A History of the World in 100 Objects (49 page)

When you use the words ‘traders and raiders’, one group of people above all springs to mind: the Vikings. Vikings have always excited the European imagination, and their reputation has fluctuated violently. In the nineteenth century, the British saw them as savage bad guys – horn-helmeted rapers and looters. For the Scandinavians, of course, it was different: the Vikings there were the all-conquering heroes of Nordic legend. The Vikings then went through a stage of being seen by historians as rather civilized – more tradesmen and travellers than pillagers. The recent discovery of the Vale of York hoard makes them seem a little less cuddly and looks set to revive the aggressive Vikings of popular tradition, but now with a dash of cosmopolitan glamour. The truth is that that’s what the Vikings have always been about: glitz with violence.

The England of the early 900s was divided between territories occupied by the Vikings – most of the north and the east – and the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, in the south and the west. The reconquest of the Viking territories by the Anglo-Saxons was the key event of tenth-century Britain, and our treasure both pinpoints one tiny part of this national epic and connects it to the immense world of Viking trade.

The hoard was found in the winter of 2007, when father and son David and Andrew Whelan were metal-detecting in a field to the south of Harrogate, in north Yorkshire.

The hoard that they found was contained in a beautifully worked silver bowl, about the size of a small melon. Astonishingly, it contained more than 600 coins, all silver and roughly the same diameter as a modern £1 coin, but wafer thin. They are mostly from Anglo-Saxon territory, but there are also some Viking coins produced in York, as well as exotic imports from western Europe and central Asia. Along with the coins were one gold and five silver arm-rings. And then – the ingredient that makes it absolutely certain that this is not an Anglo-Saxon but a Viking hoard – there’s what archaeologists call hack silver, chopped-up fragments of brooches and rings and thin silver bars, mostly a couple of centimetres long, that the Vikings used as currency.

The hoard pitches us into a key moment in the history of England – when an Anglo-Saxon king, Athelstan, at last defeated the Viking invaders and built the beginnings of the kingdom of England. Above all, it shows us the range of contacts enjoyed by the Vikings while they were running northern England. These Scandinavians were extremely well connected, as the historian Michael Wood makes clear:

There’s a Viking arm-ring from Ireland, there are coins minted as far away as Samarkand and Afghanistan and Baghdad. This gives you a sense of the reach of the age; these Viking kings and their agents and their trade routes spread across western Europe, Ireland, Scandinavia. You read Arab accounts of Viking slave dealers on the banks of the Caspian
Sea; Guli the Russian, so called because of his Russian hat but actually Irish, was dealing in slaves out there on the Caspian and those kinds of trade routes, the river routes down to the Black Sea through Novgorod and Kiev and those kinds of places. You can see how, in a very short time, coins minted in Samarkand in, say, 915 could end up in Yorkshire in the 920s.

Coins from the hoard: (
top
) dihram, (
middle
) coin with name of St Peter, (
bottom
) coin issued by Athelstan

The Vale of York hoard makes it clear that Viking England did indeed operate on a transcontinental scale. There is a dirham from Samarkand, and there are other Islamic coins from central Asia. Like York, Kiev was a great Viking city, and there merchants from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan traded their goods via Russia and the Baltic to the whole of northern Europe. In the process, the people around Kiev became very rich. An Arab merchant of the time describes them making neck-rings for their wives by melting down the gold and silver coins they’d amassed from trade:

Round her neck she wears gold or silver rings; when a man amasses 10,000 dirhams, he makes his wife one ring; when he has 20,000 he makes two … and often a woman has many of these rings.

And indeed there’s a fragment of one of these Russian rings in the hoard.

Although Kiev and York were both Viking cities, contact between them would only very rarely have been direct. Normally, the trade route would have been constructed through a series of relays, with spices and silver coins and jewellery moving north, as amber and fur moved in the other direction, and at every stage there would have been a profit. But this trade route also carried the dark side of the Vikings’ reputation. All through eastern Europe, Vikings captured people to sell as slaves in the great market of Kiev – which explains why in so many European languages the words for ‘slave’ and ‘Slav’ are still closely connected.

This hoard also tells us a great deal of what was happening back in York. There, the Vikings were becoming Christian; but, as so often, the new converts were reluctant to abandon the symbols of their old religion. The Norse gods were not entirely dead. And so, on one coin minted at York around 920, we find the sword and name of the Christian St Peter but, intriguingly, the ‘i’ of Petri – Peter – is in the shape of a hammer, the emblem of the old Norse god, Thor. The new faith uses the weapons of the old.

We can be pretty certain that this treasure was buried soon after 927. That was the year Athelstan, king of Wessex, finally defeated the Vikings, conquered York and received the homage of rulers from Scotland and Wales. It was the biggest political event in Britain since the departure of the Romans, and the hoard contains one of the silver coins that Athelstan issued to celebrate it. On it he gives himself a new title, never used before by any ruler:
Athelstan Rex totius Britanniae
: Athelstan, King of All Britain. The modern idea of a united Britain starts here, although it was 800 years before it became a reality. But there is a sense in which Athelstan is the maker of England. Michael Wood explains:

The wonderful thing about the treasure is that it homes in on the very moment that England was created as a kingdom and as a state. The early tenth century is the moment when these ‘national identities’ start to be used for the first time, and that’s why all the later kings of the English, whether Normans or Plantagenets or Tudors, looked back to Athelstan as the founder of their kingdom. In one sense you could say they go back to that moment in 927.

Yet it was a pretty messy moment, and the hoard demonstrates that the struggle between Viking and Anglo-Saxon wasn’t yet over. The treasure must have belonged to a rich and powerful Viking who stayed on in Yorkshire under the new Anglo-Saxon regime, because some of the coins in his hoard were minted by Athelstan in York in 927. Something must then have gone wrong for our Viking, which led him to bury the hoard – but he did it so carefully that he must have intended to return. Was he killed in the ongoing skirmish between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons? Did he go back to Scandinavia, or on to Ireland? Whatever happened to the treasure-owner, most of the Vikings in England stayed on and, in due course, were assimilated. In north-east England today places with names ending in ‘by’ and ‘thorpe’ – like Grimsby and Cleethorpes – are living survivals of the long Viking presence. The Vale of York hoard reminds us that these places were also at one end of the huge trade route that, around 900, stretched from Scunthorpe to Samarkand.

For many people, the name Hedwig, if it means anything at all, conjures up the obliging owl that delivers messages to Harry Potter. But if you come from central Europe, and especially if you come from Poland, Hedwig means something quite different: she’s a royal saint who, around 1200, became a national and religious symbol and who through the centuries has delivered not messages but miracles. The most famous of all Hedwig’s miracles was that the water in her glass turned regularly into wine, and across central Europe there is to this day a small, puzzling group of distinctive glass beakers alleged to be the very glasses from which she drank the miraculous liquid.

One of Hedwig’s beakers is now in the British Museum, and it takes us at once to the high religious politics at the time of the Crusades, the great age of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, and to the unexpected fact that the war between Christians and Muslims was accompanied by a great flourishing of trade. Recent research is now leading us to think that Hedwig’s beakers, revered in central Europe as evidence of a Christian miracle, were most probably made by Islamic glassworkers in the Middle East.

Hedwig was married to Henry the Bearded, Duke of Silesia – a territory that straddles the modern Polish, German and Czech borders. Henry and Hedwig had seven children, including the deliciously named Konrad the Curly, and then in 1209 – perhaps not surprisingly – they took vows of abstinence. By then, the duchess was already displaying distinctly saintly tendencies; she founded a hospital for female lepers and she treated nuns in the local convents with disconcerting reverence:

She used the water in which the nuns had washed their feet to wash her eyes, often her entire face. And more wonderful yet, she used this same water to rinse the faces and heads of her small grandchildren, her son’s children. She was firmly convinced that the sanctity of the nuns who had touched the water would profit the children’s salvation.

Although a duchess, she dressed poorly and went barefoot, even in the snow, where it was reported she left bloody footprints. Almost unheard of in those days, she drank only water. This teetotal behaviour worried her husband a good deal: drinking wine was much safer than water, because water was usually unclean, and he was afraid that she would fall ill. But one day, so the legend goes, the duke watched her raise her glass of water to her lips, and saw that it miraculously turned into wine. Her sainthood, and presumably her health, was assured from then on.

And so was the fame of her glass. Medieval Europe had an insatiable hunger for relics connected to miracles. Among the most famous of them all was a cup that had allegedly been used at the wedding at Cana, where Christ performed his first miracle of turning water into wine. Hedwig’s beakers were part of a proud tradition.

The Hedwig beaker we have in the British Museum – one of the dozen or so glass beakers, all strikingly similar, which were identified by the pious as the vessels from which Hedwig had drunk – is really much more like a small vase than a drinking glass. It is made of thick glass, a smoky topaz colour, about 14 centimetres (6 inches) high. You need two hands to grasp it, and it is not at all easy to drink out of. If I put some water into it, and then try to take a proper gulp, the rim is so wide that it spills. And, sadly, the water does not turn into wine.

But it is a miracle of a different sort that a dozen or so vulnerable, fragile glass objects like this should all have survived the centuries intact. They must have been carefully cherished, and we know that many of them were preserved in princely collections and in church treasuries, so it is probable that many of them were in fact used as chalices in royal chapels and churches. Many of the surviving Hedwig beakers have been mounted with precious metal for use in the mass, and when you look at the foot and the sides of our beaker, you can see that it too once had metal mounts.

Significantly, Hedwig was one of a new sort of saint. By the time she was canonized, in 1267, the number of women saints was at an all time high in the history of the church. This is the point where women broke through the glass ceiling of sanctity. A quarter of all new saints were female. This may have had something to do with the religious revival fostered by the new preaching orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, who believed that the true Christian life should be lived not in the cloister but in the town, and who insisted that women should play a full part in it. So they encouraged royal women to do good works. Hedwig’s support of the lepers was typical, and we all know from Diana, Princess of Wales’s work with AIDS sufferers how powerful such a royal example can be. The medieval church strengthened that example by making the women saints after their death, and the roll call of royal saints is impressive: St Cunegunde, Holy Roman Empress; St Margaret, Princess of Hungary; St Agnes, Princess of Bohemia; and St Hedwig, Duchess of Silesia. All of them were credited with miracles, but only Hedwig received the miracle of the wine.