Family Stories: Amber from other Angles

TWO CHARMS TO BIND THEM

I have [at least] three sometimes irritating attributes: an elephant's memory for anything written or read; a large capacity for seeing links, parallels and analogies [even where they may not exist]; and a compulsion to communicate my inductions. This drives my family nuts – and goes a long way to explaining why I blog.

So I have been ruminating for a while on linking three stories from the newspapers:

1. The Guardian on ‘The Hobbit ring that may have inspired Tolkien’ at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/02/hobbit-tolkien-ring-exhibition

2. The UK Independent: ‘8,000 artefacts and rising: City dig pronounced the “most important ever” in London’ at:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/8000-artefacts-and-rising-city-dig-pronounced-the-most-important-ever-in-london-8566348.html

3. Der Spiegel: 'Sensational' Discovery: Archeologists Find Gateway to the Viking Empire’ at:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/sensational-discovery-archeologists-find-gateway-to-the-viking-empire-a-714235.html

All through the 3-D lens of an economic geographer / transport economist who remains besotted with archaeology; as one who has tried to get his head around the pre-contact history Maori tribal and trade relationships in New Zealand; and as someone who has long-believed that most history as it is currently written gives too little attention to motion, diffusion and pattern.

Anyhow, my hypothesis is this:

The English Channel was a trading nexus in the Pre-Roman era – the point where maritime trade from the Mediterranean met maritime trade from the Baltic. The Romans did not conquer Britain because it was backward and exotic and had barbarian chiefs who would look good in chains – they conquered it because they wanted to control the Channel and take over London and the east coast ports.

The two charms pictured above illustrate perfectly the overlap between the northern and southern European cultures in SE England in the Roman era.

[The ring was found near Silchester in 1785. It is gold and weighs 12 grams and it is ornamented with a head a spiky head wearing a diadem (possibly a representation of the god Nodens). The Latin inscription reads: "Senicianus live well in God".

It may that Senicianus stole the ring from a Roman called Silvianus, because a curse has been discovered on a votive tablet which informs the god Nodens of the theft and asks him to intercede and ‘grant none health who bear the name of Senicianus until he bring back the ring."

The amulet is from the ongoing Bloomberg Place dig in the City of London. It is made of Baltic amber in the shape of a gladiator’s helmet. As the Museum of London Archaeology notes ‘amber was an expensive imported material and was thought to have magical powers. The Roman author Pliny describes how amber amulets could protect children from illness and the symbolism of the gladiator may also be protective.’]

So far so good!

I am going on though to argue that the two charms explain part of the background to the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the South East of England.

Historians have a preoccupation it seems to me with identifying particular tribes in Pre-History with particular bits of land as though they were dealing with mini-countries. The example of Maori in New Zealand challenges this. Here you had 20-30 tribes that spoke a common language and that were frequently at war in shifting alliances that variously led to roving conquests, eviction and migration, absorption and sometimes tribal extinction.

I argue that the Northern Germanic / Proto-Scandinavians were much the same. And that as with the Maori, war-or-no-war, maritime trade continued regardless.

In this sense, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were simply an early wave of Vikings. And it would surprise me little to have it confirmed that they traded and settled in Roman London, and that the Angles in particular dominated commerce at the entrepôt forts of the 'Saxon Shore'. Just as I find it totally reasonable that Dublin may have originated as an Anglo-Saxon trading village.

And this brings us to the Der Spiegel article.

This concerns the 30-kilometer (19-mile) wall which runs through the entire state of Schleswig-Holstein. Termed the Danevirke ["Work of the Danes"] – it is considered the largest earthwork in northern Europe.

By the 8^th Century it was three meters thick (10 feet) - and a gateway known as the Wiglesdor has just been excavated near Hedeby (known as Haithabu in German). Archaeologists now think the foundation stone might have been laid as early as the 7th century by the Friesians [or I would add probably earlier by the Angles].

[Incidentally someone should look for the trade gateways between the English and the Welsh along Offa's Dyke. This may similarly have been largely designed to intercept and direct cart and pack-horse trains, being for the most part patrolled by the equivalent of customs officers rather than warriors in peace time - but taking on a more offensive function in times of war].

As der Spiegel explains:

'The Frisians, who lived on the west coast of what is now Denmark and on a number of islands in the North Sea, were fighting for supremacy in the region with three other peoples: the Danes, the Slavs and the Saxons. "It was the Kosovo of the early middle ages” but in the end, it was the Danes who emerged victorious.

[I add here the suggestion that the 'Angles' were in reality a sub-tribe of the Friesians - or what Maori in New Zealand would call a 'hapu' of the main 'iwi'] .

'According to contemporary records, King Göttrik of Denmark ordered in 808 that the border of his empire with that of the Saxons be fortified.

...

‘Only their long boats were state-of-the-art -- fast and light but easily navigable. They allowed the Danes to develop a formidable network of trading routes. They plied Russian rivers all the way to Byzantium and sailed the North Atlantic to far-away Iceland, Greenland and even the northern reaches of North America.

‘But there was an Achilles heel in this far-flung trading empire, and that was at Hedeby. In order for goods from the east to be shipped to the west, they had to cross the narrow strip of land at the base of present-day Denmark. Traders would sail inland on the Schlei Inlet, but when they got to Hedeby, their wares were offloaded and carted overland to the Treene River, 18 kilometers away. Only there could the goods be reloaded onto boats and sailed into the North Sea.

‘For the duration of this short overland trek, the valuable goods -- including gold from Byzantium, bear pelts from Novgorod and even statues of Buddha from India -- were open to attack from the mainland. In order to protect this important trade artery, archaeologists now believe, a bulwark of earth, stone and bricks was constructed. The Danevirke, in other words, was little more than a protective shield for commerce’.

Now Hedeby is in Angeln, the original home of the Angles who settled in eastern England - and a 9^th Century account of the voyages of a Ottar apparently has this comment:

‘And from Sciringesheal, he said that he sailed in five days to the trading-town which they call Hedeby; this stands between the Wends and the Saxons and the Angles, and belongs to the Danes.

‘When he sailed there from Sciringesheal, then Denmark was to the port and open sea to the starboard for three days; and then for two days before he came to Hedeby there lay to his starboard, Jutland, and Zealand and many islands.

‘The Angles dwelt in those lands before they came here to this country. And for those two days there lay to his port those islands which belong to Denmark.’

I go on then to argue that the Angles were important traders, in Roman and Post-Roman times, and that at one time they controlled the traffic through the Hedeby portages, and subsequently saw an opportunity to seize another traffic artery, the English Channel, when Roman power weakened. Whether or not this was given impetus by strikes against them in Angeln by surrounding tribes is moot.

All this is clearly at odds with what Bede says, writing around 730 A.D when he comments that the ancestral homeland Angeln ‘is said, from that time [from the migration to Britain], to remain desert to this day.’ We may ask ourselves then: ‘is it likely that such a valuable piece of commercial real estate as the Hedeby Portages be left ‘desert to this day?’

But Bede was a monk who likely never travelled far from Monkwearmouth and who would have had next to no interest or understanding with respect to commerce and trade. And of course, he was writing at the very time that the Friesians and the Danes were contesting the Baltic-North Sea link.

This leaves us with the inference that the English Angles descended from skilled navigators and traders who at one period of history may have been made wealthy by the Hedeby Portages – so much so that they were able to finance offshoots to their trading empire – but such also that they attracted the envy and enmity of their neighbours.

And that what happened under the Vikings / Danes [who similarly contested with the Mercians and West Saxons for possession of London in the period 800-900 AD] has some very clear resonances in what happened earlier in the period 300-500 AD.