Commonalities, Differences and Lacunae: Some Comments on Elite Settlement in England and Ireland in the Early Middle Ages

Abstract

The two papers that inspire this comment piece appear at an interesting time in the study of power structures in the early middle ages. The topic itself has seen renewed vigour among scholars throughout Scandinavian and Continental Europe working from a range of disciplinary perspectives, particularly following the lead set by the Transformation of the Roman World project (see, for example, de Jong et al. 2001, and, recently, Rollason 2016, Carroll et al. 2019a, Semple et al. 2020). Excavation and survey have contributed key new findings, and Scull and Thomas in England and Gleeson in Ireland have led the field in their respective regions and it is thus fitting that these scholars have provided the valuable and insightful overviews that appear in this volume of the Norwegian Archaeological Review. The requisite brevity of the present piece means that references are few and token and that any consistent unpacking of the details of the two papers is impossible. Instead, this contribution considers a few points of convergence and contrast and offers some additional viewpoints. Focussing on the 6 to 9 centuries, Gleeson’s paper discusses excavated known royal sites; Thomas and Scull focus on places discovered by various means that AngloSaxon archaeologists have decided represent a similar phenomenon, the so-called Great Hall Complexes, but one that finds much less clarity in terms of attributions of places to people than in Ireland. Gleeson healthily considers wider comparisons as far afield as the Carolingian world, very much in the spirit of breaking out of the insular traditions found in both Irish and English early medieval archaeology, while Scandinavia provides the key region of reference for Thomas and Scull. The Irish dataset, based on documented polities, suggests c. 600 royal residences, with 150 documented sites listed by Peter Sawyer in England between the 6 and 11 centuries (Sawyer 1983). Beyond Lyminge, Rendlesham and Yeavering in England, where there are explicitly royal connections, the remaining sites (12) are known only from excavation and/or aerial photography. The variety of sites in both England and Ireland in terms of their occupation sequences, form and material culture is substantial, although this ought not to come as a surprise. Early English lawcodes (of the late 7 century) show that elite residences could be moved wholesale, while charters show that lands could be granted for a single or three lifetimes; there are reflections of these situations in the archaeological record. Yorke (1981) and Thacker (1981)