Royal Settlements as Power Strategies in Seventh- to Ninth-century Britain and Ireland

Abstract

Throughout modern European history, scholars have attempted to plot how kingdoms – and consequently kingship – arose in the early Middle Ages. Their enduring interest is partly related to the hunt for national origins, prestige and legitimacy. The social and political institutions established among the ‘barbarian’ societies of the fifth and sixth centuries from the ruins of the Western Roman Empire are still considered highly influential in shaping medieval and later history; emerging nation states from the eighteenth century onwards built distinctive origin narratives from the evidence of chronicles and antiquarian discoveries. Even in the fifteenth century, scholars used early historical texts to justify claims of national pre-eminence in international relations (Wood 2013, p. 11). As modern researchers have brought increasingly critical approaches to the sparse documentary records and burgeoning volume of archaeological finds from southern Britain, they have moved away from seeing the Migration Period as the time when major polities were consolidated, shifting towards a focus on the seventh and eighth centuries. The protohistory of the kingdoms described by Bede in his early eighth-century Ecclesiastical History has consequently grown obscure, but it seems most likely they emerged as areas occupied by local groups, perhaps kin-based, that were brought together as ‘folk’ territories (Faith 1997). In Ireland, which was never part of the Roman Empire, the earliest records provide evidence for hundreds of kingships sorted in a hierarchy from tiny local territories to overarching regional polities. The complexity of the documents and their interpretation have underpinned a kind of exceptionalism which has often served to distance Irish historiography from that on Britain and Europe. Nevertheless, researchers have observed a tendency towards rationalization which meant the overall number of kingdoms diminished from the seventh century onwards, so the same period is important in Irish history (MacCotter 2008). The two articles in this issue, by Gabor Thomas and Christopher Scull on England and by Patrick Gleeson on Ireland, explore aspects of the archaeology of this formative period. Both papers provide intriguing insights into strategies used to legitimate rulership and underpin territorial claims in early medieval kingdoms. By framing their discussions within broadly international contexts, they transcend some of the key impediments that afflicted much early medieval archaeology in the twentieth century, the focus (at times almost myopic) on local datasets and national narratives.