DARK AGE BRITAIN
After the end of Roman Britain, the land became a melting pot of Britons, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings – all of whom variously shaped the character of our countryside, says Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough
The period once known as the Dark Ages – from 500 to 1066 –is where we find the origins of a surprising number of our place names, villages and counties, particularly in England. This was an age of migration and invasion, of religious and political upheaval, and its traces can still be read in the landscape today.
By 500 AD, Germanic tribes from Northern Europe had started to arrive from across the sea. The Anglo-Saxons, as they are now known, lived in the shadow of the past. The stone cities, bridges and roads of the Romans stood empty in the landscape, crumbling over time but still imposing – the ‘work of giants’ as the AngloSaxons called them. Other man-made structures were far older: earthworks from Iron Age hillforts to Neolithic standing stones.
Anglo-Saxon impressions of this multilayered landscape are preserved in many of their Old English place names, and these are the names we still use today. ‘Chester’ derives from the Old English ceaster, which the AngloSaxons borrowed from the Latin castrum, meaning ‘military camp’. From Manchester
to Chichester, from Colchester to Worcester, the Anglo-Saxons were marking out these places as the remnants of a bygone age.
The Anglo-Saxons weren’t the only inhabitants of Britain at this time. The oldest layers of place names – often connected to prominent features such as rivers and mountains – kept their Brittonic names, given to them by those who were already living there when the Anglo-Saxons arrived. The multiple River Avons dotted across England and Scotland come from the Brittonic word
abona, simply meaning ‘river’. Other place names hint at a multicultural landscape, with Anglo-Saxons and Britons living close to each other: from the Old English word wealh ‘foreigner’ we get Walsall and Walton, as well as the Brittonic territories of Cornwall and Wales. A Brittonic lullaby, possibly from Cumbria, provides a snapshot of the countryside as a hunting resource. As baby Dinogad lies snugly wrapped in pine marten furs, his mother sings, “when your father used to go to the mountain, he would bring back a roebuck, a wild pig, a stag, a speckled grouse from the mountain, a fish from the waterfall”.
The Anglo-Saxons inherited a farmed and managed countryside. This was an open landscape, not a system of regularly spaced villages, but timber buildings dotted through the countryside with infields for growing crops such as barley and oats. Beyond these fields were meadows for grazing cattle and other livestock, while woodlands provided fuel, building materials, and land where pigs could be put out to pannage.
Beyond the farmed lands were different terrains: moorlands, chalk downs, coasts and fens. As seen through Anglo-Saxon eyes, some of these were more attractive than others. When St Guthlac founded Crowland Abbey in the Lincolnshire badlands, it was in a “hideous fen of huge bigness”, where he lived as a hermit in an ancient burial mound and was apparently assaulted by demons. Nevertheless, the fens provided him with fish, waterfowl, peat and rushes, and many of the great monastic houses sprung up there later, including Ely (which means ‘Eel Island’).
Modern place names bring us closest to the Anglo-Saxon countryside, since many of them originated in this period. Through them we can construct a mental map of the world as the Anglo-Saxons would have seen it, with its natural features, its resources, the people who lived there and the activities that took place. Chiswick in London was once a ‘cheese farm’, Berwick on the borders was a ‘barley farm’, while Beoley in Worcestershire, meaning ‘bee wood’, must have been a good place for honey. The word ‘shire’ comes from the Old English word scir, a division of land governed by someone called the ‘shire reeve’, or, as the word later became, ‘sheriff’.
SPECTRES AND DRAGONS
Other place names can tell us about the Anglo-Saxons’ imaginative landscape – the supernatural creatures they believed to inhabit the groves and valleys. Just outside Durham there is a village called Shincliffe, which means ‘slope of the spectre or demon’ in Old English. Those living near Wanborough (Wiltshire) and Wodneslawe (Bedfordshire) should keep a close eye out for the heathen god Woden, since his name is associated with these places, while residents of Drakelow (Derbyshire) should beware of dragons. And in Anglo-Saxon charters setting out land boundaries, natural and supernatural landscapes merge, with goblins, giants and devils lurking in the hedges and barrows. These beings were used to explain mysterious prehistoric earthworks.
Once the Anglo-Saxons had been newcomers, often pushing back the Britons and taking their lands. Soon it would be their turn to be invaded. Viking raids had begun at the end of
“Some place names tell us about supernatural creatures believed to inhabit the area”
the 8th century, and in 865 a Scandinavian force swept through England, toppling kingdoms. They came as invaders, but they stayed as settlers with families and farms.
In the year 876, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the land of the Northumbrians was shared out between the Nordic newcomers, who “proceeded to plough and support themselves”. After King Alfred beat back the invaders, the peace treaty he drew up with the Viking leader Guthrum is so clearly embedded in the landscape that it can still be traced today. It begins with the boundaries agreed between Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian territories: “They shall run up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, and then up the Ouse to Watling Street”.
North of this line, in areas heavily settled by the Scandinavians – East Anglia, the East Midlands and Yorkshire – modern place names once given by the Norse settlers tell us how they viewed the land and its resources. The easiest way to tell there was once a Scandinavian farming the land is to look for place names ending in ‘-by’, the Old Norse word for ‘farmstead’ or ‘village’. So Grimsby was once a farm belonging to someone called Grim, Wetherby was a sheep farm, and Selby was a farm with willow trees.
From the middle of the 10th century, the landscape of England began to change, as the population grew and the distinction between urban and rural areas became clearer. Villages of the sort we might recognise today – evenly spaced houses with strips of cultivated fields beyond – started to appear, often centred around a manor or church.
THE GROWING TIDE OF CHANGE
After the Normans arrived in 1066, this process accelerated, shaping the countryside into an even more recognisable form. New stone structures sprung up, visible across the landscape: motte and bailey castles and Romanesque cathedrals. Written two decades after William the Conqueror came to power, the Domesday Book gives us a sense of the English countryside as a worked landscape of fields, pastures and meadows, common land for grazing, woodland for fuel and fences. Tracts of wooded and non-wooded land were being placed under ‘Forest Law’ and set aside so the king and his nobles could hunt venison. Further north, during William’s decade-long campaign to bring the country to heel, cattle and crops had been burnt, famine ravaged the land, and the Domesday Book lists estate after estate reduced to wasteland.
Compared to the Romans and the Normans with their great stone buildings and infrastructure, early medieval culture lay lightly on the land. But its legacy is far more present than we might realise, shaping how we understand that period’s boundaries and divisions, its field systems, its deep history. And more often than we realise, when we speak the place names that surround us, we are conjuring the former inhabitants of the countryside who lived there over a thousand years ago, whether Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians or Britons.
“Compared to the Romans, early medieval culture lay lightly on the land”