British Archaeology, no 7, September 1995: Features

For 600 years after AD410 the people of Britain lived literally in the shadow of Rome - at least, in the shadow of Roman buildings. At first, Anglo-Saxon settlements generally lay outside the walls of the former Roman fortresses and towns. But when Scandinavian raids led English rulers to set up a network of defended towns (or burhs) at the end of the 9th century, Roman walled settlements were obvious candidates for re-use, and many people moved back inside.

In practice, such a move was not always easy. Inside, much of the space was often cluttered with massive ruins, which could not be removed without a great deal of effort. However, at Chester, a careful study of how the buildings of the Roman legionary fortress decayed and were eventually demolished, combined with an analysis of the city's street plan, has given us an idea of how the problem was approached in a major town of the late Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

The city was refortified in 907 by Aethelflaed, daughter of King Alfred, in response to raids both from the Danelaw and the Irish Sea Vikings. The refortification probably involved the extension of the Roman enclosure to the River Dee by spur walls from the NW and SE corners, which would have protected the existing Anglo-Saxon settlement outside the town walls to the south - but not that lying to the east.

Although most Anglo-Saxon burhs were given a regular street grid, this was easier to do on a fresh site than on a re-used one; and at Chester, the decision to re-use not only the major Roman streets but some of the minor ones as well strongly suggests that Roman buildings were still standing to some height.

Following the extension of the Anglo-Saxon defences to the River Dee, plenty of vacant land now lay within the walled area of the city to the west, but in the event the western side of the city does not seem to have been developed in Anglo-Saxon times. Instead, occupation of the fortress intensified and was fitted around the Roman ruins. In the barrack areas, this was relatively easy: these buildings had been of timber on dwarf walls and had crumbled to low piles of rubble centuries before, making reoccupation easy. Newgate Street, for example, in the SE corner of the fortress, swept across their remains; and according to the Domesday Book, eight houses belonging to the clergy of St John's were sited there. In the centre of the fortress, in Crook Street, two hall-type houses used the remains of barrack walls as foundations.

By contrast, to the NW of the Roman headquarters, a sunken-featured hut was sited in the courtyard of a former store compound to avoid nearby heaps of debris from this building. The eastern half of another huge Roman courtyard building nearby remains an open space to this day, serving as the Market Square. Much of the building would have been intact in Anglo-Saxon times, and would have suggested itself for this role.

Finally, there were areas that were so encumbered with ruins as to discourage development until modern times. The site of the massively-constructed vaulted rooms attached to the legionary baths, between Bridge Street and Newgate Street, remained open ground up to three metres higher than adjoining areas until this century - because it was so heavily strewn with Roman rubble - and still offered considerable resistance to modern equipment when finally removed in the 1960s.

The Anglo-Saxon experience in Chester was no doubt broadly replicated in numerous other towns; and a better appreciation of these processes could contribute enormously to our understanding of the evolution of English towns. However, little evidence is yet available from elsewhere. Archaeologists still tend to think in terms of conventional periods such as `Roman' and `Anglo-Saxon' or `Viking', and prefer to concentrate on what changed rather than on what survived. The debris-covered plots the Anglo-Saxons ignored as long as possible, and the ancient walls which formed a backdrop to their timber halls merit far more attention than they presently receive.

Dr Peter Carrington is the Senior Archaeologist with Chester Archaeology at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester

The transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England is perhaps the least well understood period in the history of the British Isles. Archaeology has contributed crucial evidence for the period, but the majority of new information has come from rural sites or urban rescue excavations; and neither of the two Roman city or military sites to have yielded most surprises (Wroxeter and Birdoswald) are modern population centres. Consequently, the excavations carried out under York Minster (formerly part of the site of a major Roman fortress) between 1966 and 1973 - which were published earlier this summer - are of particular significance for shedding light on this darkest of periods.

One might have hoped that York would have provided answers about post-Roman developments. What the Minster excavations have done, however, is pose new questions. They force a redefinition of the Roman military in the 4th century, and for the following period they add more models to those which may be constructed from such sites as Wroxeter and Birdoswald, perhaps pointing to something closer to the picture at Canterbury - a run-down settlement exploited in a new way, prior to the establishment of a church. The excavation report, Excavations at York Minster (HMSO, UKP100.00), has increased the intellectual complexity of the site's problems, with Martin Carver, the editor, offering a radically different interpretation of the chronology of the site from that offered by the excavator, Derek Phillips. Essentially, while Phillips detected considerable continuity, with the principia building standing until the 9th century, Carver argues for the demolition or collapse of the abandoned basilica in or after the 6th century, with new structures being set up in the 9th.

The conflict between these two models obscures some of the more interesting general issues raised. First, there is the clear evidence for change during the 4th century. Already, before the end of the Roman period, the military basilica was altered, with a shrine-like area placed within it; moreover, the centurion's house in the second barrack block seems to have been adapted into a villa. The ideological transformation at the heart of a military headquarters that this presupposes could imply a change of outlook for the Roman military throughout Britain.

The ensuing phase is that most affected by the differing interpretations of Carver and Phillips. What is not at issue is the stripping of the site; metal working suggests the exploitation of the area's resources - not a question of decay, but of deliberate demolition. Whether this should be attributed to the remnants of the Roman army, to Romano-British survivors, or to Anglian incomers is a matter of some importance, which cannot easily be resolved on the basis of the report.

Again, it is not just a question of local importance - did the Britons make do with the surviving monuments of Roman Britain, however run down they were, or did they use them as a resource for a newly constructed environment?

What follows is equally interesting, and is most clearly exemplified by the analysis of the animal bones; at first, for an unspecified length of time, the site seems to have been exploited by a `small subsistence farming unit', part of it associated particularly with pig farming. Subsequently it seems to have become a centre of the commercial slaughter of sheep and cattle. In some ways this development is likely to have been peculiar to York; and one is tempted to ask whether the unusual prevalence of pigs was a factor in the development of the place-name from Romano-British Eburacum to Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic (`Boar-town').

These agricultural developments also raise interesting questions about the proximity of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral - would Paulinus or Wilfred have countenanced the presence of pigs outside his church? This is a point that should have been weighed in the chronology, since the presence of late 7th century sculpture suggests that the Wilfridian cathedral cannot have been far away. For the pre-Wilfridian period, the animal bones provide an interesting insight into the exploitation of what had been a Roman urban site for the purposes of agriculture and food-production.

Ian Wood is Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leeds

The author of the medieval Life of King Alfred the Great (c 847-99) informs his readers that he is Asser, the friend and tutor of the king, who came from distant Wales to live in the king's household, taught Alfred to read and benefitted from the king's great generosity. He claims, furthermore, that the king is still alive while he writes, supposedly in 893.

There is a powerful intimacy about this source which conveys the impression that Alfred was in the next room while Asser wrote; and scholars who have accepted it at face value for centuries have ranked Asser's Life as a cornerstone in Anglo-Saxon studies. The Life has been used not only as the authoritative source on Alfredian Wessex, but also to fill great gaps in our knowledge of all other Anglo-Saxon centuries.

But this source can now be shown to be a forgery - albeit an early forgery - with all the profound implications this has for our understanding of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Not only must we now discount numerous details contained in Alfred's biography; but we may also have to revise our ideas on when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - that major historical source for the entire Anglo-Saxon period - came into being. The Chronicle must pre-date the Life, because the Life borrows heavily from the Chronicle. The Chronicle was therefore thought previously to have been written before Asser wrote - ie, before 893 at the latest.

However, as the Life is a later forgery, the Chronicle can now be redated, in my view, to between 896-899, and its remarkably detailed section covering the years 890-896 can now be seen as an integral part of the earliest compilation rather than a later addition. This in turn will have serious implications for the idea that King Alfred played a major part in compiling the Chronicle - an idea that now seems more probable than ever before.

It might seem plausible that the historical Asser had indeed written a biography of King Alfred. Alfred does, after all, thank his Bishop Asser for his help with the translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care from Latin into Old English; and Asser died as Bishop of Sherborne in Dorset some ten years after the king's death in 909.

The genuine acknowledgement of Asser is found in the king's preface to the Old English version of the Pastoral Care - of which the earliest manuscript goes back to Alfred's time. When we seek the sole complete surviving manuscript of Asser's Life, however, the trail ends with a collection of irreparably charred fragments in the British Library; for that manuscript, containing the earliest biography of an English king, was destroyed in a fire which ravaged the library of Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), then housed in the Little Dean's Yard, Westminster, on Saturday 23 October 1731.

How then do we know of the contents of the Life? Fortunately, it was edited and printed by Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1574, and yet another edition of the work was published by Francis Wise in 1722 - only nine years before the destruction of the manuscript. But these editions do not provide us with photocopies of the original manuscript; and it will never be possible to distinguish between later additions to the lost manuscript and its original text. We can never know whether that manuscript was a copy several times removed from the original, or whether indeed it was the first fair copy of King Alfred's Life. Neither Parker's transcript of the medieval manuscript, nor the several earlier medieval abstracts from the Life, can provide us with certain knowledge of what the original may have contained.

The formidable medieval historian, VH Galbraith, questioned the authenticity of Alfred's Life in 1964 and attributed it to Bishop Leofric of Exeter who died in 1072. Galbraith was right to view the Life as a forgery, although he was howled down for doing so by the establishment of the day. He was wrong, however, in attributing it to a bishop of the mid-11th century, because the Life was known and summarised by Byrhtferth of Ramsey in Huntingdonshire who flourished in c1000.

Alfred's Life can in fact be attributed, in my view, to a Ramsey writer of Byrhtferth's circle, and the purpose of the Life was to further the aims of monastic reformers in the half century before the end of the millennium.

Even the most uninformed reader on Anglo-Saxon affairs will find in the Life a bizarre portrait of a king otherwise remembered on good evidence as a successful warrior, an energetic law-giver, and a tireless writer and translator. The king whom we meet in the Life attributed to Asser, however, is a saint with unhealthy and unorthodox desires for illness and pain, a neurotic invalid, and also an illiterate until his 39th, if not his 41st year. In this Life, Alfred the scholar-king has been replaced by the illiterate ruler thirsting for knowledge, being nursed towards literacy by a team of tutors who inhabit a palace school - all of which ideas are lifted straight from Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, a source otherwise quoted word for word by the author of the Life of Alfred.

That formidable West Saxon scholar-king who translated the works of Gregory, Boethius and St Augustine, has been replaced by a ruler obsessed with devoting half his time - night and day - to prayer and the service of God, and to the promotion of monastic reform - a concept that did not take serious hold in England until the third quarter of the 10th century at the earliest.

There is nothing of substance in this Life which adds to our knowledge of King Alfred or the England of his day, which an author writing in 1000 could not have found in a good library such as that at Ramsey. If this work were truly what its author claims it to be - a contemporary biography of a king who was close at hand to answer any queries - then why is the work so overwhelmingly reliant for historical data on the framework provided by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account of Alfred's reign?

The author knows nothing of Alfred's childhood other than tales of hagiographical and rhetorical invention; he is ignorant of the name of King Alfred's queen, Ealhswith; and with the exception of the dubious name of one cleric, he does not add a single name to our knowledge of Alfred's magnates or those who attended on the king's court - yet this was an author who supposedly lived at Alfred's court. His reliance on the Chronicle was total, because at the time of writing, 100 years after the king's death, Alfred was a remote subject about whom little was known.

Archaeologists have sensibly treated this specious source with caution. What scholar, after all, with an eye to reputation, would have accepted the Pseudo-Asser's claim that Alfred employed a vast international workforce to construct buildings of gold and silver, and that he presented such buildings to his former enemy, the Danish Guthrum, by way of presents at Wedmore in Somerset in 878?

Few scholars, however, have questioned the improbable statement that Alfred `moved' old royal residences of stone and reconstructed them elsewhere, even though that idea too was derived from Einhard's biography of Charlemagne.

Not even plausible comments which the author of the Life adds to the Chronicle's text can be trusted, for this is a writer who claimed that the Danes who invaded England in 865 had come from the Danube; who confused East Anglia with Essex; confused Ealdorman ’thelred of Mercia with King Eadred; and who was guilty of several omissions and duplications of material which he lifted from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Take the Life's story, for instance, of Alfred's childhood, in which his mother set up a book-reading competition between Alfred and his brothers. Whichever of them could read the book quickest, the story went, could keep the book. Alfred, attracted by the book's illuminated initial letter, won the competition and got the book - even though elsewhere in the Life he is described as illiterate until (by medieval standards) advanced middle age! This tale, which has been taken by many scholars as true, has serious chronological difficulties, and is based on folklore and hagiographical invention.

The author of the Life of Alfred the Great succeeded in foisting a work on the world which has been accepted as a contemporary biography for 1,000 years. The recognition that this Life is not what it seems, means that Anglo-Saxon history can never be the same again.

Alfred P Smyth is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kent. His book, `King Alfred the Great', is published by OUP next month.