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More Posts you might have missed on the other site

Here, in order from oldest to most recent are the not-exactly-numerous posts that have appeared on the other site in the past two and a half...

Friday 21 August 2015

The Staffordshire Hoard: Its Implications for the Study of Seventh-century Anglo-Saxon Warfare


[This is a written-up version of the paper I presented some years ago at the Staffordshire Hoard Symposium at the British Museum.  These somewhat experimental ideas have had a bit of a checkered history.  The blog-post of that paper was dubiously and unprofessionally hacked for an article in National Geographic. When written up I sent this to the Journal of Medieval Military History, which proceeded to sit on it for a year or more before sending some equivocal, vague and probably empirically-erroneous 'feedback' before I pulled it.  None of that improved my never-very-high opinion of military historians...  And by then further work on the Hoard and in the site of its discovery had rendered much of the detailed site-specific elements of this piece rather out-of-date.  Anyway, I thought - on some prompting from Asa Mittman - that I might just put this 'out there' as a blog post. Thanks are due to Asa for tracking down a copy of the final 'publication version' submitted to the journal, which had disappeared somewhere into the bowels of some data stick or other.  Also to Drs Jon Jarrett and Tom Rodway for input into discussions that shaped some of my thinking on this: they ought to have been included in the final acknowledgement footnote. Mea culpa.]
This paper assesses the contribution of the Staffordshire Hoard1[1] to the study of early medieval warfare and, conversely, how our understanding of early medieval warfare helps us think about the Staffordshire Hoard. While, at the time of its discovery it was politically necessary to say so,[2] the Hoard does not revolutionise our knowledge of early medieval warfare. What it does do is no less important; interestingly, even startlingly, it confirms what might otherwise have remained merely plausible hypotheses.

The study of the Hoard itself has to deal with two interpretive aspects. First, one can study it in the terms of its constituent elements and, second, one should analyse it as a material cultural artefact in itself. It is considerably more perplexing in the second sense than in the first, and therefore this paper is principally concerned with the import of the hoard as broken down into a collection of artefacts.

Before proceeding further, I should say that I have not been convinced by the idea that the Hoard as a ‘trophy hoard’,[3] a collection of material stripped from defeated enemies on the battlefield. For an individual to have slain perhaps 100 sword-bearing warriors even during a long career seems extremely unlikely.  In an early medieval context, the idea that small elements of sword and scabbard decoration should serve as trophies as such seems unlikely; I discuss some reasons for this scepticism below. However, if we abandon his use of the problematic term ‘trophy’, there would be many more points of contact between my reading and that of Kevin Leahy, heroic cataloguer of the Hoard itself.

Numbers: Army sizes


The first topic to concern us is numbers, primarily the hoary debate on the size of early medieval armies.[4] If it does nothing else, the Staffordshire Hoard should rule the notion of the thirty-six-man Anglo-Saxon army out of court for good.[5] I have long argued that this theory was based on a misunderstanding of Ine’s Laws, clause 13.1,6[6] but it has continued to be referred to as supporting the notion of very small armies, even by scholars as formidable as the late Tim Reuter.[7]

There are various ways of extrapolating from the amount of weaponry in the Hoard itself to the possible numbers of men in an army, which I will explore below, but each method results in the conclusion that the minimalist position can no longer be held. Otherwise the Staffordshire Hoard, containing elements of over eighty swords, would represent the remains of enough equipment to arm over two whole armies, which must surely be nonsense! The question at the ‘bottom line’ must be: how is it, if armies numbered between a few dozen and a couple of hundred, that fragments from nearly 100 swords could be found together in a single deposit?

All answers to this question must proceed from the fact that the swords manifested by the Hoard are principally revealed by elaborate, gold-and-garnet or otherwise finely decorated fittings and pommels. They therefore represent the upper end of the military equipment scale. Items such as these could relate to the equipment of a noble retinue. This suggestion is not unproblematic but for now it might be retained as a working hypothesis. In all cases it leaves unresolved the problem of the ratio of warriors with less elaborate equipment to those bearing the sort of weaponry represented by the fragments in the Hoard.

The first approach begins from the proposition that (in origin) the Hoard represented the collection of the finery that an aristocrat used to reward his followers. In his bid for the West Saxon throne in the 780s Cyneheard’s followers – it does not seem unreasonable to interpret these as his retinue – supposedly numbered eighty-four, about the same order of magnitude as the number of pommels in the hoard.[8] Maybe this is a useful index of the size of an ealdorman’s personal following. It seems reasonable, moreover, to assume that the Hoard was not the only collection of such matériel in Mercia, implying much more weaponry like this in circulation.

How much more is a difficult question to answer but, to develop this line of thinking, we can play a numbers game; no weight is attached to the details. Let us assume, taking a fairly maximalist line of what the Hoard represents, that the weapons of which it contained elements amounted to a quarter of all such arms circulating in Mercia at the time. That would imply about 400-500 swords like this at The Mercian king’s disposal. Wealthy warriors, as we know,[9] had more than one sword we might still assume that this number of weapons could equip 300 men or more. If an ealdorman’s retinue was the sort of size represented by the hoard, it is interesting to consider the Mercian king Ludeca’s defeat in East Anglia in 827.[10] He had at least five ealdormen with him, because five were killed (one needs to fill in some mental caveats about judging the scale of a Mercian defeat from a West Saxon chronicle, but the general point can stand). If there were over five ealdormen and their retinues, plus the king and his (surely larger) this would imply that – according to this line of approach – the number of well-equipped warriors in a significant Mercian army might be higher still.

Furthermore, these weapons, as noted earlier, must represent the equipment of the army’s upper echelons. What sort of percentage of the whole did these men represent? A half? A third? A tenth? Ultimately we cannot know but the last ratio is, in my view, more likely than the first. According to this means of calculation, the implication must be that Mercian armies numbered in the region of at least the low thousands. The only way of avoiding that conclusion would be to assume that the weapons contained in the Hoard represented pretty much all of the expensive sword-fittings of the whole Mercian army…Were that the case, the Hoard’s loss would have been an event of such considerable seriousness that we might expect mention of it in the surviving written sources!
[This next bit made perfect sense to me at some point but now I can barely follow it at all. I think the point was to ask how one person could end up, after 4 generations, with 80 swords still in their possession, if armies were only 3 dozen strong. I think the argument was that if one random descendant of a small ‘Sawyer-sized’ army could be in the possession, via accumulated inheritance over a century, of 80 swords, then - assuming equal division of spoils among the 36 aristos and equal inheritance between sons from one generation to the next - there must have been several dozen other such collections in existence at least and that would imply a colossal rate of destruction of other similarly-sized small armies (over the previous century), which seems extremely unlikely. But now I no longer understand why I made the assumptions I did make, or why I thought they were logical or reasonable. Ho hum.]

Thursday 13 August 2015

Results Day

It's A-levels Results Day, or 'National Hovering Teenager Day', as web-site The Poke called it.  The papers are full of the usual stuff so to add to that here is the last part of the speech I gave to the Prize-Winners at my old school, King Charles I School, Kidderminster (coincidentally also Labour's Tom Watson's old school) when I was very kindly asked to present the prizes and give a little speech at the end.  Obviously, it's aimed at those who did well, like those who got all their A's today, but it was implicitly (as I hope is clear) also aimed at those who didn't do well, or at those who don't do so well in future years.

"I have just a couple more points to pass on, on the basis of twenty-five years, roughly equally split between teaching students of the usual age, a couple of years older than you, and teaching mature students, of any age up to their seventies. The first thing is that you should be very  proud of your achievement this year and keep that with you.  That’s vital, but you shouldn’t let it weigh on you or feel that it defines you.  One thing I have seen of our students is how much pressure they put on themselves.  Being high achievers, like you all, they see anything less than a prize-winning performance as failure, and that is not only nonsense; it is really dangerous.  So you need to work hard and do your best – of course you do – it’d be mad to suggest anything else – but you also need to give yourselves a break, know when you can take it a bit easier, and appreciate that life and education involves other things than results – heresy though that is in this day and age!  As I said, I enjoyed my schooldays and didn’t always work as hard as I should have done, but turned out OK on the whole (indeed the worst year of my university career was when I decided I ought to work harder).  If you’re normal, some years you won’t win; as long as you’ve given it your best shot, that's all that matters.  The best advice I got from my supervisor, in the year I just referred to, was that is was better to be the person who got a 2:1 and had a good time than be  the person who would have got a First if he hadn’t had a nervous breakdown.  As a result I managed to get a balance, have a good time and get a first.  Sometimes trying things out that don’t pay off is at least as valuable as sticking to the tried and tested, the guaranteed prize-winning.  Education is – or it ought to be – as much about experience and experiment (experimenté means both experimented and experienced in French) as it is about high scores.

"My second, and last, point is therefore that you shouldn’t feel that what you’re successful at today defines what you’ll do for the rest of your life.  Enjoy and take pride in your success for its success – for the achievement – not for the area it was in.  Just as you can get better through life – I was much better academically at 21 than at 16 or 18, and a way better historian at 40 than at 30, and I work on really very different subjects – like philosophy – now (at 50) compared with when I was 40 – teaching mature students showed me that people can not only hit their stride much later in life but also that they could change direction at all points of life and be successful in new and quite different areas.  Your success today shows your potential to be able to do whatever you like, it’s not a life sentence.

"People use that silly phrase “life’s too short.”  Actually, as Billy Connolly (I think) once said, life’s the longest thing you ever do.  Life’s a long game and young people like you have it all to play for."