Britain in the Middle Ages: An Archaeological History. Francis Pryor

      FIG 5 South-eastern England in the Middle Saxon period, showing the location of the three major centres (emporia or wics) at Ipswich, Lundenwic (London) and Hamwic (Southampton). ‘Productive’ sites and other significant settlements or trading centres are shown by dots.

      Here I must briefly break off to say a few words about Charlemagne and the Franks. Charlemagne is often seen as the father of modern Europe, and his empire the true ancestor of the European Community. Jacques Le Goff takes a more sceptical view. For him, Charlemagne produced an abortive Europe that nevertheless left behind a legacy.²⁶ This is a view with which most archaeologists would probably agree.

      The Franks were a Germanic people who expanded west across the Rhine in the late fifth and sixth centuries, under the command of their remarkable king Clovis (died c.511), to occupy most of central and eastern Gaul (France). This expansion was continued by their greatest emperor, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne (771–814). Under his leadership the Carolingian Empire was to occupy most of western Europe, excepting Spain and southern Italy. Charlemagne, who was barely literate himself, reformed and expanded the power of the Church and encouraged the development of art and letters. While he was in sole charge his empire was stable and very prosperous. The tradition of scholarship was continued by his successors Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald, but the old flair had gone, and Europe now entered a less stable period when political allegiances were shifting. By the mid-tenth century the driving force of the Carolingian Empire shifted towards Germany, with the accession of Otto I in 936.

      The traditional view is that the wics and emporia stood at the boundary of the developed core (Francia) and the underdeveloped periphery, represented by Britain and Scandinavia. In today’s politically correct world we would doubtless refer to the latter as ‘developing’ – which the new archaeological evidence would suggest was factually correct too. As in subsequent core/periphery relations between an imperial centre and outlying regions, it was held that the wics and emporia were the places where raw materials were exchanged for luxury goods from Europe. Put cynically, the periphery produced the things that mattered, and received showy trinkets in exchange.

      This view of the setting up and operation of wics and emporia was given added weight by scholars such as Richard Hodges, who analysed these processes in the contexts of European macro-economics. He reasoned that trade and exchange only make sense if you look at the whole picture. His approach was anthropological, and rings sort-of true to a prehistorian like myself. I say ‘sort-of’ because there are no such things as permanent, static laws in anthropology, and Hodges’s seminal study of the subject, which appeared in 1989, now seems to me at least somewhat dated and mechanistic, although at the time it deservedly had a huge impact.²⁷ His views on the social and economic forces behind the growth of wics and emporia in the seventh and eighth centuries are still very influential, and are essentially based on the competitive relationship between the governing elites in the various emerging states and kingdoms.

      Anthropologists love relationships. They believe that the way humans react to each other is governed by forces other than instinctive or emotional likes or dislikes. So anthropologists hold that a married man will tend to have strained relations with his mother-in-law because she resents the loss of her daughter, and he feels that his wife is reluctant to leave her original family because her mother wants her back. Such competitive relationships have also been found in the world of tribal politics, where family considerations also complicate matters. The competitive nature of the relations between ruling elites was first discussed in detail by the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). He studied the exchange of gifts between the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, and realised that the exchange formed part of a complex system of social obligation known as the Kula cycle. This cycle was based on what anthropologists refer to as ‘Malinowski’s principle of reciprocity’ – a sonorous phrase which suggests that no gift-giving is without some form of motive. As the words imply, each ‘gift’ was actually nothing of the sort, because it carried with it the prospect of something in return: either another gift later, or some form of social obligation. Malinowski also realised that these exchanges encouraged competition between the elites on different islands. So a particularly lavish gift was less a generous donation than an expression of power on the donor’s part.

      Malinowski was an extraordinary man who also established the ground rules of anthropological fieldwork. Among other achievements he pioneered the process of structured interviews, which allowed him to compare the responses he received from different people right across the huge island archipelago he studied. Today his approach is seen as ‘functionalist’. In other words he based much of what he observed on common-sense observation and a rather masculine (dare I say it, simplistic) view of human relationships, perhaps summed up by: ‘one good turn deserves another’. Subsequent workers, most famously Margaret Mead in her wonderful book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), showed that there was a great deal more to human relationships in the Pacific – and of course elsewhere – than could readily be defined by laws of reciprocity alone. Returning to ancient trade and exchange, more recent studies such as The Gift by Marcel Mauss (1950) and Stone Age Economics (1974) by Marshall Sahlins have been far less functionalist than Malinowski; but even so, his fundamental principle still seems to apply.²⁸ Reciprocity and exchange are now seen as organising structures that are about more than the giving of gifts: they underlie most social, economic and administrative processes in both ancient and modern societies.

      Archaeologically speaking it is very hard to distinguish between the exchange of gifts and trade, pure and simple, because each involves reciprocity of one form or another. Moreover, where exchange at an elite level happens, it is not unusual to find other, smaller transactions also taking place further down the social ladder. Transactions of this sort do resemble trade, when seen in the archaeological record, because a large variety of objects – even coinage – may be involved.

      One useful rule of thumb that can help us define what was going on concerns the nature of the places where transactions took place. Traditionally the emporia and wics have been seen as rather isolated phenomena that contrasted markedly with the not-so-very-prosperous rural settlements that surrounded them. There are signs too that they were laid out by a central authority: for example, streets were arranged on a grid pattern, and many buildings seem to have been erected simultaneously. The finds include exotic items such as wine containers and pottery imported from the area around the Rhine. Taken together, these clues suggest that the wics and emporia were set up by powerful elites to control trade to and from the territories they ruled. The reason they wanted