Overview
This website invites you to explore three places
on the Atlantic rim of north-west Europe. Mayo in
Ireland, Kilmartin in Scotland and Lofotr in the
Arctic north of Norway all occupy landscapes whose
ancient inhabitants have left a rich archaeological
and historical record. In this website you can
explore these three landscapes and learn about
their past.
Archaeology
Using archaeological methods, we can discover
ancient field systems where men and women first
settled and ploughed the earth, no longer dependent
on the haphazard fortunes of the hunter-gatherer.
The day-to-day lives of people living over a
thousand years ago are revealed by the remains of
their houses and huts, by their cooking pots and
drinking horns, the games they played, the clothes
they wore, their grain-mills, their tools and their
boats. Looking at pollen remains deep in the soil
will tell us something about what they grew and
ate.
But we can also learn about the way they thought
and felt, their beliefs. There are ritual
sites, churches, monasteries
religious
carvings, holy wells and sacred trees and
burial grounds. Such sites reveal not just the
practicalities of everyday life in the first
millennium, but some of the deepest beliefs of
earlier generations about who they were, the
purpose of their lives, and their place in
creation.
An old tree by a well-spring
near Kilmartin is studded with coins
bashed into it by local people - a modern version
of an ancient practice.
We can learn about the way power was organised
in these societies, too. Warlords and kings armed
themselves and built
forts and court-complexes
to Power was held by the man with the best weapons,
the strongest fighting men, the most wealth.
Archaeology will reveal to us some dimensions of
this world of power.
Literature
During the first millennium, the people in these
three landscapes learned about reading
and writing. The literate people (mostly
clergy, in our period of interest) produced huge
quantities of writing, and the surviving texts tell
us a great deal about their world. There are
travellers' reports written down by Classical
writers - these are among our earliest sources. But
there are also laws, for example, which are very
revealing of the way society was organised. There
are saints' lives, legends and sagas, poetry and
hymns and much more.
We have to handle such materials with care,
however. A writer is never simply an objective
recorder of events, but always has some purpose for
writing, usually promoting the agenda of the person
who is paying him - and at this stage it is usually
a 'him' and not a 'her'. When reading such
material, then, we must always be conscious that
the author was often, to a greater or lesser
extent, a propagandist or spin-doctor. He was also
influenced by the perceptions and thought-world of
his time, which may have differed radically from
ours.
Place-Names
Another key to understanding our landscapes is
to look at place-names. Many features of the
landscape have names that go back hundreds or even
thousands of years. A river, for example, may keep
its ancient Celtic name long after the Celtic
language has been displaced by another tongue. But
such names can still be understood by linguists,
and many lochs and rivers contain the names of
ancient Celtic deities, giving us an insight into
pre-Christian cult. Later place-names in Scotland
and Ireland with the element kil
or cill tell us that there was a church there
centuries ago, usually with a saint's cult, and
sometimes at a place where pre-Christian rites
might have been celebrated.
Place-names containing dale (from Norse
dalr) or fell (fjall is Norse for
'hill') can be found in western Scotland, echoing
the period of Norse occupation.
Place-names have been less well exploited than
archaeology and literature as an aid to
understanding the first millennium, but scholars
are now making rapid progress in this field.
Continuity and
Change
The evidence enables us to understand how the
people who lived in our three landscapes saw
dramatic change over the centuries, while at the
same time some characteristics remained unchanged.
The fact that all three areas are on the Atlantic
coast meant that they were exposed to the constant
stimulus of contacts with sea-farers
- traders, raiders,
visitors, missionaries, fishermen and the rest.
Such contacts brought a stream of ever-new ideas
into these dynamic societies, ideas which were
absorbed and transformed to varying degrees by
local people.
The sea-roads brought new
ideas to coastal societies.
This is a view of Lofotr.
Changing
Beliefs
One of the single most obvious changes was that
of religious belief. It was during this period that
the Celtic peoples of Scotland and Ireland, and the
Norse to the east, gradually accepted Christian
beliefs and practices. This was a slow and informal
process for the most part, and there is very little
evidence for just how such conversion took place,
or how people felt about this change at the time.
Many of the pre-Christian beliefs disappeared,
though Christianity absorbed these to a remarkable
extent into its own story, and thus preserved
them.
Changing
Skills
In the wake of Christian belief came the
fundamental Christian skills of literacy and book
production. Churches and monasteries were centres
of reading and writing, copying of manuscripts,
teaching the literary skills of interpretation and
recording events. We owe much of our knowledge of
this period to the records left by monks in their
scriptoria who recorded significant events year by
year, who wrote accounts of the lives
of their founders, or who preserved in manuscript
form the laws and
legends of their
people.
The appearance of literacy meant that other
cultural changes took place, as oral practices gave
way to written culture. For example, for many
centuries people had entered into legal contracts
by taking part in a public ritual, speaking to each
other, calling on witnesses whose hands they held,
standing in a certain place and reciting certain
binding words accompanied by certain gestures. Such
ritual practices were displaced by written
expressions of contract - by land-grants for
example, charters, and so on, written in
manuscripts. Nevertheless, even today we see echoes
of old ritual practices: when two people 'shake
hands on a deal', for example.
Changing
Politics
In all three of our landscapes, a major change
that took place in the first millennium was the
centralisation and consolidation of power. At the
beginning of the period power had been exercised on
a more or less local basis by the rulers of small
kingdoms or chieftaincies. They were at the apex of
social units based on kinship. In Ireland, there
were perhaps around 150 such small kingdoms, and
Scotland and Norway had similar patterns of local
lordships. But such entities were constantly at war
with each other, jockeying for power, invading each
other's territories, seeking to gain advantage. It
was a system in permanent flux, unstable and
subject to all the uncertainties of armed
conflict.
Over the millennium, certain kin-groups and
lordships gradually consolidated power over others.
The tribal and local nature of power began to be
absorbed into a more national system, where
overkings succeeded in subjecting local rulers to
their authority. Initially this authority might
mean little more than demanding tribute from
subject rulers, but this was the beginning of a
process that led eventually to the formation of the
nations of Scotland,
Norway and
Ireland.
The Church had an important role in this
process, too. The use of writing in establishing
royal powers, promoting laws and governing larger
territories when the king might be absent by
creating an administrative class should not be
underestimated. The Church also had a strong
ideological commitment to kingship, seeking
stability under the rule of 'the Lord's anointed',
peaceful borders, and less violent transitions from
one king to his successor.
Changing
Language
In this Atlantic periphery, language was a
shifting feature. In Scotland Gaelic, Pictish,
British, Norse and English were all spoken in
different times and in different areas. Ireland was
somewhat simpler with Gaelic as the native
language, but with Norse-speaking settlements where
the Vikings established themselves. Lofotr was
fundamentally Norse, but had interchanges with
Sámi people
who spoke another quite different language..
Among all these nations, one further language
was a uniting factor: Latin. This was the language
of literature, but also of prayer and poetry in the
Christian tradition, and drew the whole of western
Europe into a common culture.
Using this
Website
It is impossible to construct a single coherent
narrative of these three areas over the first
millennium. Instead we must deal with a rather
fragmentary collection of evidence, recognising the
peculiarities of different landscapes and different
periods of history.
This web-site makes it possible to move from
historic sites and artefacts to themed essays and
back again, either by clicking links within the
texts or by browsing the lists of themes and sites
in the left-hand panel and at the foot of the
pages. From a king's court complex in Norway you
can move to an essay on kingship in Scotland, and
from there to a Scottish kings' inauguration site,
for example.
By exploring these links, putting together the
evidence from different times and places, you will
begin to compose your own narrative of the Atlantic
rim in the first millennium.
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This
project has been supported by the EU as part of the Culture
2000 programme.