THE FRONTIER IN ANGLO-SAXON PRE-HISTORY
Why did the Anglo-Saxons suddenly expand westwards around 600 AD to overrun the remaining ‘Welsh’ parts of England?
Well, the usual explanations involved dynastic skullduggery, megalomaniac thuggery by forceful leaders, clashes within the Catholic Church, and a more general sense among the Anglo-Saxons of their Manifest Destiny to rule England from shining sea to shining sea.
Indeed, the English still like to believe (as taught by Frederick Jackson Turner about the Taming of the American West) that ‘the forging of a unique and rugged identity occurred at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness.
This produced a new type of citizen - one with the power to tame the wild and one upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality’.
Alas the poor Welsh – who were literate and Christian long before the usurpers.
The blood-thirsty tribal thugs were Æthelfrith and Edwin, it being observed that the routine of kingship at this time involved regular - probably annual - wars with neighbours to obtain tribute, submission and slaves.
What seems to have been left out in all this is the economic dimension – issues that still concern us of comparative advantage and trade deficits.
FIRST OF ALL SOME DATES (I am not a date man so don’t take them too seriously)
593 Æthelfrith becomes king of Bernicia (in the northeastern 'Anglo-Saxon' part of England)
[Æthelfrith, son of Æthelric ruled two Northern English kingdoms in the 7th Century - Bernicia and Deira in the period 592 to 616. The 20th century historian Frank Stenton has written that "the continuous history of Northumbria, and indeed of England, begins with the reign of Æthelfrith".]
597 Battle of Catterick – weakening of Celtic Kingdoms of Rheged and Goddoddin
603 Battle of Degsastan – subjugation of Dal Riata
616 Battle of Chester – ‘Welsh’ of the Old North (Yr Hen Ogledd) cut off from Wales proper
616 Edwin become king
616 Collapse of North Reged
617 Subjugation of Elmet
626 Wessex defeated temporarily
624 Isle of Man taken
624 Isle of Anglesey taken – Anglo-Saxons start to dominate the Irish Sea
[From about 627 onwards, Edwin was the most powerful king among the Anglo-Saxons, ruling Bernicia, Deira and much of eastern Mercia, the Isle of Man and Anglesey. His alliance with Kent, the subjection of Wessex, and his string of successes added to his power and authority.
The imperium (as Bede calls it) that Edwin possessed was later equated with the idea of a Bretwalda or High King of Britain, a later concept invented by West Saxon kings in the 9th century.]
632 Penda of Mercia defeats and kills Edwin.
THE CAPTURE OF CHESTER
Æthelfrith attacked the Welsh Kingdom of Powys and defeated its army in a battle at Chester around 616. In this battle, the Powysian king Selyf Sarffgadau was killed.
Apparently:
'Æthelfrith king of Northumbria, at the instigation of Augustine, forthwith poured 50,000 men into the Vale Royal of Chester, the territory of Prince of Powys, under whose auspices the conference had been held.
Twelve hundred British priests of the Monastery of Bangor having come out to view the battle, Æthelfrith directed his forces against them as they stood clothed in their white vestments and totally unarmed, watching the progress of the battle - they were massacred to a man'.
According to the Raphael Hollinshead, the Tudor Chronicler:
"The Britains that dwelt about Chester, through their stoutnesse prouoked the aforesaid Edelferd king of the Northumbers vnto warre: wherevpon to tame their loftie stomachs, he assembled an armie & came forward to besiege the citie, then called of the Britains Chester.
The citizens coueting rather to suffer all things than a siege, and hauing a trust in their great multitude of people, came foorth to giue batell abroad in the fields, whome he compassing about with ambushes, got within his danger, and easilie discomfited."
So Æthelfrith put together an enormous army to subdue the city of Chester at the extreme southernmost corner of his growing ‘imperium’ of conquests – Why?
TRADE & TRADE RELATIONS
If you look at the map of England prior to Æthelfrith’s conquests, it is striking how far the Anglo-Saxon petty kings had succeeded in subduing the drier, eastern agrarian part of England before 600 AD. However, this left the western pastoral areas of England under the control of the ‘Welsh’.
There was therefore both a natural trade synergy and a source of friction between the more densely settled farming communities of the east which led themselves to more conventional forms of authority and the wilder westerners who were happy to trade livestock but who were also happy to embark on mounted raids on settled territory.
The settled lands of the east had granaries, and access to the iron of Sussex and Kent to keep their tool and weapon-smiths employed. However, they lacked resources of non-ferrous metals like lead (from Yorkshire and North Wales), tin (from Cornwall), and gold (from Wales and Ireland).
And, as the economists would say, as they grew richer and consumption increased, they developed a balance of trade and payments problem.
Perhaps most importantly, they lacked their own sources of another limited supply / high value commodity that was in universal demand as a food additive and preservative – salt.
[In the South West of England, the Anglo-Saxon intruders had reached the western shores of England well before 600 AD, having seized a major source of salt at Droitwich and set up the petty kindom of the Hwicce - see lower map].
WORTH THEIR SALT
It has been observed that the Romans seem to have focused a good deal of the infrastructure of their Empire near salt sources or on salt routes between those sites and Rome [Via Salaria].
The Roman word salarium links employment, salt and soldiers, but the exact link is unclear. The least common theory is that the word soldier itself comes from the Latin sal dare (to give salt).
Alternatively, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder stated as an aside in his Natural History's discussion of sea water, that "[I]n Rome. . .the soldier's pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it. . ." Plinius Naturalis Historia XXXI.
Others note that soldier more likely derives from the gold solidus, with which soldiers were known to have been paid, and maintain instead that the salarium was either an allowance for the purchase of salt or the price of having soldiers conquer salt supplies and guard the Salt Roads (Via Salarium) that led to Rome.
THE ANCIENT SALT TOWNS IN CHESHIRE
Salt extraction was one of the most profitable industries of the Cornovii tribe and was carried out at several sites in Cheshire, notably at Middlewich, known in Roman times as Salinae 'the Salt Pans'. In addition to these main works there is evidence of considerable Romano-British salt production here in Northwich and also at the recently-discovered salt-working settlement at Nantwich.
Condate (Northwich) was so important that is recorded in two separate itinera of the Antonine Itinerary, a the late-second century document which records all of the major road-routes within the Roman Empire.
The second itinerary in the British section of this document is entitled "the route from the Vallum to the port of Rutupiae" and details the road-stations between Hadrian's Wall in the far north of England and Richborough on the Kentish coast.
Towards the middle of this itinerary the station Condate is listed 18 miles from Mamucium (Manchester, Greater Manchester) and 20 miles from Deva (Chester, Cheshire).
Another classical geography which mentions the Northwich settlement is the 7th century Ravenna Cosmology, wherein the name is again listed as Condate, this time between the entries for Salinae (Middlewich, Cheshire) and the capital of the Coritani tribe at Ratae (Leicester, Leicestershire).
In Cheshire, recent archaeology at both Nantwich and Middlewich has confirmed that the Romans established new salt works on green field sites which were then abandoned and returned to agriculture. This was either with their departure in the 5th century or possibly even during the occupation.
One explanation is that these were Roman Army saltworks, providing salt for their own needs, while Romano-British salt makers occupied long established Celtic salt making sites nearby and continued to supply the traditional needs of the local population and the itinerant traders who travelled into Wales and to the North.
Salt making continued in post Roman Cheshire, at first through a period of Welsh control and then as part of the Anglo-Saxon Mercia. The same pattern of trade will have continued and later this attracted Viking influence from the North. The first documentary account of Anglo-Saxon salt making in Cheshire is found in the Doomsday Book of 1086.
[It is also noting that the Cheshire salt towns were detached from Northumbria in the 7th Century, as part of the Wreocansaete to become part of the thriving central English kingdom of Mercia.
As Mercia also acquired the salt facilities of the Hwicce at Droitwich, it then had a full salt monopoly - which led in turn to it becoming the paramount state before the Danish invasions and to the banishment of the 'Welsh' to west of Offa's Dyke, close to the existing boundary between England and Wales].
THE BATTLE FOR SALT & THE IRISH SEA TRADE
So I argue that Æthelfrith conquered Chester mainly because it was the centre of a lucrative trade in salt from Cheshire across the Irish Sea – one that brought Irish gold into England in payment.
And once Æthelfrith had subdued Rheged, the local fishermen and traders on the Fylde coast of Lancashire would have put forward a proposal to use their maritime resources to help wrest back the trade from the Welsh kings of Powys – to the mutual benefit of Rheged and Northumbria.
Remember, the forerunners of Rheged, the territory of the Brigantes (Brigantia) had a pre-Roman presence in both England and Ireland, with colonies around Wexford, Kilkenny and Waterford.
Not surprising then that only a few years after the fall of Chester, the Isle of Man and the Isle of Angesley were both conquered (the latter being a stepping stone to Ireland through Holyhead).
Nor should it be so amazing that, as discussed by Frank Kilfeather, Irish Times, Friday Feb 26 1999, an archaeological has uncovered a "strange" pre-Viking house built in the Anglo-Saxon style in West Temple Bar, Dublin.
The director of the dig, Ms Linzi Simpson, told The Irish Times the find was "very exciting". While working on a Viking dig they knew immediately the house was not Scandinavian, and a comb found in it could only have come from Roman-Britain.
The house was also found at the very lowest level, under Viking buildings. These three factors convinced them of habitation in the area before the Vikings arrived.
The Irish Times asks ‘If it is true that there was Anglo Saxon settlement in Dublin prior to the Viking arrival, it completely changes our understanding of the history of Dublin and Ireland. It also poses so many other questions - if they were Anglo-Saxons, where did they go?’
Well, they probably didn’t go anywhere – at least as long as they were able to exploit their newly established trade monopoly in salt across the Irish Sea.
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