Al-Idrīsī’s twelfth-century description and map of Lincolnshire

[The following short piece was originally published in the Lincoln Record Society News Review, 18 (2021), pp. 2–4; the version presented below is the fully-referenced version of this text; a PDF of this article is available at Academia.edu]

The aim of the following note is to direct attention to an often-overlooked Arabic account and map of Lincolnshire found in the Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī khtirāq al-āfāq, ‘The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands’, of the Muslim scholar al-Idrīsī, composed c. 1154 for Roger II of Sicily.(1)

The North Sea and the east coast of England on al-Idrīsī’s mid-twelfth-century Arabic map, from a mid-thirteenth- to early fourteenth-century copy. Note, north is at the top and south at the bottom; the river running across the centre of the image is the Witham with Boston on the left and Lincoln on the right, whilst Grimsby is shown on the coast to the north of the river (Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Arabe 2221, f. 338v–339r; Public Domain)

Al-Idrīsī was a descendant of the eleventh-century Ḥammūdid dynasty of Málaga in al-Andalus (Spain), a distant branch of the Idrīsid family that ruled Morocco from the late eighth to late tenth centuries, and his Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī khtirāq al-āfāq is one of the great geographical works of the medieval period.(2)  Preserved in ten manuscripts dating from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, this work was written in Sicily for Roger II (1112–54) and gathered together a vast array of information on the various regions of the world known to its author and was illustrated by a series of 70 maps. As part of this, al-Idrīsī included a brief description of eastern England that runs as follows:

Herein is the second section of the seventh climate, containing a portion of the Ocean wherein lies the island of lnqlṭrh [England, l’Angleterre]… From the town of ǧrnmūdh [Yarmouth, Gernemutha/Gernemuda] to the town of nrġīq [Norwich, Norwic] is ninety miles. The town of Norwich is distant ten miles from the sea, and from there to aġryms [Grimsby] is a hundred and fifty miles by sea. From the said town of Yarmouth the sea[-coast] curves round in a circle, but still tending northwards. From the said town of Grimsby to the town of afrwīk [York, Evrvic] is eighty miles. The latter lies at a distance from the Ocean, and on the border of the peninsula of sqwsyh [Scotia], which is contiguous with the island of England… From the town of York to the estuary of the river of bskh [Boston] is a hundred and forty miles, and Boston is a fortress (ḥiṣn) situated on this river twelve miles upstream from the sea. From the aforementioned of Grimsby to the town of nqwls [Lincoln, Nicolas] inland is a hundred miles; the river flows through the midst of it and flows out of it towards the town of Grimsby, but flows into the sea on the south of the latter, as we have mentioned before. From the inland Lincoln to the town of York is moreover ninety miles, and from thence to the town of dūnālma [Durham, Dunelme] eighty miles northwards.(3)

Al-Idrīsī was by no means the first author of an Arabic text to discuss and describe this island, as I have discussed elsewhere, but he was the first to name it Inqalṭāra, England (Angleterre), rather than Britain and the first to leave us a description of places in Lincolnshire.(4) In terms of his knowledge of this area, which has been considered to derive either from one or more informants or even from a visit to England by al-Idrīsī himself,(5) we can highlight several points of interest.

First, Lincoln appears as Nqwls,(6) reflecting the French name for the city, Nicole, that is recorded from early twelfth century through to the late fourteenth and which shows the Anglo-Norman interchange of n/l arising from dissimilation.(7) Lincoln is described in the text as being located on both sides of the River Witham, something that accurately reflects the twelfth-century situation with the old walled city to the north and the medieval suburb of Wigford to the south, and this is replicated on al-Idrīsī’s accompanying map of England, where Lincoln is the only city depicted straddling a river (see Fig. 1). Al-Idrīsī’s claim that this river both flows into the sea to the south of Grimsby and ‘flows through the midst of it [Lincoln] and flows out of it towards the town of Grimsby’ is similarly of interest. This has been described as ‘a major error’ and a result of confusion, but this need not be the case.(8) Rather, it could again reflect a degree of genuine knowledge of the Lincoln region in the first half of the twelfth century, as Lincoln and Grimsby were indeed connected by inland waterways in the twelfth century, with one being able to travel by boat from the Witham at Lincoln north-westwards along the Foss Dyke and then down the Trent and the Humber through to Grimsby after 1121, when the Foss Dyke was renovated and made navigable again by Henry I.(9) That al-Idrīsī (or his informant) was indeed aware of this route is confirmed by his statement that ‘from the inland Lincoln to the town of York is moreover ninety miles’, something that is certainly not true via road or sea, but is almost exactly true if one travelled to York by boat via the Foss Dyke, the Trent and then the Ouse.(10)

Second, Boston appears as Bskh/Bska(11) and is shown situated just inland of the sea and located on the same river as Lincoln on al-Idrīsī’s map of the east coast (Fig. 1). Interestingly, Boston is described as a ḥiṣn, a ‘fortress, stronghold, entrenchment’,(12) in contrast to Lincoln and Grimsby, which are each described as a madīna, a ‘town, city’.(13) The reason for this description is open to question, but it is worth noting that the Barditch around the town is thought to date from the eleventh–twelfth centuries and has been interpreted in the past as a ‘defensive ditch’; needless to say, al-Idrīsī’s comment may well add further weight to this interpretation.(14)

Third and finally, it seems clear from both al-Idrīsī’s text and his map that the area from Yarmouth to York, including Lincolnshire, was the part of the east coast of England in which he was most interested. There is, for example, nothing depicted or mentioned to the south of Yarmouth until one reaches the mouth of the Thames and, moreover, little evidence for any knowledge of any sites north of the Humber aside from Durham (which is wrongly mapped on the western side of England, not the east), with the northern bank of the Humber being omitted entirely so that York is consequently placed on the coast and close to the border with Scotland. Similarly, it is noteworthy that the only river depicted between the Thames and Scotland is the Witham. Quite why the Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī khtirāq al-āfāq was particularly interested in this area of England is unclear, but we might tentatively wonder whether Lincolnshire’s well-known role in the medieval wool trade from the pre-Conquest period onwards might not have somehow motivated this interest.(15) Certainly, the early fourteenth-century Taqwīm al-buldān, ‘Survey of the countries’ (1321), of Abū l-Fidāʾ, which makes explicit use of a thirteenth-century Arabic description of England by Ibn Saʿīd al-Maghribī (1213–86), praises the quality of English wool, noting that in England ‘is made the fine scarlet cloth from the wool of their sheep, which is fine like silk’.(16) The fame of English wool and the regard in which it was held in medieval Europe is well-known, but this reference and two further ones in the early fourteenth century from Rashīd al-Dīn and Banākatī to ‘exceedingly fine scarlet cloth’(17) from England imply that the renown of English wool products reached well beyond Europe and the Mediterranean in the medieval period.

'Plan of Boston, England', by Thomas Moule, 1837, slightly cropped, showing the Barditch around the town (Source: The Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library; licensed for reuse under a Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence via Flickr).

Footnotes

1. The only reference to it by a modern Lincolnshire historian that I am aware of is in Stephen H. Rigby’s Boston, 1086 –1225: A Medieval Boom Town (Lincoln, 2017), pp. 8, 19, 61, who encountered it via an earlier version of this paper posted on my academic blog at <https://www.caitlingreen.org/2016/03/al-idrisi-twelfth-century-map.html>.

2. For al-Idrīsī, see J.-C. Ducène, a'l-Idrīsī, Abū ʿAbdallāh', in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas, and E. Rowson (Leiden, 2018), consulted online on 25 February 2021 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_32372>.

3. A. F. L. Beeston, 'Idrisi’s Account of the British Isles', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13.2 (1950), 265–80 at pp. 278, 279–80, with minor modifications; note, I have included the transliterated Arabic names as read, discussed and identified by Beeston, pp. 273, 275–7. Grimsby is mentioned by name in the previous section by al-Idrīsī, although without any further details, see Recueil de Voyages et de Mémoires Publié par la Société de Géographie: Géographie d’Édrisi, ed. P. A. Jaubert (Paris, 1840), vol. 2, p. 374.

4. On the name of England in Arabic works, see also D. G. König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2015), pp. 277–8. For an earlier Arabic text that mentions Britain and gives more than just names, see C. Green, 'Britain, the Byzantine Empire, and the concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’: Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā’s ninth-century Arabic description of Britain', in Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England, ed. K. L. Jolly and B. Brooks (Woodbridge, 2022), pp. 94–114. See also D. N. Dunlop, 'The British Isles according to medieval Arabic authors', Islamic Quarterly 4 (1957), 11–28.

5. For the latter suggestion, see C. Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. AD 600–1150: A Comparative Archaeology (Cambridge, 2013), p. 323, who accepts that al-Idrīsī ‘had visited England prior to his arrival in Sicily in c. 1138’; for the former, see Beeston, 'Idrisi’s Account', p. 280.

6. Beeston, 'Idrisi’s Account', pp. 269, 277.

7. K. Cameron, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire: Part One, The Place-Names of the County of the City of Lincoln (Nottingham, 1982), pp. 2–3, and see, for example, A Survey of the Antiquities of the City of Lincoln (Lincoln, 1848), pp. 23–4.

8. M. Ferrar, 'Al-Idrisi; The Book of Roger The description of L’Angleterre', Cartography Unchained, website, December 2020, consulted online on 25 February 2021 <https://www.cartographyunchained.com/pdfs/cgid1.pdf>, p. 10.

9. F. M. Stenton, 'The road system of medieval England', Economic History Review, 7 (1936), 1–21 at p. 20; M. J. Jones, D. Stocker and A. Vince, The City by the Pool: Assessing the Archaeology of the City of Lincoln (Oxford, 2003), pp. 116, 241; Simeon of Durham, Historia Regum, s.a. 1121: ‘In the same year, king Henry cut a large canal from Torksey to Lincoln and by causing the river Trent to flow into it, he made it navigable for vessels’, trans. J. Stevenson, Simeon of Durham: A History of the Kings of England (Felinfach, 1987), p. 188.

10. Interestingly, the distance given from Grimsby to Lincoln is approximately correct too, in this case if one sailed down the east coast of Lincolnshire and up the Witham via Boston.

11. See Beeston, 'Idrisi’s Account', p. 277 n. 55 and Arabic text at p. 269, line 55; Géographie d’Édrisi, ed. Jaubert, vol. 2, p. 425. The form here suggests that the name encountered may have been one in which the town’s name had already been shortened to Boston or similar, rather than the original Botuluestan etc., although according to Victor Watts this form is only recorded in England from 1235: V. Watts, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (Cambridge, 2004), p. 71. With further regard to the name as given by al-Idrīsī, it may also be worth noting that Boston was ‘established within lands belonging to Skirbeck’, just to its south, which derives from Old Norse skirr + bekkr, ‘the clear stream’: K. Cameron, A Dictionary of Lincolnshire Place-Names (Nottingham, 1998), p. 111; N. Grayson, Lincolnshire Extensive Urban Survey: Boston, Historic England/LCC project no. 2897 (Lincoln, 2019), p. 4; Rigby, Boston, pp. 4, 20. The name ‘Boston’ does, of course, appear in a variety of forms on early maps—for example, on the map of England attributed to the Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte in Marino Sanudo Torsello’s Liber secretorum fidelium crucis of c. 1321, Boston is Sanbetor whilst the Wash is labelled as the Gulffo de Sanbetor (British Library, Additional 27376 f. 181).

12. H. Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J. Milton Cowan, 4th edn (Wiesbaden, 1979), p. 214.

13. Wehr, Dictionary, p. 1055.

14. D. M. Owen, 'The beginnings of the port of Boston', in A Prospect of Lincolnshire, ed. N. Field and A. White (Lincoln, 1984), pp. 42–5 at p. 43; Grayson, Boston, p. 5; Rigby, Boston, p. 14.

15. On the early medieval roots of the Lincolnshire wool trade, see for example R. Faith, 'The structure of the market for wool in early medieval Lincolnshire', Economic History Review 65.2 (2012), 674–700. Note, in about 1200 Boston was second only to London in the scale of its overseas trade, with its trading activity being initially largely based around the wool trade, for which it was England’s most important port at that time: Rigby, Boston, pp. 1–2; S. H. Rigby, Boston and Grimsby in the Middle Ages (University of London PhD Thesis, 1982), pp. 175–6, 195–6.

16. Dunlop, 'The British Isles', p. 25; M. Reinaud, Géographie d'Aboulféda, 2 vols (Paris: A L'Imprimerie Nationale, 1848), vol. 2, p. 266.

17. Dunlop, 'The British Isles', p. 26.

The text content of this post and page is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2022, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

Macamathehou in Lincolnshire and the evidence for people named Muhammad in medieval England

The aim of the following draft is to offer some thoughts on a local name from thirteenth-century Lincolnshire, Macamathehou, that involves a version of the Arabic name Muhammad (Middle English Makomet/Macamethe, Old French Mahomet). Whilst it has been plausibly seen as an instance of a variant of the name of Muhammed being used to mean 'heathen', 'pagan idol' or similar (based on the false but common medieval Christian belief that the prophet Muhammad was worshipped as a god), here in reference to a barrow that was considered to be a pre-Christian site, it is worth noting that there are a small number of people with names and surnames derived from Arabic Muḥammad apparently living in twelfth- to fourteenth-century England.

Figure 1: the location of Macamathehou between Spridlington and Faldingworth parishes in Lincolnshire; click the image or here for a larger version (image: C. R. Green/OpenStreetMap and its contributors). 

The existence of the intriguing local name Macamathehou in the parish of Spridlington, Lincolnshire, was first noted in 2001 by Kenneth Cameron, John Field and John Insley in Place-Names of Lincolnshire VI (PNL), with both attestations of the name dating from the thirteenth century (the reign of King Henry III, 1216–72).(1) They identify the two elements of the name as being Old Norse haugr, 'mound, barrow', and Middle English Makomet/Macamethe, which derives from the name of the prophet Muhammad (Medieval Latin Machometus/Mahumetus, Anglo-Norman Mahumet/Mahomet/Machomete, Old French Mahomet < Arabic Muḥammad, probably via an Arabic regional form Maḥammad).(2) Needless to say, this solution is most intriguing and has, moreover, found favour with other place-name specialist, including the Vocabulary of English Place-Names (VEPN) and Richard Coates.(3)

As to the import of this name, the easiest conclusion—and the one endorsed by PNL, VEPN and Coates—is that the first element, Macamethe/Maumate etc, is not functioning simply as a normal Middle English rendering of the name Muhammad/Mahomet, but rather as a word indicative of heathen or pagan idolatry, based on the false but common medieval Christian belief that the prophet Muhammad was worshipped as a god. So, PNL describes the name as meaning 'the heathen mound', with the first element being 'a corrupt ME [Middle English] form of the name of the prophet Mohammed, for which v. MED [Middle English Dictionary], s.v. Makomete, also used to denote a pagan god or an idol'.(4) This is taken up by Richard Coates, who says that it has been suggested, 'with great plausibility', that Macamathehou in Spridlington parish 'is a Middle English name meaning "Mahomet mound", i.e. "heathen mound"', and points to 'the repeated compound of OE hæðen + byrgels "heathen burial"' as a potential comparison.(5) Likewise, the VEPN's draft section on M includes the following discussion:

makomet ME, 'idol, pagan god', an application of the name of the Arab prophet Mohammed (commonly though mistakenly believed by medieval Christians to have been worshipped as a god)... It occurs early in Macamathehou (f.n.) 1216–72 L:6·211 (haugr), presumably to be interpreted as 'heathen mound'.(6)

On the whole, this interpretation is probably the safest option. There are certainly a handful of references to 'heathen' barrows in Old English charter bounds, for example of leofwynne mearce to þam hæþenan beorge, 'from Leofwine's boundary to the heathen barrow', in the charter S956 relating to Drayton, Hampshire, and dated AD 1019, although none are recorded from Lincolnshire.(7) It has also been suggested that the Lincolnshire names Bloater Hill (North Willingham) and Blod Hou (Barrow-on-Humber) derive from Old Norse blóthaugr, 'a sacrificial mound', whilst other names involving haugr certainly refer to supernatural/demonic creatures—for example, Gasthehowe/Gastehowe, Ashby Puerorum (Lincolnshire), recorded in the thirteenth century and deriving from Middle English gast/Old English gāst, 'ghost, dead-spirit', or names like Scratters (Scrathou, in Hayton, East Riding of Yorkshire) and Scrathowes (Scrathou, in Osmotherley, North Riding of Yorkshire), which derive from Old Norse skratti, 'devil, wizard' + haugr.(8) Furthermore, the Old English compound hæðen + byrgels, 'heathen burial', does indeed recur frequently in Late Saxon charter bounds, with these names often said to be identifiable with barrows in the landscape.(9)

On the other hand, there are some possible issues with this explanation, and other interpretations are possible of Spridlington's Macamathehou. First, the comparison with the many instances of the OE compound hæðen + byrgels, ‘heathen burial’, is perhaps not as convincing as it might seem. Not only is a link between this term and barrows only demonstrable in a handful of instances, but Andrew Reynolds has also suggested that the sense of the term was primarily not ‘pagan’, but rather ‘unconsecrated’, and that it denoted burials of executed offenders and other social outcasts, which renders the proposed value of these names as support for interpreting Macamathehou  as meaning ‘heathen mound’ open to significant debate.(10) Second, if the above is correct, then this would be the only known instance of a derivative of the Arabic name Muhammad being used in a place-name to indicate a 'heathen mound' or similar, which is potentially concerning—the other elements noted above all recur in multiple names. Third, the element identified by PNL and VEPN as being present in Macamethehou is Middle English Makomet(e). The Middle English Dictionary (MED) on Makomet(e)/Macamethe etc, however, makes it clear that the primary use of this word in Middle English is as a form of the name Muhammad, not as a word referring to an 'idol'/'pagan god', with the vast majority of quotations provided by the MED referring either the prophet Muhammad or people named Muhammad; the only exceptions are a single quotation from Layamon's Brut (c. 1200, mahimet, lacking the -c-), and three from two later texts.(11) The form of the name Muhammad that was primarily—although not exclusively—used in the sense 'pagan deity, idol', is rather Maumet/Maumate, mentioned above, deriving from Anglo-Norman Maumet, a reduced form of Mauhoumet, Old French Mahomet/Mahommet.(12)

In this light, it is worth considering whether it is possible that the name Macamathehou could somehow be named from a person named Makomet/Muhammad or similar living in medieval England. Certainly, it should be noted that multiple local names relating to mounds/barrows do seem to be named after people who owned estates or land in the area. For example, Andrew Reynolds draws attention to the bounds of a mid-tenth-century charter for Swallowcliffe, Wiltshire (S468), that records the burial site of a seventh‐century woman whose grave had been cut into an existing mound as Posses hlaew, noting that 'Poss is a male name, and thus the mound is apparently not named after its Anglo‐Saxon occupant', implying that it was instead named after a later estate owner.(13) As Irene Bower long ago pointed out, such a situation can be credibly paralleled in Lincolnshire, with a number of Lincolnshire names involving haugr seeming to contain the same personal-name as is found in the same or a neighbouring parish-name—so, Scalehau (Skalli + haugr) was located near to Scawby (Skalli + bȳ), with Kenneth Cameron commenting that the two were 'no doubt named from the same man'; Leggeshou (Leggr + haugr) was located on the boundary of Legsby parish (Leggr + bȳ); Katehou/Catehowe (Kati + haugr) was located in South Cadeby (Kati + bȳ); and a Grimaldeshawe (Grimaldi + haugr) was recorded in the neighbouring parish to Grimoldby (Grimaldi + bȳ), perhaps on the boundary between the two.(14)

Figure 2: Section from the Pipe Roll Society publication of The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Seventh Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1160–1161 (London: Wyman & Sons, 1885), p. 10, dealing with Mahumet of Wiltshire (image: Internet Archive).

As to the likelihood of someone named Muhammad or one of its Anglo-Norman/Middle English variants (Mahumet, Makomet and similar) actually living in medieval England, this is perhaps less far-fetched than might be assumed. Katharine Keats-Rohan and John Moore have directed attention to the Wiltshire entries of five consecutive Pipe Rolls of Henry II (1160/61–1164/65) that refer to a man named Mahumet, whose name-form Moore considers very difficult to explain as anything other than a rendering of Muhammad and which is accepted as such by the OED and MED. This Mahumet is recorded in the Pipe Rolls only because he was fined for his part in an unlicensed duel with a John de Merleberge, probably in or near Marlborough Castle, and it seems he was not an especially wealthy man, as he was pardoned the last mark of his fine due to his poverty.(15) Furthermore, Mahumet of Wiltshire was not the only man with this name for whom we have evidence from medieval England. For example, a Theobald filius Mahumet (or filius Mahomet) is recorded from early thirteenth-century Hampshire in the Pipe Rolls of Henry III for 1222–24; another man named Mahomet is recorded in 1327, when Edward III issued him and six others a pardon at Newton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire, for 'offenses in Ireland'; and a Mahummet Saraceno occurs in the Close Rolls of Henry III for 1254. Furthermore, a number of people surnamed Mahumet and similar are recorded in documents of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for example a Humphrey Mahumet in a charter of Southwick Priory, Hampshire, a Herbert Maumet who was sergeant of Portsmouth in the mid-thirteenth century, and a Radulphus Maumet who is recorded in the reign of King John.(16) Moore also notes the presence of someone bearing another 'apparent Arab name' in twelfth-century Hampshire, a certain Paucamatus, a name that he considers to probably reflect Bakmat, who is recorded in Winchester from 1159/60 until 1183/4 and who is associated with a man named Stephanus Sarracenus, one or both of whom may be of some relevance here.(17)

Looking more generally at the question of the presence of people who were Muslims or of potential Muslim ancestry in medieval England, and so who might bear names like Mahumet/Makomet and similar, Richard of Devizes in his description of London from c. 1192 certainly implies that there were 'Moors' in that city then, when he writes that:

You will arrive in London... do not mingle with the throngs in the eating-houses; avoid dice and gambling, the theatre and the tavern. You will encounter more braggarts than in the whole of France. The number of parasites is infinite. Actors, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, Moors, flatterers... All this sort of people fill all the houses.(18)

We do need to be careful here, however. The word translated ‘Moors’ here is actually garamantes, which may indicate an origin for this section in a classical or literary source, rather than reality, especially as influence from Horace’s Satires has been identified in the subsequent sections of Richard’s description of London.(19) More certainly relevant may be recent archaeological excavations at the medieval cemetery of St John’s Hospital, Lichfield, which revealed the burials of between two and five people of African ancestry, some of apparently high status, and at Ipswich, where nine people out of a total of a total of 150 excavated from a cemetery there appear to be of 'sub-Saharan' African descent, spread across thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, with the earliest having oxygen isotope results consistent with an early life spent in North Africa/Tunisia.(20) Likewise, recent work on burials in a mid-fourteenth-century cemetery at East Smithfield, London, indicated that 29% of a sample of 41 people buried there were of ‘non-White European ancestry’.(21) 

In the above light, it may also be worth noting that both Henry II and his son Richard I seem to have had 'Saracen mercenaries' in their employ, the latter having as many as 120 such mercenaries and apparently including at least some of them in the garrison of Domfront, Normandy.(22) Similarly, it is intriguing to note that knowledge of the location of medieval Lincoln on either side of the River Witham and the existence of the Foss Dyke as a waterway between that city and the River Trent seems to have reached the great Muslim scholar Muhammad al-Idrisi, who included these facts in his geographical encyclopaedia Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq, written for Roger II of Sicily and completed in 1154—indeed, it has been suggested that al-Idrisi probably travelled to England himself during the first half of the twelfth century, which is a point of some significance.(23)

Figure 3: Al-Idrisi's mid-twelfth-century Arabic map of Britain, from a late sixteenth-century copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the map is split across three different drawings which have been combined together here so that the whole island can be seen (Bodleian Library MS. Pococke 375 folios 281b-282a, 308b, 310b-311a)—click the image or here for a larger view. Lincolnshire is on the left hand side, as the map is orientated with north at the bottom; the river flowing nearly horizontally from the left to right is the Witham, with Boston near the sea and Lincoln upstream, where the river flows through the town, just as it did in the medieval period when it divided the old Lower City from its medieval southern suburbs (image: Bodleian Library)

Finally, attention might also be directed to the evidence for at least some 'Saracens' having been unwillingly brought into England in the medieval period, although this is perhaps less directly relevant to the current enquiry. So, the Flores Historiarum under the year 1271 makes reference to Thomas de Clare having returned to England from the Holy Land with 'four Saracen prisoners',(24) and the Calendar of Patent Rolls for 1259 includes a mandate for the arrest of a runaway 'Ethiopian... sometime a Saracen' who had apparently escaped his master:

Mandate to all persons to arrest an Ethiopian of the name of Bartholomew, sometime a Saracen, slave (servus) of Roger de Lyntin, whom the said Roger brought with him to England; the said Ethiopian having run away from his said lord, who has sent an esquire of his to look for him: and they are to deliver him to the said esquire to the use of the said Roger.(25)

In sum, whilst we can point to no specific man named Mahumet/Makomet/Macamathe/Maumet (< Muhammad) present in twelfth-/thirteenth-century Lincolnshire after whom Macamathehou in Spridlington might be named, it seems clear that it is not entirely impossible that someone bearing such a personal name or something similar could lie behind this mound-/barrow-name, rather than it simply being a folkloric name intended to convey the meaning 'heathen barrow' or similar. Although such a usage of the name Muhammad might parallel names such as Scrathou and Gastehowe and be reflected in the usage of the medieval form Maumet and similar to mean 'pagan deity' or 'idol' in Middle English, there is significantly less evidence for the form Makomet being used in this way. Furthermore, not only are there no other instances of Makomet or Maumet being used in local names to indicate a perceived 'heathen' or 'pagan' character for landscape features such as mounds and barrows, but there is evidence for at least some people named variants of Muhammad living in medieval England between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Additionally, there is also a small amount of textual evidence for Muslims and people of potential Muslim origins being present in England and Normandy in this era, some being clearly captured or enslaved, but others potentially living in cities such as London, Ipswich and Lichfield, and some even perhaps being relatively high-status or in the employ of the king. Such people were probably not present in England in great numbers, but the evidence we have for this is not insignificant, and it may at least give us further pause for thought when considering just what the meaning of Macamathehou might be. 

Footnotes

1.     K. Cameron, J. Field & J. Insley, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire: Part Six, The Wapentakes of Manley and Aslacoe, Survey of English Place-Names LXXVII (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2001), p. 211; the name appears as both Macamathehou, which they treat as primary, and Mornmatehou.
2.     Cameron, Field and Insley, Place-Names of Lincolnshire VI, p. 211; Oxford English Dictionary, 'Mahomet, n.', OED Online, third edition, Oxford University Press, September 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/112410, accessed 10 November 2020; 'Makomet(e), n.', in S. M. Kuhn & Reidy (eds), Middle English Dictionary: Part M.1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1975), p. 83. On haugr, see M. Gelling & A. Cole, The Landscape of Place-Names (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2000), p. 174.
3.     R. Coates, 'Azure Mouse, Bloater Hill, Goose Puddings, and One Land called the Cow: continuity and conundrums in Lincolnshire minor names', Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 39 (2007), 73–143 at p. 85; VEPN, The Vocabulary of English Place-Names: M, draft version, online edition at www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/ins/documents/vocabulary-of-english-place-names-m-draft.pdf, accessed 10 November 2020, p. 14.
4.     Cameron, Field and Insley, Place-Names of Lincolnshire VI, p. 211.
5.     Coates, 'Lincolnshire minor names', p. 85.
6.     VEPN, The Vocabulary of English Place-Names: M, draft version, p. 14.
7.     A. Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 274.
8.     Coates, 'Lincolnshire minor names', p. 85; K. Cameron, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire: Part Two, The Wapentake of Yarborough, Survey of English Place-Names LXIV/LXV (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 1991), p. 24—note, a similar name, Blodhowfeld/Blodhowgate, also occurs in Thurmaston parish, Leicestershire. On gastehowe/gasthehowe, see I. M. Bower, The Place-Names of Lindsey (North Lincolnshire) (University of Leeds PhD Thesis, 1940), pp. xviii, 200; for Scratters and Scrathowes, see, for example, A. H. Smith, English Place-Name Elements, Survey of English Place-Names XXVI (Cambridge: English Place-Name Society, 1956), Part 2, p. 126.
9.     Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs, pp. 274–7.
10.     Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs, pp. 219–22.
11.     Middle English Dictionary, 'Makomet(e, n.', in Robert E. Lewis, et al. (eds), Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), online edition in F. McSparran et al. (eds), Middle English Compendium (Ann Arbor, 2000–18), quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED26593, accessed 10 November 2020.
12.     Middle English Dictionary, 'Maumet, n.', in Robert E. Lewis, et al. (eds), Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), online edition in F. McSparran et al. (eds), Middle English Compendium (Ann Arbor, 2000–18), quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED27106, accessed 10 November 2020. For the use of Maumet and similar as a surname, see below and MED sense 2(d).
13.     Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs, pp. 203–04.
14.     Bower, Place-Names of Lindsey, pp. xviii, 253–4; K. Cameron, A Dictionary of Lincolnshire Place-Names (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 1998), pp. 26, 80, 107. See also Hawardeshou, the meeting-place of Haverstoe Wapentake, which was almost certainly a barrow in Hawerby (Hawardebi) parish, both names involving the Scandinavian personal name Hāwarth, and Calnodeshou, the meeting-place of Candleshoe Wapentake, which was probably on Candlesby Hill, named from Candlesby, Calnodesbi: Cameron, Dictionary, pp. 27–8, 61. Likewise, the meeting-place of the wapentake of Wraggoe was presumably a Wraghehou (Wraggi + haugr), which may well have been at Wragohill in Wragby (Wraggi + bȳ): Bowers, Place-Names of Lindsey, p. 250; Cameron, Dictionary, pp. 143–4.
15.     K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, 'Queries', Prosopon, 9 (1998), p. 6; J. S. Moore, 'Who was "Mahumet"? Arabs in Angevin England', Prosopon, 11 (2000), pp. 1–7; D. Thornton, K. Keats-Rohan & R. Wood, 'Mahumet', COEL Database: Continental Origins of English Landholders, 1066-1166, [data collection], UK Data Service SN: 5687, doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-5687-1; OED third edition, 'Mahomet, n.'; Middle English Dictionary, 'Makomet(e, n.'. See The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Seventh Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1160–1161, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society IV (London: Wyman & Sons, 1885), p. 10; The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Eighth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1161–1162, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society V (London: Wyman & Sons, 1885), p. 13; The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Ninth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1162–1163, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society VI (London: Wyman & Sons, 1886), p. 46; The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Tenth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1163–1164, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society VII (London: Wyman & Sons, 1886), p. 14; and The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Eleventh Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second, A.D. 1164–1165, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society VIII (London: Wyman & Sons, 1887), p. 57.
16.     K. S. B. Keats-Rohan in Moore, 'Who was "Mahumet"?', pp. 6–7; The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Sixth Year of the Reign of King Henry III, Michaelmas 1222 (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1999), p. 96, and The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Eighth Year of the Reign of King Henry III, Michaelmas 1224 (London: Pipe Roll Society, 2005), p. 12; Calendar of Patent Rolls: Edward III, A.D. 1327–1330 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1891), p. 123; Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III: A.D. 1253–1254 (London: HMSO, 1929), p. 211; K. A. Hanna (ed.), The Cartularies of Southwick Priory: Part 1 (Winchester: Hampshire County Council, 1988), pp. 16–17, and K. A. Hanna (ed.), The Cartularies of Southwick Priory: Part 2 (Winchester: Hampshire County Council, 1989); Middle English Dictionary, 'Maumet, n.', sense 2(d), as surname, and Rotuli de oblatis et finibus in Turri Londinensi asservati, tempore Regis Johannis, ed. T. D. Hardy (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1845), p. 455.
17.     Moore, 'Who was "Mahumet"?', p. 3.
18.     Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First, ed. and trans. J. T. Appleby (London, 1963), pp. 65–6, with modifications by W. Johansson, 'London's Medieval Sodomites', in History of Homosexuality in Europe and America, ed. W. R. Dynes & S. Donaldson (New York and London: Garland, 1992), pp. 159–63.
19.     J. Scattergood, ‘London and money: Chaucer’s Complaint to his Purse’, in Chaucer and the City, ed. A. Butterfield (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 162–76 at pp. 171–2.
20.     Ipswich: BBC, History Cold Case: Series 1, Episode 1—Ipswich Man (broadcast 27 July 2010); 'Skeleton of medieval African found in Ipswich sheds new light on Britain's ethnic history', BBC Press Office, 2 February 2010, online at www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/05_may/02/history.shtml, accessed 18 November 2020; K. Wade, Ipswich Archive Summaries: Franciscan Way, IAS 5003 (Ipswich: Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service, 2014), pp. 9, 10, 12, online at archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/ipswich_5003_2015/downloads.cfm; and Xanthé Mallett, pers. comm.. Lichfield: C. Coutts, 'St John’s Hospital, Lichfield: a Black and White Medieval Cemetery', talk at the Market Hall Museum, Warwick, on 24 July 2017, online abstract at www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/listings/region/west-midlands/st-johns-hospital-lichfield-black-white-medieval-cemetery/, accessed 18 November 2020; Jasmine Kilburn, pers. comm..
21.     R. Redfern and J. T. Hefner, ‘“Officially absent but actually present”: bioarchaeological evidence for population diversity in London during the Black Death, AD 1348–50’, in Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People, ed. M. L. Mant and A. J. Holland (London: Academic Press, 2019), pp. 69–114.
22.     Moore, 'Who was "Mahumet"?', p. 1; F. M. Powicke, 'The Saracen mercenaries of Richard I', Scottish Historical Review, 8 (1911), 104–05.
23.     C. R. Green, 'Al-Idrisi's twelfth-century map and description of eastern England', blog post, 28 March 2016, online at www.caitlingreen.org/2016/03/al-idrisi-twelfth-century-map.html, accessed 18 November 2020; A. F. L. Beeston, 'Idrisi's Account of the British Isles', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 13.2 (1950), 265–80 at pp. 278, 279–80; C. Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. AD 600–1150: A Comparative Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 323 ('Al-Idrisi... had visited England prior to his arrival in Sicily in c. 1138')
24.     C. D. Yonge (trans.), The Flowers of History (London: Bohn, 1853), vol. 2, p. 453.
25.     Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry III: Volume 5, 1258–1266, ed. H. C. Maxwell Lyte (London: HMSO, 1910), p. 28, and see further M. Ray, 'A Black Slave on the run in Thirteenth-Century England', Nottingham Medieval Studies, 51 (2007), 111–9. Note, ‘Ethiopian’ here probably means simply someone of ‘Black African ancestry’, rather than someone from modern Ethiopia, given Late Antique and medieval uses of this term.

The text content of this post and page is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2020, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

Were there camels in medieval Britain? A brief note on Bactrian camels and dromedaries in fifteenth-century Kent

The following brief note is concerned with an intriguing fifteenth-century reference to both Bactrian camels and dromedaries (aka Arabian camels) in England, examining both the context of these specific animals in late medieval Kent before moving on to look at the wider evidence for the presence of camels in medieval Britain and Ireland.

King Arthur riding a camel on a glass roundel of c. 1500; click here for a larger version of this picture (image: Met Museum).

Previous posts on here have discussed the archaeological and textual evidence for the presence and use of camels in Roman and early medieval Europe, but have only touched on their presence in medieval Britain and Ireland. The prompt for the present discussion is an intriguing reference in the fifteenth-century work known as John Stone's Chronicle, f. 78b:

In the year of the Lord 1466, on the twelfth day of the month of December, namely, on the vigil of St. Lucy the Virgin, there came to Canterbury [gap in text] the Lord Patriarch of Antioch, who, in honor of the king and queen, had here four dromedaries and two camels. And this had never before been seen in England.(1)

Needless to say, this is a most intriguing reference, indicating the presence of both two-humped Bactrian camels and single-humped dromedaries (or Arabian camels) in medieval Kent! The chronicle itself is preserved in a fifteenth-century manuscript, CCCC MS 417, written by a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, in 1467, with contemporary additions through until 1472, and as such can be considered an exemplary witness. The context of the presence of six camels at Canterbury is rather more mysterious. In particular, the identity of the 'Lord Patriarch of Antioch' who seems to have brought these camels to Canterbury 'in honour of the king and queen', has often been unclear. The first editor of the text, W. G. Searle, identified him simply as 'Peter II, Maronite patriarch' of Antioch, following W. F. Hook's suggestion in his 1867 Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury.(2) However, it seems likely that he was, in fact, Ludovico Severi da Bologna, a Franciscan observant who styled himself as Patriarch of Antioch and papal legate to the East.

One of a number of gold camels bearing flower baskets that march across the fifteenth-century Erpingham Chasuble, embroidered in late medieval England (image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, used under their non-commercial licence). 

A miniature of a camel from a manuscript probably made for King Edward IV of England (1461–70, 1471–83), who was the king in whose honour the six camels were paraded by the Patriarch of Antioch in 1466; from MS Royal 15 E III f. 200 (image: British Library).

Although Ludovico da Bologna is sometimes described as a fraud, this is arguably unfair. Ludovico first appears in a papal bull of 1454, when he is residing in Jerusalem and is granted privileges and dispensation by Pope Nicholas V to travel to Ethiopia and India, and in 1456 he is again engaged to act as Pope Callixtus III's messenger to Ethiopia. In 1457 Ludovico is sent by the pope with letters of recommendation to the Christians of Persia and Georgia, and the next pope, Pius II, confirmed these tasks and the perogatives granted to him in 1458. In 1460, Ludovico returned from the East accompanied by what seem to be genuine ambassadors from a number of eastern rulers including David Megas Komnenos, the Emperor of Trezibond, and George VIII of Georgia, who were seeking aid against the Ottomans, and Uzun Hasan, the Turkoman ruler of Persia, who was said to be ready to provide military assistance. Upon meeting with Pope Pius II, the ambassadors not only specified the readiness of their kingdoms to engage in military action, but also requested that Pope Pius II name Ludovico as Patriarch of Antioch, something that the pope agreed to do but stipulated that Ludovico should not use the title until he was consecrated as such by him after both the completion of his mission and the territorial jurisdiction of the patriarchate had been defined. Ludovico's party was then sent on by the pope to Milan, France and Burgundy—where they were received with apparent enthusiasm and great celebrations—in order to obtain and confirm commitments for a future crusade against the Ottomans, before returning to Italy in 1461.

It is at this point that things seem to have gone somewhat awry, as Ludovico da Bologna and his party for some reason decided not to wait any longer for Pope Pius II to do as he promised and instead had Ludovico consecrated as Patriarch of Antioch immediately in Venice, a decision that aroused papal wrath and saw Ludovico having to leave Venice to escape this. In the long-term, however, this dispute over his proper consecration as patriarch seems not to have greatly affected Ludovico's ability to function as a papal envoy and diplomat. In 1465, for example, he is recorded as acting as papal legate for Pope Paul II (1464–71) to the first Crimean khan Hacı I Giray and then subsequently ambassador from the khan to Casimir IV Jagiellon, King of Poland, with Ludovico using the title Patriarch of Antioch whilst in Poland. Similarly, in 1468–9 he seems to have been present in Denmark as papal ambassador and 'Patriarch', where he helped in ending the rivalries between Denmark and Sweden, and in 1471 he was in Rome meeting with Pope Paul II on behalf of the Uzun Hasan of Persia. In 1472, the new pope, Sixtus IV, reconfirmed and republished Ludovico's nomination to Patriarch of Antioch and invited him to resume negotiations for an anti-Ottoman alliance. Ludovico was subsequently also appointed by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, as his ambassador to Persia in 1473, and in 1475 he was recorded in Persia in audience with Uzun Hasan, who sent back positive messages with him to Europe.

In light of all of the above, it thus seems highly likely that the 'Lord Patriarch of Antioch' who arrived in England in December 1466 can be identified as Ludovico Severi da Bologna. Not only was he clearly active as a diplomat in this period, visiting a number of northern European countries as a papal ambassador using just this title, but he also clearly had close connections to a number of eastern rulers and states that might have provided the camels that he brought with him 'in honor of the king and queen' of England, if they weren't sourced in Europe itself. The visit of 1466 was presumably an otherwise-unrecorded diplomatic endeavour by Ludovico acting as 'Patriarch of Antioch' to promote positive relations and commitments for an anti-Ottoman alliance between the rulers of East and Europe.

A miniature of a man riding a camel, probably drawn in south-east England (possibly Rochester, Kent); from the mid-thirteenth-century MS Royal 12 F XIII f. 38v (image: British Library).

If this is the immediate political context for the presence of four dromedaries (Arabian camels) and two Bactrian camels in fifteenth-century Kent, what of the wider context of camels in medieval Britain? Whilst John Stone's assertion that such a mixed troop of six Bactrian and Arabian camels 'had never before been seen in England' could be true, it is demonstrably not the case that 1466 represented the first appearance of camels in Britain since the Roman era. Indeed, the earliest reference to camels as definitely present in medieval Britain comes rather from the beginning of the twelfth century. William of Malmesbury, writing in the early twelfth century, records the following of the menagerie of King Henry I of England (1100–35) installed at Woodstock near Oxford, which he had apparently visited himself:

Henry took a passionate delight in the marvels of other countries, with much affability... asking foreign kings to send him animals not found in England—lions, leopards, lynxes, camels—and he had a park called Woodstock in which he kept his pets of this description. He had put there an animal called a porcupine, sent him by William of Montpellier, which is mentioned by Pliny in the eighth book of his Natural History and in Isidore in his Etymologies; they report the existence of an animal in Africa, called by the Africans a kind of hedgehog, covered with bristling splines, which it has the power to shoot out at dohgs pursuing it. The spines, as I have seen for myself, are a palm or more in length, and sharp at both ends, something like goose quills at the point where the feather-part leaves off, but rather thicker, and as it were striped black and white.(3)

Moreover, the king of England was not the sole possessor of camels in Britain and Ireland then, with the Irish Annals of Inisfallen recording under 1105 that 'in the above year a camel, an animal of remarkable size, was brought from the king of Alba to Muirchertach Ua Briain', indicating that the rulers of both Scotland and Ireland had camels amongst their own royal menageries in the early twelfth century. Whether there were any camels in medieval Britain or Ireland before the start of the twelfth century is undocumented, although Rodulf Tortarius writing, according to Mark Hagger, at the end of the eleventh century in his Epistula IX, recounts that William the Conqueror provided the citizens of Caen in Normandy with a wild animal show involving lions, leopards, lynxes, camels and ostriches that Rodulf himself witnessed. If correct, this obviously raises the distinct possibility that an Anglo-Norman royal menagerie containing camels may have been at least occasionally present in William's English domains too, and that Henry I's menagerie at Woodstock could furthermore have been partly an inheritance from his father.

Two Bactrian camels positioned above Duke William of Normandy, later King William I of England, on the Bayeux Tapestry, probably made in England in the 1070s (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Camels in the eleventh-century Old English Hexateuch, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius B IV, f. 39v (image: British Library).

Looking forward in time from Henry I, the medieval English royal menagerie seems to have regularly included camels. For example, in 1235 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II sent a camel to King Henry III of England 'as a token of the continuation of his regard', and Henry's son King Edward I is recorded as having kept a camel at his palace at Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, for the amusement of his children. Edward II likewise kept a camel at Kings Langley Palace—his camel-keeper was called Ralph Camyle and the animal's feed included hay, beans, barley and oats, with the area of the royal park responsible for producing the camel's fodder apparently being subsequently known as Camylesland. Edward II is also recorded as being the recipient of two camels in 1317 from the wealthy Genoese merchant Antonio di Pessagno in return for appointing him steward of Gascony, and camels continued to be kept during the reigns of Edward III and Richard II too. Indeed, the latter granted John Wyntirbourne 'the keepership of the king's camel' for life in January 1393 and apparently receiving a camel and a pelican from the people of London at around the same time, the two events presumably being related. Finally, moving into the fifteenth century, Henry VI is recorded as having received 'of late three camels and an ostrich from Turkey' in March 1443 from an Italian merchant named Nicholas Jone of Bologna, and in 1472 Edward IV sent a camel to Ireland, this being potentially one of the beasts brought to England in 1466 by the Patriarch of Antioch 'in honor of the king and queen'.

In conclusion, it seems possible to elucidate the context of the intriguing reference to both Bactrian camels and dromedaries in medieval Kent found in John Stone's Chronicle for 1466. Firstly, the 'Lord Patriarch of Antioch' who paraded six of these beasts in Canterbury can be identified as Ludovico Severi da Bologna, an important papal diplomat who was promoting positive relations and a potential anti-Ottoman alliance between the rulers of East and Europe in this period. The four dromedaries and two Bactrian camels that John Stone saw were presumably intended as gifts for King Edward IV as part of this diplomatic effort, and in this light it is interesting to note the possibility that one of these camels was subsequently 'regifted' by Edward IV to Ireland a few years later. Secondly, although John Stone expressed astonishment at the sight of these six exotic beasts, it ought to be emphasised that they were by no means the first camels to be physically present in medieval Britain. Indeed, there is solid evidence for the presence of such creatures in England, Scotland and Ireland at least as far back as the early twelfth century, with potential hints of an even earlier presence, and English kings are recorded as receiving a number of camels as gifts from other rulers as well as townsfolk and merchants at various points in previous reigns.

A Barbary macaque riding backwards on a camel, England, c. AD 1300; note, there is both documentary and archaeological evidence for the presence of Barbary macaques in medieval Britain and Ireland. Click here for a larger version of this illustration (image: MS. Douce 151 f.26r).

A kneeling camel misericord carving, c. 1390, in the Church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire (image: Spencer Means, CC BY-SA 2.0).

Notes

1.     M. Connor (ed. & trans.), John Stone's Chronicle: Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, 1417–1472 (Kalamazoo, 2010), p. 116, and W. G. Searle (ed.), Christ Church, Canterbury: I. The Chronicle of John Stone (Cambridge, 1902), p. 97; my thanks to Richard Hopper for drawing my attention to this reference.
2.     W. G. Searle (ed.), Christ Church, Canterbury: I. The Chronicle of John Stone (Cambridge, 1902), p. 122; W. F. Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (London, 1867), vol. v, p. 357.
3.     William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, v.409.2–3, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, & M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 740–1.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2018, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

An eleventh-century Chinese coin in Britain and the evidence for East Asian contacts in the medieval period

This post is concerned with a rather curious and unique find of an eleventh-century Northern Song dynasty coin from China in Cheshire, looking first at its archaeological context before going on to explore the evidence for a degree of contact between people from East Asia and Britain in the medieval era, a topic that is of interest whatever the origins of this particular coin may be.

A Northern Song dynasty coin from China, minted during the Xining reign between 1068 and 1077, found in Cheshire; Click here for a larger version of this picture (image: PAS).

The coin in question was found in the Vale Royal area of Cheshire and has been identified by the British Museum as a cast copper alloy Chinese coin from the Northern Song dynasty (AD 960–1127), minted during the Xining reign period of Emperor Shenzong of Song between 1068 and 1077. Curiously, it appears to be a unique find from Britain—40 individual Chinese coins and one hoard are recorded on the Portable Antiquities Scheme, but only this eleventh-century example is of medieval date, with all of the other 146 Chinese coins being minted between the mid-seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Needless to say, this coin has consequently been the subject of an understandable degree of scepticism, with the PAS record suggesting that it is 'doubtful that this is a genuine medieval find... more likely a more recent loss from an curated collection'. The aim of the following post is simply to ask whether it is at all possible that such a coin might have arrived in Britain during the medieval era, and, in doing so, review the evidence for contacts between East Asia and Britain in that period whatever our conclusion on this coin may be.

Looking first at the coin itself, recent losses or deliberate modern depositions of exotic finds are certainly encountered in Britain, including a group of 107 Chinese coins dated 1659 to 1850 found buried together at Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria; another group of four coins from Foxhall, Suffolk; and a lovely Sasanian carnelian finger ring from East Sussex that was found with an odd collection of material of various dates including a modern replica of a Byzantine coin. Nonetheless, although the possibility of a loss from a curated collection certainly cannot be discounted, it can be perhaps overused as an explanation for 'surprising' finds—as Martin Biddle has observed, 'the proverbial absent-minded college don or cathedral canon, dropping items of his collection here, there and everywhere... has never seemed a very convincing character', and in recent years the hyper-scepticism over finds of at least some exotic coins in Britain has abated somewhat.(1) Given the above, it is worth looking at the local context of this medieval Chinese coin, to assess whether there are any positive reasons to believe it is part of such a 'suspicious' grouping of finds or deposited curated collection. The coin itself is one of a discrete group of 24 finds found in an area less than 100 metres in all directions from the findspot, and aside from the coin being considered here, none of these other finds appear especially 'suspicious' or exotic. They consist of two worn Roman coins (a common find across England, with 263,791 recorded on the PAS as of March 2018); two late medieval lead weights, two pieces of medieval copper-alloy casting waste, and two medieval or post-medieval weights; and fifteen post-medieval finds, dating from the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries and ranging from coins of Elizabeth I to rings, trade weights and musket balls. All told, the post-Roman finds from the site suggest relatively unremarkable activity on the site from c. 1300 to c. 1750, with nothing else found that might hint at a deliberate exotic deposition or loss from a curated collection.

Looking more widely at the context of such a coin, whilst no other medieval Chinese coins are known from Britain, this find would not stand entirely alone as a medieval-era East Asian import to these islands if it is genuine, with two British sites having apparently produced such items from stratified contexts. One of these medieval imports is a sherd of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain from a small cup or bowl that was found in a late fourteenth-century context at Lower Brook Street, Winchester. The other import is a small piece of bronze with the character 藤 engraved upon it, possibly representing the name 藤原, Fujiwara, apparently found in a context of c. 1300 in the north bank of the Thames at London.(2) Of course, both finds are markedly later in date than the apparently eleventh-century coin found in Cheshire, as are the other finds from the site where the coin was discovered (c. 1300–1750) and, indeed, the other non-textile East Asian imports known from elsewhere in medieval Europe, such as the fragments of a small Chinese qingbai bowl that were recovered from a late thirteenth-century context in the medieval castle at Lucera, Italy.(3) However, this chronological difference is perhaps not such a major problem as might be assumed. Northern Song coins appear to have been minted in exceptional quantities and to have remained in circulation long after their initial minting date, so that in the fourteenth century around 88% of the coins both in circulation within China and exported outside of it seem to have been actually minted under the Northern Song dynasty (960–1126). As such, if the Northern Song coin from Cheshire is a genuine medieval import then it might quite credibly have arrived at any point up to perhaps the late fourteenth century, resolving the above issue.(4)

The Mongol Empire at its greatest extent in the late thirteenth century (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Such a potential thirteenth or fourteenth-century context for the arrival of an eleventh-century Chinese coin in Britain is not only supported by the archaeological evidence, but also by documentary sources. These texts make reference to both the presence of people from Britain and Ireland in East Asia and the presence of people who have, or may have, travelled from these regions in Britain during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For example, the Flemish Franciscan missionary and explorer William of Rubruck (d. c. 1293) encountered a man of English origin whilst visiting Mongolia in 1254 AD. The man in question, named Basil, was living at Karakorum (near Kharkhorin, Mongolia), the capital of the Mongol Empire between 1235 and 1260, and is described as 'the son of an Englishman'; he is also probably the 'nephew of a bishop' that William later mentions that he met at Karakorum and who he states was captured by the Mongols at Belgrade.(5) Moreover, Basil is not the only Englishman known to have been living among the Mongols during the mid-thirteenth century. Ivo of Narbonne, for example, reported in a letter copied by Matthew Paris in his Chronica Majora that the 'prince of Dalmatia' captured eight fugitives in 1242 during the surprise withdrawal of the Mongols from Central Europe, just as they were at the gates of Vienna, and that these captives included 'an Englishman' who

had twice come as an envoy and interpreter from the king of Tattars to the king of Hungary, and plainly threatened and warned them of the evils which afterwards happened, unless he should give up himself and his kingdom to be subject to the Tattars.(6)

This English envoy of the Mongols (Tatars/'Tartars') was apparently an exile from England who had lost all he owned to gambling at Acre, Israel, and then wandered 'in a shameful state of want' further east into modern Iraq and beyond before the Mongols persuaded him to join them due to his apparent skill with languages, at which point he then travelled with them until he returned to Europe and was finally captured in Austria. Given that he had clearly travelled huge distances with the Mongols and, most especially, his role as envoy and interpreter for the Mongol khan, it seems possible that he was an earlier English visitor than Basil to the Mongol capital of Karakorum, Mongolia.

A detail from Andrea di Bonaiuto's fresco 'The Way of Salvation/The Church Militant and the Church Triumphant', c. 1365–8, with the figures at the centre identified by Jacques Paviot as an English knight of the Garter talking to a Mongol (Paviot, 2000, p. 318; Delvin, 1929); the fresco is located in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Click here for a larger version of this image (image: Wikimedia Commons).

In addition to individual English people who were living amongst the Mongols on their own account or as slaves in the thirteenth century, there were also direct diplomatic contacts between Mongol rulers and the English then. Of particular note is the evidence for unidentified Mongol envoys ('Tartars') actually crossing the Channel to visit England in 1264, much to the apparent disgruntlement of the papal legate Guy Foulques—the future Pope Clement IV—who waiting in Boulogne for his own authorisation to cross!(7) Likewise, in 1287–8 the Turkic/Chinese Christian monk and diplomat Rabban Bar Sauma, originally from Beijing, China, visited Europe as an emissary of the Mongol Ilkhanate that stretched from Iraq to northern Afghanistan and met with King Edward I of England in Gascony:

And they went forth from that place, that is to say, from Paris, to go to the king of England, to Kasonia [Gascony]. And having arrived in twenty days at their city [Saint-Sever], the inhabitants of the city went forth to meet them, and they asked them, "Who are you?"And Rabban Sauma and his companions replied, "We are ambassadors, and we have come from beyond the eastern seas, and we are envoys of the King, and of the Patriarch, and the Kings of the Mongols."And the people made haste and went to the king and informed him [of their arrival], and the king welcomed them gladly, and the people introduced them into his presence. And those who were with Rabban Sauma straightway gave to the king the Pukdana [i.e. letter of authorisation] of King Arghun, and the gifts which he had sent to him, and the Letter of Mar Catholicus. And [King Edward] rejoiced greatly, and he was especially glad when Rabban Sauma talked about the matter of Jerusalem. And he said, "We the kings of these cities bear upon our bodies the sign of the Cross, and we have no subject of thought except this matter. And my mind is relieved on the subject about which I have been thinking, when I hear that King Arghun thinks as I think."And the king commanded Rabban Sauma to celebrate the Eucharist, and he performed the Glorious Mysteries; and the king and his officers of state stood up, and the king partook of the Sacrament, and made a great feast that day. 

Then Rabban Sauma said to the king, "We beseech you, O king, to give [your servants] in order to show us whatever churches and shrines there are in this country, so that when we go back to the Children of the East we may give them descriptions of them."And the king replied, "Thus shall you say to King Arghun and to all the Orientals: We have seen a thing than which there is nothing more wonderful, that is to say, that in the countries of the Franks there are not two Confessions of Faith, but only one Confession of Faith, namely, that which confesses Jesus Christ; and all the Christians confess it."And King Edward gave us many gifts and money for the expenses of the road.(8)

The route taken by Rabban Bar Sauma during his journey from Beijing to Gascony in the 1280s (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Yet another Mongol envoy named Buscarello de Ghizolfi, a Genoese adventurer who had settled in Persia, visited London in January 1290, accompanied by three squires who were probably themselves Mongols. Further envoys were sent from the Mongol Ilkhanate later that year, including a Mongol named Zagan and his nephew Gorgi, who were baptized by the Pope before being sent on to England on 2 December 1290 (accompanied again by Buscarello de Ghizolfi), and a certain Saabedin Archaon—a Nestorian cleric who had previously travelled to the west with Rabban Bar Sauma—who arrived after Zagan had left for England and who was, in turn, sent on with letters of credence in his favour addressed to Edward I by Pope Nicholas IV on 31 December.(9) Envoys were also dispatched in the opposite direction, with the regime at Acre sending the English Dominican friar David of Ashby eastwards in 1260 (he returned in 1274, accompanying the Mongol embassy that attended the Second Council of Lyon in that year) and King Edward I sending Geoffrey of Langley with Buscarello de Ghizolfi to the Mongol Ilkhanate capital of Tabriz, Iran, on a diplomatic mission in 1291.

In the early fourteenth century there is further evidence for direct diplomatic contact with both the Mongols and potentially China, which had been partly under Mongol control in the north since the first half of the thirteenth century and was ruled from 1271 by the Yuan Dynasty of China, founded by the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. For example, in 1313 the royal household records for Edward II record a visit to England by an ambassador of 'the emperor of the Tartars', who Jacques Paviot suggests may have been representing the Great Khan in China, something perhaps supported by the fact that he was one William of Villeneuve.(10) This Franciscan missionary was one of seven suffragan bishops consecrated by Pope Clement V in 1307 to serve in the newly created archdiocese of Beijing, China (Khanbaliq), at the request of John of Montecorvino, the founder of the Chinese mission in the late thirteenth century. William is usually believed to have made it to India but to have then given up and not carried on to China with the others, instead returning to Italy, being next recorded at Avignon, France, in 1318.(11) However, this seems not to take account of the English record of his activities, which suggests that he returned to Europe as a Mongol envoy of 'the emperor of the Tartars' in 1313. Moreover, it is worth noting that Edward II sent a letter to the Emperor of China on 22 May 1313 in which he asks him to him to aid and protect the bishop William of Villeneuve, something that suggests that not only did William returned to Europe in 1313 as an envoy of the Great Khan in China, but also that he then aimed to return there.(12)

A fifteenth-century image of James of Ireland and Odoric of Pordenone in Sumatra, from BnF Français 2810, f.104r; click here for a larger version of this illustration (image: BnF).

In addition to the above, notice should also be made of the journey of James of Ireland, a cleric who travelled with Odoric of Pordenone to the east in the 1320s. Odoric's own account of the journey, written in 1330 after their return to Europe, indicates that they visited India, Sumatra, Java, and Champa (southern Vietnam), before arriving at Guangzhou, China, in 1323–4 and reaching Beijing in 1325, where they stayed for 3 years before travelling back home; Odoric died in 1331 at Udine, north-eastern Italy, and a present of 2 marks was subsequently paid to his companion, James of Ireland, according to the public books of Udine, who unfortunately then disappears from the pages of history.(13) Whether other subjects of the English king undertook similar journeys eastwards to Southeast Asia and China in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is unrecorded, but it is by no means implausible that they did so. Certainly, we know of a number of European merchants who travelled to China at this time, from Marco Polo and Peter of Lucalongo in the late thirteenth century onwards, and there seem to have been communities of Genoese and Venetian merchants living in Yuan China during the fourteenth century, with Latin tombstones moreover known from Yangzhou and Zaiton (Quanzhou) in China. In this light, it is interesting to note that late medieval English coins have apparently been found in Vietnam.(14)

In conclusion, it may well be that this apparently eleventh-century Chinese coin from Cheshire is a modern loss from a curated collection, for example. However, given the lack of other 'exotic' items from the site where it was found, the possibility that it was actually a genuine medieval loss can perhaps be at least considered. Certainly, coins like this seem to have continued to circulate in significant numbers in China well into the fourteenth century, and in this light it is interesting that the other, largely unremarkable, post-Roman artefacts found at the site range in date from c. 1300–1750. Likewise, it is worth noting that there is, in fact, a small quantity of archaeological evidence for East Asian imports into thirteenth-/fourteenth-century England and, perhaps more importantly, a significant quantity of documentary evidence referring to both the presence of people from Britain and Ireland in East Asia and the presence of people who had, or who may have, travelled from these regions in England during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In consequence, a potential context can be constructed for such a coin having arrived in England in c. 1300 or a little after, although this is—of course—not the same thing as saying that such an origin is by any means certain, especially whilst this coin remains a unique find in Britain.

The tombstone of Katerina Ilioni, daughter of the Genoese merchant Domenico Ilioni, dated 1342 and found at Yangzhou, China; click here for a larger version of this image (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Notes

1.     See, for example, M. Biddle, 'Ptolemaic coins from Winchester', Antiquity, 49 (1975), 213–15; S. Moorhead, 'Early Byzantine copper coins found in Britain – a review in light of new finds recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme', in O. Tekin (ed.), Ancient History, Numismatics and Epigraphy in the Mediterranean World (Istanbul, 2009), pp. 263–74; E. S. Georganteli, 'Byzantine coins', in M. Biddle (ed.), The Winchester Mint and Coins and Related Finds from the Excavations of 1961-71, Winchester Studies 8 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 669–78; and C. Morrisson, 'Byzantine coins in early medieval Britain: a Byzantinist's assessment', in R. Naismith et al (ed.), Early Medieval Monetary History: Studies in Memory of Mark Blackburn (London, 2014), pp. 207–42.
2.     D. Whitehouse, 'Chinese porcelain in medieval Europe', Medieval Archaeology, 16 (1972), 63–78 at p. 68; P. Ottaway, Winchester: Swithun’s ‘City of Happiness and Good Fortune’: An Archaeological Assessment (Oxford, 2017), online; M. Cooper, 'Cultural survey, 1991', Monumenta Nipponica, 47 (1992), 99–105 at p. 100. My thanks are due to Andrew West for drawing my attention to the London find.
3.     D. Whitehouse, 'Chinese porcelain in medieval Europe', Medieval Archaeology, 16 (1972), 63–78 at pp. 67–8.
4.     On the long life of Northern Song coins and their medieval export to Western Asia and East Africa, see J. Cribb & D. Potts, 'Chinese coin finds from Arabia and the Arabian Gulf', Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 7 (1996), 108–18. Note, both coins and pottery seem to have been exported westwards from China in the medieval period, see for example Bing Zhao, 'Chinese-style ceramics in East Africa from the 9th to 16th century: A case of changing values ​​and symbols in the multi-partner global trade', Afriques, 6 (2015), online at http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/1836.
5.     W. W. Rockhill (trans.), The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55 (London, 1900), pp. 211, 222–3.
6.     J. A. Giles (trans.), Matthew Paris's English History (London, 1889), vol. 1, pp. 470–1.
7.     J. Paviot, 'England and the Mongols (c. 1260–1330)', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 10 (2000), 305–18 at p. 308.
8.     E. A. Wallis Budge (trans.), The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China; or, The History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Sawma (London, 1928), pp. 185–7, spelling slightly modernised and adjusted for consistency.
9.     J. Paviot, 'England and the Mongols (c. 1260–1330)', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 10 (2000), 305–18 at pp. 314–5. The letters carried by Zagan and Saabedin are in the National Archives as SC 7/30/18 ('Commendation to Edward I of Andrew formerly called Zaganus, Buscarellus de Gisulfo and Moracius, envoys of Argon, king of the Tartars', 2 Dec 1290) and SC 7/31/16 ('Letters of credence to Edward I in favour of Saabedin Archaon, envoy of Argon, king of the Tartars', 31 Dec 1290); see also P. Jackson, The Mongols and the West 1221–1410 (London, 2005), p. 173, on Saabedin.
10.     J. Paviot, 'England and the Mongols (c. 1260–1330)', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 10 (2000), 305–18 at p. 317; for the view that he was sent by the Middle Eastern Mongol il-khan, see for example J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1998), p. 129.
11.     J. B. Friedman & K. M. Figg (eds.), Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia (London, 2000), pp. 22, 402, 403.
12.     T. Rymer (ed.), Foedera, Conventiones, Literæ, et Cujuscunque Generis Acta Publica, Inter Reges Angliæ et Alios Quosvis Imperatores, Reges, Pontifices, Principes, vel Communitates (London, 1739), vol. 2 pt. 1, p. 40 (22 May 1313), which is also discussed in K. Warner, Edward II: The Unconventional King (Stroud, 2014). Edward II also sent letters asking for aid to be given to William of Villeneuve to the emperor of Trebizond (Alexios II), the king of Georgia (Davit VIII), and the il-khan Oljeitu, suggesting the route that William of Villeneuve was intending on taking; a similar route was followed by Odoric of Pordenone in 1318, as related in his The Eastern Parts of the World Described (1330).
13.     Odoric of Pordenone, The Eastern Parts of the World Described, translated by H. Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither (London, 1913), vol. 2, pp. 97–267, and p. 11 for the gift to James of Ireland; J. B. Friedman & K. M. Figg (eds.), Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia (London, 2000), p. 457.
14.     J. B. Friedman & K. M. Figg (eds.), Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia (London, 2000), pp. 107–09, 372–4, 474, 663; L. Arnold, Princely Gifts & Papal Treasures: The Franciscan Mission to China & Its Influence on the Art of the West, 1250–1350 (San Francisco, 1999); J. Purtle, 'The Far Side: expatriate medieval art and its languages in Sino-Mongol China', in J. Caskey et al (eds.), Confronting the Borders of Medieval Art (Leiden, 2011), pp. 167–97; and J. Kermode, Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley and Hull in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 2–3 at fn. 10 for the claim that late medieval English coins have been found in Vietnam.

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