Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture: Toller Lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text

Introduction

Gale R. Owen-Crocker

This volume contains five recent Toller Memorial Lectures hosted by the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (MANCASS).¹ MANCASS was founded in 1984, based at, but not confined to, The University of Manchester, as a cross-disciplinary forum for the discussion of all aspects of culture in pre-Norman England. Its first director was Professor Donald Scragg, who presided over the Centre until his retirement in 2005. He was succeeded as Director by Dr Alexander Rumble (2005–2010) and Professor Gale Owen-Crocker followed (2010–2015), each of them serving until their retirement from the University of Manchester. The present director is Dr Charles Insley.

Members of the MANCASS group of scholars have been involved in major publicly-funded research projects, including Fontes Anglo-Saxonici, The Transmission of Texts and Ideas in Anglo-Saxon England, Inventory of Script Categories and Spellings in Eleventh-Century English and The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing. Their research assistants and associates of these projects have become part of the MANCASS community and the Centre has accumulated a substantial research library which has been supplemented by a loan from the estate of Professor John Dodgeson, a bequest from former student Margaret Bailey and a gift from former student Dr John Highfield. This library is shelved in the office of the present deputy director, Dr James Paz, and may be consulted on request to him. MANCASS has also, through liaison with Professor Craig Davis of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA, welcomed as visiting fellows several undergraduates from Smith College, USA and the University of Hamburg, Germany, who have been taught editing, indexing and bibliographical skills while assisting in the preparation of publications. The editors thank recent honorary fellow Emily Rothman for her help in the early stages of the preparation of this volume.

MANCASS welcomes visiting scholars to read papers at least three times per year, and has hosted many conferences and study days, including an annual Easter Conference. The proceedings of most of these have been published, both in the series Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (Boydell and Brewer) and in individual volumes produced by a range of other scholarly publishers. The Toller Memorial Lectures, held on the first Monday of March each year, are the highlights of the MANCASS annual programmes. The lectures are named for Thomas Northcote Toller (1844–1930) the first professor of English Language at what was then called Manchester University. He is best known for his completion and supplementation of the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary begun by Joseph Bosworth and known familiarly to all Anglo-Saxonists as ‘Bosworth-Toller’ (Toller 1898; 1921). In recent years the Toller Lectures have been held in the magnificent historic reading room of the John Rylands Library on Deansgate, Manchester.² Lecturers are invited from among the most distinguished Anglo-Saxon scholars of their time. The choice of speakers reflects the eclecticism of the MANCASS philosophy and most lecturers have ranged beyond the traditional boundaries of scholarship in their content.

In the past, most Toller Memorial Lectures were published in the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, with a collection of revised and updated lectures being re-published in 2003 along with new papers concerning T. Northcote Toller and the Toller Collection in the John Rylands Library (Scragg 2003). However, with the establishment of the John Rylands Research Institute, the decision was made to prioritise the Special Collections of the Library in a revamped and renamed Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, published by Manchester University Press from 2014. Toller lectures which had already been submitted for publication were no longer required. After discussions between the recent Toller lecturers and Gale Owen-Crocker, who had invited some of them and hosted all of them, it was suggested (by Rolf Bremmer) that they be published as a collection. In the event Professor Bremmer’s Toller lecture was accepted elsewhere before negotiations were completed, and is now published (Bremmer 2015), but the editors thank him for his vigorous encouragement to bring the group of lectures to press. In order to present a viable collection, it was decided to wait for the 2015 lecture to take place, as well as for former lecturers to revise their material for publication. The editors thank the contributors for their patience and loyalty to MANCASS over this time.

All the lectures presented here are the product of long careers of research. In two cases they explore in detail ideas which have featured in recent major books (Hines and Bayliss 2013; Webster 2012a). In the case of Ó’Carragáin, the lecture represents the final book which he now says he will never write. It is the nature of the lecture series to be interdisciplinary and therefore this group comprises an archaeologist (Hines), a historian (Yorke), two art historians (Webster – metalwork and carving – and Brown – books), and a liturgy and sculpture specialist (Ó’Carragáin). They have honed their crafts in a range of scholarly environments: The British Museum (Webster), The British Library (Brown), universities in England (Yorke) Wales (Hines) and Ireland (Ó’Carragáin). Their voices can be very different, yet all are cross-disciplinary scholars and it is interesting to find that the same texts and artefacts weave through several of them. Literary text is used to interpret both history and art; ecclesiastical-historical circumstances explain the adaptation of usage of a literary text; wealth and religious learning, combined with old and foreign artistic motifs are blended into the making of new books with multiple functions; religio-socio-economic circumstances are the background to changes in burial ritual. The common element is transformation, the Anglo-Saxon ability to rework older material for new times and the necessary adaptation to new circumstances.

John Hines, in his lecture ‘A New Chronology and New Agenda: The Problematic Sixth Century’, discusses the results of recent research studies which have major implications for the dating of recognisable cultural phases within the early Anglo-Saxon period, from the fifth to seventh centuries AD, in particular the sixth century. Explaining that the sequences are different for male and female, the criteria for dating the male burials based on weapons, especially shield bosses, and buckles, the female on jewellery, especially glass beads, Hines notes that the research established a steep decline in the burial of both sexes with grave-goods c. 570 followed by a resurgence of female burials c. 625–630 and the abrupt end of furnished burial for both sexes by c. 680, much earlier than previously thought. He examines in detail some changes in grave-goods, particularly the adoption of continental-style equipment for men and a change in the technology of glass production which resulted in opaque beads, as well as other changes in jewellery for women. He also suggests climate-change, atmospheric disturbance and plague as factors in the transformation of burial practices, along with the well-established theories that the conversion to Christianity and the establishment of kingdoms were the influential events.

Leslie Webster’s lecture, ‘Anglo-Saxon Art: Tradition and Transformation’, discusses some of the recurrent themes visible in over six centuries of artistic creativity, from the fifth-century settlement up to and beyond the Norman Conquest. The teeming animal ornament of early metalwork was not only decorative and prestigious, but, the author argues, carried messages about mythology and the place of Man in the world, though human beings are rarely represented in surviving early art. The new imagery which came with Christianity included the human, the divine and the religious symbol, but the fascination with animal forms continued and developed. Webster identifies a fascination with visual riddles, which she compares to Anglo-Saxon textual riddles. These include complex animal-based ornament, visual puzzles of which the solutions are names, numbers or philosophical truths. Webster argues that England’s island position and geographical distance from the sources of Roman culture led to originality in the interpretation of the many new ideas and imagery which were imported. Anglo-Saxon artists were both subtle and inventive in absorbing inspiration from Rome, Byzantium and Ireland which they transformed and assimilated to older Germanic traditions.

Michelle P. Brown’s ‘Strategies of Visual Literacy in Insular and Anglo-Saxon Book Culture’ ranges widely both chronologically and geographically. Beginning with a discussion of the meaning of ‘literacy’, and arguing for the inclusion of oral and visual literacy within the meanings of the term, her lecture focuses on the book (and book-cover and book-shrine) as artefact and cultural signifier. The discussion includes the cross-cultural transformation of images and script; the visual impact of the illuminated book, its prestige and richness; the functions of books as teachers, both as assembly points for scholars and layfolk during public exhibition as well as for private study and contemplation; the role of books as relics, objects on which oaths were sworn; as talismans in war; and repositories of information. The intertextuality of Anglo-Saxon books composed in an eclectic assemblage of art styles, scripts and liturgies is set against the production of the manuscripts, from the Lindisfarne Gospels, seen as a solitary act of technical and artistic creativity, through female scribes/artists to named individuals including Eadui Basan, who is here seen as a ‘rock star scribe’.

Barbara Yorke’s lecture ‘King Alfred and Weland: Tradition and Transformation at King Alfred’s Court’ examines the eclectic influences at the court of a king raised as both a warrior leader, a descendant of real and legendary Germanic kings, and a Christian. A lover of Old English poetry, presumably both heroic and biblical, Alfred’s eagerness to educate himself and his people brought him into contact with Roman philosophy and classical mythology, filtered through Carolingian interpretations. Beginning with Asser’s biography of King Alfred, and the doubts about the authenticity of its assertions, the lecture moves on to consider the philosophy expressed in the Old English prose texts of Alfred’s reign, particularly the historical, biblical and mythological figures mentioned in the Alfredian version of Boethius. The latter are discussed in the context of other Old English texts, especially the poem Beowulf, and the carved images on the whalebone Franks Casket. These aspects of the Alfred’s interests are compared with the martial image of the king which is presented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

In ‘The Vercelli Book as a Context for The Dream of the Rood’, Éamonn Ó’Carragáin examines how the text of the Old English heroic Christian poem relates to the three different environments in which it appears over three hundred years. Beginning with analysis of the art of the Brussels Cross in which a brief but recognisable extract from the poem appears, the author goes on to a detailed examination of the Ruthwell Cross, which contains a longer text, discussing the significance of the Cross’s words and images to eighth-century Northumbrian Christians. In both cases the interrelationship of words, art and shape of the Cross which holds them are investigated. The lecture continues by examining the contents of the Vercelli Book, suggesting a careful selection by an editor who held in mind the theme of the approach of death and Judgement. The collection is seen as sequential, with prose texts thematically balancing poetic ones. The lecture finally suggests that the manuscript, old fashioned in the period of the Benedictine Reform, was re-used as edifying reading for a group of eleventh-century English pilgrims on their way to Italy. The Dream, and Elene, would have prepared pilgrims for the relics they would see in Rome. The cathedral Church in Vercelli, on their route, contained the body of Saint Eusebius, famous as the founder of the way of life of canons. The person who took the Vercelli Book to Italy, may, it is suggested, have been a canon, or at least sympathetic to older forms of Anglo-Saxon spirituality associated with canons.

It is an interesting exercise to compare the transformation of the Anglo-Saxon world as our lecturers have presented it with the transformation of England in the last six centuries. At first glance twenty-first-century life maybe very different from that of the sixteenth century. The exploitation of coal, gas, electricity and oil have transformed transport, warfare, medicine and communication which is now instant and global. Artificial light has removed the restrictions that night time placed on human activity. The country is focused on great cities. Many foodstuffs and clothing are imported. Conceptions of religion, morality, gender and social mobility have changed. Yet the Victorian Gothic architecture of Manchester’s John Rylands Library (inaugurated 1899) and London’s Houses of Parliament (begun in 1840 and incorporating surviving medieval structures) consciously invokes a fifteenth-century heritage. The ‘new’ St Paul’s Cathedral (built 1675–1710) remains an iconic feature of the capital’s skyline and the nation’s favourite poems, according to a poll conducted in 1995, included Wordsworth’s Daffodils (composed in 1804), Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (first published 1833) and Kipling’s If (written 1895). Turner (1775–1851) and Constable (1776–1837) are England’s most venerated painters. Even though science and technology change life at a rapid pace, the arts have their roots in history. Recognised masterpieces and the lives of the masters themselves are re-packaged for current audiences in new media. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet thrives in opera, ballet and film versions and in popular culture. We continue to absorb, accumulate and re-interpret the culture of our past.

The England of the eleventh century, with its multiplicity of church buildings and great estates, its cities, organized crafts and trade and the seeds of industrialisation in the new, male-operated mechanical loom, was far distant from fifth-century village life. Alfred’s navy, the standardised equipment of Ethelred II’s military elite and the beginnings of cavalry warfare (used by the Anglo-Saxons in the eleventh century but alas, only by the Normans at Hastings!) made the warfare of early Anglo-Saxon England look like tribal skirmishes. Yet, though these people abandoned furnished burial abruptly about 680, they cherished its memory in the poem Beowulf, which survives for us in a manuscript dated c. 1000. Though King Alfred eagerly seized on Christian scholarship, he associated it with Germanic legendary material and understood it in terms of the heroic values of the stories on which he had been brought up. Anglo-Saxon habits of creating art with multiple levels, decorative patterns which contained puzzles for the initiated to decode, persisted from the era of pagan belief through to the literate Christian period. The Dream of the Rood poem was recycled and re-presented in different media for different audiences, and the Vercelli Book itself, which contains the longest version of the poem, was re-used for another audience well after its original compilation.

Notes

1. http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/history/research/centres/former-centres/mancass/

2. http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/

References

Bremmer, R. R. (2015) ‘Looking back at Anger: wrath in Anglo-Saxon England, Review of English Studies 275, 423–448.

Hines, J. and Bayliss, A. (eds) (2013) Anglo-Saxon Graves and Grave Goods of the 6th and 7th Centuries AD: a Chronological Framework. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 33. London.

Scragg, D. (2003) Textual and Material Culture in Anglo-Saxon England: Thomas Northcote Toller and the Toller Memorial Lectures, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies 1. Cambridge.

Toller, T. N. (ed.) (1898) An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth. Oxford.

Toller, T. N. (ed.) (1921) An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth: Supplement. Oxford.

Webster, L. (2012a) Anglo-Saxon Art: a new History. London.

Chapter 1

A New Chronology and New Agenda: The Problematic Sixth Century

John Hines

The New Chronological Framework for Early Anglo-Saxon England

It is a familiar state of affairs for the positive results of a major research project to pose an entirely new set of questions as the answers to the questions initially addressed. Indeed, it is quite reasonable to expect to assess the success of a programme of research primarily by the character and importance of the further research questions it generates. The results of a thorough review and revision of Early Anglo-Saxon archaeological chronology were published recently (Hines and Bayliss 2013). This report proposed a new chronological framework for the Early Anglo-Saxon archaeological period, now confined within the fifth to seventh centuries AD, with associated calendrical date-estimates for definable phase-boundaries. The chronological scheme and the dates associated with it have wide-ranging implications for cultural history. One of the most unexpected of those is the impact of our new insights upon processes of cultural history in the sixth century AD, a period of time which had not formerly been considered to be much of a problem.

A report that appears in a printed volume of some 600 pages, with several hundred figures and tables, inevitably includes too much in the way of data, analysis and interpretation for introduction in a summary manner. Experience has already taught us how difficult it can be to anticipate what sort of selection or emphasis from this report is most appropriate for different audiences and readerships: a fundamental choice is that between explaining technically and methodologically what was done and explaining as clearly as possible what the results are. The intention in the present paper is not to go over what is already in print; rather it is to focus on one particular context in which these results can be applied. This should serve as an effectively illustrated introduction to both the methods and the conclusions of the chronological analysis, by making the impact of those results particularly clear.

It is important, however, to be clear what the results of the new chronological framework pertain to, and therefore what sort of results we have. The project involved a great deal of interpretative work and evaluative discussion in the process of working between the methods and the results. This was not a set of tasks for which the team simply defined a series of techniques, applied them, and produced some answers. The inter-relationship between different components of the project was always meant to be iterative and cyclical, refining our methods and the organization and selection of data in light of interim results. We also had to solve some purely practical problems which no idealised or theoretical ‘methods statement’ could ever have anticipated (Hines and Bayliss 2013, esp. 89–99). These points are highly relevant to the principal focus of the present paper.

Of no less importance is the fact that this project was not the only piece of research in this field going on at the time. There is a wider context of relevant and complementary investigations. Largely by