‘explosion’ in aerial archaeology and its sister sub-discipline, Remote Sensing. Remote Sensing is a way of mapping ancient landscapes from the air, using radar and other techniques aside from photography. It’s still relatively young, but is already producing exciting results. Conventional aerial photography, on the other hand, is probably in its heyday.
Aerial photography has had a profound effect on archaeology since its first widespread use as a tool of reconnaissance during the Great War. In lowland England years and years of ploughing have removed most of the humps and bumps from the actual surface of the ground, but long-vanished features such as trackways, field ditches, even house foundations, can be seen as dark marks in growing crops. In a dry year, and only in a dry year, the roots of growing crops such as wheat and barley need to dive deep to find moisture. Directly above buried and long-filled-in ditches, wells or rubbish pits, the roots find dampness and the crops grow thick, lush and luxuriant. This darker growth, known as a cropmark, shows up clearly from the air.
The summer of 1976 was one of the driest on record, and it produced fabulous cropmarks. Subsequently we have had about a dozen good years for aerial photography, and much of this new material is slowly finding its way into local SMRs and the three National Monuments Records.7 It would seem that global warming does have a few beneficial side-effects. Cropmarks are particularly important in rural areas that have been subjected to intensive arable agriculture. They reveal the remains of farms, fields, roadways and settlements, some of which may already have been destroyed by farming and only survive as differences in soil texture. After some practice one can begin to ‘read’ a map of cropmarks and separate Bronze Age barrows and livestock fields from Iron Age farms and arable fields; one can also follow the extent of early medieval fields and the development of the ridge-and-furrow fields that have been so seriously denuded in the last two decades of the twentieth century. It is fair to say that this book could not have been written without the new information provided by commercial archaeology and aerial photography. It has affected not just the quantity of what we now know about the past, but its quality too. By learning more about them, modern archaeologists have gained huge respect for the humanity and achievements of the people they are privileged to study.
If my correspondence is anything to go by, there is a growing interest amongst the public at large in ‘real’ history and archaeology. A recent piece in the authoritative popular journal BBC History Magazine suggests that teachers are being told by their pupils that they have too much of Hitler and the twentieth century, and want to learn more medieval history.8 If their elders fail to grasp the point, brighter younger people now realise that the roots of the modern world lie in the Middle Ages. It is a period which demands reassessment from the bottom up: for too long it has been viewed from the perspective of the Normans, the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses. Certainly these were important dynasties and political events, but they were no more crucial to the development of the modern world than were the activities of millions of anonymous builders, merchants, farmers, mariners and miners. These people, and the inspired artists, architects and managers who supervised their work, were the true ancestors of today’s Britain.
Walk beneath the magnificent lantern above the transept of Ely Cathedral atop its ‘island’ of drier ground in the East Anglian Fens. Look up into the soaring space at the eight massive shaped oak trees that appear like so many distant gilded matchsticks, and you will be convinced that this is a modern building in every sense of the word. It was built by modern people who just happened to be living in an age of faith. Does that make them fundamentally different from us? I think not.
Religion and piety are foreign to many in the increasingly secular West. Speaking personally, I find the power exerted by religion over rational people quite inexplicable. But that simply reflects the fact that I do not believe in God. Today many people in Britain share my views, or rather lack of them, but my atheism does not make me somehow more modern than a person who has faith. Besides, faith and religion were never exclusively confined to the Middle Ages. The works of that great eighteenth-century genius J.S. Bach are suffused with faith. In Victorian times Charles Darwin encountered fierce public opposition, led by the Church of England, when he published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Even today, biblical creation and ‘directed evolution’ or ‘intelligent design’ are increasingly hot topics of debate. Many people in numerous countries across the modern world are perfectly content to live their lives within social and political contexts that are structured around faith. A strong belief in the power of God and the Church does not place the medieval world somehow outside our own times.
But to return to Ely, I find the achievements of those medieval master craftsmen still speak directly to me in a way that surpasses simple reason and logic. The construction of that soaring octagon high above the transept, apart from being one of the greatest achievements of medieval carpentry, required modern technical expertise, combined with modern thought and vision. I just cannot see the people with the minds to imagine, build, rebuild, maintain and support Ely as being significantly different from us today. I am aware, of course, that I am reading too much into one building, but it was the octagon at Ely that set me thinking. So I have reason to be thankful for that afternoon in the Fens. I looked upwards at the right time and in the right place. It was that single transporting moment that provided me with the motivation to write this book. Now it is time to start the story.
PART I On Britons, Saxons and Vikings (650–1066)
FIG 1 Principal places mentioned in Part I.
CHAPTER ONE The North/South Divide of the Middle Saxon Period
THIS CHAPTER will mainly be about the emergence of England. First, however, I must say a few words about the state of the countryside in general in the three centuries or so after the departure of the last Roman troops in AD 410, the generally accepted date for the end of the Roman presence in Britain. To summarise briefly, in the years prior to about 1960 it was believed that the British countryside reverted to a state of near wilderness when everything collapsed after the Roman withdrawal. The term often used to describe the situation was a ‘waste’ or ‘wasteland’, in which forests covered the land and the sun was excluded from the ground. Then waves of new settlers from across the North Sea arrived in Britain, felled the forests and pushed the few inadequate natives west towards Wales. The new people brought with them an entirely new way of life.
In Britain AD I discussed how archaeology and environmental science have shown that there was in fact very little forest regeneration, and that if anything the post-Roman landscape became more open, and the styles of farming more diverse. All the evidence points to continuity in the landscape: there was no wholesale disruption, such as one might expect if the entire population of what was shortly to become south and east England had in fact changed. Most towns and cities were indeed abandoned, but this was a process that had begun long before, in a remarkably sudden and coordinated fashion shortly after AD 300 – a full century prior to the Roman departure. The distinguished scholar of Roman Britain Richard Reece has suggested that this was because towns in Roman Britain were an idea ahead of their time, and that their grip on the population was at best tenuous – and soon slipped. Whatever the explanation, and I find Reece very convincing, Romano-British town life effectively ceased in the early fourth century and there was a (consequent?) rise in rural prosperity, which included the construction or enlargement of many elaborate country houses, known to everyone today as Roman villas.
To the north and far west the British population at large was less affected by the Roman presence,
