Harald Hardrada: King of Norway

Coming back to Norway meant that Harald Hardrada had two relatives to deal with – Sweyn and Magnus. It would make for an interesting path to the Norwegian throne. 

By 1043 the wheel of fortune had turned once more, and the family of Harald Hardrada was triumphant. While Harald had busied himself in his exile waging war across the wine-dark sea in the employ of the empire of the Romans, his nephew Magnus, the illegitimate son of Harald’s half-brother King Olaf II, had become the figurehead of a powerful bloc of Norwegian aristocrats disaffected by the burdens and excesses of Danish overlordship. With their support and after a decade of warfare, Magnus was able to not only secure his hold on Norway, doing much to establish and disseminate notions of royal authority, but also capture the throne of Denmark. Their traditional enemies and tormentors had all fallen by the wayside or been bent to purpose. Cnut the Great and his sons, their power fragmented by internecine rivalries and squabbles, all fell victim to illness and tragedy while the Norwegian aristocrats who had overthrown and then slain Olaf II had all reconciled themselves to Magnus and the notion of Norwegian kingship.

Magnus, whose role in the political unification of Norway and establishment of the kingdom has all too often been overlooked and undervalued, is known to history as Magnus the Good. He earnt this epithet we are told by the 13th-century saga material because rather than seek revenge against his father’s killers and perpetuate a destructive blood feud, Magnus chose to forgive them and work together in challenging Danish hegemony over Norway. Of course, Magnus was only eleven when he was first proclaimed king in 1035, therefore despite the support of several powerful advocates, such as his stepmother Queen Astrid and her brother King Arnud Jacob of Sweden, the extent to which he could have struck back against his aristocratic sponsors is highly questionable. Harald’s epithet of Hardrada on the other hand translates into English into something along the lines of the severe or stern. Wars fought between those famed for their decency and gentleness of heart and those known for their severe and forceful nature seldom last long.

And it was to be war, for Harald arrived in Scandinavia intent upon seizing the throne of Norway for himself. Perhaps he felt like he had come too far, seen too much and served too many simply to present himself to his nephew as just another poor relation, a potential military proxy and advisor in a royal court already replete with vested interests and aristocratic affinities. Harald had departed Constantinople with considerable haste with a meagre handful of ships and a few hundred diehard followers at the most. Yet he was a force to be reckoned with.

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The Value and Power of Books in Anglo-Saxon England

The St Cuthbert Gospel of St John. (formerly known as the Stonyhurst Gospel) is the oldest intact European book

Despite the ‘Dark Ages’ myth, Anglo-Saxon England actually had an impressive wealth and sophistication, and books were prized possessions. The printing press was still centuries away and so the creation of each book required a painstaking amount of time and effort. Thus, those available became symbols of power and wealth and were highly-valued among the upper echelons of Anglo-Saxon society.

In what different ways did books hold such value and power during this period?

Valuable possessions

One of the most notable figures who placed high value on literature was King Alfred the Great. His famous beautifully-crafted jewel, the Alfred Jewel, is thought to have originally been the handle of his reading stick, used for pointing at words when reading.

We also know Alfred championed the making of books. In the mid 880s, Alfred summoned Asser, a Welsh monk from the monastery at St David’s, to write the Life of King Alfred – while the king was still alive.

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Landscapes of the Norman Conquest

An exciting new book “Landscapes of the Norman Conquest” by Trevor Rowley has now been published.

For a long time, the Norman Conquest has been viewed as a turning point in English history; an event which transformed English identity, sovereignty, kingship, and culture. The years between 1066 and 1086 saw the largest transfer of property ever seen in English History, comparable in scale, if not greater, than the revolutions in France in 1789 and Russia in 1917. This transfer and the means to achieve it had a profound effect upon the English and Welsh landscape, an impact that is clearly visible almost 1,000 years afterwards.

Although there have been numerous books examining different aspects of the British landscape, this is the first to look specifically at the way in which the Normans shaped our towns and countryside.

The castles, abbeys, churches and cathedrals built in the new Norman Romanesque style after 1066 represent the most obvious legacy of what was effectively a colonial take-over of England. Such phenomena furnished a broader landscape that was fashioned to intimidate and demonstrate the Norman dominance of towns and villages.

The devastation that followed the Conquest, characterised by the ‘Harrying of the North’, had a long-term impact in the form of new planned settlements and agriculture. The imposition of Forest Laws, restricting hunting to the Norman king and the establishment of a military landscape in areas such as the Welsh Marches, had a similar impact on the countryside.

You can find further details here…

Metal detectorist’s find of lifetime as rare 700AD gold sword pommel uncovered

The solid gold sword pommel was found near Blair Drummond and is valued at £30,000.

An “exceptionally rare” solid-gold sword pommel discovered by a metal detectorist and which dates back to the early medieval period has come into the ownership of Scotland’s national museums.

The impressive find was located near Blair Drummond, Stirling, and is believed to date back to 700AD.

Measuring 5.5cm wide and weighing 25g, the golden pommel – the fitting at the top of the handle – is valued at £30,000.

On recommendation of the Scottish Archaeological Finds Allocation Panel, the King’s and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer allocated the find to National Museums Scotland (NMS), which described the item as “exceptionally rare”.

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Rendlesham: 1,400-year-old royal hall unearthed

Volunteers working with Suffolk County Council fully excavated post holes on the east side of the hall

A royal hall of "international importance" that dates back 1,400 years has been unearthed on private land.

The Hall of the first Kings of East Anglia was discovered in Rendlesham, Suffolk, over the summer.

Prof Christopher Scull said it was the "most extensive and materially wealthy settlement of its date known in England".

It was discovered by a community dig as part of Suffolk County Council's Rendlesham Revealed project.

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DNA From Skeletons Reveals Large Migration to Early Medieval England

Goods from a grave site at Issendorf cemetery in Lower-Saxony, Germany. 
Landesmuseum Hannover

A new study could close a long-standing debate about movement of people post-Roman rule

In the 19th century, archaeologists in England unearthed remains that dated to the era after Roman rule, which ended around 400 C.E. The items revealed a shift from Roman artifacts to those originating in present-day Germany and the Netherlands. In that era, Roman-style tools and pieces of pottery were replaced with northern European jewelry, swords and architecture.

“You can’t deny there was a big shift in material culture—Roman Britain looks very different from the Anglo-Saxon period 200 years later,” Catherine Hills, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge in England, tells Science’s Andrew Curry.

But as for what led to this change, historians have long been divided. Many archaeologists have rejected the idea of a mass migration as the cause. After all, just a small number of migrants could have introduced their culture to the island, writes New Scientist’s Clare Wilson.

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How Vikings Influenced the Modern English Language

Knowledgable linguist Rob Watts of RobWords explained how the Old Norse language of the Vikings had a profound effect upon the modern English language with many very important words.

The Vikings raided, pillaged… and changed our language. Their Old Norse words invaded English and many remain to this day

This effect includes gender pronouns (she, he, them), key verbs (to be, to take, to crawl, to guess, to trust), words of violence (slaughter, ransack, club, knife, berserk), clothing words (skirt, shirt, shorts), words with “SK” origins (shabby, scabby, scatter, shatter, ship, skipper), doubled-up words (bathe, bask, ditch, dike, shriek, screech), English place names (Derby, Grimsby, Braithwaite, Langthwaite), Scottish place names (Jura, Lerwick), and surnames (Anderson, Carson, Harrison, MacAskill, MacArthur, MacIvor), and Norse gods (Thor, Tuesday, Wednesday).

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Genome Study Offers Clues to Anglo-Saxon Migration

(Landesmuseum Hannover)

According to a statement released by the University of Huddersfield, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of Central Lancashire, and the University of Huddersfield analyzed the genomes of more than 400 people who lived in Britain, Ireland, German, Denmark, and the Netherlands, and determined that there was a wave of migration from the North Sea region into eastern England during the Anglo-Saxon period, beginning some 1,500 years ago. The study suggests that as much as three quarters of eastern England’s early medieval population had ties to continental European countries bordering the North Sea. And analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only through the maternal line, indicates that women, and likely whole families, had made the trip.

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Vikings: Raiders, Traders and Settlers (Online Course)

The University of Oxford online course will run from Wednesday, 28 Sep 2022 to Friday 09 Dec 2022 

You can find further details here...

The Worst Year Ever to Be Alive in History

The worst year to be alive? Eyjafjallajokull, the Icelandic volcano that threw transatlantic travel into a tailspin several years ago after it erupted, sending plumes of smoke over the North Atlantic, the UK and the continent. Another Icelandic volcano could have caused enormous disruption in the year 536 as well, according to new research.
Credit: Árni Friðriksson/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0

The volcanic explosions of the year 536 caused modern-day researchers to state recently that that year was definitively “the worst year to be alive” in history.

A strange and unsettling fog, which even deprived the world of the sun’s warmth, plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness both day and night for a year and a half starting in 536, causing untold misery across the globe.

The Byzantine historian Procopius made a record of the time and wrote that: “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year.”

“One of the worst years to be alive”

Michael McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past, says that in Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods, if not the worst year to be alive.”

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141 Anglo-Saxon graves discovered in England, alongside jewellery, weapons and earwax removers

Image shows a toiletry kit and a tubular rimmed glass bowl excavated from Wendover, Buckinghamshire   -   Copyright  AP Photo

Archaeologists working on a site in Buckinghamshire in England have unearthed the well-preserved graves of a clique of wealthy Anglo-Saxons.

The site, which was excavated as part of the ongoing construction of the UK’s high-speed rail service HS2, contains 138 graves and is one of the largest ever uncovered.

Among the items found were a number of grooming tools including earwax removers, toothpicks, tweezers, combs and even a tube that could have contained makeup such as eyeliner; shedding light on how our ancestors practised self-care.

One of the burials, thought to be a male aged between 17-34, was found with a sharp iron object in his spine. Researchers believe he was stabbed from the front before the object embeded in his spine.

The insights offered into Anglo-Saxon life are unprecedented. The site is known to have been used by Romans during the Bronze Age and even in the Neolithic period, but the 5th and 6th centuries from which the objects are dated represents a gap in the historical record.

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Saxon pendant with Roman jewel found in Kingsey field

The engraved semi-precious gem is known as an intaglio and shows a figure with a raised whip on small chariot with four horses

A Roman jewel engraved with a chariot and four running horses was found set in a silver Anglo-Saxon pendant by a metal detectorist.

The small piece of jewellery was found in a field near Kingsey, Buckinghamshire, in May 2019.

Historian Edwin Wood said its "high-status" Sutton Hoo-era owner was someone who would have wanted "a direct link with Rome's power and authority".

It was declared treasure by Buckinghamshire Coroner's Court.

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These Scots Still Fish Like the Vikings

Legend has it that the beam is as long as a Viking's oar.
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY JOHN WARWICK

WHEN ON DRY LAND, EXPERT fisherman John Warwick goes by his legal name. But when he’s standing chest-deep in the Solway Firth, negotiating the capricious tide, he’s known as Young Slogger. His father, Slogger, fished the firth before him, and the nickname identifies Warwick as part of a line of succession—not just a fisherman, but a haaf net fisherman, and therefore a guardian of tradition.

The Vikings were the first haaf netters. Many centuries ago, when they arrived in this narrow passage of the Irish Sea, the Nordic mariners developed a new method of fishing better suited to the local tides. Rather than cast lines from the comfort of a boat or shore, they stood in the water with a 16-foot-long beam affixed to a net and bisected by a 6.5-foot-tall pole. By digging the pole into the sand and holding the beam above water, haafers created a soccer goal-like structure that could trap unsuspecting salmon or trout riding the tide. The residents of Annan, a town in southwestern Scotland that hugs the Solway Firth, have been haafing ever since, braving quicksand and currents for the occasional catch and, more consistently, the camaraderie.

“I was brought up in a fishing family,” says Warwick. “My father haaf netted, and his father before him.”

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Digging Up the Rich Viking History of Britain

  A massive 1,100-year-old graveyard leads to a surprising new view of the Nordic legacy in Britain

St. Wystan’s church in Repton. In 873-874, a Viking army is believed to have entrenched in the garden. Right, Viking burial mounds in Heath Wood

Cat Jarman led me through a dense tangle of forest called Heath Wood. We were in Derbyshire, close to the very heart of England. There was no path, and the forest floor was overgrown with bracken and bush. It was easy to lose your footing and even easier to lose your way. Jarman, a fit, cheery woman in her late 30s, plunged jauntily on as I tried to keep up. “See all these lumps and bumps?” she asked as we broke into a small clearing. She pointed to an array of 59 small, rounded hillocks, many two or so feet high and four or five feet in diameter. Humans, not nature, had clearly put these things here, and they gave off a spooky, supernatural energy.

“We are literally walking across a Viking cemetery—the only known Scandinavian cremation cemetery in the whole country,” says Jarman, an archaeologist, whose new book, River Kings, takes a fresh look at who the Vikings really were and what exactly they were up to here. She flashes me a broad smile. “It’s very good, isn’t it?”

Yes, it is good—simple, powerful and mysterious. For a ceremonial burial place, the Vikings picked a surprisingly unceremonial spot. The overgrown forest shrouds these tombs in anonymity. There is no visible sign of a Viking settlement nearby, just an expanse of open fields and beyond that, a hamlet with a church, school and a few houses. The Vikings used rivers to get around, but it’s an awfully long hike from here to where the River Trent flows today. Which raises a big question, says Jarman. “Why have you got these Scandinavian cremation mounds here in the middle of nowhere?”

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Six-year-old Anglo-Saxon boy who lived in Cambridgeshire 1,400 years ago was infected with plague, meningitis and septic arthritis when he died.

Analysis of the remains of a six-year-old Anglo-Saxon unearthed in Cambridgeshire revealed that the poor boy had plague , meningitis and septic arthritis when he died. Pictured: the knee cap of the child, which was found to contain lesions caused by septic arthritis

Analysis of the remains of a six-year-old Anglo-Saxon unearthed in Cambridgeshire revealed that the poor boy had plague, meningitis and septic arthritis when he died.

The child — who was buried at Edix Hill sometime around 540–550 AD — was studied by a team of researchers led from the University of Tartu, Estonia.

Genetic analysis of a tooth sample revealed he had been infected with the bacteria Yersinia pestis, which causes plague, and Haemophilus influenza serotype b.

This is the earliest known case of H. influenza, which causes septic arthritis and was a major cause of infant death before a vaccine against it was created in 1977.

Today, this once-common childhood disease has been all but eradicated.

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Archaeologists stunned by lost Anglo-Saxon church unearthed along HS2 route

The Norman Conquest of 1066 saw the invasion and occupation of England by an army of thousands of Normans, Bretons, Flemish and French troops under the leadership of the Duke of Normandy, later titled William the Conqueror. After winning the Battle of Hastings, his army captured the south east and seized Dover and Winchester, before advancing to London. Though many English people were not happy about the change in leadership, William was crowned king on Christmas Day of the same year.

Under Norman rule, England changed enormously, with long lasting effects including land ownership, the building of castles and the introduction of Norman laws.

The parish of Stoke Mandeville stood in the way of William’s rolling conquest, and it was here that an isolated church, surrounded by fields and riddled in mystery, stood.

Built around 1080, the Church of St Mary’s was located in a damp, isolated spot around half a mile from the village.

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Archeologists long believed that ancient graves were robbed all over Europe, but here’s why they’re wrong

Grave from France where the individual was moved around before he fully decomposed. Éveha-Études et valorisations archéologiques/G Grange, Author provided

From the collapse of Roman power to the spread of Christianity, most of what we know about the lives of people across Europe comes from traces of their deaths. This is because written sources are limited, and in many areas archaeologists have only found a few farmsteads and villages. But thousands of grave fields have been excavated, adding up to tens of thousands of burials.

Buried along with the human remains, archaeologists find traces of costumes and often possessions, including knives, swords, shields, spears and ornate brooches of bronze and silver. There are glass beads strung as necklaces, as well as glass and ceramic vessels. From time to time they even find wooden boxes, buckets, chairs and beds.

Yet since the investigations of these cemeteries began in the 19th century, archaeologists have recognised that they have not always been the first to re-enter the tombs. At least a few graves in most cemeteries are found in a disturbed state, their contents jumbled and valuables missing. Sometimes this happened before the buried bodies were fully decomposed. In some areas, whole cemeteries are found in this state.

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North European Funeral and Burial Rites in the Early Middle Ages

Anglo-Saxons were often buried with everything they would need after death. In this case the dead woman’s family thought she would need her cow in the afterlife.

The customs and rituals for the people of Britain in the early Middle Ages were a mixture of the practices of a number of cultures.

Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons shared similar ritual beliefs as is reflected in their burial grounds, which archaeologists are still discovering today. Many of the traditions have their origins in the similar religion of the northern European tribes, Germanic or Scandinavian.

Anglo-Saxon burials and barrows

The dead of Anglo-Saxon tribes were either cremated or buried. A great deal of the evidence available for the Anglo-Saxons’ way of life comes from their burial sites. Particularly amongst the wealthy, these burial sites are often filled with artefacts which have been vital to understanding the people and the times in which they lived.

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England After Rome: Angles and Saxons

Great Britain was more adversely affected by the fall of Rome than any other region, as invaders from Northern Europe took advantage of the chaos to form new kingdoms on the tiny island. But what was life like in early Anglo-Saxon England?

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Plans for new home refused due to site potentially housing Anglo-Saxon remains

The site of the proposed house sits between the A179 and the road leading to The Fens (Image: Google)

Councillors have refused plans for a new home after hearing the land could be of "national and international importance" due to potentially housing Anglo-Saxon remains.

Hartlepool Borough Council Planning Committee on Wednesday (December 15) refused proposals for a single house to be built on land at the Fens in Hart village.

The proposals, submitted by Mr R Greig, had been recommended for refusal, with council planning officers raising several concerns such as that it could cause "substantial harm" and a loss of archaeology to the area.

At the meeting, Robin Daniels, from Tees Archaeology, outlined how neighbouring land, which the Manor Park development has been built on, has shown to be home to an Anglo-Saxon cemetery with "something like 350" human remains.

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