century on the line of the street Walmgate. It is not certain that this part of Jorvik was
defended, although a hypothetical bridge-head barrier on this east side of the River Foss
has been suggested. Although the city’s Viking Age defences have not been recorded
often or in great detail, it seems that they consisted of an earth rampart, in places
oversailing the surviving Roman walls, with a timber palisade along its top and a ditch
outside it.
Many of the city’s parish churches were founded in these centuries, as the survival of
characteristic funerary monuments indicates. A handful of churches have also been
investigated archaeologically, and shown to be Anglo-Scandinavian in origin; the
contemporary cathedral, where some Viking kings were buried, has not been found. A
few burials in some of the churchyards were accompanied by a small number of rather
mundane items, but no elaborately ostentatious pagan Vikings’ graves are known; local
Christian custom, as regards both place and mode of burial, seems to have been quickly
adopted by the incomers. The skeletons of only a few of the hundreds of thousands of
people who lived in York during these centuries have been recovered. Demographically
this was a population with a high infant mortality; 50 per cent of women died before the
age of thirty-five; average life expectancy for men was about fifty years. Average height
was 2 – 3 cm lower than today. Abundant eggs of human gut worms reveal that the
population was heavily infested.
York was an important manufacturing centre, with specialist craftspeople mass-
producing a variety of items on a scale and intensity not seen since the Roman era
(Figure 27. 2. 2 ). There were high-temperature industries including the working of iron,
copper-alloys, lead, silver and gold, and the making of high-lead glass; bone- and
antlerworking, particularly the production of combs; lathe-turning wooden items;
leatherworking to make shoes, horse-riding equipment, knife and sword scabbards; the
making of amber and jet jewellery. Most textileworking was carried out in a domestic
rather than an industrial milieu. Raw materials for these crafts came into the city from
the farms and estates in its hinterland, and the finished goods were supplied to that same
hinterland. To facilitate trade the debased, small-flan coinage issued by the Anglo-Saxon
kings of York was replaced from c. 895 onwards by a high-quality silver penny coinage,
with designs based initially on Continental as well as Anglo-Saxon models. Food for the
citizens came from the same hinterland sources; fish and shellfish came from the rivers
and from estuarine and coastal waters, and animals such as deer and birds were hunted.
Goods also flowed into the city from further afield. Items from England included pottery
made in Lincolnshire; a Pictish brooch and, perhaps, soapstone vessels originated in
Scotland. Dress pins of Irish type have been found and, although they may have been
manufactured locally, the name Divelinestaynes (‘Dublin stones’) at a riverside location,
albeit first recorded in the thirteenth century, suggests a berth for ships trading between
York and Dublin. Whetstones made of Norwegian schist were common. Goods
imported from the Rhineland included wine (the pottery containers have been found)
and lava quernstones. A series of silk fragments indicates contact with the east end of
the Mediterranean, probably Byzantium (although Baghdad might also have been a
supplier); a cowrie shell from the Red Sea reinforces these near-eastern contacts, as does
an early tenth-century coin struck in Samarkand. York was part of a great international
trading network that, for the most part, supplied high-value luxury goods; but the
majority of its commerce and economic growth was focused on the provision of more
mundane items to its extensive hinterland.
–– Richard Hall––