Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon pottery survey

English Heritage summaries 2005/2006

The Kingdom of Northumbria Anglo-Saxon pottery survey was started in 2001 with the objectives of carrying out an overview of the pottery used in the area which formed the kingdom of Northumbria, and its successor states, the Viking kingdom of York and the Old English kingdom, from the end of the Roman period through to the Norman conquest (Vince 2002). The reasons for carrying out this survey were partly  academic and partly practical; there is at present considerable uncertainty about the date and significance of pottery found in northern Britain in this period. Stage 1 of the survey studied the entire study area and resulted in the collection of data from x20 microscope study, thin section analysis and chemical analysis. Stage 2 is intended to complete the initial survey, for those collections whose existence or details were not sufficiently defined at the start of the survey for accurate estimation of the resources and actions required, and to synthesis these results. It is the final stage of the project and is scheduled for completion in October 2006.

The results of Stage 1 have been summarised in an interim report (Vince 2003). In brief, they indicate that pottery use was limited to the east of the Northumbrian kingdom throughout the period and that a case can be made for a reduction in pottery use in the mid Saxon period (i.e. later 7th to mid 9th centuries). Pottery manufacture then received a substantial boost in the later 9th century, following the Viking take-over of York, but this too seemingly faltered in the mid 10th century. Politically, this may have followed the collapse of the independent Kingdom of York and the incorporation of the region into England under a West Saxon dynasty. Rather than reverting to aceramicity at this time, it seems that a market developed for pottery made to the south of the Humber, in the Trent valley at Torksey, in the Lincoln area, and from the middle of the 11th century onwards, at Stamford. Pottery use and local production intensified in the period around the Norman Conquest, both in terms of the area in which pottery was in common use and in terms of the amount of pottery used and its places of production.

A quantity of pottery assigned to the pre-conquest period has been re-examined in Stage 1 and the case for a pre-conquest date found to be unconvincing. This, if confirmed in Stage 2, has a knock-on effect on the accepted date for both urban development and rural settlement in areas such as County Durham and South Yorkshire but has necessarily meant that some material now thought to be late 11th to mid 12th century in date has had to be included in the survey.

Bibliography

Vince, A. (2002)  The Northumbrian Kingdom Anglo-Saxon Pottery Survey: Stage One Project Design, AVAC, Lincoln.
Vince, A.  (2003) The Northumbrian Kingdom Anglo-Saxon Pottery Survey: First Interim Report.  2003.

This page was published on 15/03/2006