Lissingleys, the meeting-place of Anglo-Saxon & Anglo-Scandinavian Lindsey, and the antiquity of Ogilby's 1675 road from Lincoln to Grimsby

The focus of this post is on two important yet lost elements of the pre-modern landscape of Lincolnshire, namely a large area of common land named Lissingleys—very probably the meeting-place for the whole of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian Lindsey—and the road running north-eastwards from Lincoln to the coast at Grimsby. The latter routeway is first recorded in 1675, but is believed to have originally run along the northern border of this common pasturage and meeting-site, and other place- and field-name evidence suggests that this road may well be of a similar antiquity to the meeting-place itself.

(a) Lissingleys in 1820, before its enclosure in 1851, as depicted in Henry Stevens' drawing for the Ordnance Survey (image: Wikimedia Commons); (b) A map of the three ridings of Lindsey set against the pre-Viking landscape of the region, showing the location of Lissingleys at the point at which the three ridings met (image: Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, fig. 27). Click here for a larger version of both maps.

The common pasturage known as Lissingleys, located approximately ten miles to the north-east of Lincoln, is interesting for several reasons. First, it was an extraparochial area that was considered to lie outside any single ecclesiastical or civil parish until its enclosure in 1851, with the rights of intercommoning here being shared between eight surrounding parishes. Second, there was a concentration of multiple important estates belonging to key landholders within Anglo-Scandinavian Lindsey surrounding the site in 1066, implying that access to it was of some importance, although this centrality seems to have evaporated by 1086, when a similar pattern is conspicuous by its absence. And third and most importantly, the land itself lay at the exact point where the boundaries of the three ridings of Viking-era Lindsey met. Indeed, the eight vills that had common rights in Lissingleys were distributed across all three ridings, and the boundaries of these three ridings and their constituent wapentakes moreover look like they have been deliberately adjusted to meet at Lissingleys, suggesting that the site was important even prior to the creation of the ridings (which were probably in existence by c. 900, if not before). All of this strongly suggests that Lissingleys was a place of considerable importance to the organisation of Anglo-Scandinavian Lindsey and probably pre-Viking Lindsey too, and it has been credibly identified as the meeting-place for the whole community of Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian Lindsey. Support for this conclusion is offered by both the archaeology of the immediately surrounding area and the name Lissingleys itself, as I have argued at length elsewhere. In particular, a strong case can be made for this rural meeting-site having been an important focus in both the Early Anglo-Saxon and Romano-British periods too, with the name arguably containing Late British/Archaic Welsh *liss-, the root of Welsh llys, meaning ‘court, hall’ or ‘parliament, gathering of nobles’ (compare the name Liss, Lis/Lissa, in Hampshire, which also derives from this element).(1)

Two maps showing the parish (red lines), hundred (green line) and riding-and-hundred boundaries (yellow lines) in the immediate area around Lissingleys extraparochial area, shown in purple. The first map shows the villages with rights of common at Lissingleys and the second shows the web of manors and sokes held by key lords around Lissingleys in 1066, both being based on Roffe 2000 and using a base-map from the Historic Parishes of England and Wales: an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 project. Click here for a larger version of these maps.

Looking at the site itself, when it was mapped in 1820—prior to its enclosure in 1851—it covered around 1.58 km² or 390 acres and was criss-crossed by a number of paths with a stream running through its centre. Whether it was always this size or perhaps slightly larger in extent is open to debate; Henry Stevens' draft map for the Ordnance Survey shows a number of old enclosures immediately to the north and south of Lissingleys which might conceivably have originally been parts of it that were lost after its apparent decline in centrality/importance post-1066—if so, then the total original area of Lissingleys could have been up to around 3.1 km² or 765 acres. It is perhaps worth noting in this context that the extent of Lissingleys as mapped by the Historic Parishes of England and Wales: an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 project, based on the 1851 enclosure map, seems to be missing an area on the eastern side that is depicted as a definite part of Lissingleys on the 1820 map, so there were clearly alterations to its borders taking place in the modern era. Furthermore, in 1807 Lissingleys was described as comprising 'between five and six hundred acres of very wet land', suggesting that even greater losses of land from Lissingleys may have taken place in the late eightheenth to early nineteenth centuries.(2) As to what occurred here, such meeting-sites as this were a fundamental element of government and society in Anglo-Saxon England, where the free men from across the region (here the three ridings of Lindsey) met to discuss, arrange and decide the judicial, administrative, financial and other business of the region, hence the apparent importance of access to this site that is implied by the clustering of manors of key figures within the region around Lissingleys in 1066. They also frequently became sites of fairs and occasional markets, sometimes associated with scatters of metal-detected material, and in this context it is worth noting that there is indeed a very extensive multi-period scatter of material found immediately to the south of Lissingleys. 

Another notable characteristic of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian meeting sites is an association with major routeways, reflecting the need for the site to be accessible to all who had to attend it. Unfortunately, Lissingleys nowadays lies away from the major roads of the region. However, there are good reasons for thinking that one of the key highways of pre-modern Lincolnshire actually ran either immediately next to or even across the northern edge of Lissingleys, prior to the remaking of the medieval Lincolnshire landscape by enclosure and the turnpike acts. The road itself, which ran from Lincoln to Grimsby, is first attested by John Ogilby in his 1675 Britannia road atlas, where it was one of 100 major British routeways drawn by Ogilby as strip-maps at a scale of 1 inch to the mile:

A coloured version of John Ogilby's 1675 strip-map of the route from Lincoln to Grimsby, on the right side of the page; click here for a larger version of this map (image: John Ogilby, Britannia, 1675, Public Domain).

Ogilby's road follows the current Lincoln–Market Rasen road, the A46, north-east from Lincoln for a couple of miles, crossing a 'rill' (Nettleham Beck), a cross-roads with the Old Drovers' Road from Horncastle to Doncaster (mentioned in the early fourteenth century and mapped in the eighteenth), and a heath (Nettleham and Scothern Heath); however, at the point that the present A46 turns eastwards to Dunholme, Ogilby's 1675 road carried on into Welton before turning east and running through the hamlet of Ryland. From here it runs east before rejoining the A46 to cross Snarford Bridge (originally a ford, to judge from the place-name), passing the now-demolished Snarford Hall and Snarford Park, and then runs north-east to Faldingworth Ings and Shaft Wood. At the point the A46 turns north and runs into Faldingworth village, with a minor road running south to Friesthorpe, Ogilby's road then seems to have instead crossed the fields of the southern part of Faldingworth parish directly to Buslingthorpe parish (as the road is indeed depicted as doing on Armstrong's map of 1779 and Cary's map of 1787). After this, its route is open to some question; it may have turned north just around the north-west corner of Lissingleys and gone via Buslingthorpe along the bridleway to meet up briefly with the A46, before continuing along the Green Lane and then across what are now fields to join up with a footpath running south from Market Rasen at the time of its enclosure, something that might fit Ogilby's route measurements and turns quite well. Alternatively, both O. G. S. Crawford and Brian K. Roberts consider that Ogilby's road instead continued to run to the south of Buslingthorpe village and effectively across the northern boundary of the Lissingleys meeting-site and common pasture, separated from it only by the c. 200 metre wide old enclosures mentioned above. At the eastern end of Lissingleys, the seventeenth-century road would then have turned north and run along the present-day minor route to Middle Rasen (which is present on early mapping), before turning eastwards onto a 'Green Lane' and across what are now the fields south of Market Rasen to join Mill Road and thus enter the town proper.(3) 

A map of the first half of Ogilby's 1675 road from Lincoln to Grimsby as far as Market Rasen, after O. G. S. Crawford and Brian K. Roberts, showing the proximity of Lissingleys to the road; note, it deviates from the current A46 in two places, first when it goes through Welton and Ryland before returning to the A46 route just before Snarford Bridge, and second just before Faldingworth, when it carried on across the old open fields to run just to the north of Lissingleys before turning sharply north along a present-day minor road—it carried on along this until just before Middle Rasen, when it turned right along a 'Green Lane' and then across present-day fields to meet Mill Road, Market Rasen. Click here for a larger version of this map; note, the extent of Lissingleys in 1820 is mapped by the thick dark purple line and hashing, whilst the old enclosures mentioned above to the north and south of Lissingleys are depicted with dotted lines and stippling (image: Caitlin Green, drawn on a base-map from OpenStreetMap).

For the second half from Market Rasen to Grimsby, the route deviates completely from the current A46 main road. Leaving Market Rasen north of the River Rase (here named 'Ankam', i.e. the Ancholme, of which the Rase is a tributary), it crosses Tealby Moor eastwards to the south of Hamilton Hill before crossing a brook to enter Tealby village. There is no single road following this route nowadays, but there are footpaths and tracks on this route are thought to represent it, although which water-mill is the one mentioned by Ogilby is uncertain. Passing through Tealby with the church on the right, the seventeenth-century main road then followed Caistor Lane through Tealby Vale, but rather than continuing that road as it nowadays turns left, it instead carried on north-eastwards along what is now a track and then a footpath up to and across the ancient (probably pre-Roman) Caistor High Street before meeting up with the modern road to Stainton le Vale. Passing through Stainton le Vale via both the modern road and a former track, it then continued north-eastwards along another track/road to Thorganby—the latter half of this route is is depicted on maps through to the 1940s, but has since been erased by RAF Binbrook. From Thorganby, Ogilby's 1675 road is believed to have largely followed the line of the modern B1203 and the late eighteenth-century turnpike road through East Ravendale to Ashby, crossing the prehistoric Barton Street, and then to Brigsley, Waltham (with the church on the left), Scartho and finally Grimsby.

A map of the second half of Ogilby's 1675 road from Lincoln to Grimsby, from Market Rasen onwards; note, it deviates completely from the current A46 road from Market Rasen to Grimsby and only follows the B1203 minor route in its second half, which much of its route from Market Rasen to Thorganby being either no longer passable or preserved only as tracks or footpaths. Click here for a larger version of this map (image: Caitlin Green, drawn on a base-map from OpenStreetMap).

Having established the probable route of the 1675 road from Lincoln to Grimsby, what then can be said of its antiquity? The proximity of this route to the meeting-site at Lissingleys, whatever its exact route from Lissingleys to Market Rasen, is certainly suggestive of its existence prior to 1066, given that the political import of the site seems to have declined after this, but it is not the only such indication. For the southern half of the route, one can also note the following. First, the local name Rennestihge occurs in the twelfth century in Dunholme parish. This is a Scandinavian compound *rennstígr meaning 'a supraregional road used for rapid travel, usually by horse'. The medieval 'Old Drovers' Road' ran to the south of Dunholme parish based on the historic parish bounds and its route as mapped by Andrew Armstrong in the eighteenth century (the earliest detailed county map), so isn't what is meant here, and no other major routeways that we know of ran or run through Dunholme parish other than the Lincoln to Market Rasen road.(4) As such, this name can be credibly associated with the 1675 route described by Ogilby and strongly suggests that at least the initial parts of the route were in existence in the Anglo-Scandinavian period (the later ninth to eleventh centuries) and were recognised then as a key cross-regional routeway, which is a point of considerable interest. 

Second, after travelling through Welton and Ryland, the 1675 route then passes across Snarford Bridge into Snarford parish. The bridge here is first mentioned in 1316, but there must have been a ford here prior to its construction to explain the parish name, and there is no other likely location for this ford aside from where the Lincoln to Market Rasen road crosses the Barlings Eau river. As such, the name evidence again would seem to suggest considerable antiquity and importance for this routeway, such that it would give its name to a pre-Norman parish. Certainly, the name Snarford is first recorded in 1086 as Snerteforde and similar, and this is a compound of the Old Norse personal name Snǫrtr with the Old English place-name element ford, indicating that the current name was once again coined in the Anglo-Scandinavian era and could, moreover, represent a renaming of a pre-Viking crossing site. Indeed, Arthur Owen has suggested that this name indicates that the roadway passing across the ford and later bridge at Snarford must have been 'an ancient line of communication between the Lincoln area and the Wolds'.(5) 

A topographic map of the Dunholme and Snarford area, showing how Ogilby's 1675 road (the purple dashed line) follows the most credible landscape route across the Barlings Eau valley, keeping to the higher ground except for the ancient crossing at Snarford. Note, the rivers are based partly on the modern river routes and partly on the 1820 and 1880s OS maps for now-lost channels. Click here for a larger version of this map (image: Caitlin Green, drawn on a topographic base-map). 

Third, the name Stret'deyl, 'share of land by a strǣt, a paved road', is recorded in the southern field of Faldingworth parish in c. 1300. The name-element strǣt in Lincolnshire is usually only used in the medieval period for major roads and, as such, its appearance in the southern fields of Faldingworth parish is notable, particularly as the route of Ogilby's road crossed the southern fields of that parish on its way to Buslingthorpe and Lissingleys. Moreover, another reference in the same document relating to Faldingworth's southern field mentions land in the south near to the king's highway (ex parte australi iuxta regiam viam de Faldingwrth'). As Arthur Owen points out, the term via regia had a legal implication, being the king's highway where the king's peace held good, and its appearance here again indicates that there was an important road in the southern part of Faldingworth parish, presumably the routeway under consideration here, given that no other significant routeways are known in this area.(6) 

In sum, when taken together, the above names all suggest that the portion of Ogilby's road from Lincoln through to Lissingleys was indeed an ancient route, as its proximity to the probably meeting-place of the whole of pre-Norman Lindsey might imply. It was very probably a 'king's highway' in the medieval period and a *rennstígr, 'a supraregional road used for rapid travel', in the Anglo-Scandinavian era, with its origins going back at least as far as the ninth to eleventh centuries, if not before, in light of the name Snarford and the likely antiquity of the meeting-site at Lissingleys.

Herman Moll's 1724 map of northern Lincolnshire that depicts Ogilby's 1675 road from Lincoln to Grimsby, highlighted here in purple, from Moll's A New Description of England and Wales (London, 1724). Click here for a larger version of this map (image: David Rumsey).

North of Lissingleys there is less direct evidence for the antiquity of Ogilby's route to Grimsby. The name 'Rasen' does not derive from the River Rase, but instead probably derives from Old English æt Ræsnum, 'at the planks', in reference to a plank bridge across the tributary of the River Ancholme here, with this tributary then receiving the name Rase as a back-formation from the bridge-/place-name 'Rasen'.(7) Unfortunately, whilst the name Rasen is first recorded in the late tenth century, it is unclear as to where this plank bridge was actually located—in particular, three modern parishes now include Rasen in their name (West Rasen, Middle Rasen and Market Rasen) and there are multiple potential river crossing points that might have been where this obviously important plank bridge was located. It could well have been at Market Rasen, as Kenneth Cameron suggests, and so imply an Anglo-Scandinavian or probably pre-Viking origin for this part of Ogilby's route, but it has to be admitted that it might not have been. 

More certain is the name that occurs at the opposite end of the 1675 road at Brigsley, Brigeslai in 1086. This is an Old English name brycges-lēah, meaning 'the wood/glade of the bridge', with a Scandinavianised first element; as Kenneth Cameron points out, the only really plausible place for this bridge is the crossing-point of the Waithe Beck in this parish, where Ogilby's 1675 road—preserved here by the B1203—comes down off the Wolds and heads on through Brigsley to Waltham.(8) Needless to say, this suggests that at least this section of the route was in existence in the pre-Viking period and had a bridge by that point that was significant enough to give rise to a parish name, all of which implies that it was then a route of some importance. Indeed, in this context, it is may also be worth noting that the parish immediately to the north on this road is Waltham, which has been considered a major and early Anglo-Saxon royal estate centre with authority over part of the Lincolnshire Wolds.(9) 

Captain Andrew Armstrong's map of Lincolnshire, published 1779, the first truly detailed county map; click here for a larger version of this map (image: British Library).

If the road from Lincoln to Lissingleys seems almost certainly to have been an ancient and important route, and the remainder of the road from Lissingleys through to Grimsby was potentially so too, what then of the decline of this routeway? With respect to this, Ogilby's route seems still to have been current in 1724, when it was mapped by Herman Moll, and it was repeated by William Morgan in his Pocket-Book of the Roads published in 1732 and by John Senex in his Ogilby's Survey Revised of 1759.(10) On the other hand, whilst the majority of the Lincoln to Grimsby route depicted on Emanuel Bowen's map of Lincolnshire from 1751 seems to be broadly the same as Ogilby's, his road doesn't seem to go through Welton by Lincoln, instead being drawn between that village and Dunholme, and looks to have gone via Faldingworth village rather than passing it to the south, although neither point is entirely clear. However, by the time of the first truly detailed map of Lincolnshire, published by Andrew Armstrong in 1779, there do seem to have been notable changes to the perceived main road routes from Lincoln to Market Rasen and Market Rasen to Grimsby.(11) 

For example, Armstrong shows multiple routes between Lincoln and Snarford, and two major routes through to Buslingthorpe. One of these is the route via Snarford shown by Ogilby, but the other is more northerly, going north from Welton to Cold Hanworth, Oldfield (Faldingworth Grange), Faldingworth village and finally Buslingthorpe. Armstrong also shows a different route from Buslingthorpe to Market Rasen to that of Ogilby as reconstructed by Crawford and Roberts, which turns north at Lissingleys to go through Buslingthorpe itself and thereafter following what is now a track north past Buslingthorpe Grange to meet the modern A46, although this is the same as the alternative Ogilby route mentioned previously. Beyond Market Rasen there are significant alterations—the route south of Hamilton Hill to Tealby is not shown at all, and there is instead a route through to Stainton le Vale that is probably that which survives today as the Market Rasen to Stainton le Vale via Walesby road (although Armstrong doesn't show the slight diversion along the Caistor High Street that is required). The road from Stainton le Vale to Thorganby across the modern RAF Binbrook is certainly shown, but from there the road is shown as going via Hatcliffe to Barnoldby le Beck in order to reach Waltham, and no road is shown joining Thorganby to the newly established turnpike from Wold Newton/Ravendale to Grimsby that seems to have preserved the last part of Ogilby's route. Perhaps most importantly, Armstrong also shows what seems to be a version of the modern A46 going north from Market Rasen to Caistor and then across to Grimsby, although the latter stages beyond Caistor are different. 

John Cary's 1806 map of Lincolnshire, showing that the primary road from Market Rasen to Grimsby followed its modern route by this point, whilst the main route from Lincoln to Market Rasen now avoided Snarford; click here for a larger version of this map.

These changes seem to be confirmed by John Cary's maps from the 1790s and 1800s. His detailed 1794 New Map of England and Wales depicts Armstrong's multiple routes almost exactly, whilst his smaller scale county maps from 1792 and 1806 show only the perceived major routes indicate that the apparently ancient Ogilby route had been largely replaced as the major Lincoln to Grimsby road by this point.(12) In particular, Cary's county maps show that the current A46 main road route from Market Rasen to Grimsby via Caistor and Laceby was apparently already in existence and the major route between these places then, something that makes sense given that the latter part of this was an eighteenth-century turnpike route established in 1765. Furthermore, between Lincoln and Market Rasen, the only road shown now avoids Snarford and instead goes via Welton, Cold Hanworth and then Oldfield (Faldingworth Grange), before following what looks like Armstrong's route from Buslingthorpe to Market Rasen. Subsequently, the primary Lincoln to Market Rasen route seems to change again. For example, in Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of England of 1835 the main route north-eastwards follows the old Roman road to Langworth before turning north via Wickenby and Lissington. Likewise, on Henry Stevens' 1820 draft Ordnance Survey map, the only main routes shown (tinted yellow) are the modern A15 Ermine Street north to Caenby Corner and the A631 from Caenby Corner to Market Rasen, although all the modern roads that make up the current A46, including the diversion through Faldingworth village (the old Ogilby 'king's highway' across Faldingworth's southern fields to Buslingthorpe seems to have been removed at or by Faldingworth's enclosure in 1795), appear there for the first time.(13) Interestingly, both Lewis's and Stevens' main road routes continued to be marked as the primary routes through to Market Rasen into the early twentieth century, when both are depicted as such on the relevant sheet of Bartholomew's Half Inch Maps of England and Wales of 1902, with the modern A46—which borrows significant elements from Ogilby's 1675 road—only being definitively established as a 'main road' in 1922–3, when it became Class I road number 46.(14)

The various main routeways from Lincoln to Market Rasen and beyond indicated by cartographers from Ogilby (1675) through to Lewis (1835), mapped against the modern road network, including the A46 from Lincoln to Market Rasen that was established in 1922; click here for a larger version of this map. Note, only the major modifications of the routes are shown, so the deviations from Ogilby's route (as reconstructed by Crawford and Roberts) in Armstrong 1779 are mapped in blue, whilst Cary's route appears in green where it differs from the Armstrong/Ogilby route, i.e. the diversions through Cold Hanworth and Faldingworth south of Market Rasen and a new 'primary' route northwards to Grimsby via Caistor; Stevens' and Lewis's routes follow the Cary green route to Grimsby via Caistor beyond Market Rasen (image: Caitlin Green, drawn on a base-map from OpenStreetMap).

In conclusion, there is a good case to be made for the rural meeting-place of the three ridings of Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian Lindsey having been located at Lissingleys, with this meeting-site probably having even earlier roots that this too. Although no modern major roadway passes close to this important element in the early medieval administrative landscape of the region, it is notable that the Lincoln to Grimsby road mapped by Ogilby in 1675 did do so. An investigation of this route suggests that it was probably a major road of some antiquity, perhaps originating as far back as the Anglo-Scandinavian period or even earlier, and the fact that it seems to have gone close to or skirted the northern boundary of Lissingleys is thus unlikely to be a coincidence. This routeway appears to have remained important right through to the middle of the eighteenth century, but after that it rapidly declined in significance and alternative routes began to supersede various elements of it, in some cases only temporarily but in others permanently, especially between Market Rasen and Grimsby. Maps from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggest that there was considerable variation in the perceived main route between Lincoln and Market Rasen in this era prior to the establishment of the modern A46 in 1922–3, which reinstated large elements of the Ogilby route as a primary cross-county road. 

Footnotes

1.     See further on all of this C. Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650, 2nd edn (Lincoln: History of Lincolnshire Committee, 2020), pp. 140–5, and D. Roffe, 'Lissingleys and the Meeting Place of Lindsey' (2000), available at the author's website, www.roffe.co.uk/lindsey.htm.

2.     For the quotation, see J. Britton, The Beauties of England and Wales; or, Original Delineations, Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive, of Each County (London, 1807), vol. 9, p. 694. For Henry Stevens' draft 1820 map of the Hackthorn district for the Ordnance Survey, see British Library OSD 282, digitised here, and for the boundaries at enclosure see R. J. P. Kain & R. R. Oliver, Historic Parishes of England and Wales: an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata, data collection, UK Data Service, first published 17 May 2001, updated 24 April 2020, and accessed 30 December 2020, http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-4348-1.

3.     The exact route described here is essentially that of O. G. S. Crawford, A Map of XVII Century England (Southampton: Ordnance Survey, 1930), who traced and plotted the routes of John Ogilby's 100 road-maps published in his Britannia, Volume the First: or an Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales: By a Geographical and Historical Description of the Principal Roads thereof (London, 1675) onto a modern OS map, with this map being then scanned and georeferenced by me so that Crawford's proposed route can be followed in detail; Crawford's plotted roads have also been used by the Creating a GIS of Ogilby's "principal roads" of England and Wales c. 1675 project at the University of Cambridge, which shows the same route as described here (from plate 78 of Ogilby's volume). Brian K. Roberts also shows this route in B. K. Roberts, 'Woods, fens and roads: where are the Fens?', in Through Wet and Dry: Essays in Honour of David Hall, ed. T. Lane & J. Coles (Heckington, 2002), pp. 78–86 at p. 83 (once again scanned and georeference by me). The alternative route, that turns north at Buslingthorpe along the bridleway, would arguably fit Ogilby's measurements better, and is essentially what Captain Andrew Armstrong seems to show in 1779, see below, but the entry into Market Rasen may well fit Crawford and Roberts's route better, see the Historic Urban Character Types Map no. 3 from N. Grayson, Lincolnshire Extensive Urban Survey: Market Rasen, Historic England/LCC Project Number 2897 (Lincoln, 2020); my thanks are due to Max Satchell for discussing all of this with me. Note, the presence of a ford before the church at Market Rasen may be a mistake on Ogilby's part, but it need not be—it may well rather reflect the former stream that ran to the south of the church and along the line of Dear Street, see Grayson, Market Rasen, pp. 5, 6. For the 'Old Drovers' Road', see F. M. Stenton, 'The road system of medieval England', Economic History Review, 7 (1936), 1–21 at p. 18.

4.     K. Cameron, J. Insley & J. Cameron, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire: Part Seven, Lawress Wapentake, Survey of English Place-Names LXXXV (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2010), pp. 45–6; A. Armstrong, Map of Lincolnshire, published 20 January 1779, British Library Maps K.Top.19.19.5 tab.end; R. J. P. Kain & R. R. Oliver, Historic Parishes of England and Wales: an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata, data collection, UK Data Service, first published 17 May 2001, updated 24 April 2020, and accessed 30 December 2020, http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-4348-1.

5.     A. E. B. Owen, ‘Roads and Romans in south-east Lindsey’ in A. R. Rumble & A. D. Mills (eds), Names, Places and People (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1997), pp. 254–68 at p. 265, supported by Cameron, Insley & Cameron, Place-Names of Lincolnshire 7, pp. 109–10, and K. Cameron, A Dictionary of Lincolnshire Place-Names (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 1998), p. 112.

6.     C. W. Foster (ed.), The Registrum Antiquissimum of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln, Volume III, Lincoln Record Society vol. 29 (Lincoln: Lincoln Record Society, 1932), pp. 381–2; Cameron, Insley & Cameron, Place-Names of Lincolnshire 7, pp. 51–2; Owen, 'Roads and Romans in south-east Lindsey', p. 259.

7.     K. Cameron, J. Field & J. Insley, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire: Part Three, The Wapentake of Walshcroft, Survey of English Place-Names LXVI (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 1992), pp. 94–6; Cameron, Dictionary, p. 100.

8.     K. Cameron, J. Field & J. Insley, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire: Part Four, The Wapentakes of Ludborough and Haverstoe, Survey of English Place-Names LXXI (Nottingham: English Place-Names Society, 1996), pp. 60–2; Cameron, Dictionary, p. 21.

9.     Cameron, Field & Insley, Place-Names of Lincolnshire 4, p. 183; Cameron, Dictionary, pp. 134–5; D. Hooke, 'Old English wald, weald in place-names', Landscape History, 34 (2013), 33–49 at pp. 39–40; R. Huggins, 'The significance of the place-name wealdhám', Medieval Archaeology, 19 (1975), 198–201.

10.     H. Moll, A Set of Fifty New and Correct Maps of England and Wales, &c. with the Great Roads and Principal Cross-Roads, &c. (London, 1724), p. 28; W. Morgan, Ogilby's and Morgan's Pocket-Book of the Roads, 7th edn. (London, 1732), p. 34; J. Senex, The Roads Through England Delineated, or Ogilby's Survey Revised, Improved, and Reduced to a Size Portable for the Pocket (London, 1759), p. 86.

11.     E. Bowen, An Accurate Map of Lincolnshire; Divided into its Wapontakes. Laid down from the best Authorities, and most approved Maps & Charts, with various additional Improvements (London, 1751), British Library Maps K.Top.19.18; Armstrong, Map of Lincolnshire, 1779.

12.     J. Cary, Cary's New Map of England and Wales (London, 1794), pp. 43, 52; J. Carey, Cary's Traveller's Companion, or, a Delineation of the Turnpike Roads of England and Wales (London, 1792), Map of Lincolnshire; J. Cary, Cary's Traveller's Companion (London, 1806), Map of Lincolnshire.

13.     For Faldingworth's enclosure map, see E. Russell and R. Russell, Making New Landscapes in Lincolnshire: the Enclosure of Thirty-Four Parishes in Mid-Lindsey, Lincolnshire History Series No. 5 (Lincoln: Lincolnshire Recreational Services, 1983), pp. 44–7. For Samuel Lewis's map, see S. Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of England (London, 1835), p. 93, digitised by the British Library here; for Henry Stevens' draft 1820 map of the Hackthorn district for the Ordnance Survey, see British Library OSD 282, digitised here. Another mapped route from the early nineteenth century is that of William Faden from 1801, which follows the Langworth road through to Snelland, then seems to turn north to Buslingthorpe (via the road to Friesthorpe shown by Armstrong and Cary) and then to Middle Rasen before turning east to Market Rasen: W. Faden, A map of England, Wales & Scotland, describing all the direct and principal cross roads in Great Britain, drawn 1801 and published 1811, digitised here.

14.     Bartholomew's Half Inch Maps of England and Wales, sheet 10, 'Lincoln Wolds' (1902), digitised here; Ordnance Survey, Ministry of Transport Road Map (1923), digitised here. 

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2021, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

Indo-Pacific beads from Europe to Japan? Another fifth- to seventh-century AD global distribution

The aim of the following post is to briefly discuss another global distribution from Late Antiquity, this time of Indo-Pacific beads. Indo-Pacific beads were made in southern India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia from the third century BC onwards, and by c. 400 to 700 AD they have an impressive distribution stretching from northern and eastern Africa across to China, Korea and Japan, with recent research demonstrating that they were exported to Europe at this time too.

Distribution of Indo-Pacific beads and Jatim beads during Late Antiquity, c.AD 400 to c.700, showing both findspots (dots) and production sites (stars) thought to be active during finds of the fifth to seventh centuries; Indo-Pacific beads are shown in orange and Jatim beads in red, with the latter included here for interest due to the fact that an example has been recovered from the Byzantine Red Sea port of Berenike alongside a sizeable quantity of Indo-Pacific. For a larger version of this map, click here. Note, the map is based on the sources listed in fn. 1 and is not exhaustive; rather, it is intended to offer an impression of the wide distribution of these beads across Eurasia and Africa in this era based on published discussions. Likewise, findspots of Jatim beads are very general for some territories and are only be plotted at a country/region level in these cases. Image: C. R. Green.

Previous posts on this site have discussed fifth- to seventh-century AD global distributions of Early Byzantine and Late Sasanian objects stretching across Eurasia and Africa. The following piece looks at an additional global distribution from Late Antiquity, this time of tiny glass beads produced in southern India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, which are recognizable both morphologically/typologically and by chemical analysis due to their use of Southern Asian high aluminous soda glass. These Indo-Pacific monochrome drawn beads were first produced in the third century BC and continued to be made through until the early twenty-first century in India, but they seem to have reached their widest pre-modern distribution from the late fourth century through to the seventh century.(1) For example, over 150,000 of these beads were discovered during excavations of the Yongningsi Temple site in the Northern Wei capital of Luoyang, China, founded by the Empress Wu in AD 516 and destroyed by lightning in 534.(2) Similarly, thousands of these beads have been recovered from fifth- to seventh-century Silla and Kofun tombs in Korea and Japan, and significant numbers have also been found on a number of sites in Africa—indeed, 51% of the beads discovered from the Late Roman/Early Byzantine Red Sea port of Berenike, Egypt, are Indo-Pacific beads, with finds from this site also including a probably sixth-century Jatim bead made on the Indonesian island of Java, and such beads are also found as far afield as sixth- to seventh-century Zanzibar (Tanzania) and the Late Garamantian kingdom in the Fazzan area of the Libyan Sahara.(3)

In this light, recent work by Constantin Pion and Bernard Gratuze is of particular interest as it extends this Late Antique distribution of Indo-Pacific beads even further, into the far west of Eurasia. They have demonstrated that thousands of these tiny beads were imported into continental Europe during the fifth and sixth centuries, being found on 44 sites stretching from Spain across to Serbia, with one cemetery in France (Saint-Laurent-des-Hommes, Dordogne) containing as many as 3,037 of these Indo-Pacific beads.(4) Pion and Gratuze date the graves containing these beads primarily to the period from the mid-fifth to later sixth centuries and note that these are the smallest of the glass beads that appear in early medieval European cemeteries, being predominantly c. 2.5mm or smaller in diameter and green in colour. In 75% of the graves where the deposition context is clear, these tiny imported beads were used within necklaces, whilst in 25% of graves they were used to decorate the embroidery of textiles, notably headresses of silk, and it is possible that they arrived in Europe already attached to such textiles as well as on their own (the latter witnessed by the discovery of uniform strings of these beads at the Byzantine Red Sea port of Berenike). Even more interestingly, these Indo-Pacific beads are found in graves of 'varying degrees of richness' and 'do not appear to be the prerogative of a privileged few', which is a conclusion of considerable interest when considering the wider significance of these very long-distance imports to early medieval Europe.(5)

Indo-Pacific beads discovered in the Roman/Early Byzantine cemetery at Qau, Egypt, similar to those discovered in fifth- to sixth-century Europe, from bead assemblage UC74134 (image: Petrie Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

As to the context of these imports from India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, it should be remembered that they do not stand alone as Red Sea and Indian Ocean products traded through to western Europe in the fifth to seventh centuries AD. Perhaps the most obvious of these other imports were the garnets used in the polychrome gold jewellery of this period that is found widely distributed across Europe, notable examples including the garnet cloisonné items discovered in the late fifth-century burial of Childeric (at Tournai, Belgium) and the probably mid- to late sixth-century shoulder clasps from the early seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship-burial (Suffolk, England); these garnets have been shown via archaeometric data to have had their origins in India and Sri Lanka.(6) Likewise, the cowrie shells that were popular all across early medieval northwestern Europe and Anglo-Saxon England as amulets and elements within necklaces are believed to have their origins either in the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean, whilst recent studies of the large number of ivory rings now known from both sixth- to seventh-century England and the continent confirm that they came from the tusks of African savannah elephants, probably obtained via the Red Sea from the east coast of Africa. Indeed, not only were both imported cowrie shells and ivory rings found in significant quantities right across northwestern Europe and England, but they were also not simply confined to high-status graves during the sixth- and seventh centuries, instead being used more widely; as such, they offer an important parallel to and confirmation of the situation outlined above with regard to the use of Indo-Pacific beads in Europe.(7) Finally, it is likely that a number of other gemstones in use in Europe during this period, such as sapphires and perhaps amethysts, were definitely or possibly ultimately obtained from India/Sri Lanka, as were most certainly the spices such as pepper that are recorded in impressive quantities in Europe during this period and after: for example, the mid-seventh-century Merovingian king Chlothar III granted an annual rent of 30 pounds of pepper (grown in India) to the monastery of Corbie in northern France, along with sizeable amounts of other spices including cinnamon (from Sri Lanka) and cloves (from Indonesia).(8)

Lastly, in addition to such Indo-Pacific beads, the map included at the start of this post also shows the distribution of Jatim beads made in East Java, Indonesia, and these deserve a brief concluding comment too. Such beads were produced from the end of the fourth century AD through until perhaps the seventh century, and have a fairly extensive distribution in Southeast Asia and across to Korea and Japan, where—like Indo-Pacific beads—they are found in Silla Kingdom and Kofun period tombs. Although no examples of these beads are (yet) known from sites in Europe, at least some definitely made their way to the fifth-/sixth-century Byzantine Empire, as an example was found at the Byzantine Red Sea port of Berenike, Egypt, in 1999. This is, in itself, fascinating and worthy of note. However, what is particularly interesting about these beads is that they also help illustrate trade in the opposite direction too, as recent compositional analysis indicates that both Early Byzantine and Sasanian Persian glass was used to produce some of these beads in East Java!(9)

The distribution of possible Red Sea and Indian Ocean imports in fifth- to seventh-century Britain; click here for a larger version of this map. Finds of garnet are indicated by diamonds, cowries by dots, ivory rings by open squares, and amethysts by stars (image: C. R. Green).

The stunning gold, garnet and millefiori glass shoulder-clasps from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, using garnets imported from India or Sri Lanka; although they were deposited in the early seventh-century, Noël Adams has concluded that they were probably made in the mid- to late sixth century, see N. Adams, 'Rethinking the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps and armour', in C. Entwistle & N. Adams (eds.), Intelligible Beauty: Recent Research on Byzantine Jewellery (London, 2010), pp. 83–112 (image: British Museum).

A probable elephant ivory ring from an early Anglo-Saxon bag, found at Ruskington, Lincolnshire; such rings from early Anglo-Saxon burials have been to shown to be cut from the base of tusk of an African savannah elephant (image: C. R. Green). 

A cowrie shell from the Red Sea or Indian Ocean found in an Anglo-Saxon grave in Lincolnshire (image: PAS).

The fifth- or sixth-century AD Escrick Ring, found in Yorkshire, set with a central cabochon sapphire gem from Sri Lanka (image: Yorkshire Museums Trust, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notes

1.     The distribution map of Indo-Pacific and Jatim beads and production sites in the fifth to seventh centuries AD included here is based on a number of sources including C. Pion & B. Gratuze, 'Indo-Pacific glass beads from the Indian subcontinent in Early Merovingian graves (5th–6th century AD)', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 51–64; A. K. Carter, 'The Production and Exchange of Glass and Stone Beads in Southeast Asia from 500 BCE to the early second millennium CE: an assessment of the work of Peter Francis in light of recent research', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 16–29; S. A. Abraham, 'Glass beads and glass production in early South India: contextualizing Indo-Pacific bead manufacture', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 4–15; J. W. Lankton, L. Dussubieux & T. Rehren, 'A Study of Mid-first Millennium CE Southeast Asian Specialized Glass Beadmaking Traditions', in E. Bacus, I. Glover & P. Sharrock (eds.), Interpreting Southeast Asia’s Past: Monument, Image and Text (Singapore, 2008), pp. 335–56; K-W. Wang, Cultural and Socio-Economic Interaction Reflected by Glass Beads in Early Iron Age Taiwan (University of Sheffield PhD Thesis, 2016); J. Then-Obluska, 'Cross-cultural bead encounters at the Red Sea port site of Berenike, Egypt: preliminary assessment (seasons 2009–2012)', Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean, 24 (2015), 735–77; M. Wood, 'Glass beads from pre-European contact sub-Saharan Africa: Peter Francis's work revisited and updated', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 65–80; M. Wood et al, 'Zanzibar and Indian Ocean trade in the first millennium CE: the glass bead evidence', Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 9 (2017), 879–901; V. Leitch et al, 'Early Saharan trade: the inorganic evidence', in D. J. Mattingly et al (eds.), Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 287–340; A. K. Carter, S. A. Abraham & G. O. Kelly (eds.), Asia's Maritime Bead Trade, special issue of Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), pp. 1–104; P. Frances, Asia's Maritime Bead Trade: 300 B.C. to the Present (Honolulu, 2002); A. K. Carter, 'Beads, exchange networks and emerging complexity: a case study from Cambodia and Thailand (500 BCE–CE 500)', Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 25 (2015), 733–57;A. Jiayao, 'Glass beads found at the Yongningsi Temple', Journal of Glass Studies, 42 (2000), 81–4; J. W. Lankton, I-S. Lee & J. D. Allen, 'Javanese (Jatim) beads in late fifth to early sixth-century Korean (Silla) tombs', in Annales du 16e Congrès de l'Association Internationale pour l'Histoire du Verre (Nottingham, 2005), pp. 327–30; T. Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 38, 41, 45; S. Lee & D. P. Leidy, Silla: Korea's Golden Kingdom (New York, 2013), pp. 115–9; I. Nakai & J. Shirataki, 'Chemical Composition of Glass Beads Excavated from Kofun (ca. AD 2nd to 7th c.) in Western Japan by Portable XRF Showing Glass Trade among Asian Countries', in F. Gan et al (eds.), Recent Advances In The Scientific Research On Ancient Glass And Glaze (Hackensack, 2016), pp. 73–94; and K. Oga & T. Tomomi, 'Ancient Japan and the Indian Ocean interaction sphere: chemical compositions, chronologies and trade routes of imported glass beads in the Yayoi-Kofun periods (3rd century BCE – 7th century CE', Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology, 9 (2013), 35–65. Unfortunately, no cemeteries in England were examined as part of Pion & Gratuze's research into early medieval European Indo-European beads; however, it seems more than credible that these beads were also imported to early Anglo-Saxon England too given both that other exotic imports of the period are indeed found on both sides of the English Channel and that some of the beads recorded from fifth- to sixth-century graves in eastern England appear to be similar to Pion & Gratuze's continental examples. Consequently, one such English site that contains potential Indo-Pacific beads is plotted here to reflect this; my thanks are due to Dr Sue Brunning, the curator of the European Early Medieval Collections at the British Museum, and to Dr Rose Broadley, archaeological glass specialist and Kent Historic Environment Record officer, for sharing photographs and thoughts on some of these beads from early Anglo-Saxon Kent.
2.     A. Jiayao, 'Glass beads found at the Yongningsi Temple', Journal of Glass Studies, 42 (2000), 81–4.
3.     For Korea and Japan, see S. Lee & D. P. Leidy, Silla: Korea's Golden Kingdom (New York, 2013), pp. 115–9; I. Nakai & J. Shirataki, 'Chemical Composition of Glass Beads Excavated from Kofun (ca. AD 2nd to 7th c.) in Western Japan by Portable XRF Showing Glass Trade among Asian Countries', in F. Gan et al (eds.), Recent Advances In The Scientific Research On Ancient Glass And Glaze (Hackensack, 2016), pp. 73–94; and K. Oga & T. Tomomi, 'Ancient Japan and the Indian Ocean interaction sphere: chemical compositions, chronologies and trade routes of iimported glass beads in the Yayoi-Kofun periods (3rd century BCE – 7th century CE', Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology, 9 (2013), 35–65. On Berenike, Egypt, see for example T. Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 38, 41, 45; J. Then-Obluska, 'Cross-cultural bead encounters at the Red Sea port site of Berenike, Egypt: preliminary assessment (seasons 2009–2012)', Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean, 24 (2015), 735–77; J. W. Lankton, I-S. Lee & J. D. Allen, 'Javanese (Jatim) beads in late fifth to early sixth-century Korean (Silla) tombs', in Annales du 16e Congrès de l'Association Internationale pour l'Histoire du Verre (Nottingham, 2005), pp. 327–30. On Indo-Pacific beads from the earliest layers at the Unguja Ukuu site, Zanzibar Island, Tanzania, see for example M. Wood, 'Glass beads from pre-European contact sub-Saharan Africa: Peter Francis's work revisited and updated', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 65–80; M. Wood et al, 'Zanzibar and Indian Ocean trade in the first millennium CE: the glass bead evidence', Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 9 (2017), 879–901, and M. Wood, 'Glass beads from pre-European contact sub-Saharan Africa: Peter Francis's work revisited and updated', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 65–80. For the Garamantian kingdom, see V. Leitch et al, 'Early Saharan trade: the inorganic evidence', in D. J. Mattingly et al (eds.), Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 287–340.
4.     C. Pion & B. Gratuze, 'Indo-Pacific glass beads from the Indian subcontinent in Early Merovingian graves (5th–6th century AD)', Archaeological Research in Asia, 6 (2016), 51–64.
5.     Pion & Gratuze, 'Indo-Pacific glass beads from the Indian subcontinent in Early Merovingian graves', p. 59.
6.     For the origins of the garnets in use in Europe from the fifth to seventh centuries AD, see T. Calligaro et al, 'Contribution à l'étude des grenats mérovingiens (Basilique de Saint-Denis et autres collections du musée d'Archéologie nationale, diverses collections publiques et objets de fouilles récentes): nouvelles analyses gemmologiques et géochimiques effectuées au Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France', Antiquités Nationales, 38 (2006–07), 111–44; for a distribution map and discussion of garnet finds from Britain, see H. Hamerow, 'The circulation of garnets in the North Sea Zone, AD 400–700', in A. Hilgner, S. Greiff & D. Quast (eds.), Gemstones in the First Millennium AD (Mainz, 2017), pp. 71–86; for the date of the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps, see N. Adams, 'Rethinking the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps and armour', in C. Entwistle & N. Adams (eds.), Intelligible Beauty: Recent Research on Byzantine Jewellery (London, 2010), pp. 83–112.
7.     For the continent, see J. Drauschke, '"Byzantine" and "oriental" imports in the Merovingian Empire from the second half of the fifth to the beginning of the eighth century', in A. Harris (ed.), Incipient Globalisation? Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century (Oxford, 2007), pp. 53–73, especially pp. 67 and 72; C. Hills, 'From Isiodore to isotopes: ivory rings in early medieval graves', in H. Hamerow & A. MacGregor (eds.), Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain (Oxford, 2001), pp. 131–46; and J. Drauschke, 'Byzantine Jewellery? Amethyst beads in East and West during the early Byzantine period', in C. Entwistle & N. Adams (eds.), 'Intelligible Beauty': Recent Research on Byzantine Jewellery (London, 2010), pp. 50–60. For Britain, see J. W. Huggett, 'Imported grave goods and the early Anglo-Saxon economy', Medieval Archaeology, 32 (1988), pp. 63–96; H. Geake, The Use of Grave-Goods in Conversion-Period England, c.600–c.850 (Oxford, 1997); and C. Hills, 'From Isiodore to isotopes: ivory rings in early medieval graves', in H. Hamerow & A. MacGregor (eds.), Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain (Oxford, 2001), pp. 131–46. For recent work on the ivory rings confirming that they were indeed made of elephant ivory, not walrus ivory, see Hills, 'From Isiodore to isotopes: ivory rings in early medieval graves', and, for example, G. Edwards & J. Watson, Ancient Monuments Laboratory Report 31/91: Mineral Preserved Organic Material from Empingham Anglo-Saxon Cemetery, Rutland (London, 1991), p. 2, which notes that seven ivory rings from Empingham Anglo-Saxon cemetery, Rutland, could be shown to be elephant ivory cut from the base of a tusk.
8.     D. W. Rollason, Early Medieval Europe 300-1050: The Birth of Western Society (London, 2012), p. 160; I. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751 (London, 1994), pp. 215–16.
9.     J. W. Lankton, L. Dussubieux & T. Rehren, 'A study of mid-first millennium CE Southeast Asian specialized glass beadmaking traditions', in E. Bacus, I. Glover & P. Sharrock (eds.), Interpreting Southeast Asia’s Past: Monument, Image and Text (Singapore, 2008), pp. 335–56; J. W. Lankton, I-S. Lee & J. D. Allen, 'Javanese (Jatim) beads in late fifth to early sixth-century Korean (Silla) tombs', in Annales du 16e Congrès de l'Association Internationale pour l'Histoire du Verre (Nottingham, 2005), pp. 327–30; T. Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 39–40; J. Then-Obluska, 'Cross-cultural bead encounters at the Red Sea port site of Berenike, Egypt: preliminary assessment (seasons 2009–2012)', Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean, 24 (2015), 735–77 at p. 751.

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