“The best way to make a significant profit from warfare was to defeat the enemy army in battle, because early medieval armies took their wealth with them. More and more the lesson is underlined that, particularly in the immediately post-imperial centuries, people wore their wealth, and that was nowhere truer than with warriors, except that they also rode theirs. The price of a warhorse remained fairly constant at about 10 solidi across western Europe between 450 and 900.[33] It is difficult to know what that really meant in practice, given that the solidus was usually a somewhat abstract unit of account; suffice it to say that people exchanged reasonably sized parcels of land for horses. These were then given lavishly decorated harnesses, bits, bridles and saddles – some of this seems to be represented in the Hoard. This, it is worth pointing out, was a hugely risky investment; horses die distressingly easily on campaign.[34] Looting the average Anglo-Saxon village –as we currently understand it[35] – was not going to recoup such a loss and sacking a monastery was not usually an option within the norms of warfare. Even with the economic changes that had occurred by the end of the eighth century, this opposition further explains the Vikings’ choices of target and the fear that they instilled in their enemies.
An early medieval warrior’s own accoutrements did not cost the equivalent of a year’s income from a whole village, as has sometimes been implied,[37] but they certainly did not come cheap. They were adorned and decorated as much as possible. The sometimes-seen notion that things like the Sutton Hoo helmet represent ‘parade armour’ is misconceived.[38] The early medieval warrior was a frightening and imposing, a glittering and plumed figure. I do not doubt that in their own way these were every bit the dangerous strutting dandies that were their descendants in the Hussar regiments of a millennium later. The Staffordshire Hoard’s items emphasise this with the almost casual gilding and ornamentation of just about every object or surface that could be so decorated. This is one instance where the Hoard fascinates and intrigues, but does not surprise. What is perhaps more important, following on from some of the arguments made earlier, is just how much of the surplus from the agriculture of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England was being invested in what we might call the ‘dandification’ of warriors.[39] When that is taken into account, the lack of impressive settlements in earlier ‘Middle-Saxon’ England becomes easier to understand.
Battles were a huge risk – early medieval people knew that[40] – but if victory was gained the rewards were enormous. Taking an enemy army’s horses, let alone its weaponry and armour, would represent a major windfall.[41] Furthermore we know of the lavish tents that kings took on campaign.[42] Kings took their treasuries with them. Charles the Bald, one of the most interesting, if also the least lucky, of early medieval commanders lost his royal finery once to the Bretons and once to his nephew Louis the Younger, as well as temporarily losing three crowns and fine jewellery on a Viking campaign.[43] By the ninth century, and probably earlier, merchants like the shield-sellers who followed Charles the Bald’s army in 876,[44] accompanied armies and their wares too were looted by victorious troops. Finally there were the elaborate banners that armies carried, of whose capture, as later, especial mention and celebration were made. Most meaningful early medieval discussions of trophies concern banners. After his 892 victory over the Vikings on the river Dyle, King Arnulf sent sixteen captured banners to be paraded through Bavaria as proof of his success.[45]The one thing in the Hoard that might have served as a trophy is the cross, and that has been smashed up.[46]
The extent of risk involved in battles is probably one reason why mechanisms seem to have existed to restrict, normalise, and even ritualise the conduct of endemic early medieval warfare. For warfare was endemic. Mercia fought forty-two recorded wars between 600 and 850, and that is almost certainly only a record of the serious outbreaks that their enemies thought worth remembering.[47]Even with these limitations on our knowledge, half of the Mercian kings in this period fought such a major war within two years of their accession, most of the rest within four (figure).[48] Such was the frequency of warfare that if you were defeated one year, you might expect to take back some or even most of what you lost a year or so later. Serious wars came when this sort of tit for tat failed to keep things flowing.[49] That is the most important thing about loot and booty: the point was not to hang on to it but to keep it circulating. John, a nobleman on the Spanish march, sent the pick of the loot he took in a minor victory over the Moors – a fine horse, a jewelled sword and a mail shirt – to Louis, Charlemagne’s son (the future Louis the Pious), in return for which Charlemagne granted him lands on the frontier.[50] Arguably, the reason for taking material booty was to give it away, often but, as we have just seen, not always to one’s followers. As everyone knows, the dragon in Beowulf is the figure of a bad ruler because he hoards, he literally sits on, his treasure.[51] This is one reason why I cannot see the Staffordshire Hoard as a ‘trophy hoard’.[52]
Another is the Hoard’s composition. It might be salutary to remind ourselves that for all the intrinsic interest and importance – to us – of the items recovered, to early medieval people the important bit of a sword was not the bright, shiny pommel and scabbard fittings but what we see as the rusty length of iron: what they saw as the long, sharp instrument for killing people. When people talk about important gifts or possessions that might, in a way, have functioned as trophies, it is as swords, not bits of decoration.[53] Let us remember what an impressive feat of blacksmithing a sword-blade was, and how much it was valued. Frans Theuws, who has thought hard and seriously about sword chronologies, has said that, because blade-design stayed more or less the same, an early medieval sword itself is pretty much undatable; all the things that we can pin a date to are in most important regards the ephemera, the things you can change: scabbard, hilt and pommel.[54] For the purposes of the chronological association of its elements, a sword is not a sealed context. Furthermore, one adds a new pommel and hilt to a good blade; one does not have a new blade made to fit to a nice pommel.
To think about what the Hoard might represent then let us first return to the idea of a retinue. In the light of what I have discussed so far, an ealdorman with a sizeable military following, such as I have mentioned, might not want simply to equip it functionally. He would want it to look impressive too. When Wilfrid formed his own retinue he did not just provide it with horses and weapons but with clothes too.[55] When I started thinking about the Staffordshire Hoard, one idea that occurred to me was that this might similarly be thought of in terms of the ‘ornamentation’ of a medieval retinue’s appearance that would reflect on their lord – possibly even identify him: horse-harness decoration, pommels and scabbard fittings, elements of helmets, shield-fittings. It would make an impressive show, one aimed at competing with the appearance of other retinues.
The problem with this theory, though – and others – is why it would all be in one place. It does not explain the Hoard as ‘artefact-in-itself’. Given the importance of belts in the early middle ages, as markers of office and of service, the absence of buckles is also, in my view, fatal for this idea. Hypothetically, it could nevertheless represent what a lord might have to so furnish new recruits or further reward old ones. It could be booty collected by his retinue and returned to the lord for those purposes. It might be a ‘treasury’ of – literally – political capital collected, deposited and not retrieved in the course of Mercia’s turbulent internal political history. Perhaps. These are no more than wild stabs in the dark.
The Staffordshire Hoard underlines just how badly, by its very nature, the archaeological record sometimes serves us. Our knowledge of early medieval helmets is based upon high-end examples deposited intact in graves[56] but the Hoard suggests to me that ordinary helmets might often have been as much chronological mélanges as swords: one cheek piece from one helmet and the other from another, a crest-band added from a third. Similarly, it reinforces a similar point about revealing the wealth of the early Middle Ages. Although his dismissal of cemetery archaeology’s value in establishing the power of a deceased individual and his or her family was too extreme, James Campbell was right that the Sutton Hoo treasure is small beer compared to what the written sources tell us kings had in their treasuries.[57] In weight, the Staffordshire Hoard gold, the largest find of Anglo-Saxon gold, amounts to about 800 solidi. It is not possible to move simply from the solidus-as-coin to the solidus-as-unit-of-account that I mentioned earlier but, if we suppose briefly that it is, the Staffordshire Hoard would buy about eighty horses. That makes it more than just a tidy sum, but we should remember that equipping a reasonably-sized army, in line with the suggestions made earlier, could cost in excess of fifty Staffordshire Hoards.
I wonder if the Staffordshire Hoard might be much more similar to a coin-hoard than has thus far been suggested: a collection of units of bullion that could be used in certain transactions – maybe political ones: again, a sort of treasury. I note the deliberate cutting up of pieces and I should like to know more, when the work is done, about the weights of the components. I wonder if it is a sort of ‘hack gold’. Or perhaps it is there as raw material, to be melted down and reworked into more fashionable objects and ornaments: or coins.
The Staffordshire Hoard also confirms Mercia’s wealth. We ought not to be surprised about where the biggest find of Anglo-Saxon gold was located. The centres of Mercia were located far from the coast and thus access to foreign trade, something that seems to have made tight Mercian control over places like Kent and London a perennial problem. Nevertheless the heartland of the kingdom, like that of its two biggest rivals, Deira (Northumbria) and Wessex, lay in a band of territory along the border between the lowland, or arable, zone of Britain (or, as it was fast becoming by the time of the hoard’s deposition, Anglo-Saxon England) and the more pastoral highland zone. This region had been the most economically prosperous part of late Roman Britain, containing the most elaborate villas, the mosaic industries, and the towns which seem to have prospered most in the period and which in some cases show the best evidence of high status continuing into the fifth century.[58] The connection between the economic prosperity of this zone and the power of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that emerged there deserves further study, bridging the traditional division between studies of the Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods. For these reasons the location of the Hoard ought not to astonish us.”
- Guy Halsall, “The Staffordshire Hoard: Its Implications for the Study of Seventh-century Anglo-Saxon Warfare.” Historian on the Edge, August 21, 2015.
