Simon Roffey - Danes in Wessex : the Scandinavian impact on southern England, c.800-c.1100

Published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by

OXBOW BOOKS
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Oxbow Books and the individual authors 2016

Print Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-931-9
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-932-6
Kindle Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-933-3
PDF Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-934-0

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lavelle, Ryan, editor, author. | Roffey, Simon, editor, author.

Title: Danes in Wessex : the Scandinavian impact on southern England, c.800-c.1100 / edited by Ryan Lavelle, Simon Roffey.

Description: Philadelphia : Oxbow Books, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015031241 | ISBN 9781782979319 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Danes--England--Wessex--History. | Wessex (England)--History. | Great Britain--History--Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066. | Scandinavians--England--Wessex--History. | Vikings--England--Wessex. | Wessex (England)--Antiquities.

Classification: LCC DA670.W48 D36 2015 | DDC 942.201--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015031241

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Contents

Editorial Preface

This volume stems from a conference of the same title, which we ran at the University of Winchester as part of the Wessex Centre for History and Archaeologys programme in September 2011. New work on the early middle ages, not least the excavations of mass graves associated with the Viking Age in Dorset and Oxford, was beginning to draw attention to the gaps in our understanding of the wider impact of Scandinavians in areas of Britain not traditionally associated with them, and that a multidisciplinary at times interdisciplinary approach to the problems of their study was required to be applied to the Wessex region. Our tentative plans to publish the papers delivered at the conference were given a boost when Martin Biddle was able to confirm that he and Birthe Kjlbye-Biddles English translation of their contribution to Danske Kongegrave a major work on Danish royal graves, due to go to press at the time of writing could be made be available for our volume. We are delighted that all those who spoke at the conference have been able to present versions of their papers as chapters here but we have solicited further contributions, especially from those who, for a variety of reasons, were unable to speak at the conference. We are grateful to all of the contributors for their hard work, as well as their copious quantities of patience, good humour and forebearance.

Editing this book has incurred a number of further debts of gratitude: Michael Hicks, David Hinton, and Barbara Yorke were instrumental in their encouragement and advice when organising the original conference, and we are especially grateful to Barbara Yorke for her advice at many points during the gestation of this volume and for kindly providing a foreword. Clare Litt and her colleagues at Oxbow Books have been extremely accommodating in helping bring this volume together, and in answering many technical queries. Our colleague Kate Weikert provided an invaluable final reading of the complete manuscript, which saved us from a number of infelicities. We also wish to record our thanks to Richard Abels, John Crook, Carey Fleiner, Charles Insley, Janine Lavelle, Duncan Probert, David Score, Sarah Semple, Gabor Thomas, Nick Thorpe, Katie Tucker, and Andrew Wareham.

Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society whose generous grant has allowed a number of illustrations in this volume to be reproduced in colour as well as the financial and institutional support of the Archaeology and History Departments of the University of Winchester.

Foreword

There have been many studies of the Scandinavians in Britain, but this, so far as I know, is the first collection of essays to be devoted solely to their engagement with Wessex. It must be welcomed as an important contribution to wider debates concerning Anglo-Scandinavian relations in the ninth to eleventh centuries. While there may not have been the same degree of impact, discernable particularly in place-names and archaeology, as in those areas of Britain which had substantial influxes of Scandinavian settlers, Wessex was a major theatre of the Viking wars in the reigns of Alfred and thelred Unrd. The succession of Cnut brought the Danish king and his court into the heart of Wessex, with some of his countrymen becoming major landowners and royal agents. These two major topics, the Viking wars and the Danish landowning elite, figure strongly in the collection, but are not its exclusive concern, nor the sole reasons for the presence of Danes, or items associated with them, in Wessex. Multi-disciplinary approaches mean that Vikings and Danes are evoked not just through the written record, but through their impact on real and imaginary landscapes and via the objects they owned or produced. Some never returned home, with, at one extreme, the executed Scandinavians of the Dorset Ridgeway, and, at the other, the burials of Cnut and members of his family and court in Winchester. The papers raise wider questions which the editors explore in their joint contribution. When did aggressive Vikings morph into more acceptable Danes, and what issues of identity were there for natives and incomers in a province whose founders were believed to have also come from North Sea areas, if not from parts of Denmark itself? Readers can continue for themselves aspects of these broader debates that will be stimulated by this fascinating and significant series of studies by both established scholars and new researchers. Read, enjoy and think!

Barbara Yorke
Professor Emeritus
University of Winchester
and
Honorary Professor
Institute of Archaeology