Read Battle of Hastings, The Online
Authors: Harriet Harvey Harriet; Wood Harvey Wood
Trade, however, internal as well as external, was the most important element in English prosperity in the late Anglo-Saxon period. It depended to a great extent on the maintenance of the means
of communication. The three basic services that landowners were rarely, if ever, excused contributed to this: if service in the fyrd or national host and the building and repair of fortifications
were demanded primarily for purposes of the defence of the realm, the work on fortifications would have included the maintenance of roads, and the bridge-building requirement, though it might also
have military aspects, was a significant contribution to the ability of merchants and goods to move around the kingdom. The evidence of caches of coins from the period all over England confirms
that money did move around, for the vast majority of the coins found so far were minted miles from where they were dug up. One of the problems of knowing what was exported is the fact that, as
already noted, much of it has perished during the last thousand years. Pottery tends to last better than other things and more pottery of the period has survived than anything else; if wood and
leather and textiles were profitable articles of trade, as the written evidence suggests, few examples have been recovered to prove or illustrate it and we must rely on written sources for
information. Henry of Huntingdon, writing about sixty years after the conquest (the basic
conditions he described are unlikely to have changed significantly in the interim),
tells us that, although little silver was mined in England, a large amount came into the country from Germany in payment for English exports (he mentions particularly fish, wool and cattle) so that
there was more silver in England than in Germany itself.
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As for the imports, the merchant in Ælfric’s
Colloquy,
that delightful
dialogue between a schoolmaster and his pupils, designed to be used to teach schoolboys Latin, gives us a list of what he brought back from overseas in the tenth century: purple garments and silks,
precious stones and gold, various vestments and pigments, wine and oil, ivory, brass and tin (Cornwall must have seemed as remote as overseas to many Englishmen), sulphur and glass.
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Few artefacts, whether made in England or overseas, have survived from before 1066. This is easily understandable if we consider what hazards they were exposed to throughout the period of
Anglo-Saxon civilization. Early Anglo-Saxon England, like most Dark Age European countries, was a violent place; and in the ninth century there was the first wave of Viking invasions, starting with
the sack of Lindisfarne in 793 and continuing with the looting of most of the other English monasteries and churches for the precious metals and jewels with which they were lavishly and reverently
endowed. What had been stripped was painstakingly restored during the comparative peace of the tenth century, only for the second wave of Danish depredation to begin in the 980s. Throughout the
period, fire was a constant danger in a society that built largely in wood; textiles and books were especially vulnerable. The minsters in Canterbury (both of them) and York were all destroyed by
fire shortly after the conquest. Christianity meant that burials from the age of the conversion onwards took place without grave goods such as those found at
Sutton Hoo, and
where pagan burial sites did exist, they were frequently looted (that Sutton Hoo survived unlooted is, like the endurance of the Bayeux Tapestry, one of more inexplicable miracles). After the
Norman Conquest English art treasures, particularly artefacts in gold and silver, were exported to Normandy and elsewhere in Europe on a scale unequalled in Europe until the days of the Nazi
Property Transfer Office, no doubt to protect their original owners from the shameful luxury of which William of Poitiers complained. Finally, there was almost the worst act of vandalism of all,
the dissolution of the monasteries at the Reformation, during which innumerable pieces of religious art were broken up or melted down. Items made of precious metals were always at risk of being
melted down, either for refashioning in more modern styles or, more usually, for their cash value. William of Malmesbury records one such instance, this one not the responsibility of the Conqueror
but of his heir, William Rufus:
The bishops and abbots flocked to the court complaining about this outrage, pointing out that they were not able to meet such heavy taxation. . . To which, the officials of
the court, replying as usual with angry expressions, said: ‘Do you not have reliquaries made of gold and silver, full of the bones of dead men?’ No other reply did they deign to
give their petitioners. So, the latter, seeing the drift of the reply, stripped the reliquaries of the saints, despoiled the Crucifixes, melted down the chalices, not for the benefit of the
poor but for the King’s treasury. Almost everything which the holy frugality of their ancestors had preserved was consumed by the avarice of these extortioners.
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Fortunately, there are records that give some idea of what England was once like. Dorothy Whitelock has given a good description of what the churches once
had:
. . .while the St Cuthbert stole and the Bayeux tapestry let us understand why English needlework was so prized on the Continent, it is the constant reference to precious
objects – a cloak of remarkable purple, interwoven throughout with gold in the manner of a corselet, which was turned into a chasuble; robes of silk interwoven with precious work of gold
and gems; a beautiful chasuble that shone like gold when worn in the house of the Lord; a chalice of gold flashing with gems ‘as the heavens glow with blazing stars’; great
candelabra, all of gold; images of the saints, covered with gold and silver and precious stones; and countless other treasures – vestments, altar-cloths, tapestries, dorsals, shrines,
croziers, bells, etc. – which explains the great impression made on the Norman conquerors by the richness of the equipment of the English churches. We should never have guessed this
without the aid of literary records.
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Professor C. R. Dodwell has taken the trouble to go through all the written records and bring together the evidence they contain about Anglo-Saxon artefacts. His valuable book,
Anglo-Saxon Art
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, has revealed an impressive amount of information about what used to exist, even if practically nothing of it has
survived. It is clear from this that the average Anglo-Saxon, and even more the higher ranking ones, believed in conspicuous display. Anything that could be fashioned in gold was made of it.
Objects that could not be made entirely of gold would at least be covered
with it, like the ship presented by Earl Godwin to King Harthacnut, which not only had a
gold-encrusted prow but was also equipped with eighty warriors, each of whom wore two gold arm-rings and had a partly gilded helmet, a sword with a gilded hilt, a battle-axe edged with gold and
silver and a shield with gilded boss and studs. The description of Cnut’s ships supports the evidence for this kind of display:
So great, also, was the ornamentation of the ships, that the eyes of the beholders were dazzled, and to those looking from afar they seemed of flame rather than of wood. For
if at any time the sun cast the splendour of its rays among them, the flashing of arms shone in one place, in another the flame of suspended shields. Gold shone on the prows, silver also
flashed on the variously shaped ships.
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Professor Dodwell discovered that much of what emerges from the study of everyday documents such as wills and charters supports what might otherwise have been taken for artistic
hyperbole in poetry:
If, in
Beowulf,
there are references to a gold-plated hall, we are told that, in the eleventh century, the domed architectural canopy that surrounded the high altar
at Waltham was gold plated and had columns, bases and arches also embellished with gold, and a tenth-century portrayal of another canopy in a cathedral shows parts of the capitals and bases in
gold. If, in that epic poem, the eaves of the same hall were said to be adorned with gold, we know that, if life had been his companion, as a
contemporary delicately put
it, King Eadred in the tenth century would have adorned the east porch of the church at Winchester with gilded tiles. If the same poem mentions a gold figured tapestry, we know that even sails
in the eleventh century could be embroidered with historic scenes in gold.
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As he points out, the poets were not dreaming up gilded visions but delineating the tastes of the world around them. The golden banner that illuminated the dragon’s den in
Beowulf
was paralleled by Harold’s golden and jewelled banner of the Fighting Man at Hastings, sent to the Pope by William after the battle as part of the spoils of war. Kenneth Clark,
in his lectures on civilization, made the very accurate point that, when an Anglo-Saxon poet wanted to put his ideal of the good society into words, he spoke of gold.
Particular generosity was lavished on religious books and codices, and the magnificent standard of their production can be seen from survivors such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Canterbury
Codex Aureus, now in the Stockholm Royal Library. We know that St Wilfrid commissioned a gospel book for his church at Ripon in 678, to be ‘in letters of purest gold on purpled parchment and
illuminated’; and he had a case made for it of purest gold, set with gems. Ironically, the very splendour lavished on such productions was to be their undoing, for it would be the gold and
jewelled covers that attracted the attention of the illiterate pagan robbers. The Codex Aureus provides an interesting example of this. It was looted by Vikings who stripped it of its golden
jewelled cover, but had no use for the illuminated manuscript inside; they therefore sold this back to an Anglo-Saxon nobleman named Alfred for yet more gold, and it was restored by him to
Canterbury.
Among the interesting characteristics of Anglo-Saxon life noted by Professor Dodwell was the passion for precious possessions in comparison with land which, after the
conquest, would be prized by the Normans above any other form of wealth (though this is not to imply that the Anglo-Saxon was indifferent to land; there is ample evidence that he was not). Land,
which he could pass on to his heirs, might come later when he could no longer fight; gold came first. It was the responsibility of any lord to reward the warriors who followed him with gold rings
and gilded weapons. The aristocratic Anglo-Saxon would have had gold arm-rings (weighing anything up to 100 mancuses of gold at 4 grams a mancus) on both arms, his clothes would have been made of
wool and imported silk with woven gold borders, with the addition of furs for warmth; his sword and dagger would have had hilts covered and decorated with gold and silver and inlaid with jewels. He
could, in fact, have been wearing the price of a substantial estate. He would retain his warriors by the generosity with which he lavished gold rings and weapons on them. This could (from the point
of view of William of Poitiers) be accounted for by a weakness for luxury and display; it was more probably due to the conveniently portable nature of precious metals during periods of invasion and
rapine. There is also the point that you could not be taxed on the possession of gold. When Godwin was exiled in 1051, the ample treasury he is reported to have packed into his fleet would have
been in gold and jewels. But what Dodwell says of the importance to the Anglo-Saxons of the changing and shifting and reflected light on gold and silver and precious stones in a northern landscape
that must for most of the year have been dark and overcast is the most interesting of all:
Æthelwulf remarks on how the changing light gave vibrancy to gold vessels and, in the dark interiors of northern buildings, unlit as yet by a
general and generous use of windows, we can understand how the warm glow of gold would give a delicate tremulousness to the surface of art treasures as they caught and reflected at various
angles the northern light or the gleam of wax lamps or candles.
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. . . Perhaps, indeed, it is in the sea and the mesmeric fascination it
still has for us today that we can recapture some of the Anglo-Saxon interest in colour. Though the sea can change almost imperceptibly from blues to bruise-coloured greys and greens, its real
visual attraction lies in the fact that each colour can vary within its own range in terms of ‘depth’ and ‘brightness’. The merest ruffling of the surface produces an
exciting mobility of brightness of the same hue which gives a new animation and interest to the whole. This vibrancy the Anglo-Saxons managed to achieve even in their coloured outline drawings,
and the almost shimmering quality of some of their coloured drawings reminds us of Æthelwulf’s interest in the tremulous flames of the hanging torches at night which he likened to
gleaming stars.
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Quite apart from its treasures, however, England was, on the whole, a good country to live in by the standards of the times. It was, in many ways, a remarkably fluid society.
There were, of course, class distinctions, as there were in every country at that time, but the possibilities of crossing class barriers seem by eleventh-century standards very enlightened. The
basic ranks of society under the king, starting from the top, were ealdormen (after Cnut’s reign,
known as earls), thegns (subdivided into king’s thegns, who
presumably held land directly from the king, and others who held from intermediate lords, and who roughly equated to gentry and yeomanry), and churls, or free peasants and farmers; these classes
were differentiated by their wergild or blood-price, the compensation that had to be paid to their kin if they were killed. The wergild of a nobleman was 1,200 shillings, that of a thegn 600
shillings, that of a churl 200 shillings. Below all these came the unfree men or slaves, who naturally had no wergild. But the situation was not static. A churl who did so well that he possessed
five hides of land on which he paid the appropriate taxes was assessed at the wergild of a thegn and achieved a correspondingly higher social status; and if his son and grandson continued to hold
the same amount of land, the title, the status and the financial obligations became hereditary. A merchant who had crossed the sea three times in his own ship and at his own risk was also entitled
to be upgraded to thegnship, a significant encouragement to trade. An unfree man could be manumitted by his lord and become free and technically could start to aim at thegnship. Equally in times of
hardship and famine, a man might, in desperation, sell himself or his family into slavery for the sake of food and maintenance, and a free man who failed or was unable to pay judicial fines might
be sentenced to lose his liberty and become unfree. If he were, he could be redeemed by his relatives on payment of a stipulated sum. It was a system where, by contrast with Normandy, less
attention was paid to blood or descent than to achievement. Earl Godwin, the most powerful man in England under the king, was the grandson of a Sussex thegn of no particular distinction. Society in
Anglo-Saxon England was, as in contemporary Europe, brutal, violent and frequently unjust; but there were more aspects of it that mitigated the general misery than elsewhere.