Alex Harvey | University of York
It is 955, I talk with a Turkish merchant about how bad the market is this year.
It is 2025, I talk with a Turkish merchant about how bad the market is this year.
I have a friend who makes replicas of Early Medieval jewellery. Using authentic techniques, he forges and sells his wares at fairs up and down the country, travelling along the Roman roads of England to make some hard cash.
The world he lives in - the world we live in - is different from the one people inhabited during the Early Medieval Period, but he walks the same roads, engages in the same acts, and fulfils the same goals. The other day, he messaged me that he’d just been to get a kebab from a Turkish stall near his, and the pair of them - one man from Nottingham and the other Istanbul - complained about the dire state of this year’s market, the quality of the customers, the lack of trade. It struck him, and it then struck me, that nothing has really changed; people would have had these conversations in the tenth century just as they do today. So, it got me thinking: what else hasn’t changed? Sure, Early Medieval people could not click ‘send’ on a generative AI script, but they still dealt with hollow knockoffs of real artisanal crafts in the markets of their day. Medieval tourists would be dazzled by today’s neon signs and blaring five-second-long ‘brainrot’ TikTok adverts but might soon realise they are just a newer version of that one irritating stall owner shouting about their wares above the cacophony of other shoppers. “This be the only realm where attention spans are so short.”
I suppose money itself has changed; where it used to be physical, it is now represented by abstract numbers on a screen, but then again, you still have marketplaces that only take cash. These are the North Sea rim markets of today, escaping the yolk of credit card oversight or modern Charlemagnes; tax evasion in a different skin. There are close historical parallels where one least expects. We study ‘the past’ by reading books about it, listening to podcasts, lecturing, engaging in seminars and so on. But new perspectives and perceptions can come at the weirdest of moments. This is especially important for some of the more experiential aspects of history. It is difficult, nigh impossible perhaps, to encompass the atmosphere and intensity of a shield wall or battle by just reading something on a page.
A thousand years ago, thanes and peasants would have been at the mercy of the elements: biting winds, howling rain, rusty blades and spearheads, stray arrowheads. I don’t envy them, and as much as I like to read about the psychology of their time, I will never be one of them. I will never walk in their mud-stained boots. But, for one Friday night in Manchester last December, I did my best attempt to emulate them.
I saw the post-punk, hardcore rock band IDLES at a small, sweaty, and cramped concert a few months ago. Standing right at the front, amidst it all, I engaged in the closest thing to a ‘shield wall’ one can get in the twenty-first century. The crush of the battlefield; everyone pressing in, screaming recognisable chants to build a sense of morale; the lead guitarist stage diving, playing a solo in the middle of the mosh-pit, everyone rushing forward to get an acknowledgement, a handshake, a nod, just a touch; the lead singer chants his political views and more-or-less everyone repeats them back to him; a battle-cry, filling everyone with the adrenaline to survive the next three songs. This time the battle-cry was ‘F**K THE KING’ instead of ‘God save’, but the idea behind the chant is the same: to find common ground through shouting, instilling in everyone a sense of momentum so that they might survive the coming carnage. The context has changed but the process is an echo.
About two thousand sweat-drenched, sometimes bloody, and adrenaline-fuelled people pushed, shoved, and punched their way around in a vague circle, occasionally instructed by the lead singer to form a ‘wall of death’ and charge at the other side. It was exhilarating, and in much-needed moments of downtime, I thought how bizarre it is that we nowadays actively choose to put ourselves in these scenarios.
It might seem odd to compare something fun (a concert) to something horrible (an Early Medieval battle), but I can think of nowhere else accessible enough where one might experience a similar moment-to-moment series of events. Of course, there is no real threat of death at a rock gig, but there is a tangible danger of being hurt and a sense of ‘groupthink’ that would also have permeated a seventh-century battlefield. The psychological aspect of early warfare is an intangible thing that cannot be easily unpicked from metal-detected finds and historical documents but remains here, now, in the oddest of places. Other similarities and differences are more easily observed.
Now, information can reach us faster than ever before. Long gone are the days of waiting for couriers and plumes of smoke on the horizon; when a battle occurs today, you can hear about it in a few seconds, but still, there are lies and propaganda. Living very much in a ‘post-truth age’, where the charisma of leaders speaking about information seems to hold more weight than the information itself, one must wonder if people like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage would get on well with the court jesters and grifters of the last few hundred years. Would they respect their game? Their charisma? Can they corral masses with a few words and an alleged respect for old traditions? But power changes and the ebb and flow of societal hierarchies dictate that the binds which tie our world together will occasionally unravel, unwind, multiply, morph, and evolve. Even renaming a landmass or a gulf carries with it political connotations.
In the twelfth century, the ambulating Gerald of Wales wandered the borderlands of his country and described the ruins of an ancient kingdom that, as he claimed, sat beneath today’s Shrewsbury. He called it Pengwern, a tiny realm which appears in a much earlier poem about a fallen king. Pengwern was crushed sometime in the seventh century; its bloodline extinguished, its royalty scattered, but for Gerald of Wales, the name stuck for decades, evading obscurity through the West Saxon shirring system and county reforms and emerging as a linguistic fossil. Maybe people in the local area still referred to the place as ‘Old Pengwern’, rather than later names like Magonsæte and Wreocensæte.
Even these two polities have parallels to share, the former mentioned scarcely in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as late as 1016 and the latter in the earlier Tribal Hidage. These -sæte territories represent pre-existing British communities taken over by Germanic-speaking successors, neatly parcelled as defined and demarcated administrative units. Therefore, names were replaced. A few often-misunderstood documents refer to a ruler of the Magonsæte (considered centred around Kentchester) who is styled as ‘Westan-Hecanorum rex’, or ‘King of the Western Hecani’. This name, perhaps an Iron Age tribal moniker, appears nowhere else but might be a trace of an older title, a word these lands were named with long before they became redefined as the ‘Magonsæte’.
The act of renaming or redefining historical polities is tried and tested. Even in the ninth century, whoever compiled the History of the Britons saw fit to focus most of the narratives and add miracles in Buelth and Gwerthrynion in central Wales. Assumed to reflect the local bias of the compiler and little else, the names of these ‘kingdoms’ have persevered for centuries. Their status has been enhanced through their presence in the History, and now the History enhances their status in other history books. A self-fulfilling cycle generated almost entirely by names and those who named them.
There are few, basically zero parallels to social media in the Early Medieval world, but replacing the name of a location (or an idea) with something else, only for different names to persist, is well-rooted. On July 23rd, 2023, the world’s richest man had the bright idea of renaming one of the most recognisable social media platforms in history to ‘X’, presumably for no other reason than to inflate his ego. This decision was derided by most, and to this day, the name has not stuck. The app might be called ‘X’, and officials may call it ‘X’, but speak about the platform in person and ‘Twitter’ is still on people’s tongues, and everyone still ‘tweets’ their thoughts about this. The old name has stuck no matter how hard the push to rename the blue bird.
Following this, a rival app, BlueSky, has all but replaced Twitter/X for many circles, and seems to be growing at an accelerated rate due to the continued misbehaviour of Elon Musk. BlueSky, though not quite as bad as ‘X’ as a brand name, lacks the catchiness of Twitter, and so is also referred to as just ‘Twitter’ or ‘the new Twitter’, where people ‘tweet’ their thoughts. Here, we see an example how an old, extinct name can be reused to replace a new one, despite there being (on paper, at least) no discernible connection other than their similarities in function and the wider socio-political context of the 2020s. Names are kaleidoscopic, contradictory, and dynamic; the place names we observe today through street banners, signposts, and road markers, are just the latest snapshot of a long process of linguistic borrowing and evolution, a back-and-forth between speaker, landscape, and language. If you think the Twitter > X > BlueSky pipeline is messy and awkward, that’s because it is. Yet so is the process of naming altogether, seen throughout the last two thousand years. Modern debates percolating about the usefulness of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ crystallise this.
Originating through homogenised political nomenclature and a desire to artificially unite the disparate peoples of England before and during the Viking Age, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has now become synonymous with the far-less catchy ‘Early Medieval Period’. The value of the name comes not from its accuracy but its ability to carry an idea, an aesthetic, a suggestion of the ‘Dark Ages’, for better or for worse.
Historically, humans love to name things. At the very least, we love to inscribe our own name into things (physically or metaphorically) to preserve a legacy of sorts. When the Varangian guardsman Halfdan carved his name into the upper balustrades of the Hagia Sophia in the tenth century, did he know that he would persevere in history as one of the most physical remnants of his kinsmen in the Eastern Mediterranean? Of course not, but he probably wanted to be remembered all the same, just like everyone who spray-paints their name nowadays. Around York, itself an ancient city that Halfdan may very well have frequented back in the day, there are hundreds of instances where the name ‘PEST:)’ (or ‘PESTO’) is graffitied on walls, archways, underpasses, and bridges. I have lived here for seven years and have no idea what it means, who does it, or when they do it, but I can imagine the reason is like why Halfdan carved runes into marble: making a legacy, however small, however menial it may seem to others. I suppose that is the very same reason I am writing this article.
‘I shit on the eyes of whomever reads this’, ‘The one who buggers a fire burns his penis’, ‘Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds!’, and of course, ‘I hope your haemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than they ever have before!’. Obscene jokes, references to sex, the perceived depravity of promiscuous men and women, and instructions for others to kill themselves. Are these the words of the men and women of first-century Pompeii or a modern stag do?
‘O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not collapsed already in ruin!’. Be it a wall buried under Vesuvian ash or the entire breadth of human history, a need to exclaim through comedy, achievements, and insults remains consistent. We write on different walls to the Romans, but we write all the same, be it on Twitter, X, BlueSky, or whatever the next one is. They have held up so much tedious graffiti already, what are a few more words?
Further Reading:
Mark Redknap, Re-Creations - Visualizing Our Past ( National Museum Wales Books, 2003).
Carole Hough, The Oxford Handbook of Names & Naming ( Oxford University Press, 2016).
Guy Halsall, Warfare & Society in the Barbarian West: 450-900 (Routledge, 2003).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006).
Alex Harvey is a postgraduate at the University of York in the Department of Archaeology, who now works across multiple museums in a tour-guiding and curatorial capacity, and lectures across Yorkshire for schools and historical societies. He is the published author of ‘Riddles of the Isle’, ‘Forgotten Vikings’, and the soon-to-be-released ‘Little Kingdoms: An A-Z of Early Medieval Britain’.