THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (15)

[Stanley]

THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (15)

24 December 2001

We are coming up towards 800 now and once again, we have to cast our eyes across the North Sea towards mainland Europe and Scandinavia and take note of what was happening there because it was to have serious consequences for Britain as a whole and Barlick in particular.
The Norsemen of what is now Norway were actively looking for plunder and new lands. The population was rising and they were constrained because there was only a narrow strip of land suitable for farming between the sea shore and the mountains inland. They looked out to sea for a solution and the first target was the lush pastures of the British east coast. They had already made some small raids on coastal monasteries early in the seventh century and had even penetrated the Western Isles but had never settled. The main source of sea-rover activity at this time seems to have been Hordaland, the area around Hardanger Fjord in south West Norway.
In 789 they attacked at Portland, in 793, on the 8th of June, they sacked Holy Island (Lindisfarne in Northumbria), in 794 they attacked Jarrow, the home of the Venerable Bede. In 795 Monkwearmouth and Iona were sacked, in 806 they attacked Iona again. All these were opportunistic raids for plunder, remember that the Norsemen were Pagan and the fact that all these places were monasteries meant nothing to them. They were rich and undefended, this was sufficient reason for attacking them.
The closest land to Norway was The Shetlands and Orkneys. By c.800 the Norsemen had established a staging post on Hjaltland (Shetland) which was the most northerly part of the territory of the Picts. The Norse influence can be seen there to this day, Orkney and Shetland were ruled by Norway until 1472. As well as settling on Shetland, the Norsemen colonised Caithness and Sutherland. We see the evidence in the place names; Thurso means ‘Thor’s River, Scrabster was Skaraboldstadr or ‘Homestead on the Edge’ and Wick is ‘Vik’ which means bay or inlet.
These bases were used as jumping off points for further exploration out into the Hebrides where they interrupted a long conflict between The Picts and the Dalradians (the struggle which was to eventually result in Scotland). By 850 serious settlement was taking place and after the Hebrides the Isle of Man was taken over. The Manx parliament, Tynwald, is a Norse meeting and still survives to this day. 100 years later they were still advancing attacking Dublin in 981 and Limerick in 965.
In passing we should note that not all the Norse sea-raiders turned south into the Hebrides. Some of them sailed on out into the Atlantic and from this stemmed the colonisation of Iceland, Greenland and eventually, landings on North America long before Columbus.
Further South in Scandinavia the inhabitants of what we now know as Denmark were under the same pressures as the Norsemen. In 835 the Danes landed on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent and established a toehold in the kingdom of Aethelwulf, son of Egbert who is sometimes regarded as the first king of All England. Aethelwulf reigned as king of Kent and on his father’s death took over Wessex as well in 839 and reigned until 856. During this time the Danish incursions increased in frequency and numbers, Southampton and Dorset in 840, Somerset in 843 and 845, Devon in 850. In 850 the Danish army over-wintered on the Isle of Thanet for the first time. In 851 they attacked Canterbury and London. In 854 the Danes wintered in Sheppey. Lindsey and East Anglia were attacked in 841, the usurper Raedwulf of Northumbria was killed in 844, king Beorhtwulf of Mercia was defeated in 851 and the Danes were marauding in Shropshire in 855.
In 871 Aethelwulf’s son Alfred (later called The Great) succeeded to the throne of Wessex and Kent. The outlook was bleak and after a couple of defeats by the Danes Alfred followed the example of Mercia and paid the Danes a bribe to leave him alone, this was the infamous ‘Danegeld’. Under this arrangement the Danes took control of the east and north of England and London. If you imagine a line drawn from London to the Wirral, everything to the north and east of this as far as the Caledonian border became ‘The Danelaw’. The Danes kept their word and went off to concentrate their attack on Mercia and Northumbria, the Mercian’s Danegeld must have run out! In 876/77 the same thing happened to Alfred and the Danes attacked again. Once more Alfred paid them off but in 878 they were back again and subjected large parts of Wessex to their authority. Alfred had to flee to the west and found refuge in the marshy country of the Parrett Valley in Somerset. If legend is to be believed, it was here that he burned the cakes.
Later in 878 Alfred gathered his followers and started a guerrilla war against the Danes. He gathered support and defeated the Danish army under Guthrum at Edington in Wiltshire. Guthrum was converted to Christianity, baptised and swore to leave Wessex in peace. In 884, a Danish army that had been campaigning in continental Europe against the Franks laid siege to Rochester. Alfred defeated them and chased them back to the continent. In 892 the Danes attacked Wessex again but by 896 they had decided that it was too tough a nut to crack and withdrew to concentrate on campaigns in East Anglia and on the continent. In 899 Alfred died at the age of fifty and was buried at Winchester.
Sorry about this glut of dates but in order to assess what was happening to Barlick we’ve got to have an idea of the extent of the Danish conquest. Theoretically, Barlick was inside the Danelaw but once again the settlement might have been cushioned against the worst effects of the fighting by its remote location. There’s no doubt that the Vikings penetrated this area, we have place names that are definitely Scandinavian in origin like Earby, Ellenthorpe at Gisburn and Ingthorpe behind West Marton. Our dialect carries similar evidence, ‘laik’ is Norwegian for ‘play’, ‘kirk’ as in Gill Kirk is Old Norse for church, ‘laithe is the Old Norse ‘hlatha’ or barn, ‘bairn’ for child and ‘beck’ for brook, all come directly from Old Norse. The question is, what effect did this invasion have on Barlick?
There is no doubt that the Pagan Vikings were a terrifying lot when they were on the war path, there is abundant archaeological evidence for fierce battles and even massacres. Forget about them having horns on their helmets, they didn’t, this is a nineteenth century invention. However they were heavily armed and very mobile in their Dragon Ships. The curious thing is that from what we can understand from the written history and the archaeology it seems that once they settled in an area they became industrious and peaceful neighbours and usually converted to Christianity within a generation. So I think we are fairly safe in assuming that by about 880 our old Barlickers had some new neighbours and were learning how to get on with them.
This of course was nothing new. First the Saxons came and then the Norsemen from Norway and Denmark. Until very recently we had no way of knowing the extent to which the Celts were displaced or swamped by the invaders but recent advances in genetic testing have given us a new tool. In a recent programme on BBC, 'Blood of the Vikings', University College of London was commissioned to do a survey to try to determine what the ethnic origin of people was in various parts of the Isles. The study is continuing but one clear result is that in our area, the north west, we have the highest percentage of invader genes in England, York is remarkably high. So I think we can say that the old Barlickers had changed quite a lot between 450 and 900. In 450 they were Celts but in 900 they were definitely a mixed bag, the significant thing is that by 900 they were essentially the same ethnic mix as we are today, the ‘English Race’ had arrived!
As I keep saying in these articles, the research continually modifies and clarifies our knowledge of Barlick. I came across something this week which perhaps gives us a clue about when Barlick gained a Christian Church. In 601 Pope Gregory sent Mellitus and Paulinus to help Augustine in his work of conversion. In 627 Paulinus was created bishop and went to Northumbria to convert King Edwin, remember that Barlick was within the kingdom of Northumbria. Edwin accepted conversion having already agreed to do so on the advice of king Ethelbert whose daughter Ethelburga he had married. Before he actually undertook baptism he consulted with his advisers, one of whom was his Pagan High Priest, Coefi (or Cefi). The advisers all agreed to the conversion and surprisingly, after some thought, Coefi also agreed because he said that he had suspected for some time that the gods they were worshipping were useless. Coefi further said that it was his duty as High Priest to desecrate and destroy the temple, idols and altars. He went to the temple at Goodmanham, east of York and he and his followers desecrated the temple and burned the enclosure. Edwin was baptised and instructed all his subjects to do the same.
This was a fairly powerful message and given the speed at which news could travel even in those days Barlick must have heard about it. In the absence of any other evidence I think we can be fairly certain that Barlick as a settlement converted to Christianity by 630. Further, the first thing Paulinus did after Edwin’s conversion was to build a church at York where he became the first bishop. Did Barlick take their cue from the king? Was this when a church was built in Barlick? Given the evidence this looks like a good bet.
So, it is 900 and we have another snapshot of Barlick. It has converted to Christianity and certainly has a church. The people are a mixture of Celtic and invader blood. The old Pagan beliefs are waning but still a powerful force. Bede gives us a very good clue as to how people viewed life and death in those days. When Edwin asked his nobles for their opinion on conversion one of them said that life was rather like being a sparrow on a wild and stormy winter’s night. By chance, the sparrow flies in through the window of a lord’s hall where there is a feast in progress. It flies through the warmth of the hall and out through a window at the other end into the storm. The noble said that the passage through the hall was a man’s life and that we knew nothing of whence we came or the storm that was to follow. If the new religion gave a better idea about what came before and went after, it was worth trying it out. This was essentially the world picture in Barlick as well and doubtless one of the attractions of the new religion was the promise of life after death, something that the old gods had only promised to warriors who died in battle.
I think you deserve a little treat, I’ve been working you very hard this week. I have come across a nice example of the development of language. The word ‘angling’ to describe fishing with a rod and line originates from an Old English word ‘angul’ which in turn has Germanic roots and probably originated in the Indo-European word ‘ank’, to bend. The Latin ‘angulus’ comes from the same root and gives us our word ‘angle’ meaning the space between the junction of two straight lines. There was a tribe in Schleswig in Germany who lived in a district which was shaped like a fish hook, consequently they named it Angul and eventually the tribe became known as the Angles. When they joined the Saxons and Jutes and invaded Britain they inadvertently gave us a new name for Lower Britannia. This was Engla Land, the land of the Angles. So, we live in a country that is named after a fish hook. Clever stuff eh?

24 December 2001