Normanising the North: The Evidence of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian Sculpture
Abstract This Study Probes the destruction of material culture to illuminate the introduction of Norman political authority into northern England. A brief overview of Norman destruction of churches provides the background to a review of the potential relationship of Anglo-Saxon monuments with memory and identity, in the context of recent discussions of monument reuse. Durham and York, the Anglo-Saxon monastic sites at Wearmouth/Jarrow, Lindisfarne and Jedburgh, and a selection of local churchyards provide case studies. It argues that some monuments seem to have been deliberately targeted, but a wider range of factors, all ultimately derived from changing political circumstances, can be identified that explain why sculpture was removed and reused. The paper serves as a platform for further debate about the significance of monuments in the Middle Ages, and as a contribution to the broader discourse within archaeology about their social meanings.
Hogbacks: the Materiality of Solid Spaces
Introduction The hogbacks of northern England and southern Scotland have long been seen as a distinctive category of tenthand early eleventh-century early medieval stone monument resulting from Hiberno-Norse influence and settlement. This chapter reviews previous research and suggests a new foundation for their interpretation, arguing that hogbacks were an effective commemorative media because of the mnemonics of their materiality. Specifically, I focus upon the skeuomorphic allusions inherent in the ornamentation and form of hogbacks. Combined with their solidity and lithic weight, hogbacks cited a multi-scalar network of architectural material cultures and buildings already established within Britain and Ireland prior to, as well as during, the Viking Age. Rather than exclusive translations of secular halls into stone as often portrayed in both popular and scholarly research (e.g. Stocker 2000; Eriksen 2013), hogbacks cited a complex network of buildings (including secular halls but potentially also churches) and small-scale architectures (from biers and coffins to caskets and reliquaries) which were distilled into a solid lithic architectural form in various fashions. In this regard, hogbacks operated as elite commemorative monuments because their form connected to this shared elite network of architectural ‘things’ and implied the presence of the dead as inhabiting, or at least accessible through, the monument. Endbeasts and other themes of conflict were apotropaic in this context. The monstrous, sometimes ursine, beasts threaten to engulf some hogbacks – although sometimes they are demonstrably curtailed by their binding and muzzling. The emphasis upon bound beasts reveals the significance of sealing and fixing the tomb in place through its hogback design.
II.— Late Saxon, Viking, and Early Medieval Finds from York
The study of the Viking Age in this country has in the past remained largely the province of the historian, using the material afforded by the written sources and by the scientific investigation of place-names, and what systematic work has been done on the antiquities of the period, outside the fields of architecture and sculpture, illumination, and fine metalwork, is in considerable measure due to the labours of Scandinavian scholars. The contribution of archaeology to the problems of the period has until recently been quite inadequate and this state of affairs is all the more surprising in view of the important and controversial question of the origin of the English towns, the historical evidence for which, being both sketchy and ambiguous, has now been argued almost to the point of exhaustion. The publication in 1927 of the material remains of the Viking period from London in a manner appreciative of their equal value with the documentary and place-name evidence for the history of the site was exceptional, and in recent years the investigation by deliberate excavation of towns and settlement sites of the Viking Age, at Norwich, Oxford, Southampton, and Thetford, and far away in Shetland at Jarlshof, has gone some way towards compensating for earlier neglect. The systematic investigation of such sites, however, is only now beginning and so far no comparable work has been undertaken in the lands north of Humber, where from the time of Halfdan's settlement in 876 a thriving Viking province maintained with varying fortune its individuality until the Conquest and beyond. At York, the political centre of the Danelaw, the historical and place-name evidence indicates a thoroughly Scandinavian occupation, but the abundant archaeological material of the period, considering the importance of the site, has never received the attention in detail that it deserves. This material constitutes one of the largest groups of town finds of the Viking Age in the country and although for the most part recovered by chance in modern building operations and ill recorded in consequence has far too long been ignored.