Author Archives: Damo

The Holy Grail

Censorship is the last line of defence…

…Yesterday I was finally prevented from posting my studies concerning King Arthur & his period on the international e-forum known as Arthurnet. Its moderator, Judy Shoaf, from the University of Florida, had been growing increasingly exasperated with my discoveries which ended up with her conducting a condescending campaign against me. Continuing on regardless I continued to post my discoveries, countering any counter-arguments tossed at me from the (apparent) best in the field with aplomb. I was just to hot to handle. The crunch moments came in the past week when I posted my discovery of the Holy Grail, on which I suddenly had the plug pulled out on me just as I was about to reveal the truth behind the legend, with our so-called neutral moderator denying me the chance to have my democratic say – & she heralding from the country of liberty herself. Here’s what she wrote at the end of the last post I was allowed to place on Arthurnet.

Judy Shoaf

Damo is just playing games with words. I would point out that using Wolfram as raw material for his games is so productive because Wolfram was likely to play these games himself. He clearly loved inventing names. Flegetanis not only evokes “Fulgentius” (author of a well-known mythography) but even more strongly “Flegeton” or Phlegethon, the flaming river of the classical underworld. Wolfram managed to pack two different mythical-authoritative-scary meanings in one, outdoing for once Damo’s own vigorous inventiveness. I was delighted to find this sentence in the Wikipedia article on Fulgentius: “Fulgentius’ etymologies (while typical of his age) have been recently criticized as being wildly extravagant, arbitrary, and often simply incorrect.” I will try to post a bit separately about why I, as moderator, have allowed Damo, whose theories are wildly extravagant, arbitrary, and often simply incorrect, to continue to post on Arthurnet, and why his writings should not be taken as an accurate guide to anything except his own imagination.’

Quality stuff! There is no intelligent dissemeniation & rebuking of my thoughts here, just outright denial & refusal to broadens one’s capacity for intellectual endeavor. What has happened is that where great minds in the past have failed to discover the truth about Arthur, then it is deemed an impossible task. However, I live in the blossoming age of the internet, when obscure ancient texts are available at the click of a button, & I also live in Edinburgh & its fathomless National Library of Scotland. I understand why Judy doesnt want me to succeed – shes been running Arthurnet for 20 years now, & for some cheeky young(ish) Burnley boy to swagger in & work out every unsolved ‘problem’ seriously decredits the whole purpose of the site, which was to pool ideas & work out who Arthur was. Problem, is after 20 years they got absolutely nowhere, showing that what was need was something along the lines of;

‘Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have either been very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change’
Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)

I have found Arthur, & I have also found the Holy Grail. It may seem ‘wildly extravagant’ & ‘arbitrary,’ but it was the only way to find the answer! Here’s the nuts & bolts of why I was taken off Arthurnet, & please decide for yourself on whether I am correct or not.

FINDING THE GRAIL

Montsalvy

In the early years of the 13th century, two writers gave the location of the castle in which the grail was kept. The first was Robert de Boron – who placed the ‘secret of the grail’ at the Vaus d’Avaron, in the west, erroneously changed by later poets to Avalon in Glastonbury. The second was Wolfram von Eschenbach – who placed the castle in France at a place called Montsalvat, adding the grail was guarded by the Knights Templar. This in turn leads us to a department of France called Aveyron, famous for being a Templar hotbed. Just a mile inside its modern borders we find the charming village of Montsalvy. Today, the grail castle has to be the ruins known as the castle of Mandarulfen at Montsalvy, which in turn leads us to an artifact known as the Mandylion. This was a piece of material which bore the face of Jesus which has been associated with the Holy Grail for a number of years, especially in the work of Dan Scavone.

The Mandylion

The Mandylion was taken to France in the wake of the 1204 sack of Constantinople by French crusader knights, & that a castle named after it was built at Montsalvy is strong evidence that that it was indeed the grail. Before Constantinople, the Mandylion was held in the Syrian city of Edessa, where it surfaced in 544 during a siege of the city by the Persians. Two years previously, a Byzantine general was stationed in that very city, whose name was Bouzes. Is it a coincidence that medieval romancers named one of the three grail knights as Sir Bors? Perhaps, but when we observe second grail knight was known by two names – the Gerrman Parsifal & the Welsh Pheredur – & that Bouzes fought in the same army as a certain Pharos the Herulian, we can reconcile both Parzival & Peredur, whose names contain the phonetics of Pharos Eril – the latter epithet being that of the Herulians found on stones in Scandinavia;

PH – The ‘ph’ of Pheredur, the archaic spelling of Peredur
AROS – The ‘arz’ of Parzival
ER – The ‘ur’ of Pheredur
IL – The ‘al’ of Parcival

Parcival

We should see the name Pharos the Herulian as the trunk of a tree on which the name Peredur is found along the Welsh branch & Parzival along the Teutonic. History also supports the connection, for Peredur’s 14 year sojurn in Constantinople finds a tally with Pharos the Herulian who served in the armies of Byzantium.

St Catherine's Monastery

The medieval grail legend tells us that Sir Bors, Parcival & Galahad, on discovering the grail, took it to a site on the Egypto-Arabian border where the Saracens dwelt, called Sarras. This points us to the Sinai peninsular, which Procopius tells us was the homelands of the Saracens. So far so good. It is at the foot of Mount Sinai that three years after the Mandylion was seen at Edessa, the Byzantines built a fortified monastery dedicated to the transfiguration of Jesus. This was the grail castle, which was deemed to be in the middle of the wasteland by medieval writers – & we must remember that Sinai is an absolute desert. That the mandylion was moved there is evident from Templar-built churches in Cyprus (the church of panagia phorbiotissa at asnou is the best) which saw the iconography of Mt Sinai – burning bush/10 tablets’ together with the mandylion & images of the transfiguration. Indeed, in the book ‘Approaching the Holy Mountain,’ we are told;

‘Take the famous tenth century diptych showing the disciple Thaddesu & King Abgar who recieves the mandylion, represented in the features of Constantine Porphyogennetos, who had transferred the mandylion from Edessa to Constantinople in 944. A row of monastic saints below make makes it propbale that the two wings of what may have been a tryptich are agions to be seen within the localism characteristic of Sinai.’

St Catherine’s monastery was a repositary for cristian icons – including copies of the mandylion which probably influenced all future images of Jesus. Indeed, one of these, originally made in the 6th century, is touched up in the 940′s just before the mandylion itself is moved to Constantinople. We are also told that the knights found the natives of Sarras had reverted to pagan ways, which matches a description by John, Bishop of Nikiu, describes the peoples about Sinai (in the reign of Anastasius) as; -’Impious barbarians, who eat flesh & drank blood, arose in the quarter of Arabia & approaching the borders of the red sea, they seized the monks of araite (Rhaithou), & they put them to the sword or led them away captive & plundered their possessions; for they hated saints, & were themselves like in their devices to idolators & the pagans…’

Galahad

It’s location then helps us solve the mystery of the last of the grail keepers, Galahad, in whose name we can see the phonetics of a welsh Arthurian knight called Glewlwyd as in

Gal = Gl
Ah – Ewl
Ad – wyd

In a poem called Culwhych & Olwen he tells us; ‘Half of my life is past, and half of thine. I was heretofore in Kaer Se and Asse, in Sach and Salach, in Lotor and Fotor; and I have been heretofore in India the Great and India the Lesser.’ Here we see Sarras as Caer Se & Asse, & with Ethiopia being known as Lesser India in antiquity, we can place him in the region of the Red Sea! With Bouzes & Pharos being goths, that it makes sense that Galahad/Glewlwyd was also a Goth, & indeed, in the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire – a gigantic compendium of all the names recorded in those times – there is a Goth who lived at just the right time called Gudahal, which contains all the letters of Galahad, as in;

g u d a h a l
g a l u h a d

If the letters changed over 700 years, through the effect of dark-age chineses whispers – then perhaps certain facts did also. Thus, whhen medieval writers wrote that Galahad was the son of Sir Lancelot, what they meant to say was Galahad was the father of Lancelot, for the Prosopography tells us that Guduhal had a son called Landarit. It is through understanding how names change over time & through languages that I have been able to unravel the knotted woolen ball of the Arthuriana. For example, just look at some of the names given for Guinevere…

Gwenhwyfar – Triads
Guanhumara – Monmouth
Guennuuar – Caradoc
Wenneuereia – Gerard of Wales

To an untrained eye, Wenneuereia & Gwenhwyfar seem totally different, but they are the same woman. The way I see it is that the historian must develop techniques to analyze the changes that incur during the chisper process in order to elucidate a name-change. For example, by isolating rhotacism in a changing consonant to one particular language, although we may have lost the text itself, we can identify at least the language in which the text was written.

JUDY’S REPLY

After ignoring my protests for a few days, I alerted Judy to my blog, on which she suddenly began to speak again – here’s the blog she sent to arthurnetters – funny as!

From Judy Shoaf, your moderator.

The concern of some Arthurnetters as to the poverty of Damo’s grasp of basic texts and concepts had moved me enough that I held back his latest post. I would like to recap and explain why I have continued to forward his posts to the list, despite the fact that they do not form a contribution to Arthurian scholarship in any way, and if taken seriously as statements of fact would actually form a sort of negative contribution.

To clarify, up front: None of Damo’s posts has ever included a single assertion that is useful to the study of Arthurian literature or of history. If any people on the list have assumed that they did, I apologize to them. My thought was that he was perhaps making a contribution on the creative side.

Damo joined the list, I believe, in January of 2012, with the announcement that he had had a revelation regarding the identity of Arthur as Arthwys, King of the Pennines. Since then Damo has posted abundantly, at least 160 posts. His methodology is roughly as follows:

If it is my idea, it is a good, true idea.
If an assertion fits or can be made to fit my idea, or generates an idea in my mind, it is a fact.

Thus any bit of Wolfram’s Parzival which generates a train of thought in Damo’s mind constitutes a “fact” which he has “proven” to be a valid part of Arthuriana, and even of history. Its factuality is not dependent on whether it actually happened that way, but depends on how well it serves the pattern in Damo’s head.

Damo has always been polite and kept his temper, so far as I can recall. He has never complained when people dismissed his assertions as absurd.

I have posted his comments for almost a year and a half as an example of how King Arthur is still generating fact-free history, as he did for Geoffrey of Monmouth, for the Welsh hagiographers, or for Malory. It seems to me that Damo writes very much in that spirit, as someone who pulls “history” out of the air and then asks us to believe in it, and apparently at least in passing believes it himself.

What has surprised me, given Damo’s obvious abilities, is that he has clearly gone far beyond the possibility of combining his “research” into any coherent whole. He simply wanders along playing the “name game” and asserting that Arthur was here or there, but he seems to have no ambition to write a narrative in which all his assertions and name games would find a place.

Then she wrote privately to me with;

Damo, thank you for resolving my debate with myself re. whether to continue posting your stuff. You have always been polite on the list and I hesitated to block someone who is generally well-mannered, but I think it is time to part ways. Your work is moronic, and of interest only for its spectacular ignorance & I decided not to shame you by sending it to anyone. You said that I censored you. I am censoring you. I am not going to post any more of your stuff on the list.

Charming stuff!

Basically, as a neutral she was waiting for me to turn rude or whatever, so she had grounds to remove me from Arthurnet. To provoke this she first begen to insult my intelligence, then began to name me as the composer of each post I offered, as in ‘Damo on Merlin, Damo on Montsalvy,’ but this didn’t work either. Finally, she just denied me from posting at the very point I offered a well-researche hypothesis on the location of the grail castle, leaving me no choice to record her unfair & ignorant attitude for posterity. In essence she blinked first & like I said before, censorship is the last form of defence… & somewhere in the middle of all this is the Holy Grail, the discovery of which prompted my removal from a meeting of Arthurian minds. Its a simple case of an upset child taking the ball off me & saying I cant play anymore! Proper kindergarten.

To finish, I would like to quote Judy one last time, who said… ‘None of Damo’s posts has ever included a single assertion that is useful to the study of Arthurian literature or of history.’ This evidently contradicts what she wrote to me concerning my discovery of Arthur’s grave, as in;

‘BTW, I was interested in your idea that Nudus and Dumnogenus are adjectives modifying princes in the Yarrow Stone inscription. I thought you must be wrong, because clearly you don’t know Latin, and this would not work grammatically. BUT I checked the inscription and your suggestion makes sense—the forms have endings in –i which fit the plural “princes” rather than implying names of single individuals in apposition with “princes.” It’s odd that the two words were read as names, but one would expect that a memorial would give the names of the persons involved; perhaps the names were on the other side, which I gather is damaged. However, I guess people who study inscriptions are better qualified than I am to interpret what the words mean in context. The way one figures it out is to look at other memorial stones (or texts) that use these words or a similar structure. (Liberalis, on the other hand, looks like a name, in terms of both grammar and sense… At the same time, the fact that the inscription may have been misinterpreted does not mean that it marked Arthur’s grave!

Here we have an example of the stuck-in-the-sand nature of Arthurian academia. Judy’s initial instinct was ‘I thought you must be wrong,’ a sentiment shared by every other scholar who have been trying to find Arthur through entire lifetimes. However, Judy is a Latin expert & recognized the correctness of my theory. Unfortunately she lacks expertise elsewhere, & can only offer outright denial when presented with unfamiliar territory.

Anyway, thats enough academic fencing, the summer’s just about on us & I need to get proper mashed up!

Sardinia

The Real King Arthur – part 2

Matthew Packer – the True Jack the Ripper

1 Reply

I would like to express an opinion. He thought he’d hoodwinkd everyone. He thought he’d got away with it. He was counting on the naievity of 19th century detective work & his seemingly unstoppable mission. However, there is enough of his avtivity stored by the relentless statetment-taking of the Whitechapel police for a modern-mind, thinking outside the box, to identify the Ripper’s identity. His name was Matthew Packer, who became a major witness of the murder of his third victim, Elizabeth Stride. It is frustrating to know how much his ‘evidence’ & future ‘sightings’ of the Ripper helped divert attention from himself. However, very few people actually get away with murder these days, & neither, now, has Jack the Ripper.

Matthew Packer

Matthew Packer was born in Goulston Street in 1831, the son of John Packer & Elizabeth Packer (nee Lewis). As an impressionable youth, Packer would have been intrigued & terrified by Spring-Heeled Jack, an urban legend who was said to leap from roof to roof & breath out blasts of flame. He was first observed in 1837, & sightings continued throughout the 19th century. Is this where we get the name Jack from? He married twice, to Anne Purdy, by which he had several children, & Rose Ann Wallis, with whom, the census of 1871 reports, he was living in Princess Street & plying his trade as a fishmonger. Proffesional opinion has decided that the Ripper, although not quite up to doctor standard, did have an elementary skill in surgery… perhaps obtained through the gutting of fish! Indeed, the slang word for this proffesion was the phrase ‘ripper,’ & gutting a fish entails an accurate use of a sharp knife, & the removal of innards – an exact match for the Ripper’s mutilation of his victims.

By 1881 we see Packer living & working in Berner Street, a point to which all the other murders are roughly equidistant (see map below – Berner St is marked by a number 3). His trade by this time was that of a grocer, wheeling his barrow around the East End while his wife sold fruit & veg through their window. This would have given him an excellent knowledge of the chaotic labyrinthe of the Whitechapel area which would enable him to evade capture as he performed his dark work. Indeed, after the death of Annie Chapman, Inspector Helson opined that the Ripper must have been familiar with the district & its inhabitants, & was most likely a resident of the locality. The victims, when faced with such a familiar face as Packer’s, would have felt much more at ease than with meeting a stranger under such a climate of fear. It is even possible that PAcker was a regular client – he had already had one failed marriage & in 1888 his wife was 56 years old, in the dusklight of her beauty.

The Ripper has five canonical victims, but there may be more. What ties the first five together is the modus operandi of their slayings, i.e. a rather nasty throatcutting & adbominal mutilation. All the five major victims were prostitutes, a social diseaese that was epidemic in Queen Victoria’s century London, with mothers even pimping out their six year old daughters as they to touted their wares for the fourpence needed for a bed in the dosshouse. The Ripper’s first two victms died on the 31st August (Mary Ann Nichols) & on the 8th September (Annie Chapman). The second murder had been more vicious than the first (the uterus had been removed), & the Ripper, realising he had got away with it, begant to taunt the press just as would many serial killers who follow’d him. He even named himself, & the world read for the first time the catchy prhrase ‘Jack the Ripper’ in a letter he sent to the Central Newspaper on 27th September. It reads

Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck. Yours truly Jack the Ripper
Dont mind me giving the trade name
PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha

The Dear Boss Letter - written in red ink

By sending the letter to the Central News Agency, we can see the socipathic need for control, power & fame coming to the forefront of Packer’s mind. He even drops a clue when he says that a ‘Ripper’ is a ‘trade-name,’ recalling his days as a fishmonger. Bouyed on by his not being caught, & the growing interest in his ‘work,’ he was planning another murder & three days after he sent the Dear Boss letter, the Ripper slew two different women within the space of an hour. It has been postulated that while murdering his first victim, Elizabeth Stride, the Ripper was disturbed, for she lacks the abdominal mutilation of all the other canonical victims. The second, however, Catherine Eddowes, was brutally sliced open all up the front of her body, in the same manner as that of a fish. Like Annie Chapman the uterus had been removed, but the Ripper went further this time, by removing a kidney & for the first time disfiguring his victim’s face, including removing the earlobe as promised in the Dear Boss letter. Most interesting is the inverted V’s carved into each cheek, which together make the letter M. Indded,a sketch by a poileceman called Foster shows the top of the left V is more rounded, indicating the letter M even more.

A Gutted Fish

Eddowes at the mortuary - notice the fishlike gutting

The next morning a postcard was received by the Central News Agency which read;

I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. Had not got time to get ears off for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper

This taunting note confirms measured opinions that the Ripper was disturbed during the slaying of Elizabeth Stride. Also noticeable is the spelling of the word ‘kidding’ as ‘codding’ a probable nod to the fismonger origin of the name Ripper. It is the mention of the ears that connecets this postcard with the slaying of Catherine Eddowes & the Dear Boss letter.

We must now come to Le Grand & Batchelor, two private detectives hired by several newspapers to investigate the murders. On talking to a certain Mrs Rosenfield & her sister Miss Eva Harstein pf 14 Berner Street, they were informed that the two women had passed the murder scene early on the Sunday morning & noticed a grape-stalk stained with blood. The detectives went to search thed rain in the passage where the body had been found, & ‘amidst a heap of heterogenerous filth, they discovered a grape-stalk.’ Armed with this information they went to the nearest grocer, Matthew Packer, who told the detectives that a man & a woman had bought grapes off him about an hour before the murder. To confirm his story, on the 4th October Le Grand & Batchelor took Packer to the mortuary wher he positively identified the body of Elizabeth Stride with the woman who bought the grapes. If Packer was the Ripper, what a strange satisfaction he must have felt to be looking at his ‘work’ first-hand under the very noses of the Law.

But why should Packer be a suspect? The problem comes through the web of lies he has spun, which is always indicative of guilt., Packer’s original statement to the police, given during a door-to-door survey of the area at 9AM on the day of the murder, says nothing of a couple buying grapes. It reads;

SGT WHITE: When did you close up shop?

PACKER: ‘Half past twelve, in consequence of the rain it was no good for me to keep open.’

SGT WHITE: Did you see a man or woman go into Dutfield’s Yard or stand about the street when you closed up shop?

PACKER: ‘I saw no one standing about neither did I see anyone go up the yard. I never saw anything suspicious or heard the slightest noise. And knew ‘nothing about the murder until I heard of it this morning.’

Elizabeth Stride, drawing from 'The Illustrated Police News'

As we have seen, Packer would later contradict himself in the statement to Le Grand & Batchelor, where he says the couple, after buting their grapes, waited across the road from the shop in the pouring rain til about 12.15 AM, with Packer even commenting to his wife, ‘what fools those people are to be standing in the rain like that.’ In addition, when telling the same story to newspapers, the time of the grape-buying jumped from 11 PM to 11.45 to midnight & back to 11 again. “Lying, deceiving, and manipulation are natural talents for psychopaths,” states Dr. Robert Hare in his book, Without Conscience. “When caught in a lie or challenged with the truth, they are seldom perplexed or embarrassed–they simply change their stories or attempt to rework the facts so that they appear to be consistent with the lie.” Thinking outside the box, do we not see Packer, when faced with evidence that may implicate him in the murder – i.e. the bloodied grape-stalk – making up a cover story on the spot. His lies began to unravel from at least October 4th, when the Star reported that the poilce had rejected his story after a post-mortem by Dr Phillips found no traces of grapes in Elizabeth’s stomach. Let us look at what is actually happening here;

1 – A grape stalk is found with blood on it at the murder-site

2 – No traces of grapes were found in the victim’s stomach – thus the stalk must have been the Ripper’s.

3 – When confronted with the stalk, a man who stated he saw & heard nothing unusual that night suddenly declares he sold grapes to a man & a woman he identified as he victim, & watched them act erractically for half an hour outside his shop.

From here on in Packer’s stories grow ever more bizarre. The Daily News (15th November) published a strange report of Packer’s where he declared he had met the Ripper’s cousin. The story reads;

On Tuesday evening two men came to my house and bought twelve shillings’ worth of rabbits off me. They then asked me if I could give an exact description of the man to whom I sold the grapes, and who was supposed to have committed the Berner-street and Mitre-square murders, as they were convinced they knew him, and where to find him. In reply to some questions by Packer, one of the men said ‘Well, I am sorry to say that I firmly believe it is my own cousin. He is an Englishman by birth but some time ago he went to America, stayed there a few years, and then came back to London about seven or eight months ago. On his return he came to see me, and his first words were “Well, Boss, how are you?” He asked me to have some walks out with him, and I did round Commercial-street and Whitechapel. I found that he had very much altered on his return, for he was thoroughly harem scare-em. We met a lot of Whitechapel women, and when we passed them he used to say to me, “How do you think we used to serve them where I come from? Why, we used to cut their throats and rip them up. I could rip one of them up and get her inside out in no time.” He said, “We Jack Rippers killed lots of women over there. You will hear of some it being done over here soon, for I am going to turn a London Jack Ripper…

Other newspapers, however, state the detectives doubted the veracity of the story & dismissed it as being important to the case. Part of this reason was the discrepancies beginning to show up in Packer’s story, such as Packer telling a journalist on the 3rd October he had not been visited by any policemen, when he had in fact been interviewed on the morning of the murder. Packer also began to embellish upon his version of the Ripper by placing him in his very own neighbourhood. The Echo stated that Packer had seen the Ripper in his locality many times & even lodged on Batty Street, a neighbouring street to his own;

An Echo reporter called this afternoon upon Mr. Packer, the Berner-street fruiterer, where the murderer bought the grapes for Elizabeth Stride. It now appears that the man was known by Mr. Packer, who positively asserted, “I had seen him in this district several times before, and if you ask me where he lives I can tell you within a little. He lodges not a great way from the house where Lipski, who was hanged for poisoning a woman, lived.” “How many times have you seen him?” was asked Mr. Packer. “About twenty; and I have not seen him since the murder.”

Packer then later told the same newspaper he had actually come face-to-face with the killer of Elizabeth Stride;

A representative of The Evening News this morning had an interview with Mr. Matthew Packer, at 44, Berner-street, with reference to the rumour that the supposed Whitechapel assassin had been seen by him again on Saturday last. Packer made the following statement:

“Between seven and eight o’clock, on Saturday evening last, I was standing with my barrow at the corner of Greenfield-street, Commercial-road, when I saw a man pass by on the opposite side of Greenfield-street, near the watchmaker’s shop. I recognized him in a minute as the man I had seen outside my shop on the night when Elizabeth Stride was murdered in Berner-street. It was the man who bought the grapes and gave them to the woman that was afterwards found murdered in the yard. I shall never forget his face, and should know him again amongst a thousand men.”

It is clear that Packer was immersing himself in fancy & through his role of a supposed chief witness, he could absolve himself of responsibility & direct the investigation in ways of his own choice – a situation that would have fed into the deep-seated psycotic need for power inherent in all serial killers. It is through this need to control the case – just like the Zodiac killer in San Francisco 1969 – that we see Packer & his background in other symbolic events that occurred on the night of the double murder. It begins with a curious meassage left by the Ripper after the murder of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square.

With the life-force of Eddowes draining away before him, Packer swiftly cut a piece from her apron, wiped the blood from the blade & made his escape. He proceeded from Mitre-square, by way of Church-passage, Duke-street, Houndsditch, Gravel-lane, Storey-lane, to Goulston-street, the very street in which he was born. It was there that he left the bloodied piece of apron beneath a message he had chalked on a wall which read;‘The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.’

This double negative suggest that Packer is trying to blame the killings on the Jews. Indeed, the siting of that morning’s first murder is also connected with the Jews. It was performed right next to an instituation called the International Workmen’s Educational Club, which the Daily News (1-10-1888) stated was a, ‘Rendezvous of a number of foreign residents, chiefly Russians, Poles, and Continental Jews of various nationalities, it is customary on Saturday nights to have friendly discussions on topics of mutual interest, and to wind up the evening’s entertainment with songs.’ After the murder, the police went on to question & search all the members who were at the social club that night, inconveniencing them & spreading suspicious look sthrough the community. This fits in with the chaos that psychopaths like to cause. An article – ‘The Haunts of the East End Anarchist’ from the Evening Standard of 2 October 1894 describes how Russian Jews had taken over Berner Street;

‘There is Backchurch Lane, where the Irish resident still holds his own against the incoming Russo-Jewish settler, and Berner Street, where the window bills, written in Hebrew characters. inform you that there are ‘loshing’ or a ‘bek-rum’ (back room) to let, and thus proclaim the nationality of its denizens…. The Club and rallying place of the Russo-Jewish Anarchists in East London was until lately in Berner Street. Recent occurrences, however, rendered this an undesirable locality; it was too well looked after by the authorities. So it was transferred to a quieter and more obscure corner, where it was less likely to attract the notice of outsiders; and it is now by no means easy to find.’

If the ‘recent occurrences’ described above tally with the disturbances mentioned as happening in the street outside the club by a Ripper witness, then we can detect a hint of anti-semetic feeling in the air. The Jews had been arriving in the East End since 1881, & by 1888 their population there had grown to 50,000. Local resentment was raised by their willingness to work harder & accept less wages than the locals, forcing the Pall Mall Gazette to write, in February 1886, “Foreign jews… are becoming a pest & a menace to the poor native born east ender.” The year before the Ripper murders, one of the locals had been posioned by a Jewish man named Lipski on Batty Street, right next to Berner Street. Has the non-Jewish Packer, perhaps annoyed his locality had been taken over by the Jews, decided to gain some semblance of revenge by associating them with the Ripper

Berner Street in 1888 - the Wheel marks the INternational Club

We now come to the Packer’s final acts as the Ripper. In early November 1888 his bloodlust began to rise & he perforemd his most brutal slaying, that of Mary Jane Kelly, in the early hours of the 9th November, 1888. Two weeks later, the Echo printed a story about Packer once again seeing the murderer, & also mentions that Packer announced the ‘reappearnce’ of the Ripper only three days before the killing.

Late last night, several of the witnesses who have alleged that they saw the man who it is believed committed the murders declared that they again saw him. After watching him for some time they observed him accost a woman, but, on their crossing towards him, he suddenly disappeared down a dark turning in the Commercial-road. These witnesses were Mr. Burch, the milkman, and his son, and Matthew Packer, the fruiterer. It is a singular thing that about a fortnight ago Packer made a similar statement as to the reappearance of the man. Some discredit was thrown on his assertion. Singularly enough, however, three days afterwards the atrocious murder in Dorset-street was committed.

It seems that Packer was ready to kill & was preparing to play the press accordingly. Indeed, on a letter in the same handwriting as the ‘Dear Boss’ message was sent to the press the day before the murder;

Dear Boss
I am still knocking about Down Whitechapel I mean to put to Death all the dirty old ores because I have coughtteh pox & cannot piss I have not done any murders lately but you will find one done before long. I shall send you the kidney & cunt so that you can see where my prick has been up I am in one of the lodging houses in osborn street but you will have a job to catch me i shoudent advise any coppers to catch hold of me because I shall do the same to him as I have done to others
Old Packer the man i bought the grapes off saw me the other night but was to frightened to say anything to the police. He must have been a fool when there is such a reward offered never mind the reward will not be given. You will hear from me a little later on that I have done another murder. but not just yet. dear boss if i see you about i shall cut your throat. The old queen is none other but one of those old ores i have been up her arse & shot sponk up her
I remain dear
old boss
Jack the Ripper

Knowing that Packer was the actual Ripper, we can see how brazen his mentioning of himself actually was. However, suspicion in the area that he was the Ripper must have been high, because, as the Echo tells us (on the 24th November 1888) he got a good beating up from a bunch of local vigilantes.

A few evenings ago Packer received an anonymous threatening letter. On this a murder was represented, drawn in blood. It was posted at Tottenham. At all events, it bore the Tottenham post-mark. He took it to the police. In the course of this week while standing one night outside his shop he was set upon by a gang of roughs. Two of them seized him and punched him in the ribs, and then threw him to the ground. His wife ran out to his assistance, and, on raising an alarm, they hurried away… Packer was last night still suffering from the injuries he has received.

I believe this gang, although not being able to prove he was the Ripper, must have felt a little local self-policing was in order & given Packer a good hiding. Funnily enough, after this the murders seemd to cease for a year. Then, on the 8th september, exactly a year after he had murdered Annie Chapman in Hanbury Street. Two days later a decomposing torso was discovered under a railway arch in Pinchin Street with heavy, Ripperesque mutilations of the abdomen region, including a missing womb. In the aftermath of the murder, The Echo published the following;

Shortly after the commission of the murder preceding the Pinchin-street discovery, Packer again expressed an opinion that the criminal did not live “very far from Batty-street,” which is within three minutes’ walk of the railway arch. Not long after Packer averred that, while he was standing near his doorstep, two men rushed upon him and knocked him down, with the remark, “Know where Jack the Ripper lives, do you?” The unfortunate man was as a result admitted to the London Hospital, where he was detained for three weeks. An Echo reporter has since seen Packer. He declares that this story is quite true, and that he was seriously injured by the attack.

I believe now that Packer was on the verge of resuming his Ripper activities in 1889, but a second roughing up by local vigalantes put paid to his ‘work’ forever.

The True Joseph

Ambrosius Aurelianus

1 Reply

Ambrosius Aurelianus

When we cast our gaze back through the murky waters of the Dark Ages, there is one figure that seems rather neglected by the armies of moderns historians. His name was Ambrosius Aurelianus, a Roman general who in the 5th century led Brythonic opposition to the first furious waves of Saxon invaders. Sipping now the bramble wine Ive been brewing all Autumn (tasty & natural & strong), I shall now present the most cutting edge account of his life & times. We must begin with Gildas, who celebrated the fame of Ambrosius within a couple of generations of his lifetime.

That they (The Britons) might not be brought to utter destruction, took arms under the conduct of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a modest man, who of all the Roman nation was then alone in the confusion of this troubled period by chance left alive. His parents, who for their merit were adorned with the purple, had been slain in these same broils

From this we glean the following facts.

Ambrosius was a Roman – His surname Aurelianus means he belonged to the high-status Aureli gens. This was an ancient Pleibian family, which broke into numerous branches such as the Cottae, Oristedes & the Symmachi.

He was one of the last true Romans to remain in Britain – That some stayed behind in positions of power after the departure of the legions is confirmed by a chronicle known as the Bern Codex; ‘In the year 409, Rome was taken by the Goths, and from that time Roman rule came to an end in Britain, except for some, who were born there, and who reigned for a short time.’

His parents were members of the Roman aristocracy – they were probably of senatorial or consular rank on account of them wearing purple-bordered togas.

His parents had been slain in Britain – Gildas describes their plight; ‘The miserable remnant, being taken in the mountains, were murdered in great numbers.’

Gildas

The next record of Ambrosius comes from the Historia Brittonum of the Welsh monk Nennius. The material seems to have been compiled by several historians, including Gildas, with the final pieces added in the late seventh century. It would be in the early 9th century that Nennius would transcribe his version of the text, which tells us;

“What is your name?” asked the king (Vortigern); “I am called Ambrose,” returned the boy; and in answer to the king’s question, “What is your origin?” he replied, “A Roman consul was my father.’

From this we glean the following facts;

Ambrosius was a boy after 450 (i.e he was born in the 440s) – Chronologically, the passage above occurred after the arrival of the Saxons lin 449. This connects with a passage in Roger De Hovedon; ‘In the year of grace 464, the Britons sent messengers into Brittany to Aurelius Ambrosius and his brother Uterpendragon, who had been sent there for fear of Vortigern, beseeching them to come over from the Armorican country without delay, to drive out the Saxons and king Vortigern, and take the crown themselves. As they had now arrived at man’s estate, they began to make preparations of men and ships for the expedition.’

The father of Ambrosius was a Roman consul - At this period, the Roman empire elected two consuls every year, one for the western empire based in Rome, & the other for the eastern empire in Constantinople.

The works of Gildas & Nennius are the two foundation stones of all Dark-Age research, two candles of illumination without which our knowledge of that great period in history would be as black as midnight. Yet they do offer us glimpses of truth & in the case of Ambrosius have given us enough clues as to asecrtain the identity of his father. Blending the facts we have already gathered we know we are looking for;

(i) A Roman Consul…
(ii) …from the Aureli gens…
(iii) … able to have children in the 440s.

A Roman Consul at work

It is time to look through the consular list of Rome, in particular the one kept by Cassiodorus. Looking through his list, there are only three consuls who bear the name Aurelianus in the 5th century. The first is far too early (Aurelianus, consul 400) & likewise the third is far too late (Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, consul 485), which leaves only one possible candidate for an Aurelian consul. His name was Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (*), a member of the Symmachi branch of the Aureli gens, & was consul for the western empire in 446 AD. Throughout my litological surveys of 2012 I have been surprised how much historical information has been missed by many centuries of serious scholars, but this particular nugget seems so obvious its perpetual non-discovery defies belief. When our oldest historians tell us that a certain man was the son of a Roman consul, common sense dictates we flick through a list of Roman consuls just as we moderns flick through a telephone directory!

It is at this point, however, that the hard evidence for Aureliius ends, & from now we must abide with pure speculation. Yet the remaining evidence contains tantalising essences of truth, such as the connection between Quintus, Britain & his fellow consul for 446, Flavius Aetius. When he took over the reigns of the eastern empire that year, Aetius was entering his third office as a consul, during which time Gildas records him receiving a desperate letter from the British; “To Aetius, now consul for the third time: the groans of the Britons… The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea throws us back on the barbarians: thus two modes of death await us, we are either slain or drowned.”

Gildas then very curtly says that the Romans ‘could not assist them.’ However, knowing that Quintus was in Britain, slain in the Gildasian ‘broils’ which beset the native Britons, it is possible that Aetius (**) sent Quintus on some post-consular military mission to Britain c.450. Both his arrival in the islands at that time & his death are supported by Nennius.

The king (Vortigern) sent messengers throughout Britain, in search of a child born without a father. After having inquired in all the provinces, they came to the field of Aelecti, in the district of Glevesing, where a party of boys were playing at ball. And two of them quarrelling, one said to the other, “” boy without a father, no good will ever happen to you. (***)

This passage gives us several new incites. It makes apparent that Quintus was slain before the birth of his son Ambrosius. We also learn that Ambrosius lived in the kingdom of Glywysing, a coastal sub-kingdom between the modern-day cities of Swansea & Cardiff. This in turn leads us to a contemporary of Ambrosius – Saint Paul Aurelian. His Vita, written by Wrmonoc, tells us;

Saint Paul, surnamed Aurelian, the son of a certain count named Perphirius, who held a position of high rank in the world, came from a province which is in the language of the british race, because a section of it is regarded as an island, is called Penychen.

Penychen was one of the the three cantrefs of Glywysing (along with Gwynllwyg & Gorfynydd) placing another nbly-born Aurelian in the very area where the young Ambrosius grew up. With the saint dying c.575 AD, he would have been born two generations or so after Ambrosius. As both their home regions & surnames match, it is highly likely that they were related, especially when Wrmonoc tells us that Paul, ‘sprang from a family most noble in the eyes of the world.’ It is tempting to conflate Ambrosius with Count Perphirius (***), especially when the latter mean means ‘clad-in-purple.’ Indeed, the title comites/count was used for a number of different positions of power in the Roman empire, from military stations to civic seats, strongly suggesting Paul’s father was a Roman. Yet this is impossible to prove Ambrosisus & Perphirius were one & the same, especially when the name Perphirius was used elsewhere by figures such as a famous 5th century Roman charioteer.

Amesbury

Returning to Ambrosius Aurelianus, Nennius tells us that he was the great king among the kings of Britain, & we can see his name scattered across the country, from the Humber estuary in the north, to Amesbury in the south, which in the ninth century was know as Ambresbyrig, “the burh of Ambrosius”. (****) From these fortified poistions he would have rallied the British to the ongoing cause, as defined by Gildas;

Sometimes our countrymen, sometimes the enemy, won the field, to the end that our Lord might this land try after his accustomed manner these his Israelites, whether they loved him or not, until the year of the siege of Badon.

The era of these battles is given us by the 8th century English historian Bede, who placed the activities of Ambrosius during the 17 year reign of the eastern Roman Emperor Zeno (474-491). Medival writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth & Roger De Hovedon gave vivid accounts of his campaigns, imposing his deeds upon the blueprint of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but their validity as accurate sources can never be ascertained. However, both Monmouth & De Hoveden gave us information that was verifiable in other sources.

The Identity of his Mother

Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us that the boys mother was a daughter of the King of Dyfed; ‘They told them that none knew his father, but that his mother was daughter of the King of Demetia, and that she lived along with the nuns in St. Peter’s Church in that same city.’ Looking through medieval genealogies, it is tempting to see this king as Triphun, with Triphun meaning Tribune, both a military & political rank in Roman times. Indeed, Constantius of Lyon tells us of the presence of a Tribune in Britain in the 430’s;

About this time a deputation from Britain came to tell the bishops of Gaul that the heresy of Pelagius had taken hold of the people over a great part of the country and help ought to be brought to the Catholic faith as soon as possible. A large number of bishops gathered in synod to consider the matter and all turned in help to the two who in everybody’s judgement were the leading lights of religion, namely Germanus and Lupus… Suddenly a man of the rank of Tribune accompanied by his wife, stepped into the middle and put his ten-year-old daughter, who was blind, into the arms of the bishops.

The year of his death

According to Roger DeHovedon, Ambrosius died in the year 498, when;

There appeared a star of wonderful size and brightness, with a single ray, on which was a ball of fire extended like a dragon, out of whose mouth proceeded two rays, one of which seemed to extend its length beyond the regions of Gaul, and the other, verging towards the Irish Sea, terminated in seven smaller rays. Struck with terror at this sight, Uther anxiously inquired of liis wise men what this star portended. They made answer, ” The star and the fiery dragon under the star, are thyself; the ray which stretches towards the region of Gaul, portends that thou wilt have a very powerful son, who will possess the extensive territories which the star covered ; the other ray signifies thy daughter, whose sons and grandsons shall successively possess the kingdom of Britain. Hasten, therefore, most noble prince; thy brother Aurelius Ambrosius, the renowned king of Britain, is dead ; and with him has perished the military glory of the Britons.

Confirmation for this dating of the death of Ambrosius comes from the 6th century Chronicle of Edessa, which tells us that for many days during January 499, there was seen a great comet ‘like a spear.‘ By this time he had become the first great hero of post-Roman Britain, whose descendants it seems carried on the fight. Gildas tells us;

And now his progeny in these our days, although shamefully degenerated from the worthiness of their ancestors, provoke to battle their cruel conquerors, and by the goodness of our Lord obtain the victory.

Since Geoffrey of Monmouth, the ‘progeny’ of Ambrosius has been conflated with the other great Brythonic war-leader of the age, King Arthur. Monmouth made him the nephew of Ambrosius, but of this we can never be sure…

NOTES

(*) Although purely conjectural, we can deduce the motivation behind Quintus’s naming of his son, for the author Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius (mostly called Ambrosius) dedicated his work ‘De differentiis vel societatibus graeci latinique verbi’ to Quintus. Was this a literary sign of the endearing friendship that drives men to name their children after their greatest friends? Indeed, it seems Macrobius was close to the entire family, for he also wrote about Quintus’ grandfather – also called Quintus Aurelius Symmachus – in his famous ‘Saturnalia.’ This Quintus had been a loyal supporter of the British-based Roman emperor Magnus Maximus. Apart from lands in Britain, this Quintus also had estates in Italy, Sicily & Mauritania (West Africa). He was also a distinguished author, but little of his work has been translated into English. It is possible that through his connections with the British-based Magnus Maximus he may have even held lands in Britain, but this is pure speculation.

(**) In his own endeavors Aetius was much more successful, however, halting Attila & his Huns in their tracks in 451.

(***) Nennius tells us that the mother of Ambrosius at first claimed immaculate conception for Ambroisus, & it was only later that Ambrosius revealed his true identity.

(****)Geoffrey of Monmouth places Ambrosius near to Amesbury by the rather fabricated ordering the building of Stonehenge, perhaps connected to the hillfort known as Vespasian’s camp only two miles from Stonehenge. Other possible Ambrosius sites include;

Ombersley in Worcestershire,
Ambrosden in Oxfordshire,
Amberley in Herefordshire,
Amberley in Gloucestershire
Amberley in West Sussex
Emberton – Buckinghamshire
Ambleston – Pembrokeshire
Ambleside – Cumbria
Emborough – Somerset

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bede – Chronica Majora (725)

Bern Codex – MS Bern Bürgerbibliothek Codex 178, f.11 (c.860)

Cassiodorus – Chronica (519)

Constantius of Lyon – Vita Sancti Germani (480)

De Hovedon, Roger – Chronica (1192)

Geoffrey of Monmouth – History of the Kings of Britain (1130)

Gildas – De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (c550)

Nennius – Historia Brittonum (c.830)

Wrmonoc – Life of Saint Paul Aurelian (884). Taken from The Saints of Cornwall (vol.1) by Gilbert H Doble

Mons Graupius

3 Replies

Yesterday afternoon I took a walk to my drummer’s house just off the Leith Links in Edinburgh. My purpose was to get a container for the bramble wine I am about to start brewing (its been a bumper crop this year), but I also came away with a few books. He is moving out soon & on hearing he was going to take a load of them to a charity shop, the poet in me reveled at the chance to gain a few additions to my own library. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was welcomed warmly, but I also gained a copy of Tacitus’s Agricola & Germania. Now, I knew that the Agricola was the only source on the Battle of Mons Graupius, & I also knew that no-one had been able to identify the battle-site. Yet, this same state of affairs had existed before, from Brunanburh to King Arthur’s grave, & I thought it wouldn’t hurt if I made a pot of tea & had a look at the battle. It occurred c.83AD, somewhere in the north of Scotland, & was said to be a great victory over the allied Caledonian tribes by the great Roman general Agricola. Within about an hour or so I’d worked out where it took place.

We have two main pieces of evidence for Agricola’s campaign in Scotland – the account by his son-in-law, Cornelius Tacitus, & the remains of a chain of a dozen ‘marching forts’ that the Romans erected as they pressed further north. David Breeze, in his ‘The logistics of Agricola’s final campaign,’ tells us; The known Roman marching camps north of the Forth point to all roman armies following roughly the same route, skirting the south eastern flanks of the highlands to pass around the mounth at stonehaven & continue north-westerly along the edge of the mountains. This same route, incidentally, was used in 1746 by the British army on their way to face another Caledonian army at Culloden.

Many of the camps are sited near the sea, so Agricola could maintain contact between his fleet & his soldiers, confirm’d by a passage in Tacitus;

In the summer in which he entered on the sixth year of his office, his operations embraced the states beyond the Forth, and, as he dreaded a general movement among the remoter tribes, as well as the perils which would beset an invading army, he explored the harbours with a fleet, which, at first employed by him as an integral part of his force, continued to accompany him. The spectacle of war thus pushed on at once by sea and land was imposing; while often infantry, cavalry, and marines, mingled in the same encampment and joyously sharing the same meals,

Knowing that Agricola withdrew to winter quarters after the battle, which was the high-water mark of the invasion, common sense tells us that the battle took place at a fort near the end of the chain. Indeed, it is upon the area around the penultimate fort at Balnagieth, just to the west of Forres, that all the topographical clues found in the account of Tacitus coalesce. These can help us paint a mental picture of the battlefield, which would have contained, in the following order;

SEA – CAMP – PLAIN – HILL – WILDERNESS

Sea

Few in number, dismayed by their ignorance, looking around upon a sky, a sea, and forests which are all unfamiliar to them; hemmed in, as it were, and enmeshed, the Gods have delivered them into our hands (Calgacus speaking about the Romans)

Camp

And so you and I have passed beyond the limits reached by former armies or by former governors, and we now occupy the last confines of Britain, not merely in rumour and report, but with an actual encampment and armed force.

He arrayed his eager and impetuous troops in such a manner that the auxiliary infantry, 8,000 in number, strengthened his centre, while 3,000 cavalry were posted on his wings. The legions were drawn up in front of the intrenched camp;

Plain

The plain between resounded with the noise and with the rapid movements of chariots and cavalry. Agricola, fearing that from the enemy’s superiority of force he would be simultaneously attacked in front and on the flanks, widened his ranks

Hill

The enemy, to make a formidable display, had posted himself on high ground; his van was on the plain, while the rest of his army rose in tiers up the slope of a hill.

The effect of tiers indicates the hill quite steep. We can also infer from the text that Mons Graupius was not a smooth, single-peaked feature, & instead possessed several peaks, as in;

Those of the Britons who, having as yet taken no part in the engagement, occupied the hill-tops

Wilderness

When, however, the enemy saw that we again pursued them in firm and compact array, they fled no longer in masses as before, each looking for his comrade; but dispersing and avoiding one another, they sought the shelter of distant and pathless wilds

In addition to the above, we must note that the battlefield was close to several settlements & hills;

Meanwhile the Britons, wandering amidst the mingled wailings of men and women, were dragging off their wounded, calling to the unhurt, deserting their homes, and in their rage actually firing them

The silence of desolation reigned everywhere: the hills were forsaken, houses were smoking in the distance

Nelson's Tower on Cluny Hill

Forres

There is only one place in Scotland that combines the correct topographical features given above with an appropriate Roman fort, & that is Forres, twenty-five miles east of Inverness beside the Moray Firth. This means that the steep multi-peaked’ hill known as Cluny Hill was once named Mons Graupius. The Cluny Hills today house the eco-living lovers that are the Findhorn Foundation, & a impressive monument to Nelson, yet 2000 years ago it was home to a massed confederacy of Caledonian tribes, all ready to face the alien invaders.

Forres lies close to the sea, & to its east there is a plain which leads to a Roman Marching Camp at Balnagieth, while to the south of Forres spreads a hilly wilderness. Tacitus tells us Agricola’s army were lightly equipped, indicating he was acting on information that the Caledonians had gathered en masse, & were preparing to give him the set-piece battle the Romans excelled at. It seems they had gathered at a Caledonian ‘power base‘ for just to the east of Forres lies the oldest Pictish hill-fort at Burghead – where a recent dig at Clarckly hill uncovered Iron Age circular stone houses & building foundations. Also found at the fort were carved slabs depicting bulls & a very ancient chambered well, while the fort itself is three times bigger than any other Pictish hillfort, suggesting its great importance.

Sueno’s Stone

We now come to the evidence for Forres that has really been staring the world in the face. The Pictish monument known as Sueno’s stone is the largest (6.5m), most impressive piece of Pictish stoneworking we know. It is dated to c.900 AD, while its name comes from an 11th century Dane. On one side there is a great cross, & on the other we have images from a great battle. Scholars have scratched their heads over which battle it was, but surely now the most magnificent piece of Pictish artwork can be associated with the greatest military moment of the Caledonians. One can imagine the King of the Picts commissioning the monument – which originally had another obelisk standing beside it (Timothy Pont’s Mapp of Murray c 1590) – to honour the great ancestors.

The stone is packed full of battle-scenes, all of which can be connected with passages in Tacitus.

Two cavalry forces - Agricola… opposed their advance with four squadrons of cavalry held in reserve by him for any sudden emergencies of battle
&
Meantime the enemy’s cavalry had fled

Archers – The action began with distant fighting. The Britons with equal steadiness and skill used their huge swords and small shields to avoid or to parry the missiles of our soldiers, while they themselves poured on us a dense shower of darts

Corpses and decapitated heads – The open plain presented an awful and hideous spectacle… Everywhere there lay scattered arms, corpses, and mangled limbs

An infantry battle – Agricola encouraged three Batavian and two Tungrian cohorts to bring matters to the decision of close fighting with swords

Soldiers with small shields & large swords - An enemy armed with small bucklers and unwieldy weapons

Other features on the stone also reflect the battle;

A tent - This would have been the Roman camp

Three musicians blowing trumpets - Three Roman trumpet brooches were found at Culbin sands just to the north of Forres, which lie beside a perfect natural harbour for Agricola’s fleet

A broch – This would have been the Caledonian hillfort at Burghead, known as ‘The broch’ by locals

A kilted war-leader – This would be either Calgacus, or King Galdus given in the medieval account of the battle by Hector Boece

Balnageith

Agricola’s presence this far north is suggested by a number of Roman finds in coins in the area. Alongside discoveries at Cawdor, Portmahomack & Tarradale, also discovered were cooins minted in the name of pre-83AD Roman emperors, such as a Vespasian at Garnout, a Nero at Fortrose, & most importantly a Titus at Forres. In addition, the temporary camp at Balnagieth has all the hall marks of Agricola’s hand, of whom, ‘It was noted by experienced officers that no general had ever shown more judgment in choosing suitable positions,‘ for n one side it is protected by the River Findhorn just a couple of miles upstream from a beautiful sea-harbour. The fort is 234 metres long, & at least 70 meters wide & surrounded by a 3 metre wide ditch, while , ‘it is possible that the camp was possessed of six-post corner-towers and that the front of the rampart was revetted in timber, which would suggest a more permanent encampment. (Britannia xxii (1991) p.226 & fig.4.)

The Boresti

Forres is looking more & more like it hosted the grand battle of Mons Graupius, & there is more evidence to come. Agricola is said to have; led his army into the territory of the Boresti. He received hostages from them, and then ordered the commander of the fleet to sail round Britain. Nobody knows where the Boresti dwelt, but the word seems could be linked to the Boreas, as in Hyperboria, the north wind from beyond the land of the boreas. The b of Boresti wseems to have at some point changed to a v, which then became Forres, eithe r through a scribal error, or a misunderstanding over the two letters – for example, the 9th century Cyrillic script of the Slavs uses the letter b for the v sound. It must also be noted that the legion which fought at Mons Graupius was the Ninth, which was Spanish in origin – as is evident in later centuries Spanish dialetic pronunciation of the Latin language changed v’s to b’s.

Victoria

The quest for Mons Graupius has been going on for centuries, but as with many things like this, no concensus has ever been reached. A spenner in the works was Ptolemy’s secod century naming of a fort in the Perthshire area as Victoria, or victory. This sent many scholars scampering to that part of Scotland & ignoring Tacitus when he said that the Romans were at the ‘furthest bounds’ of Scotland & that Agricola ordered his fleet to round the northern tip of Britain (with them being so close, I presume)

Several sites have been suggested for Camp Victoria, but the best candidate for is the Roman marching camp called Battledykes, near Fortrose. Jamieson, writing in 1786, states the fort possessed five gates, & was double ramparted, except for a portion of the western side which was a marsh. It is the mention of the marsh – & of course the ‘battle’ element in the name of the fort, that connects with this passage from Tacitus concerning a battle that took place the year before Mons Graupius.

This becoming known to the enemy, they suddenly changed their plan, and with their whole force attacked by night the ninth Legion, as being the weakest, and cutting down the sentries, who were asleep or panic-stricken, they broke into the camp. And now the battle was raging within the camp itself, when Agricola, who had learnt from his scouts the enemy’s line of march and had kept close on his track, ordered the most active soldiers of his cavalry and infantry to attack the rear of the assailants, while the entire army were shortly to raise a shout. Soon his standards glittered in the light of daybreak. A double peril thus alarmed the Britons, while the courage of the Romans revived; and feeling sure of safety, they now fought for glory. In their turn they rushed to the attack, and there was a furious conflict within the narrow passages of the gates till the enemy were routed. Both armies did their utmost, the one for the honour of having given aid, the other for that of not having needed support. Had not the flying enemy been sheltered by marshes and forests, this victory would have ended the war.

Conclusion

We can now see that Agricola pushed beyond the Forth & fought a battle near Fortrose. The next year he built a series of marching camps as far as Forres, where the Caledonians were waiting for him. History is written by the victor, & Tacitus tells us that, ‘About 10,000 of the enemy were slain; on our side there fell 360 men.‘ However, the scottish historian, hecto boece, tells a different story;

Our annals record that twelve thousand Romans died in that unhappy conflict, and about twenty thousand Scots, Picts, and auxiliaries. Among these was the Danish leader Gildo, who was surrounded by the enemy while fighting with great ferocity and ardor, together with a few chosen comrades.

What is true, is that after the battle of Mons Graupius the Romans hardly ever ventured this far north again & it is easy to see how the Caledonians would have slowly but surely looked upon Mons Graupius as the moment they dismissed tribal rivavlries, bonded as a fighting force & met the might of rome in open conflict. They may have lost many men, but their combined strength was enough to convinve the romans to build a wall across britain to keep them out of the empire, rather than attempt to subdue them. It is to celebrate this, then, that the Picts erected their fabulous memorial of the day the Romans came to town – Sueno’s Stone.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on September 13, 2012 by Damo.

Harthacanute

Leave a reply

On my return from Greece last December I arrived in London & spent my first night in Britain for 2 months. The next morning I awoke to a news story that announced the discovery of a new Viking king called Airdeconut, a version of Harthacnut. The name turned up on a coin found in 2011 at Silverdale in Lancashire, & the so-called top numismatist in the country, Gareth Williams of the British Museum, declared the king as ‘not previously known.‘

However, numismatists are not proper historians, & with my mind full of Parnassus I set about finding the true identity of Harthacnut. An early insight propelled me to approach Mr Williams, who found my theory ‘completely unconvincing,‘ & added, ‘I do not have the time to spare on further correspondence on this subject.‘ Appreciating his entrenchment in a staid academic system I carried on with my investigations, for every new generation of an enlightened society has the means, will & wherewithal to push on from the restrictions of the past. I even approached The Press newspaper in York, who were happy to print my story. I believe there is enough evidence in the Gesta Danorum (GD) of Saxo Grammaticus, the anonymous Ragnarsson Pattr (RP) & Adam of Bremen’s ‘History of the Archbishops of Hamburg‘ to paint a fairly accurate picture of his life.

The Birth of Harthacnut (c.890)

In the 9th century, the sons of Ragnar Lodbruk, a Danish emperor, took Northumbria, slaying its King, Aella, in the process. On Ragnar’s death his empire was divided between his sons, of which parts Denmark was taken by a certain Sigurd. One by one the sons of Ragnar died, leaving Sigurd as the king of all Ragnar’s lands.

Thus SIWARD, by the sovereign vote of the whole Danish assembly, received the empire of his father. But after the defeats he had inflicted everywhere he was satisfied with the honour he received at home, and liked better to be famous with the gown than with the sword. He ceased to be a man of camps, and changed from the fiercest of despots into the most punctual guardian of peace. He found as much honour in ease and leisure as he had used to think lay in many victories. Fortune so favoured his change of pursuits, that no foe ever attacked him, nor he any foe. GD

As for his family, we learn of his marriage to a Northumbrian princess, & the son they sired, our very own Airdecnut. 

Sigurd Snake-in-Eye married Blaeja, the daughter of King Ella. Their son was Knut, who was called Horda-Knut RP

Harthacnut inherits Denmark (891)

 Sigurd died in the great battle of Leuven, september 891, when the Annals Fuldenses tell us that the bodies of dead Northmen blocked the run of the river, &; 

This year went the army eastward; and King Arnulf fought with the land-force, ere the ships arrived, in conjunction with the eastern Franks, and Saxons, and Bavarians, and put them to flight. (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)

Sigurd Snake-in-Eye and Bjorn Ironside and Hvitserk had raided widely in France. Then Bjorn headed back home to his kingdom. After that, the Emperor Arnulf fought with the brothers, and a hundred thousand Danes and Norwegians fell there. There also fell Sigurd Snake-in-Eye, and Gudrod was the name of another king who fell there. RP

 A certain Helgi Hvassi managed to escaped from the battle with Sigurd’s standard & presented it to Sigurd’s mother, Aslaug. The empire was now under threat, & only Sigurd’s young son, Harthacnut, remained of the bloodline. The RP tells us;

But because Horda-Knut was young, Helgi stayed with Aslaug for a long time as protector of the land.’

Harthacnut flees to Northumbria (c.900)

Around about the year 900, Denmark was conquered by a by a Swedish adventurer named Olof the Brash. According to Adam of Bremen he & his sons, Gyrd & Gnupa, invaded Denmark, & ‘took the realm by force.’ Swedish tradition tells us Olof’s sons ruled Denmark side-by-side, perhaps a power partition made by their father, who preffered to remain in Sweden after the conquest. Faced with such an onslaught I feel that Sigurd’s widow, Queen Blaeja, would have fled for safety with her young son. Northumbria was the obvious choice, for Blaeja was a member of its pre-Ragnar ruling house. In addition, the Viking dynasty there had been set up by Harthacanute’s uncle, Ivar, giving him a strong claim to the throne.

Harthacnut becomes king of Northumbria (c.911)

Harthacnut would have appealed to the mixed Anglian-Viking society of Northumbria, & he appears as CNUT REX on a number of Cuerdale coins minted at York, whose Christian symbolism mirrors that of the Airdeconut coin, suggesting they were indeed the same person. His accession to the throne probably came in 911, at about the age of twenty, when the ASC records the deaths of Northumbrian kings Eowils & Healfden.

Adam of Bremen

Harthacnut reclaims Denmark (917)

As he grew up this disenfranchised prince would have burnt with the desire to one day reconquer his father’s empire. Across time there has been many tales of young dispossesd princes growing up in exile, gathering an army & attempting to seize back the lost throne, from the triumph of Romulus & Remus, to the disaster of Bonnie Prince Charlie. In 917 it was in the hands of Sigtrygg, the son of Gnupa, whom Adam of Bremen tells us came to power at some point during the tenure of Hoger, the Archbishop of Bremen, 909-917.

Adam then asserts (on the testimony of Sweyn II) that prior to Archbishop Hoger’s death in 917, a certain Harthacnut came to Denmark & conquered it. The fact that he, ‘came to Denmark,’ suggests that he had been in Northumbria, & when Adam corrupts this name to ‘Northmannia,‘ a place he says had been colonized by the Vikings not long before, we get a perfect fit for Jorvik Northumberland. Adam goes on to tell us that Harthacnut immediately deposed the young king Sigtrygg, and then ruled unopposed for approximately thirty years.  

Saxo

Saxo Grammaticus

The above sequence of events is confirmed by the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus. On analysis of his text, I realised that the accounts of his kings often get shuffled about in chronology, & it is up to a discerning eye to recreate the correct order. Let us begin with;

…and the royal stock of the Danes, now worn out by the most terrible massacres, was reduced to the only son of the above Siward

The son is evidently Kanute, but at this point Saxo mistakenly interposes Erik Bloodaxe. However, it makes more sense to assume he had his names mixed up when we read;

While this child remained in infancy a guardian was required for the pupil and for the realm…

This is essentially the same account as the RP’s Helgi Hvassi. Saxo actually names him as Enni-gnup. As we have seen, it was true that a king called Gnupa ruled Denmark after Sigurd, but he belonged to the House of Olof. Saxo hints at the confusion when he describes Gnupa as ruling, ‘The affairs of the whole people. For which reason some who are little versed in our history give this man a central place in its annals.’ Saxo continues with, ‘But when Kanute had passed through the period of boyhood, and had in time grown to be a man, he left those who had done him the service of bringing him up, and turned from an almost hopeless youth to the practice of unhoped-for virtue.’

At this point in the text, Saxo mistakenly replaces the name Kanute with that of Frodo, but it evident that they were actually the same man. Adam of Bremen tells us Harthacanute carried a status as the High King of the Vikings. This moniker is similar to one used by Henry of Huntingdon uses during his account of the Battle of Brunanburh, where he mentions a certain Froda as being ‘chief of the Northmen.’

Saxo Grammaticus’s description of Frodo completely fits with Harthacanute; ‘This man’s fortune, increased by arms and warfare, rose to such a height of prosperity that he brought back to the ancient yoke the provinces which had once revolted from the Danes, and bound them in their old obedience.’  This tallies with Harthacanute’s defeat of Sigtrygg in 917.

Saxo continues; ‘  But he desired that his personal salvation should overflow and become general, and begged that Denmark should be instructed in divinity by Agapete, who was then Pope of Rome. But he was cut off before his prayers attained this wish. His death befell before the arrival of the messengers from Rome:.   That Frodo’s death came during the papacy of Agapetus II (946-955) ties in with Harthacanute’s 30 year reign ending, according to Adam of Bremen, in 947.

King Gorm

In addition, where the RP tells us that Harthacanute’s, ‘…son was Gorm,‘ & Adam of Bremen mentions ‘Hardecnudths son,Vurm,‘ the GD say, ‘Frodo’s son ‘GORM, who had the surname of “The Englishman,” because he was born in England, gained the sovereignty in the island on his father’s death.‘ With Frodo being another name for Harthacanute, we have further proof that Harthacanute was present in Northumbria, & indeed had ‘sovereignity in the island,’ enough to have coins struck in his name. These coins, then, were most probably struck between 911 & 917, offer further proof that the Cuerdale hoard has been incorrectly dated, as I claimed in a recent post.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on September 11, 2012 by Damo.

Orsnaford – Burnley’s Viking Burh

2 Replies

In Dark Age Britain money talked. A sophisticated trading sytem stretched from England via Europe to China along the old Silk Road, while to the north the Vikings traded from the Caspian Sea to Ireland. This vast panapoly of goods, along with everyday products, were bound together by silver coins, stamped with the names of kings & the moneyers who issued them. Towards the end of the 9th century, the dominant economic force in Britain was Alfred’s Wessex, whose coins influenced the designs of the Vikings, forming a universal coinage from the Firth of Forth to the Channel. Some of these Viking imitation coins were issued at a place called Orsnaford, by a moneyer named Bernvald. Baring the name of King Alfred the Great, they give us a rough date of 880-900 for their issue.

The River Brun

In an earlier post (Brunanburh) I speculated that Orsnaford was once a Viking settlement at a place called Heasanford in Burnley, renamed as ‘Brunanburh’ by King Athelstan. Following certain investigations through Scandinavian sagas I have come to the conclusion that Heasanford was named after the Asen, another name for the family of Nordic gods known as the Aesir. To confirm the association, we must turn to Osnabrück, a city in Lower Saxony, whose ‘brück’ element means bridge. Through the city runs the Hase river, named after the Aesir, & as Orsna became Heasan, so the river Osna became the River Hase. The name probably originated during the reign of the Viking king, Rorik of Dorestad (d.882), who ruled over Lower Saxony. The slight difference between Orsna & Osna is probably down to some ancient Teutonic dialect dispersion.

In Norse mythology there was another family of gods known as the Vanir, or VAN. Suddenly we have the elements for VINheath & WENdune, alternate names for the site of the battle of Brunanburh. It must be noted that name Wendune remains in sWINDEN Water, to the south of the suggested battlefield (where Walton Spire stands today) & the Vin element in the village of WINEwall, to the north. This reinforces the Vanir supposition, for the name Vanir was anglicized to Wane. The battlefield was probably named after the action, for the Vanir were involved in a great war with the Aesir, & would have been a very poetic naming made by a local Viking who had just witnessed Britain’s greatest battle on his home turf! It is also possible that Hell Clough was given that name after the battle, for the goddess Hel ruled over the realms of the dead & funerary urns containing human burns were found by the river.

It was during the 9th century that the Vikings began to settle in ever increasing numbers throughout England, predominantly in the eastern parts. Their principle city was York, capital of the kingdom of Jorvik, which formed a central role in a line of communications that ran between Scandinavia, via the Humber, to Viking Ireland, via the Ribble. Slap-bang on this very line lies the town of Burnley, at a three-way junction of ancient trade-ways. A days march from the Ribble estuary where the Viking ships would have moored, after a night’s accomodation & refreshment, Heasanford offers the Viking merchant two land routes to York; one due east along the Longcauseway & the other north-east to the old Roman Road via Skipton.

The area was also the meeting place between the two different blocks of Scandinavian settlement in northern England. William Bennet tells us; ‘At some point during the invasion, Norsemen who had landed on the coasts of Lancashire & Cumberland, & the Danes who had invaded Yorkshire, eventually joined hands across the north of England… Norse penetration into this district came from the Lune valley & via the Wenning into the Ribble Valley, from which the invaders passed into the Whalley area. At the same time Danes pressed from the Craven district towards Colne; the names Skipton, Earby, Barnoldswick, Icornshaw (nr Cowling) represent settlements to the north-east of Burnley.

Very few physical remains have been found for the Scandinavian occupation of Britain, & we must rely on Sacndinavian words to identify their places of settlement.TT Wilkinson wrote that in Burnley, ‘almost every local name that is not saxon is either Danish or Norwegian in origin.’ Examples given by SW Partington include;

Thursden Water – named after the God Thor
Hell Clough – named after the Goddess Hel
Finsley – finn’s Hill
Raven-Holme - land liable to be flooded
Ayneslack – enclosure in the valley
Carr – wet ground overgrown with bushes
Booth – farmhouse
Gawthorpe – hamlet of Gaukr

Harle Syke from the battlefield

In addition, the area seems to have been of high-status – important enough to mint coins – for above Heasanford, the area known as Harle’s Syke means the ‘Defensive ditch of the Jarl (earl).’ There is also a ‘Daneshouse,’ which could have been the site of the Earls chief residence. In the area around Burnley we also find many other Viking place names, proving the Vikings settled therein some numbers, such as Buckflatt (Whalley), Hycornehurst (Accrington), Kyrkebank (Haslingden) & Woluetscoles (Clitheroe). Even today, the Old Norse ‘skrika,’ meaning scream, remains in the local dialect as ‘skriking,’ or loud & heavy weeping.

Thus far we have can confirm both the presence of a Viking mint in the area & that the Battle of Brunanburh took place on the moors above the burh. This brings us neatly back to the Orsnaford coins, which we must look at in more detail. Modern scholars presume Orsnaford is Oxford, a mis-guided supposition based on the text of a couple of the coins being blundered to Ohnsaford, & then the oh- element perhaps once sounding as ‘ox’ (see ‘The Inscription on the Oxford pennies of the Ohsnaforda type by Alfred Anscombe – 1908). However, not one of the Anglo-Saxon coins known to have been minted at Oxford coins mention the ‘-ford’ suffix, as in Cnut’s Oxsen or Athelstan’s, ‘Ox Urbis.’

Adding to my supposition that Orsnaford led to Heasanford, James Parker suggests; ‘Horsaford, however, would have been a good name of a place. There is one spelt in Domesday Horseford, now Horseforth, five miles north-west of Leeds in Yorkshire ; and, in the same county, Hoseford, the name of which does not seem to have survived. In Norfolk also there is a Hosforda, now Horsford, four miles north of Norwich. The omission of the H on the inscription would surely be more reasonable than the insertion of an R where it did not exist ; and so those who argue on the theory that the word represents the name of a place ought to choose one of those here named rather than Oxford.’

The coins have been found at only three deposit sites, with almost all of them at Cuerdale, between Preston & Blackburn on the River Ribble. The first was found among the Harkirke hoard, discovered in 1611 near Crosby to the north of Liverpool, while another was discovered in the river Ouse near York in the 18th century. These three sites are all found in a narrow band that stretches across northern England & strongly suggests they were minted in the north. With York being on the eastern side of the band, near the Humber & subsequently Scandinavia, it makes sense there was another mint in the west, & the site of Burnley fits the bill accordingly, being only a few miles from the Ribble estuary, & thus Dublin.

We must now look at the name of the man who minted these famous silver pennies, Bernvald. In my ‘Brunanburh‘ blog I suggested that Orsnaford had been renamed in his honour during the reign of Athelstan. The king spoke West Saxon, a different Teutonic dialect to that of the Northumbrians in East Anglia & the Jutes of Kent. On coming to power he standardised the English tongue, & it is during this period that the northern, Danish-influenced ‘Bern’ element became Brun, confirmed by Layamon‘s, ‘ & the names of the towns in saxish speech… & in saxish he gan speak the names of the men.‘ The antique metathesis between these two names occured several times in the early middle-ages. In the early 12th century, the Anglo-Norman chronicler Geoffrey Gaimar gave the names Bruneswerce & Burneweste for the battle of Brunanburh itself. Other examples include Saint Brynstan/Burnstan & Roger de Burne/Brun.

To conclude this post I would like to focus on the Viking element -by which remains in another name for the Battle of Brunanburh. A recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives the battle’s name as Brumby. The -by element is Danish for settlement & is found in the name Earby, a large village near Colne. Burnley is situated only a few miles away & according to the History of the Counter of Lancaster (1911), in antiquity the town was ‘more commonly’ known as Brum-ley. This connects with Ranulf Higden’s naming of the battle site as Brumford (Bruneford – William of Malmesbury), which seems to have derived from Orsnaford/Heasanford. Thus, if Brumby & Brum-ley are the same place, then the -by element reaffirms my conviction that a major Viking settlement stood on the banks of the Brun near Heasanford.

Bibliography

Bennet – History of Burnley – Volume 1 (1941)

Gaimar – L’Estorie des Engles – edited and translated by TD Hardy & CT Martin, C.T. (1888-89)

Layamon – Brut – Edited by Frederic Madden - Society of Antiquaries of London (1847)

Parker – The Early History of Oxford (1885)

Partington – The Danes in Lancashire & Yorkshire (1909)

Wilkinson – Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire & Cheshire - vol 9 (1856-57)

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on September 10, 2012 by Damo.

Redating the Cuerdale Hoard

2 Replies

Introduction

Scholars have dated the depositing of the fabulous wealth of Viking treasure known as the Cuerdale Hoard to c.905. The purpose of this blog is to question this assumption by moving the date of the deposition to a very possible later year. The horde is the most significant find of Viking silver ever to have been unearthed in the British Isles. It was discovered in May, 1840, by workmen digging in the banks of the River Ribble, & it is these same workmen who shed the initial doubt on the academic dating of the hoard. The hoard itself is made up a thousand pieces of silver bullion, & parcels of coins minted from as far away as the Hindu Kush, & had been assembled piecemeal. A thousand or so coins were minted during the reign of Alfred the Great (d.899), while a number of the other coins, such as the Carolingian & Kufic pieces, have a terminus ante quem of between 895 & 910 AD. In light of this, the hoard has been tentatively dated at 905.AD.

The thing is, we can never know the true dating of the Curedale hoard for the simple fact that not long after the discovery, about fifteen percent of the coins were syphoned away by anonymous private collectors or melted down by the workmen who found the hoard in the 19th century. One workman was found with 26 secreted in his boots & was allowed to keep them! Elsewhere, even the 149 coins selected for Queen Victoria largely vanished without trace.

There was no unifying mind behind such a random & disparate collection, & the normal rules of dating such hoards may not be applied with confidence. It has been over a millennium since the deposition, & Viking banking habits are unknown to posterity. The owner of the treasure was evidently a rich man, & also a collector as attested by a coin at Curedale dated to the seventh century. He could well have hung onto certain parcels of coins for years. In light of this, I shall now present a number reasons why the traditional dating of the Cuerdale horde is incorrect;

1
Of the 8,000-10,000 coins reported early on, only 6700 coins were ever officially recorded. This means fifteen percent of the find went missing, & if a single coin in that 15 percent was minted after 905, the whole assumption would be wrong

2
Of the 1000 or so Anglo-Saxon coins in the hoard, most were minted during the reign of Alfred the Great (d.899), but over a hundred belong to the flourits of his successor, Edward, & Archbishop Plegmund. With Edward dying in 924 & Plegmund dying in 923, the coins in their name could well have been minted after 920. Indeed, modern scholarship (Graham-Campbell) has stated that, ‘there is no way of putting a precise date on the latest west saxon coins in Cuerdale.’

Plegmund coins

3
1,800 coins belong to the type known as the St Edmund memorial issue. These are all undated, however, CE Blunt suggests a later date than Cuerdale; ‘The late coins on small flans with increasingly & illiterate & curtaile legends, some of which are present at Cuerdale, continued to be issued for a short-time into the post-Cuerdale period.’

The likeliest date for the minting of the coins is c.925, when King Athelstan founded the abbey of Bury St Edmunds around the shrine of St Edmund, as suggested by WA Abram; “The type consists of the letter A on the obverse, with the name of the sainted king as legend ; on the reverse is a small cross, with the name of the moneyer. It has generally been supposed that the coins of St. Eadmund were struck at the mint of the abbots of St. Edmundsbury, the earliest notice of which is a grant made to them by Edward the Confessor, in 1066. The name of the place does not occur upon the coins, but has been supposed to be intimated by the name of the mint.‘ Here, the ‘A’ on the coins should represent Athelstan, & it is his founding of the burh (Bury) of St Edmunds that created the mint which struck the coins.

4
Of the Carolingian coins, some are minted in the name of King Charles (the Simple), who ruled France from 898 to 922. Hawkins adds that the latest possible date of the French coins is 928.

King Charles the Simple

5
An arm ring found at Cuerdale is identical to ones found at Lough Ree in Ireland, & Deptford in England, with both hoards being dated to the 930s.

6
There were many coins found at Cuerdale minted with the name Cunnetti. Michael Dolley tells us; A further specimen has come from the Morley St Peter hoard of 1958 which is of good Cuerdale style… The latest coin in this hoard carries the name & portrait of an Athelstan.’ This links the Cunnetti coins with Athelstan, who died in 939.

7
Hawkins refers to finds at Vaalse Island, dated to the late tenth century, which resemble objects found at Cuerdale

8
Four of the Cuerdale coins were minted in Scandinavia, one of these is suspected to be of a later date. Archibald shows his surprise at being found so early (c.905); ‘The final Scandinavian coin in the hoard is another Danish issue, of Malmers KG7, which imitates a Carolingian type. According to Malmer, KG7 commenced c.900, making the Cuerdale example the earliest dated deposit of the type, with its occurence in graves & hoards continuing into the third quater of the tenth century.’

An examination of the coin shows that it had not been freshly issued. With almost all of these coins being minted later in the ninth century, a pre-905 minting of the coin seems difficult to accept.

Coins from the Calliphate

9
Nicholas Lowick identifies Coin 17 of the Kufic coins as being minted at Urmiyah al-salam, with the Salam element meaning’ peace.’ He states, ‘The earliest recorded coins of Urmiyah were recorded in 902 & 903, too late to have served as models for this imitation,‘ adding, ‘the coins must have travelled from the caliphate to Lancashire in no more than 8 years, a fairly short interval bearing in mind that they probably did not come directly but passed through various hands en route. Richard Vasmer, in his important analyses of north european hoards containing islamic coins, lists only two that exhibit a shorter interval between their latest kufi coin & their presumed date of burial.”

10
According to Herbert Grueber, The St Edmund coinage is ‘very similar in character‘ to what is known as the St Peter Coin, which was ‘assigned to a period extending from about 920-940.‘ Grueber also tells us that ‘several types of the Regnald’s coins are met with on the St Peter money.‘ Regnald ruled & minted at York in the early 920′s, which indirectly suggests the St Edmund coinage was minted at about the same time. In addition, Grueber also tells us these coins struck at Lincoln, in the name of St Martin, ‘in type & fabric somewhat approaches the St Peter money struck at York.’ The terminus ante quem of the St Martin coins is 943, when Eadmund took Lincoln from the Danes, which matches the dates of the St Peter Coin.

11
Two of the coins found at Cuerdale have the words SIHTRIC COMES inscribed on them. They have all the hallmarks of the Viking imitation coins, & with ‘Comes’ meaning earl, we are looking for an Earl Sihtric. This could well be Sihtric Ceach of the House of Ivar, who ruled Northumbria between the years 921 & 927. His status as an earl is confirmed by a passage in the Icelandic Egil’s Saga, which says, ‘Alfred the Great had deprived all tributary kings of name and power. they were now called earls, who had before been kings or princes. This was maintained throughout his lifetime and his son Edward’s.’ The coins were struck by a moneyer named Gundibert, who also minted some of the St Edmund coins discovered at Curedale, confirming the date given them in section 3 above.

Conclusion

I believe there is now enough evidence to doubt the 905 dating of the Cuerdale hoard & move it forward by at least two decades. As stated in the introduction, it is impossible to say how the Cuerdale collection was put together. The regal instinct is to hoard ones riches & it is possible that parts of it were collected during the raids by Analf in Ireland during the raids of the 930s as recorded by the Irish chronicle, ‘The Annals of the Four Masters;

934AD Amhlaibh Ceannchairech, with the foreigners, came from Loch Eirne across Breifne to Loch Ribh. On the night of Great Christmas they reached the Sinainn, and they remained seven months there; and Magh-Aei was spoiled and plundered by them.

Was the Cuerdale hoard deposited by by Analf during his flight from Brunanburh? In the next blog I shall show you how this took place at Burnley, from where he fled to Dublin. Directly inbetween lies the mouth of the River Ribble. His main fleet, according to Florence of Worcester, was at the Humber estuary. Did Analf, in the mad rush for safety, bury his treasure while searching for a boat. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle tells us that he escaped with only a few followers, which strongly supports the notion. One can imagine Analf burying the hoard at night & returning at some point in the future unable to find the spot where he left his wealth. This in turn led to the antique local tradition recorded by WJ Andrew that, ‘If one stood upon the hill at Walton-le-Dale on the south bank opposite Preston, & looked up river towards Ribchester, ones gaze would pass over the greatest treasure in Christendom..’

Bibliograhy

Abram - A history of the Parish of Blackburn, county of Lancaster (1877)

Andrew – British Numismatic Journal vol.1 (1904)

Archibald – A Scandinavian coin of Carolingian type from the
Cuerdale hoard’ – Hikuin II 79-82 (1985)

Blunt – The St Edmund Memorial coinage – Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of. Archaeology, xxxi (1969)

Dolley - Anglo-Saxon Coins (1961)

Graham-Campbell – Viking treasure from the North West – The Cuerdale horde in its context (1992 – ed. james graham-campbell)

Grueber – Handbook of the Coins of Great Britain and Ireland in the British Museum (1899)

Hawkins – Account of coins & treasure found at Cuerdale - Archeological Journal (1847)

Lowick – Kufic coins from Cuerdale – British Numistatic Journal ( 1976)

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on September 6, 2012 by Damo.

Post navigation

← Older posts