There is a degree of
exceptionalism about the part of the country I have the honour to dwell in. It
is quite hard to view the television schedules today (indeed, I suspect since
the 1970s) without dropping across something about ‘Yorkshire’. The scare
quotes are deliberate – the Yorkshire portrayed may have little to do with the
Yorkshire that is here in reality.
Exceptionalism is not, of course,
and exclusively Yorkshire concern. British exceptionalism is also rife (c.f.
B****t), although that smug assumption that the ‘British are best’ should have
been undermined by the recent health crisis and fair criticism from the foreign
press about a slow response from an incompetent government and a chronically
underfunded and overly bureaucratic health service, albeit staffed by heroes
(have we been applauding them every week to salve our consciences over not
paying them a decent wage, I wonder.)
Anyway, this blog is decidedly
non-political, and I want to talk a bit about a book which explains why
Yorkshire might be considered as a bit different from the rest of the country,
or at least parts thereof:
Townend, M., Viking Age Yorkshire
(Pickering: Blackthorn, 2014).
This is an academic tome which has a
mix of narrative chapters involving the fall of York to the Vikings in 866, the
conquering of the Viking kingdom by the Wessex Saxons a hundred years later or
so, and finishing up with the last gasp of the Vikings around the time of the
Norman Conquest. There is a lot to say, although often exactly what happened is
lost in the mists (or perhaps myths) of time.
The overall narrative is fairly clear,
except for the details of who ruled and what happened. The Saxon kingdom of
Deria ruled roughly from the Humber to the Tees and was more or less taken over
directly (insofar as any political entity could be said to rule directly at the
time) by the Vikings. Norse influence, however, does not seem to have crossed
the Tees in any significant quantity. There are a few Viking influenced bits of
sculpture north of the Tees, but not very far north.
Once here, the Vikings seem to have
rather given up on the idea of extracting money by violence – perhaps they had
already extracted what they could – and started to settle down to farming.
After a lapse of about thirty years coins started to be produced again in York
and there are, inevitably, arguments over how much Viking / Norse culture displaced
Anglo-Saxon, how much synthesis there was and whether an Anglo-Scandinavian
culture emerged.
From reading the book (and my memory
of reading it, it has taken a few weeks to get around to this post) mostly the
answers to those questions are unclear. The Norse seem to have become
Christians fairly quickly, so there are relatively few pagan Viking burials in
Yorkshire. But there are a few, most spectacularly at Kildale, where about
fiver warriors were found in mid-Victorian times. The bones and artefacts are,
alas, lost, but there is some evidence for pagan Vikings running around the
place.
More evidence comes from place-names.
The density of names, for example, starting with Kirkby (or, equivalently, Kirby)
is high: Kirkbymoorside, Misperton and so on. These are Old Norse names. There
are also a lot of Norse personal names around, as well as others, many and
various, referring to places and geographical features. Of course, this adds
grist to the mill of the assimilation or replacement arguments: does a place
name represent a new landlord declaring their arrival, a simple renaming of a
local place or feature so everyone around understands it or new settlements in
the landscape? I doubt if that question will ever be definitively answered.
Still, there are many features of the
Yorkshire landscape which have landed up as being Norse influenced. There is a
fair bit of sculpture, particularly in churches, around the place which show Norse
influence, if not Norse cultural symbols, some of them possibly Christianised,
some of them in juxtaposition with Christian symbols. Part of the point seems
to be that even if the leaders (and, indeed, many followers, subjects etc.)
were baptised, the old stories and (possibly) beliefs carried on. A sculpture of
an ancient Norse tale does not entail belief in that tale, any more than a
figure of Christ on a cross entails wholehearted Christianity by either the
sculptor or the person who erected it.
Still, it has to be admitted that
Christianity did come back to Yorkshire and the Scandinavians were baptised.
Indeed, the Scandinavians in Scandinavia were baptised and Christianity became
the official creed and, so far as most people went, the only game in time. The
Norman Conquest, after all, was a fight between three Christian kingdoms, not
between the forces of Christ and pagans. William seems to have been pious as
well as having been a violent power politician.
So far as the Harrying of the North
goes, Townend has a paragraph or two towards the end of the book. His view is
that while William’s army could and did carry out a great deal of destruction
in the winter of 1069-70 there was a limit to exactly how much they could do in
winter. Many Yorkshire estates declined in value between 1066 and 1086, but
there were a variety of reasons why that might be the case. Domesday Book
records of ‘waste’ could be ‘destroyed by the Normans in 1070’, or simply mean ‘untenanted’
or ‘unknown by the commissioners’ (p. 216). On the other hand, there was enough
destruction and hardship for the twelfth-century chroniclers to note it, record
it and, possibly, exaggerate it.
The post-Conquest settlement in
Yorkshire did lead, albeit a bit slowly, to changes in society. Thegns were
addressed as both French and English. Lands were redistributed, although as
Townend notes, estates were not formed geographically but transferred piecemeal
as they were held before, so an estate was formed of bits and pieces of land
across a region or even, in the case of some of William’s own retainers, across
the country.
A good read and a good book, I think. I
certainly will not be looking at the places where I live, or at least their
names, in quite the same way again. And the Cleveland dialect, I believe,
contains still some Old Norse-isms, if not the actual words themselves.