 1989; Symonds 2003).
14 Hadley (2006: 116-17) has drawn attention to the
fact that a similar process seems to have occurred at
the Anglo-Saxon settlement at Firsby, also in
Lincolnshire.
15 The absence of identifiable high-status smiths
graves from the late Anglo-Saxon period (which,
incidentally, contrasts to only one definite middle
Anglo-Saxon smiths grave from Lincolnshire)
reflects a general change in burial practice that did
not generally include grave goods in the same way
as during the preceding period (Buckberry 2004),
rather than a lowering in the status of smiths.
16 Weland was a mythical smith who played an
important role in Scandinavian and pre-Christian
Anglo-Saxon mythology, whilst Sigurd was the
foster-son of a smith.

-28-

assemblage

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