A History–Before the Normans

I have barely touched on the ‘Dark Ages’ as we have so few facts to tell us about life and events here in Rowley; yet towards the Norman Conquest, more or less from the return here of the Christian church, last seen in Roman times, we enter the ‘early mediaeval’ period. Historians have only two credible documents, the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicles’, and the Venerable Bede’s ‘A History of the English Church and People’ to help. The first records the period AD 1 to 1154, but sparely in Rowley’s part of Britain. Bede, a monk at Jarrow monastery, finished his history in 731, so he left us a gap of three hundred years to the Norman Conquest. Where else can we look? One source if we dare trust it lies in local traditions or, maybe, incomer’s legends and myths.

We have ‘Saint Austin’s Stone’ just yards from our present parish boundary near Drewton; an outcrop of chalk and flint from which legend has it that St. Augustine, sent to Britain in 597, preached Christianity to the local Angles. York had long been a northern centre for religion and visits by Augustine seems likely. Only a few years later, in 627, Augustine’s follower Paulinus baptised our northern King, Edwin, who then built the first York church, now the Minster. Times were most unstable and establishing the church outside York fell to Paulinus who, Bede tells us, preached widely in Deira (our ‘kingdom’) and Bernicia (the other part of ‘North-humbria’). So, maybe Augustine did preach at Drewton.

In Britain, Kent and Northumbria were the first to accept Christianity, giving us our present day Archbishoprics of Canterbury and York. In that early 7th century Christianity would have reached Rowley, if only via visiting preachers establishing a church. The Domesday Book tells us that by 1086 Little Weighton had a priest and a church. Thus we have a local society developing in the 400 years before the Normans around the church, with Christianity and paganism rising and falling as invaders came and went. Maybe on a day-to-day level to the man behind the plough, or woman at her spinning, life would be little changed, but elsewhere much was changing. In Britain some sixteen or so ‘kingdoms’ existed, few were Christian. Our king, Edwin, killed in 633 by pagan Cadwalla caused Paulinus to flee by sea to Kent–dangerous times. But Bede tells that in 731 ‘As peace and prosperity prevail in these days, many of the Northumbrians, both noble and simple, and their children, have laid aside their weapons,…’.

This was not to last as Vikings ‘pirates’ (Danes and Norwegian) invaded (794), but nonetheless, in this apparent tumult, an Anglo-Saxon legal and trading structure emerged. Offa gave coinage of high quality, and other kings had courts for settling disputes. Government , law and administration was developing. ‘Shires’ and sub-divisions such as hundreds, wapentakes, and parishes with boundaries close to present ones became settled (974). King Alfred the Great, a West Saxon, first to used the name ‘England’ as he set down a legal code in about (880) that spread over time to the whole country, and their essence remains today as a just and fair model.

Eventually the pagan Viking invaders ruled us as part of the secular ‘Danelaw’ along the east and north of Britain, but it was only in 937 that England could be accepted as a single entity. This was brought about when the ‘Southumbrians’, an alliance under Athelstan, with the aid of mercenary Viking ‘sea-kings’ Thorolf and Egil, conclusively defeated a Celtic-Norse confederation uprising at the battle of Brunanburh–at which point we come back to mythology. Thorolf , despite his two ell long sword, was killed at this battle, but his brother Egil returned home, and told ‘The Saga of Egil’ about the famous battle. It is a story worth reading, if only for the splendid names of the participants. The site of this battle has never been identified, but with one in Little Weighton have we a minor claim to fame? In December 1875 Mr C S Todd, Town Clerk of Hull put to the Hull Literary and Philosophical Society that Little Weighton was the site. He deduced from Egil’s Saga that this bloodiest of battles in which five kings and seven earls were among the dead, was fought ‘on the plain’ between the Skidby road and Socken Wood. I fear it received scant support, but maybe that is ‘mythology’ for you.

Big Thank You to Barry Heaton for his historical articles which we hope will become a regular feature of both the Web site and Newsletter.

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