The forgotten 1066 battlefield of Fulford

Battlefield casualties (from Chas Jones The Forgotten Battle of 1066 Fulford)

Fulford is arguably the battle that made the Norman Conquest possible, although it has largely been overshadowed by the battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings. Over the last years a considerable amount of work has been done to try and identify the site of the battle. On Saturday I went out to Fulford with members of the Medieval Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society for a tour of what our guide, Chas Jones, believes to be the site of the battle of Fulford.

Fleet (from Chas Jones The Forgotten Battle of 1066 Fulford)

In the summer of 1065 the Northumbrians rebelled against the unpopular rule of Tostig. Having lost control of northern England Tostig appealed to his brother Harold I of England to reinstate him after he became king but when Harold refused, Tostig sought help from abroad. In September 1066 whilst Harold was expecting the Normans to land on the south coast, Tostig and Harold Hadrada of Norway landed in East Yorkshire and sacked Scarborough. They sailed up the Humber with a fleet of an estimated 400 vessels, exploiting high tides to land at Riccall about 3.5 miles from Fulford. Tidal rises of between 7 and 11 m have been recorded which would have helped the Scandinavians.  In the Domesday Survey Tostig owned land at Riccall and so he must have been familiar with the phenomenon of high tides at this time of year. Earls Morcar and Edwin moved their forces to cover the likely invasion routes on the rivers Wharfe and Ouse. The Northumbrian army  marched out from York to meet the invaders. Unfortunately it is not known precisely where the battle took place but Chas Jones made a plausible case for the battlefield being located along the banks of the Germany Beck close to the present village cemetery. A plaque in the playing field commemorates what an earlier generation of researchers thought to be the site, very close to where Chas believes the battle took place.

Commemorative plaque for the battle of Fulford

Sources for the battle are sketchy at best but Chas has drawn on material from Scandinavian sagas. Though written down in the 13^th century there are grounds to suppose that the composer was concerned to record historical information accurately.

Chas Jones

Chas set the historical context for the battle and explained the topography of what he believes to be the battlefield of Fulford. The glacial moraine on which the village stands is crucial because it overlooks low-lying swampy ground and there are steep slopes on either side to defend the flanks.  In front of the position Germany Beck served as a moat, protecting the approach to York from the south along the moraine.

the slope down to the Germany Beck

Chas drew on the Orkney Sagas to piece together an account of the battle. Tostig’s forces tried to cross the Germany Beck but were thrown back by Morcar and the Northumbrians. However the Northumbrians were then taken in flank by Hadrada’s Scandinavians who were waiting their moment in low-lying ‘dead’ ground close to the River Ouse. The Northumbrians fled along the Germany Beck and Chas told us about archaeological work in the area immediately north of the posited battlefield which has revealed hearths and furnace bottoms where broken arms and armour were recycled. Chas showed us the centre of the battlefield on the moraine, the Germany Beck and the dead ground near the river where the Scandinavians waited.  Walking back to the village it was striking just how steep the edge of the moraine is.

edge of moraine

Over a number of years Chas has sampled various areas of the battlefield looking for evidence. He thinks he may well have this but unfortunately he couldn’t show us any military finds because the objects are in the York conservation lab. However, he did say that iron nails and furnace bottoms found along the line of the Northumbrian retreat have excited considerable interest amongst Scandinavian archaeologists.

A short time after the battle Harold arrived, having marched the length of England at great speed. He caught Hadrada, Tostig and their army by surprise at Stamford Bridge. The Scandinavians suffered heavy casualties and it was said that only a small fraction of the original invasion fleet returned to Norway. Having learnt that William of Normandy had landed, Harold  returned south. His men were tired after their epic march and not all of the reinforcements had arrived. At Hastings Harold was killed with many of his closest supporters and England was ruled by William I.

Sadly the battlefield is threatened by development – a housing estate and a road – surprisingly located on low-lying ground liable to flooding. Chas has challenged the development in the courts but the battlefield is still under threat.

King and County Exhibition

Facial reconstruction of Richard III

Readers of this Blog may be interested to know that there is a small display about Richard III at the Yorkshire Museum. I stumbled across it at the weekend whilst showing some international curators some of the York’s cultural heritage on Saturday. It is more of an ‘installation’ in the Yorkshire Museum’s existing Medieval gallery and it is fairly modest: the facial reconstruction of Richard III made by Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee for the recent documentary, supported by four text panels and a number of exhibits from the Yorkshire Museum’s stunning collection of treasure items from the period, star exhibits such as the Middleham jewel, the Middleham ring and a boar badge worn by those of Richard’s household and affiliation.

Livery badge showing a boar, the symbol of Richard III

The exhibition is open until 13th October and then moves on to Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, the British Museum and Gloucester Museum and Art Gallery. After touring, the facial reconstruction will return to Leicester for permanent display in the new King Richard III visitor centre.The tour was organised by Leicester Arts and Museums Service and the model has been kindly loaned for display by the Richard III Society.The tour is supported by the University of Leicester, the University of Dundee and Darlow Smithson Productions.

The sign outside the Yorkshire Museum generated expectations in me that were not actually met. This is clearly quite a modest affair though it does create a new focus for beautiful objects in the museum’s collection. With the discovery of the king’s remains in a Leicester car park, has the time come for a major block-buster re-evalutation of the last Plantagenet king’s brief but controversial reign? Perhaps it’s time for a dayschool on Richard III incorporating lectures on the recent excavation, a reappraisal of the battle of Bosworth, the Medieval landscape at Middleham and contributions by authoritative historians?

Ancient Worlds and A Game of Thrones (Trone de Fer)

Dragonglass dagger from Game of Thrones

Readers of this Blog will have seen the recent entry about an obsidian vessel that I saw whilst on holiday in Crete recently. Fans of George R.R.Martin’s popular Game of Thrones novels will instantly recognise this material as dragonglass, which is referred to by some of the characters as ‘fire given form’. Jon Snow finds a cache or hoard of ‘dragonglass’ weapons at the Fist of the First Men in the second book….

PLOT SPOILERS FOLLOW
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and distributes them among his brothers in the Night’s Watch. They prove to be unexpectedly useful when self-confessed craven Sam Tarley uses a dagger against one of the White Walkers.

This material that archaeologists know as obsidian as discussed earlier turns up in the Middle east, the eastern Mediterranean, the Americas and other places beside. The working of the material is often stunning, leaving cores with flake scars so evenly spaced as to make you think they were worked by a machine.

Samwell Tarly in Game of Thrones

Martin’s Game of Thrones series of novels (still unfinished) frequently draw upon archaeology and ancient history. Though set in the fictional kingdom of Westeros, this is recognisably ‘high medieval’ world comparable to England during the Wars of the Roses, complete with a hierarchical society of king, lords, knights who show off their prowess in  jousts, seneschals, castellans, men-at-arms, archers with longbows, crossbowmen and commoners. There are even trebuchets for siege warfare, each with its own name, reflecting the grim humour of the besiegers.

But it is Medieval world conscious of its historical backdrop, which goes back thousands of years.The timescales are incredibly long – the Wall (a kind of Hadrian’s Wall but built of ice not stone) has been held by the Night’s Watch for eight thousand years, so long in fact that it is not clear whether Jon Snow is the 998th Lord Commander or merely the 675th as Sam points out (A Song of Ice and Fire 5: A Dance with Dragons, p.100). The rather slippery understanding of time in Westeros has been picked up by Adam Whitehead in a short article ‘An Unreliable World – History and Timekeeping in Westeros’ in James Lowder (ed.) Beyond the Wall Exploring George R.R.Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Benbella Books, 2012). If you compare the same time span in a north west European context, the Wall would have stood from the flooding of the English Channel in the middle of our Mesolithic period up to the present day.  What stuctures could possibly have survived the passing of so much time? Maybe the pyramids are our best comparison. The great pyramid at Giza was built about 2500 BC but the Wall is made of ice and it’s in a cold northern environment.

Sam is the budding archaeologist and historian. As a steward he serves a maester and has access to the library, where he is fascinated by all the old records – much to the incomprehension of Jon Snow who can’t understand where his friend has been all night. Sam tells him he can work out what the garrison of the Wall was thousands of years ago from looking at records of amounts of food shipped to the wall to feed the garrison. Sam’s records are written on parchment and badly decayed in some cases, copied half-a hundred times over the years. It is reminiscent of the Vindolanda tablets with their troop manifests and duty rosters… or the auxiliary diploma displayed in the Discovering Archaeology gallery at Manchester Museum,  which refers to a Syrian recruit in the Roman army of northern Britain. Maybe Sam is going to make nerdy chic fashionable, in which case there’s hope for the curatorial profession!

The historical backdrop is Valyria, a superpower rather like Rome that was destroyed by a cataclysm (like the erruption of Santorini and the supposed decline of Minoans?). Valyrian roads run dead straight across the landscape; skilfully crafted Valyrian swords are greatly prized by the ruling families; and powerful artefacts inscribed with glyphs of the writing system still circulate in the aftermath. Perhaps Valyria was inspired instead by the Aztecs of Meso-America?

For all its gritty historical realism it is, none-the-less, a world in which magic is present, though used sparingly by Martin. The last dragons supposedly died out a hundred years or more earlier but the power of the magic deployed by pyromancers and red priests appears to have been mysteriously amplified just as rumours are circulating of a three headed dragon in the east and the return of a claimant from the previous ruling dynasty of Westeros – the Targaryens.

Pretender Unmasked?

Links from bracelet

Now seems to be the season for finding lots of interesting stories about fakes and forgeries and objects that might not be what they seem at first glance. We are putting some fakes and forgeries as well as copies of objects in the Ancient Worlds displays opening on 30th October.

Just before Xmas a member of the public brought some objects into the Manchester Museum for identification. They are silvery-looking links from a bracelet. Each link shows a different design: there’s a castle tower or turret, the head of an archbishop and so on.  They might not look particularly old but I remembered seeing something very similar about 20 years ago reported by a metal-detectorist to the Hull Museum where I was then working. I’d forgotten all about it until I came across an image of the item in a Portable Antiquities Scheme publication. Caroline Barton, Assistant Treasure Registrar at the British Museum, kindly found the reference in a 2003 report. The link was identified as ‘medieval’ and ‘c.1450’.  Caroline sent me an image:-

It is pretty well identicial to the links brought in recently. Compare the photo above with the link in the centre of the photo at the top of this Blog and you’ll see. The enquirer told me that she had purchased the links in a charity shop in Manchester. She thinks they had come from a house clearance. This suggests that the link I saw in Hull in the 1990s cannot be of medieval date and is much more likely to be  modern. You can see the virtually complete bracelet on a Blog for the Medieval section of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society. Something like 20 years after the event I can at last get some closure on what the object was and its date. I suspect the links were part of a bracelet made in, say, the 1950s. I feel sure there must be a complete example somewhere out there. It would be great to see one intact. If anyone out there has one do let me know.