The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 196 • Julian D.Richards
There is little settlement evidence
that can clearly be categorized as
Scandinavian. Indeed, there is no
reason why the buildings of Viking
York should be any different from
those of Saxon London, although the
appearance in tenth-century York
and Chester of town buildings with
semi-sunken cellars, providing space
for storage of traded and
manufactured items, mirrors their
occurrence in Danish towns.
Similarly, the appearance of bowsided
halls, on high status rural sites
such as Sulgrave, Northamptonshire,
and Goltho, Lincolnshire, matches
the Trelleborg-style halls of
Denmark. It is likely, however, that
so-called Norse farmsteads, with
stone-footed buildings such as those
discovered in Scotland and the Isle
of Man, or that excavated at
Ribblehead, North Yorkshire, simply
represent a typical upland farmstead
type that would have been familiar
to both Norse settlers and natives
Figure 11.1 Cuerdale, Lancashire: part of the early tenth-century silver (Richards 1991).
hoard.
The identification of
Source: Trustees of the British Museum
Scandinavian settlements raises the
question of whether the majority of
Viking Age inhabitants of the British Isles originated from Scandinavia or had merely acquired a
politically correct Viking veneer. It is probably impossible to attempt to use material culture to
identify race rather than ethnicity. Certainly in York it seems that Anglo-Saxon style disc brooches
were decorated with Danish Jellinge style ornament, rather than Anglo-Saxon women adopting
Scandinavian costume with the bow brooches needed to hold it in place. The established view
has relied heavily upon linguistic evidence to support the idea that there was a substantial number
of immigrants. In the former East Riding of Yorkshire, for example, it has been calculated that
48 per cent of placenames are of Scandinavian influence; the English language also adopted a
number of Old Norse words into everyday usage. In the Isle of Man, it has been argued that
Gaelic was completely supplanted by Norse and was restored only at the end of Scandinavian
rule. However, such arguments beg the question of how many people are required to change a
language, and linguistic studies have shown that a small but influential group can have an effect
out of all proportion to their numbers. Similarly, arguments based on placenames often ignore
the fact that placenames tell one only about who named the settlements, and sometimes about
who collected the taxes, but not necessarily about who lived there. Certainly, the distribution of
Scandinavian type placenames corresponds fairly well with the areas of recorded Danish
settlements in Yorkshire, Mercia and East Anglia and the Wirral, although there are also further
concentrations, such as that in the Lake District, for which there is no historical documentation.