The W G Hoskins Lecture 2017
‘From Tents to Townhouses: The Viking Great Army and the Origins of the Borough of Torksey’ presented by Professor Dawn Hadley.
The twenty-eighth Hoskins lecture
24 June 2017
The Hoskins Lecture of 2017 was delivered by Professor Dawn Hadley, Professor of Medieval Archaeology, Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield.
Prof Hadley is an authority on the Viking invasions of the ninth century and the establishment of the Danelaw. In this lecture she described the aims, methods and results of a five year project recently carried out in collaboration with Professor Julian Richards (York University) in an area north of the village of Torksey, which lies on the River Trent at its conjunction with the Roman waterway, the Foss Dyke.
One of the few documented activities of the Viking Army (the Micel Here) to be found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles are the sites where the army overwintered in England between 865 and 874 AD, but archaeological investigation of most of them is impeded by their location in modern conurbations. Only Repton (AD 873/4) and Torksey (AD 872/3) are accessible sites, and Repton was extensively investigated in the 1970s and 1980s by Martin and Birthe Biddle. The site of the Torksey winter camp lies in six ploughed fields north of Torksey village. This site has yielded over 1500 metal artefacts, found by metal detectorists since 1990, and now dispersed between a number of museum collections. Prof Hadley’s team determined to investigate this site further by examination and analysis of the vast collection of metal work, geophysical analysis of the site and selective small-scale excavations. The distribution patterns of specific categories of finds and also of burial sites have been carefully plotted using GPS on a LIDAR analysis of the landscape extending down towards the present village, in an attempt to establish any connections between the Viking camp and any Anglo- Saxon settlements. The data has been interrogated in order to determine the activities of the winter camp and its organisational structure and social composition. From the outset the huge amount of excavated metalwork resulting from such a short period of residence suggested that very specialised activities occurred here, the character of which implied an ‘urban’ settlement. Comparisons were made with other ‘urban’ sites of the period and later.
The metalwork showed that the army was operating a bullion and a monetary economy. They were processing silver and gold hackmetal into ingots and coins. Copper- alloy (bronze) dress fittings were processed into ingots and perhaps even coins (Northumbrian Stycas), lead was used for scale weights, fishing weights, spindle whorls and gaming pieces and there were iron tools for manufacture and for woodwork. There was evidence for minting coins and ingots, creating weights and making boat repairs and sword repairs.
The site itself was carefully selected to be easily defensible, being similar to an island with a deep water river-bay at one end and a swampy paleo-channel of the Trent lying behind the land above the river flood-plain. It was also within easy striking distance of two Anglo-Saxon churches and the Vikings may have been systematically raiding or purchasing the church renders to feed themselves.
No burial grounds like the ones at Repton and Heath Wood near Repton were discovered at Torksey. Fieldwalking in one place yielded a quantity of human bone fragments in a relatively small area. This location was at the top of the prominent clay bank to the west of the site. There were Anglo-Saxon burial grounds lying close to the village of Torksey but these were eleventh-century and associated with the sites of two early churches.
It is estimated that the camp (the largest found in England), covering 55 hectares, must have accommodated more than a thousand people and would have included women and children, merchants and craftworkers as well as fighting men. After this over-wintering, the army moved on to Repton after which it divided into two.
An attempt has also been made to relate the subsequent history of the Torksey site to this significant split. In the late Anglo-Saxon period Torksey became the site of a fine pottery industry in which wheel-thrown pottery was fired in up-draught kilns, and the products of these kiln sites have been examined. Most of them lie around the area of the eleventh-century borough of Torksey, not on the camp site, but as the techniques used were imported from continental Europe it does imply continuing interest by the Danes in Torksey. The development of a town specialising in manufacture suggests a possible Viking investment. The clay used for the pottery was special to the locality and may have been first discovered by the continental potters.
The results of this project were published in 2016 and the paper may be downloaded freely from the internet. D.M. Hadley and J.D. Richards, ‘The Winter Camp of the Viking Great Army, AD 872-3, Torksey, Lincolnshire’, The Antiquaries Journal, 96 (2016), pp. 23-67.