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 an 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.

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: British Library, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Open Government Licence version 1.0 (OGL v1.0)) (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 Kain, R. J. P., Oliver, R. R. (2020). Historic Parishes of England and Wales : an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata. [data collection]. UK Data Service. SN: 4348, DOI: http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-4348-1, Copyright R.J.P. Kain and R.R. Oliver). 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, credit: OpenStreetMap and its contributors, under the Open Database License).

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, credit: OpenStreetMap and its contributors, under the Open Database License).

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 from topographic-map.com, which uses TessaDEM licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0). 

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: modified and cropped from David Rumsey; David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford University Libraries, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

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, via Flickr, licenced as no known copyright restrictions).

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, credit: OpenStreetMap and its contributors, under the Open Database License).

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.

King Alfred and India: an Anglo-Saxon embassy to southern India in the ninth century AD

[The following post has now been fully revised, expanded and published as C. R. Green, 'King Alfred and India: an Anglo-Saxon Embassy to Southern India in the Ninth Century', in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours (formerly Anglo-Saxon England), vol. 52 (2026). You can read it for free here, as the article is Open Access]

One of the more intriguing references to early medieval contacts between Britain and the wider world is found in the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', which mentions a late ninth-century AD embassy to India that was supposedly sent by King Alfred the Great. The following post offers a draft discussion of the evidence for this voyage before going on to consider its potential context and feasibility.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 883 AD in MS F, which refers to Alfred sending alms to the shrines of St Thomas in India and St Bartholomew (image: British Library, Cotton MS Domitian A VIII, f. 55v).

According to the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' for AD 883, King Alfred of Wessex sent two men, Sigehelm and Æthelstan, overseas with alms to carry both to Rome and to the shrines of 'St Thomas in India/Indea and to St Bartholomew', fulfilling a promise made when he besieged a Viking raiding-army at London (MSS D, E & F; also mentioned with additional details by William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester, see below).

883: Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome—and also to St Thomas in India and to St Bartholomew—the alms which King Alfred had vowed to send there when they beseiged the raiding-army in London; and there, by the grace of God, they were very successful in obtaining their prayers in accordance with those vows.(1)

Needless to say, this passage has been the subject of considerable interest. Some have suggested that 'India seems an unlikely destination for two English thanes' and argued that we might thus see India/Indea as a mistranscription of Judea, based on variant forms in MSS B & C.(2) However, whilst possible, this is by no means a necessary assumption, and a reading of Sigehelm and Æthelstan's intended goal as indeed being India remains commonly accepted.(3) Certainly, a final destination for Alfred's two emissaries at shrines in India, rather than Judea, would fit well with contemporary Anglo-Saxon knowledge of the two saints mentioned in the Chronicle's account. As the ninth-century Old English Martyrology attests, both St Thomas and St Bartholomew were said to have been martyred in India in tales that were current in King Alfred's time; likewise, Cynewulf's arguably ninth-century Old English poem The Fates of the Apostles explicitly links these two saints with India, and so too do the works of Aldhelm, d. 709, whom King Alfred notably considered England's finest poet.(4) Furthermore, it may well be that, rather than India being an 'unlikely destination for two English thanes', its remoteness from early medieval England was, in fact, the very point of Alfred's gift: that, in return for success against a Viking raiding-army that had occupied London, King Alfred had deliberately pledged to send alms to the very furthest-known reaches of Christendom, to the land that was conceived of as mirroring Britain's position on the very far edge of the known world.(5)

A Late Anglo-Saxon map of the world, orientated with east at the top; Britain and India are situated at opposite sides of the world and both at its very margins, Britain on the far bottom edge of the map and India at the far top. Click the image for a larger version of this map (image: British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius BV, f. 58v).

If two emissaries of an Anglo-Saxon king carrying alms for the shrines of St Thomas and St Bartholomew were indeed sent to India in the 880s, then this would naturally raise a number of additional questions, namely what, exactly, were Sigehelm and Æthelstan travelling to visit? How might they have travelled there and what was the context for such a visit? And who actually were these two travellers?

With regard to their intended destination, the usual—and most credible—interpretation of alms being sent to India by King Alfred is that they were being sent to shrines located in southern India. The existence there of an early and notable Syriac Christian community, known usually as 'Thomas Christians' after their claimed founder St Thomas the Apostle, is well-established. Although the exact circumstances of this community's origins are much debated, there is little doubt that stories of St Thomas's claimed missionary activity in India were circulating in the Mediterranean world by the third and fourth centuries AD, nor that there was indeed a permanent Christian community established in southern India by at least Late Antiquity.(6) So, for example, the Chronicle of Se’ert is believed to offer plausible testimony for fifth-century Christians in India, referring to a bishop of Rev-Ardashir at coastal Persis (Fars, Iran) sending materials for use among Christians in India in c. AD 470, and Isho'dad of Merv mentions that 'Daniel the Presbyter, the Indian', assisted Mar Koumi in preparing a Syriac translation of a Greek text for Bishop Mari of Rev-Ardashir, something that must have taken place in the early to mid-fifth century. Likewise, two letters of Isho‘yabh III, bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and Patriarch of the Church of the East from 649 to 659, refer to the metropolitan of Fars administering Indian episcopal sees then, and India recieved its own metropolitan bishop in the seventh century by his hand and then again—possibly after a period in which it was once more under the authority of Fars—in the eighth century.(7)

A copper plate grant of AD 849 from Kollam, southern India, providing documentary evidence of the privileges and influence that the Saint Thomas Christians of the church at Kollam enjoyed in early Malabar; the document contains signatures of the witnesses in Pahlavi, Kufic and Hebrew scripts. For a colour image of these plates and further details, see the De Monfort University/British Museum project on the copper plates (image: Wikimedia Commons).

As to a knowledge of this Indian Christian community, with its Persian connections, in the Mediterranean region and Europe, various pieces of evidence from the fifth century and after are suggestive of an awareness of Christians in India that extended beyond the circulating accounts of the Acts of the Apostle Thomas. For example, the anonymous author usually known as Gelasius of Cyzicus, writing around AD 475 in Bithynia (modern Turkey), was certainly aware that Indian Christians were linked with the Persian church. Furthermore, by c. AD 500 the tradition had begun to circulate in Greek, Latin and Syriac sources that St Thomas had died at Kalamene/Calamina in India (Cholamandalam), something that is thought to reflect knowledge of the establishment of a tomb/shrine associated with St Thomas on the Coromandel coast in south India by this point at the latest, presumably the site at Mylapore where Thomas Christians venerated his tomb in subsequent periods (it is perhaps worth noting that this site is indeed mentioned in the ninth-century Old English Martyrology account of St Thomas, referred to above).(8) Other sources take us even further. Perhaps most famously, the Byzantine author known as Cosmas Indicopleustes—probably writing in Alexandria, Egypt, in the sixth century—demonstrates a notable degree of knowledge of India and Sri Lanka, making a number of references to Christians in India and Sri Lanka:

Even in the Island of Taprobane [Sri Lanka] in Inner India, where also the Indian sea is, there is a church of Christians, clergy and believers... The same is true in the place called Male [Malabar, India], where the pepper grows, and the place called Kaliana, and there is a bishop appointed from Persia... 

[Sri Lanka] has a church of Persian Christians who are resident in that country, and a priest sent from Persia, and a deacon, and all that is required for conducting the worship of the church.(9)

Even more intriguingly, Gregory of Tours—writing at Tours, France, towards the end of the sixth century—not only recounts a number of significant details regarding the shrine of St Thomas in India in his account of the saint, but also specifies the source of his knowledge of the shrine and church there as someone who had actually visited it, a point of considerable significance in the present context. The account in question is found in Gregory's Glory of the Martyrs, chapter 31, finished c. AD 590, and runs as follows:

The tomb of the apostle Thomas... [I]n that region of India where he had first been buried there are a monastery and a church that is spectacularly large and carefully decorated and constructed. In this church God revealed a great miracle. A lamp was placed there in front of the spot where he had been buried. Once lit, by divine command it burned without ceasing, day and night: no one offered the assistance of oil or a new wick. No wind blew it out, no accident extinguished it, and its brightness did not diminish. The lamp continues to burn because of the power of the apostle that is unfamiliar to men but is nevertheless associated with divine power. Theodorus, who visited the spot, told this to me.(10)

All told, it thus seems clear that there was indeed an early Christian community in southern India that was associated with St Thomas, as per the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', and which had a shrine and church—'spectacularly large and carefully decorated and constructed'—that visitors carrying alms from north-western Europe might journey to during the early medieval period. If the destination itself is therefore not implausible, what then of the second query outlined above, namely the context of such a visit and how two ninth-century Anglo-Saxons might have travelled to India?

Illustration of pepper trees, accompanying the text of Cosmas Indicopleustes's sixth-century Christian Topography in Codex Sinaiticus graecus 1186, fol. 202v, eleventh century, probably from Cappadocia, now at St. Katherine's monastery, Sinai; the text associated with it is translated as follows in Faller 2011: 'This is a picture of the tree which produces pepper. Each separate stem being very weak and limp twines itself, like the slender tendrils of the vine, around some lofty tree which bears no fruit. And every cluster of the fruit is protected by a double leaf. It is of a deep green colour like that of rue.' Faller suggests that both the image and text are 'so detailed and accurate that personal inspection and experience are almost a certainty' (image: Faller 2011, used under the CC BY 3.0 licence specified by the Journal of Transcultural Studies).

An Old English recipe for a salve against cysts, which contains a number of ingredients including radish, turnip and pepper from India, from BL Cotton MS Domitian A. i, f.55v (image: British Library, via For the Wynn).

With regard to this wider context, the early medieval journey of Theodorus to St Thomas's church in India, probably located at Kalamene/Calamina (Mylapore), and then back to western Europe—where he could inform the Bishop of Tours, Gregory, of the magnificent monastery and church that he found there—coincides with a period in which there is significant material evidence for contact between the Mediterranean and Europe on the one hand and the Indian Ocean world on the other.(11) However, there is no reason to think that subsequent centuries saw the severing of routes between India and the Mediterranean/Europe. Certainly, pepper from India continued to be used in north-western Europe into the mid-seventh century and beyond, and in impressive quantities: for example, the mid-seventh-century Merovingian king Chlothar III granted an annual rent of 30 pounds of pepper (grown in India) to a single monastery at Corbie in northern France, along with sizeable amounts of other spices including cinnamon (from Sri Lanka) and cloves (from Indonesia), and this grant was reconfirmed by Chilperic II in 716.(12) Likewise, in England Bede's few personal possessions included pepper when he died in AD 735, and Aldhelm at the end of the seventh century composed a riddle to which the answer was 'pepper', indicating that he expected his audience to be familiar with this spice:

I am black on the outside, covered with wrinkled skin, yet inside I have a glistening core. I season the delicacies of the kitchen: the feasts of kings and extravagant dishes and likewise sauces and stews. But you will find me of no value unless my inwards are crushed for their shining contents.(13) 

Indeed, in the probably late ninth-century 'Bald's Leechbook', written for Anglo-Saxon physicians in King Alfred's reign, Indian pepper frequently occurs and is, it should be noted, mentioned more times than many native ingredients, being prescribed in more than thirty recipes in the first book alone.(14) Perhaps most famously of all, however, several trade routes leading from western Europe to India and beyond were, in fact, documented during the mid-ninth century in Ibn Khordadbeh's account of the Jewish Radhanite merchants found in his Book of Roads and Kingdoms:

These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman (i.e. Greek and Latin), the Frank, Spanish, and Slav languages. They journey from West to East, from East to West, partly on land, partly by sea. They transport from the West eunuchs, female slaves, boys, brocade, castor, marten, and other furs, and swords. They take ship from Firanja (France), on the Western Sea, and make for Farama (Pelusium, Egypt). There they load their goods on camel-back and go by land to al-Kolzom (Suez), a distance of twenty-five farsakhs (parasangs). They embark in the East Sea (Red Sea) and sail from al-Kolzom to al-Jar (port of Medina) and Jeddah (port of Mecca), then they go to Sind, India, and China. On their return from China they carry back musk, aloes, camphor, cinnamon, and other products of the Eastern countries to al-Kolzom and bring them back to Farama, where they again embark on the Western Sea. Some make sail for Constantinople to sell their goods to the Romans; others go to the palace of the King of the Franks to place their goods. Sometimes these Jew merchants, when embarking from the land of the Franks, on the Western Sea, make for Antioch (at the mouth of the Orontes); thence by land to al-Jabia (? al-Hanaya on the bank of the Euphrates), where they arrive after three days’ march. There they embark on the Euphrates and reach Baghdad, whence they sail down the Tigris, to al-Obolla. From al-Obolla they sail for Oman, Sind, Hind, and China... These different journeys can also be made by land. The merchants that start from Spain or France go to Sus al-Aksa (Morocco) and then to Tangier, whence they walk to Afrikia (Kairouan) and the capital of Egypt. Thence they go to ar-Ramla, visit Damascus, al-Kufa, Baghdad, and al-Basra (Bassora), cross Ahwaz, Fars, Kirman, Sind, Hind, and arrive in China.(15)

In light of all this, it seems clear that Sigehelm and Æthelstan's claimed late ninth-century journey from England to 'St Thomas in India' was not only credible in terms of its proposed destination, as noted above, but also the availability of routes for getting there, to judge both from the continued availability of imports from India (and beyond) in north-western Europe and Ibn Khordadbeh's testimony as to routes accessible in the ninth century for travelling from West to East and back again (note, a northern trade-route that brought a small number of Indian coins and at least one statuette of the Buddha to eighth- to tenth-century northern Europe and England also existed, but is perhaps less relevant to the present inquiry, not least because King Alfred is said to have sent Sigehelm and Æthelstan with alms for Rome as well as India).

Map of Eurasia and North Africa, c. AD 870, showing trade routes of the Radhanite Jewish merchants (blue) and other major routes (purple) blue; cities with sizable Jewish communities are shown in brown. Click here for a larger version of this map (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Finally, as to the question of the identity of these two Anglo-Saxon royal emissaries, several candidates have been proposed. William of Malmesbury, writing in England in the early twelfth century, identified Sigehelm as a bishop of Sherborne in both his Gesta Pontificum Anglorum and his Gesta Regum Anglorum, and claims that the gems Sigehelm brought back from India could still be seen at Sherborne in William's day:

He [Ealhstan, bishop of Sherborne] was followed as bishop by Heahmind, Æthelheah, Wulfsige, Asser and Sigehelm. Both the last two are known to have been bishops in the time of king Alfred, who was the fourth son of Æthelwulf... Sigehelm was sent overseas on almonry duties for the king, even getting as far as to St Thomas's in India. Something which could cause wonder for people of this generation is that his journey deep into India was a marvellously prosperous one, as he brought back exotic precious stones, in which the land abounds, and some of them can still be seen in precious objects in the church.(16)

Being devoted to almsgiving, he [King Alfred] confirmed the privileges of churches as laid down by his father, and sent many gifts overseas to Rome and to St Thomas in India. For this purpose he dispatched an envoy, Sigehelm bishop of Sherborne, who made his way to India with great success, an astonishing feat even today, and brought with him on his return gems of exotic splendour and the liquid perfumes of which the soil there is productive...(17)

This identification of Sigehelm is also briefly alluded to by John of Worcester in the early twelfth-century Chronicon ex Chronicis, in which he states that the 'bishop of Sherborne', Swithelm [sic], 'carried King Alfred's alms to St Thomas in India, and returned thence in safety'.(18) Needless to say, the claim that Sigehelm returned from India bringing with him 'exotic precious stones' that 'can still be seen in precious objects in the church' suggests that William was basing his account on local traditions at Sherborne. Nonetheless, his identification has been subject to some scepticism on account of the fact that William omits the names of three bishops of Sherborne who come between Asser and Sigehelm in the preserved episcopal lists, and that Sigehelm signs charters as bishop from AD 925 to 932, not in Alfred's reign, 871–99.(19) Whether these discrepancies are fatal to William's identification is open to debate, however. The mistaken attribution of Sigehelm's episcopacy to Alfred's reign and the omission of three intervening bishops in the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum may simply reflect an attempt by William and/or his source to reconcile a local Sherborne tradition that Sigehelm, bishop of Sherborne, was Alfred's envoy to India—and that he returned with riches subsequently used to endow the church at Sherborne with, and which could still be pointed out in the early twelfth century—with the dates of King Alfred, working from a false assumption that Sigehelm must have been bishop when he was sent overseas. In this light, it is worth pointing out that Sigehelm could conceivably have both travelled to India in 883 and attested charters from 925–32 if his pilgrimage carrying alms to India for King Alfred took place in his relative youth and he had become the Bishop of Sherborne in his relative old age.(20)

On the other hand, if the early tenth-century bishop of Sherborne named Sigehelm was not the Sigehelm sent to India in 883, contrary to what William of Malmesbury appears to have been told and shown of his supposed spoils from his trip at Sherborne, then identifying him is significantly more difficult: he could be the western Kentish ealdorman killed by the Danes in 902, as some have speculated, but he could equally well be another Sigehelm active in the era, either recorded or otherwise. As to Sigehelm's companion, Æthelstan, he is even more obscure, and unfortunately no recorded traditions of his identity survive. He may be a Mercian priest and chaplain of this name who was associated with Alfred according to Asser's contemporary Life of Alfred, but the name is very common and there are multiple alternative candidates available, including at least two thegns and an ealdorman active in Alfred's reign.(21)

In conclusion, what can be said of King Alfred's apparent embassy to India in the 880s? All told, it seems credible that India was indeed the intended destination for the alms carried by Sigehelm and Æthelstan in 883. Not only is this reading of the text the most commonly supported position and backed by the majority of the manuscripts, but it accords well with the identity of the two saints whose shrines were to be visited according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, St Thomas and St Bartholomew: these were both explicitly and repeatedly associated with India in material current in Alfred's day. Indeed, India's remoteness from early medieval England could well have been the very point of Alfred's gift, as noted above, and it would moreover fit with what we know of Alfred's own intellectual curiosity about the wider world and its limits, as Oliver Pengelly has recently pointed out.(22) Beyond this, it would seem that such a journey would also have a good context. It is clear that there was indeed a permanent Christian community in India from at least Late Antiquity, if not before, and knowledge of a shrine and church dedicated to St Thomas at Mylapore had spread to the west by c. 500; indeed, Gregory of Tours' account of the church and monastery of St Thomas in India indicates that Sigehelm and Æthelstan would have been by no means the first to visit this shrine in the early medieval era. Furthermore, a journey from western Europe to southern India appears plausible in terms of not only its proposed destination, but also the availability of routes for getting there, given the continued availability of imports from India and Ibn Khordadbeh's account of ninth-century trans-continental routeways. Finally, whilst the identity of King Alfred's two emissaries, Sigehelm and Æthelstan, remains uncertain, it can be tentatively suggested that we should be wary of rejecting outright the apparent Sherborne tradition recorded by William of Malmesbury in the early twelfth century that Sigehelm, bishop of Sherborne, was one of those who travelled to India; likewise, it is not impossible that Æthelstan may have been the Mercian priest of that name who appears in Asser's contemporary Life of Alfred as Alfred's close confidant.

The famous stone cross preserved on St Thomas's Mount, Mylapore, Chennai; the cross includes an inscription in Pahlavi ('Our lord Christ, have pity on Sabriso, (son) of Caharboxt, (son) of Suray, who bore (brought?) this (cross).') that is considered to date on palaeographic grounds to around the eighth century AD.(23) The cross was found in the area of India believed to be the location of the Indian tomb/shrine associated with St Thomas that was known in the early medieval west as Kalamene/Calamina, discussed above; as such, if Sigehelm and Æthelstan did indeed travel to India to visit the shrine of St Thomas in the late ninth century, then it is not implausible that they could have looked on this cross during their visit there (image: Wikimedia Commons).

Notes

1.     M. J. Swanton (ed. & trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London, 1996), p. 79. Note, this annal is missing from MS A of the Chronicle but is present in MSS B, C, D, E and F, and is thus thought to represent a contemporary insertion into the text—see, for example, O. Pengelly, Rome in Ninth-Century Anglo-Saxon England (University of Oxford D.Phil Thesis, 2010), pp. 164–5, 246, 286; S. Keynes, 'King Alfred and the Mercians', in M. A. S. Blackburn & D. N. Dumville (eds.), Kings, Currency, and Alliances: History and Coinage of Southern England in the Ninth Century (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 1–45 at pp. 21–4.
2.     J. Harris, 'Wars and rumours of wars: England and the Byzantine world in the eighth and ninth centuries', Mediterranean Historical Review, 14 (1999), 29–46, quotation at p. 39; others holding to this interpretation include R. Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1998), p. 192, and J. Parker, 'Ruling the waves: Saxons, Vikings, and the sea in the formation of an Anglo-British identity in the nineteenth century', in S. I. Sobecki (ed.), The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture (Cambridge, 2011), pp.195–206 at p. 200.
3.     See, for example, M. J. Swanton (ed. & trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London, 1996), p. 79; D. Anlezark, Alfred the Great (Bradford, 2017), p. 54; C. R. Hart, Learning and Culture in Late Anglo-Saxon England and the Influence of Ramsey Abbey on the Major English Monastic Schools (Lampeter, 2003), p. 178; O. Pengelly, Rome in Ninth-Century Anglo-Saxon England (University of Oxford D.Phil Thesis, 2010), pp. 245–7, 254, 267, 277; M. B. Busbee, 'A paradise full of monsters: India in the Old English imagination', LATCH, 1 (2008), 51–72; R. E. Frykenberg, Christianity in India (Oxford, 2008), pp. 112, 117; N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 225 (fn. 67) & 228; H. R. Loyn, Society and Peoples: Studies in the History of England and Wales, c. 600-1200 (London, 1992), p. 253; D. Whitelock (ed. & trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation (London, 1961), p. 50; and Dr Beachcoming, 'Anglo-Saxons in southern India?', blog post, 15 July 2011, online at http://www.strangehistory.net/2011/07/15/anglo-saxons-in-southern-india/.
4.     Old English Martyrology: C. Rauer (ed. & trans.), The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 167, 227 ('On the twenty-first day of the month [December] is the feast of the apostle St Thomas, who in Greek was called Didymus... And after Christ's ascension he instructed many nations in Christ's faith...[including] two Indian nations... he travelled through the lands of pagan people and the eastern parts of the world, and in India he built their king's hall in heaven, whose name was Gundaphorus... In another Indian country... one of the pagan bishops then killed the servant of Christ, and the texts sometimes say that he was stabbed with a sword, sometimes they say he was stabbed with spears. He suffered in the city of Calamina in India...'; 'On the twenty-fifth day of the month [August] is the feast of the apostle St Bartholomew; he was Christ's missionary in the country of India, which is the outermost of all regions... In this country he cast out idols which they had previously worshipped there...'). The Fates of the Apostles: S. A. J. Bradley (ed. & trans.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1995), pp. 155–6 ('Certainly, it has been no secret fact abroad that Bartholomew, a soldier strong in the strife, went to live among the people of India... So too Thomas bravely ventured to other parts in India, where the heart was illumined and the purpose strengthened in many people through his holy word...'). The works of Aldhelm: M. Lapidge & J. L. Rosier, Aldhelm: the Poetic Works (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 53–4, 55 ('On Thomas: ...Christ, therefore, the holy offspring of God, sent this man, who was performing many miracles with magnificent success, to convert the peoples of the orient with holy books. India at that time worshipped icons with unspeakable rite... but it confessed the true faith when Thomas won its salvation and (henceforth) believed in Christ, Who controls the sceptres of heaven.'; 'On St Bartholomew: Mighty India stands as the last of the lands of the earth... Given over to pagan rites, India used to worship idols. But Bartholomew destroyed the pagan shrines, duly smashing the images of the pagan gods...'); M. Lapidge & M. Herren, Aldhelm: the Prose Works (Cambridge, 1979), p. 81 ('Didymus [Thomas] at one time the disbelieving doubter of the Lord's resurrection—but once the scars of Christ's wounds had been seen, (became) its confident preacher—who illumined the tripartite provinces of eastern India with the clear light of evangelical preaching and totally annulled the... rites of (pagan) sanctuaries...'). On King Alfred's view of Aldhelm as the finest Anglo-Saxon poet, see M. Lapidge, 'The career of Aldhelm', Anglo-Saxon England, 36 (2007), 15–69 at p. 18 and fn. 17, & A. Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm (Cambridge, 1994), p. 5.
5.     For the view that there was indeed a Viking raiding-army that occupied London in 883, see S. Keynes, 'King Alfred and the Mercians', in M. A. S. Blackburn & D. N. Dumville (eds.), Kings, Currency, and Alliances: History and Coinage of Southern England in the Ninth Century (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 1–45 at pp. 21–4; for the idea that India was conceived of as mirroring Britain's position on the edge of the known world, see M. B. Busbee, 'A paradise full of monsters: India in the Old English imagination', LATCH, 1 (2008), 51–72. See further O. Pengelly, Rome in Ninth-Century Anglo-Saxon England (University of Oxford D.Phil Thesis, 2010), pp. 246–7, 267, 277–8, on how dispatching a expedition to the far-eastern limits of Christendom may have been a deliberate choice on Alfred's part.
6.     See especially R. E. Frykenberg, 'Thomas Christians and the Thomas tradition', in Frykenberg, Christianity in India (Oxford, 2008), pp. 91–115; N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture (Cambridge, 2018); S. Neill, A History of Christianity in India (Cambridge, 1984); and W. Baum & D. W. Winkler, The Church of the East: A Concise History (London, 2003), pp. 51–8.
7.     N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2018), especially pp. 143–4; M. D. Gibson (ed. & trans.), The Commentaries of Isho'dad of Merv, Bishop of Hadatha (Cambridge, 1916), vol. V, part 2, pp. xi–xiv; C. Buck, 'The universality of the Church of the East: how Persian was Persian Christianity?', Journal of the Assyrian Academic Society, 10 (1996), 54–95 at pp. 68–9; S. Neill, A History of Christianity in India (Cambridge, 1984), p. 44.
8.     N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2018), especially pp. 144–5, 212–13, 222–5, 227–32; C. G. Cereti, L. M. Olivieri & J. Vazhuthanapally, 'The problem of the Saint Thomas Crosses and related questions: epigraphical survey and preliminary research', East and West, 52 (2002), 285–310 at pp. 303–04. On the shrine/tomb and associated church at Mylapore, Chennai, see further Cereti, Olivieri & Vazhuthanapally, 'The problem of the Saint Thomas Crosses and related questions', East and West, 52 (2002), 285–310 at pp. 302–09.
9.     R. E. Frykenberg, Christianity in India (Oxford, 2008), p. 110; on Cosmas Indicopleustes and his knowledge of India, see further S. Fallar, 'The world according to Cosmas Indicopleustes—concepts and illustrations of an Alexandrian merchant and monk', Journal of Transcultural Studies, 1 (2011), 193–232. Incidentally, it is worth noting that Cosmas Indicopleustes's work was probably known in Anglo-Saxon England, see B. Bischoff & M. Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 208–11.
10.     R. Van Dam (trans.), Gregory of Tours: Glory of the Martyrs (Liverpool, 1988), p. 51; N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2018), p. 227.
11.     Long-distance trade and contacts in the fifth to seventh centuries AD have been the topic of several previous posts on this site, especially C. R. Green, 'A very long way from home: early Byzantine finds at the far ends of the world', blog post, 21 March 2017, online at https://www.caitlingreen.org/2017/03/a-very-long-way-from-home.html, & C. R. Green, 'Indo-Pacific beads from Europe to Japan? Another fifth- to seventh-century AD global distribution', blog post, 22 July 2018, online at https://www.caitlingreen.org/2018/07/indo-pacific-beads-europe.html. See further, for example, R. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade: From Pots to Pepper (London, 2008); K. R. Dark, 'Globalizing late antiquity: models, metaphors and the realities of long-distance trade and diplomacy', in A. Harris (ed.), Incipient Globalisation? Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century (Oxford, 2007), pp. 3–14; 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; 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.
12.     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.
13.     Aldhelm: M. L. Cameron, 'Bald's Leechbook and cultural interactions in Anglo-Saxon England', Anglo-Saxon England, 19 (1990), 5–12 at p.8. Bede: Epistola de Obitu Bede, 'Cuthbert's letter on the death of Bede', translated in J. McClure & R. Collins (ed.), Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1994), p. 302. Another reference to pepper (and cinnamon) in Anglo-Saxon England comes in a letter of 732–42 to an English abbess named Cuniburg that mentions the sending of both pepper and cinnamon to her: E. Emerton, The Letters of St Boniface (New York, 1940), pp. 55–6.
14.     M. L. Cameron, 'Bald's Leechbook and cultural interactions in Anglo-Saxon England', Anglo-Saxon England, 19 (1990), 5–12 at p.8; K. S. Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 62–5. Note, 'Bald's Leechbook' is not the only Anglo-Saxon medical recipe book to include pepper and other eastern ingredients; they also occur in the tenth-century Lacnunga, for example. Moreover, it is worth emphasising that the evidence is against these medical recipes being simply indiscriminately copied and not actually used: whole recipes containing rarely used exotic ingredients were omitted and other recipes saw modification to omit perishable exotic ingredients, whilst further recipes see pepper and cinnamon compounded with native ingredients according to typical English methods, as Beckett, p. 65, observes.
15.     Ibn Khordadbeh in E. N. Adler, Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages (New York, 1987), pp. 2–3; on the Radhanite merchants, see further M. Gil, 'The Rādhānite merchants and the land of Rādhān', Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 17 (1974), 299–328.
16.     William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, chapter 80, trans. D. Prest (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 117–18.
17.     William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ii.122.2, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, & M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 190–1.
18.     John of Worcester, Chronicon ex Chronicis, trans. T. Forester, The Chronicle of Florence of Worcester (London, 1854), p. 73.
19.     For the bishops and their dates, see M. A. O'Donovan, 'An interim revision of episcopal dates for the province of Canterbury, 850–950: Part II', Anglo-Saxon England, 2 (1973), 91–113 at pp. 104–05. For scepticism over William's identification, see W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred (Oxford, 1904), pp. 289–90; D. Whitelock, 'William of Malmesbury on the works of King Alfred', in D. A. Pearsall & R. A. Waldron (eds.), Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway (London, 1969), pp. 78–93 at p. 83. R. M. Thomson & M. Winterbottom, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: II, General Introduction and Commentary (Oxford, 1999), pp. 98–9, accept Stevenson's scepticism, but also note that 'There is no reason to doubt that William here represents local (Sherborne) tradition' (p. 99), and Whitelock similarly considers that William of Malmesbury must have been 'told at Sherborne that this church still had in its possession some rare gems brought back from India by Bishop Sigehelm' (Whitelock, 'William of Malmesbury', p. 83).
20.     See, for example, L. White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (London, 1978), pp. 214–5.
21.     The two specific alternative candidates for Sigehelm and Æthelstan detailed here are supported by W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred (Oxford, 1904), p. 290; D. Pratt, 'The illnesses of King Alfred the Great', Anglo-Saxon England, 30 (2001), 39–90 at p. 69; and R. Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1998), p. 191. Æthelstan, a priest, is said to have been summoned from Mercia by King Alfred in Asser's Life of Alfred, chp. 77; he attests a number of charters and may be the Æthelstan who was appointed bishop of Ramsbury in c. 909, which is intriguing given the traditional identity of his companion, Sigehelm, and the suggestion made above as to his career: S. Keynes & M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (London, 1983), pp. 92–3, 259.
22.     O. Pengelly, Rome in Ninth-Century Anglo-Saxon England (University of Oxford D.Phil Thesis, 2010), pp. 246–7, 267, 277–8; Pengelly has argued that the dispatch of the mission arguably reflects 'something of the king's intellectual curiosity about the wider world and its limits... Alfred was probing the horizons of the wider world he had inherited from Christian Latin culture' (p. 247).
23.     S. Neill, A History of Christianity in India (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 47–8; C. G. Cereti, L. M. Olivieri & J. Vazhuthanapally, 'The problem of the Saint Thomas Crosses and related questions: epigraphical survey and preliminary research', East and West, 52 (2002), 285–310; N. J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 211–2.

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