[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Hoard and in the site of its discovery had rendered much of the detailed site-specific elements of this piece rather out-of-date.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.]