Chapter 3. Early-Eleventh-Century Weapons from the Site of Old London Bridge: A Reassessment

John Clark

In 1920 workmen on a building site at the north end of London Bridge, in the City of London, discovered a group of ancient weapons – battleaxes and spearheads – along with a grappling hook, lying in the silt on what was considered to be the old bed of the River Thames. The weapons were quickly identified as “Viking period” and acquired, in rather mysterious circumstances, by the London Museum. In 1927 they were published in a London Museum catalogue London and the Vikings, the work of the museum’s Keeper, R. E. M. (Mortimer) Wheeler.¹ On grounds of typology and the presence of decoration in Scandinavian “Ringerike” style, Wheeler dated the group to the early eleventh century.² He concluded that the finds “were clearly part of the equipment of some Viking battleship, [and] it is tempting to associate them with one or other of the attacks which, in the days of St. Olaf and King Cnut, centered around the old timber bridge.”³ The finds have been on display, as a group, in the galleries of the London Museum and its successor the Museum of London more or less continuously ever since. However, since Wheeler published his account in 1927, there has been no full discussion of the group, of the circumstances of its discovery, or of its significance.

The purpose of this chapter, then, is to reassess these objects, illustrated here in Figure 3.1 from the original London Museum photograph.⁴ We shall set the discovery in the general context of weapon finds from the Thames and from other rivers, and in the context of its historical period, the wars of the early eleventh century and the accession and reign of King Cnut; we shall consider mechanisms by which these weapons may have found their way into the river, and potential “ritual” motives for their deposition.

Figure 3.1: Photograph of the finds from Old London Bridge, originally published as the frontispiece to the London Museum catalogue London and the Vikings (1927). The item illustrated top right (described as a pair of tongs) may not belong with the other finds. Photograph © Museum of London.

“Special Deposits in Watery Locations”

In 1972 German prehistorian Walter Torbrügge published an extensive and influential study of metalwork finds from rivers in northern and north-western Europe. He concluded that the archaeological evidence indicated that in many cases the items had been deliberately thrown or placed into the river, although the purpose of such depositions could not be determined.⁵ Although most of the finds that he studied were prehistoric, he extended his coverage into the Roman and early medieval periods. Among his distribution maps of river finds is one showing finds of “Viking” weapons from the River Thames in the vicinity of London.⁶ Prominently marked on Torbrügge’s map is a “‘ship-find’ [Schiffsfund] with weapons.” Elsewhere, Torbrügge elaborates: “a boat that was discovered in 1927, not far from the Old London Bridge. It must have sunk about the year 1000; there apparently belonged to it eight axes, six spearheads, a pair of tongs, and a boat hook.”⁷ Sadly, no boat had been discovered – Torbrügge misinterpreted Wheeler’s conclusion that these finds were “part of the equipment of some Viking battleship.”

This is not the place in which to attempt a résumé of the debates about the significance of spectacular archaeological finds of all dates (particularly those coming from rivers, springs, marshes, or other wet places) that have in the past been identified as “ritual offerings” or “votive deposits” – although current practice may prefer a neutral term “special deposits.” Richard Bradley provided a thorough survey of the evidence and the issues in 1990, and has recently revisited the topic, setting it within an analysis of the relationships of such deposits to the wider landscape.⁸ Although much of the early discussion related to prehistoric finds, particularly those of the Bronze Age, as long ago as 1965 David Wilson discussed a number of river finds of late Anglo-Saxon swords, and listed in an appendix thirty-four “swords of the Viking period found in English rivers.”⁹ Of these he commented: “It is surely odd to interpret all these weapons as casual losses. They are present in such large numbers that it is difficult to see them in any other light than as offerings. Parallel phenomena in different periods would support this argument.”¹⁰ In Scandinavia, with great Iron Age deposits of weaponry in marshes or lakes as at Nydam, Illerup, and Vimose in Denmark, with no “Roman period” to interrupt the “Late Iron Age” cultural sequence, and with the late adoption of Christianity, one might well expect to find similarity of practice, if not continuity of purpose, in the later first millennium AD.¹¹ It seemed a reasonable hypothesis that Scandinavian raiders or settlers might bring the practice to Britain.

The English evidence for such ritual deposition in the early medieval period has been discussed by Andrew Reynolds and Sarah Semple, Julie Lund, and others.¹² Recently Ben Raffield, in a study of the deposition of weapons in English rivers and wetlands in the Viking Age, concluded that it was indeed a ritual practice introduced by pagan Scandinavians to impose their customs upon their new land – although in the case of the River Thames “in an area never subject to Scandinavian settlement” it might represent an “adoption [by Anglo-Saxons] of foreign ritual practice or a return to ancient belief systems.”¹³ However, John Naylor has considered early medieval finds from the full length of the Thames, from above Oxford to the City of London, and has drawn attention to the presence of many earlier Anglo-Saxon weapons, predating the ninth century – the earlier material comprising largely spearheads, in contrast to the swords and seaxes (single-edged short swords or knives) of the later period.¹⁴ As we shall see, Naylor’s statistics are confirmed when we consider finds from the London area. Whatever process resulted in weapons entering the Thames in the early “pagan” Anglo-Saxon period did not cease or necessarily diminish with the coming of Christianity. Nor did it suddenly resume with the arrival of new pagan raiders and settlers in the ninth century. Moreover, to spread the chronological net more widely, in a study of weapon finds from the River Witham in Lincolnshire, David Stocker and Paul Everson have argued that ritual deposition of swords continued as late as the fourteenth century, into a period when one might expect (but does not find) documentary evidence of such a practice.¹⁵

Most river finds are necessarily of single objects. For the most part the “ritual deposition” explanation has been offered for those clearly recognized as weapons, although Julie Lund has noted the prevalence of finds of horse equipment, tools, and jewelry as well.¹⁶ However, “hoards” of mixed ironwork, including tools and other iron objects alongside weapons, on dry land or waterside sites, formerly often identified as blacksmiths’ collections of scrap metal, are now brought into the debates about “ritual deposition.”¹⁷ This may lead us, for example, to question the status of the early medieval carpenters’ axes that have come from the Thames, and that of the two, or perhaps three, items in the group from London Bridge that are not weapons.

Medieval Finds from the River Thames

Over the years the River Thames, which runs for some 40 miles (65 km) through the Greater London area, has produced a vast number of archaeological and antiquarian finds, from dredging, building, and embankment works, stray finds on the tidal foreshore, and more recently from foreshore searching by metal-detectorists. Most of them are metalwork; they range in date from prehistoric to modern, tend to be in an excellent state of preservation, and are often of the highest quality. Although several museums hold Thames material,¹⁸ the most extensive collection of river finds from the London area is that in the Museum of London. Opening in 1976, the Museum of London brought together the collections of the former London Museum and Guildhall Museum, both of which included Thames finds, and has since benefited from the activities of Thames “mudlarks,” the licensed metal-detectorists who report their finds to the museum, now under the terms of the national Portable Antiquities Scheme.¹⁹ As curator of the Museum of London’s medieval collection, I had long been aware of the importance of Thames material in that collection, and on my retirement from the museum in 2009 I began a study of those finds and the circumstances of their discovery.

Some 2,600 objects out of approximately 15,500 in the core medieval collection of the Museum of London are recorded as coming from the River Thames, and most of them have closer findspots recorded (though these are often vague and/or unreliable).²⁰ The existence of so many records suggested that it might be possible to derive meaningful statistics concerning the types of object, their dates, and the locations in which they were found, and to assess whether there were any patterns that might suggest that at any period or in any circumstances one was dealing with the sort of deliberate deposition recognized by prehistorians. The chronological span of the museum’s medieval collection, from the fifth century to the fifteenth, allowed the comparison of distributions of early and later medieval finds that, for example, Raffield’s period-specific study of “Deposited weapons … during the Viking Age” failed to address. Torbrügge and Bradley similarly seem to have respected an “end-date” of around the year 1000 in their studies. However, Stocker and Everson included later medieval weapons in their study of finds from the River Witham, and suggested the continuation of traditional practices into the Christian period to account for their presence.²¹

As we have seen, in 1965 Wilson had commented on the prevalence of late Anglo-Saxon/Viking Age swords as river finds: “They are present in such large numbers that it is difficult to see them in any other light than as offerings.”²² One might question just how significant as proof “large numbers” alone can be. The Museum of London collection contains twice as many late medieval swords from the River Thames as it does Viking Age swords – and ten times as many late medieval and sixteenth-century daggers.²³ Were there simply more people with weapons who might lose them or cast them away in the later medieval period, and simply more weapons around? Or did whatever practice may be envisaged to have been current among “pagan” Viking invaders and settlers continue into the nominally Christian, later medieval period?

Table 3.1 sets a functional classification of Thames finds against a breakdown of their numbers by date, from “Early Anglo-Saxon” to “Late Medieval.” The large numbers of finds attributed to the latter period, representing the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, come chiefly from the area of the medieval city of London; their numbers are heavily boosted by the activities of metal-detectorists who have been searching the river foreshore, largely in this area, for the last forty and more years. Of the categories highlighted in the table, “personal items” comprise chiefly small decorative objects of brass or lead alloy such as jewelry and dress fittings; the majority of the items assigned to “religion” are lead-alloy religious badges and pilgrim souvenirs.

Table 3.1:Categories of River Thames finds by period.

Also highlighted is the category “weaponry,” which comprises large numbers from every date within our overall medieval period. The prevalence of weapon finds of all periods from rivers has long been recognised – but must be treated with caution. We may need to allow for a selective bias. Many of these finds come from dredging or are stray finds made on the foreshore by members of the public. Dredger crews might well be attracted to pick out of the bucket something recognisable as a sword, something that might have a resale value, rather than an unidentifiable piece of scrap iron. For example, collector Thomas Layton (1819–1911) of Brentford acquired material from the crews of Thames dredgers between Richmond and Wandsworth, who quickly learned the types of objects that interested him and for which he was willing to pay more.²⁴ Finders, dealers, collectors, and museum curators might all be attracted by the “glamor” of weaponry. We do not know what proportion of metalwork was not retrieved or selected for preservation – although the considerable number of non-weapon finds acquired from the City foreshore metal-detectorists since the 1970s may provide a corrective sample.

In Table 3.2 the weaponry finds are assigned to nominal zones or stretches of the river, downstream from Hampton to Erith. The area of the medieval city of London and of Southwark (Zone 7) is, not surprisingly, rich in finds from the late Anglo-Saxon period onwards, as the urban center developed; notable, however, is the preponderance of earlier finds in the area between Kew and Wandsworth (Zones 3 and 4). Both these areas are highlighted in the table.²⁵

Table 3.2:Medieval weaponry from the River Thames by zone.

The relative distribution of weapon finds of the early Anglo-Saxon period (fifth to seventh century – largely the so-called “pagan” period) and the late Anglo-Saxon period (tenth and eleventh centuries – the “Viking wars” to the Norman Conquest) is illustrated in Maps 3.1 and 3.2. The first of these shows only spearheads (which comprise all but a handful of the weapon finds of this date).²⁶ The preponderance of finds from Brentford (more than sixty spearheads, most from a marshy area at the confluence of the River Brent and the Thames) is striking and deserves further exploration.²⁷

Map 3.1: Finds of early Anglo-Saxon spearheads from the Thames in the Museum of London collection.

Map 3.2: Finds of late Anglo-Saxon/Viking-Age weapons from the Thames in the Museum of London collection.

Map 3.2 shows the much more even spread of finds of weapons – including swords, seaxes, spears and battleaxes – belonging to the tenth and eleventh centuries. Not surprisingly, it resembles Torbrügge’s map of “Viking weapon-finds” referred to earlier.²⁸ There is a notable cluster in the area of the City of London, but finds, usually single items, are spread along the river to Brentford and beyond. How should one interpret such scattered finds?

We have noted that, given the “large numbers” of finds of weaponry, there is a temptation to interpret even isolated finds as the result of deliberate deposition, and to seek to explain this by some form of ritual activity. Yet single weapons could be accidental losses, particularly at crossing points. Even clusters of weapons, if recognisably of the same date, could arguably be relics of a battle at a river crossing. What is surely needed, before we can accept “deliberate deposition” as the default explanation, is confirmation by supplementary evidence. Thus, we might seek evidence of selection – the manner in which spearheads so strikingly outnumber any other weapon in the Brentford area, for example. Or evidence of choice of location and repetition in the same location – again, Brentford, where, to judge by the range of dates of the spearheads found, a similar process of disposal was repeated over more than two hundred years.²⁹ What, then, is the significance of the group of early-eleventh-century weaponry and other ironwork from “Old London Bridge” in the Museum of London?

The Place and Circumstances of the Find

The group of ironwork that is the subject of this chapter was acquired by the then London Museum in 1920. The axes, spears, and grappling hook are listed in sequence in the museum’s original manuscript accessions register with numbers from A23339 to A23353, each with a very brief description, a single measurement, and a date “Viking Period.”³⁰ The first record reads, “Found on Site of Old London Bridge”; the others repeat “Found with last.” Each is noted as “Bought Nov. 1920.” The “tongs” pictured top right in our Figure 3.1 (accession number A23506) were not acquired until several months later – together with two large iron nails. Although also “Found on Site of Old London Bridge,” there is no confirmation from the museum register that these three items were found at the same time or in the same location as the others.

There is no further information in the museum’s archives about the circumstances of discovery or the manner of the museum’s acquisition of the items. This was not unusual at the time.³¹ In 1927 Mortimer Wheeler, then Keeper of the museum, was a little more forthcoming:

Some years ago, workmen excavating in the former foreshore of the river, not far from the north end of Old London Bridge, found a number of weapons and tools, sixteen of which are now in the Museum. The implements lay in the alluvium within a narrowly restricted area, and it is all but certain that they form a group.³²

Wheeler did not become Keeper until 1926. Where did this information – with the disturbing suggestion that what we have is only part of an originally larger group – come from? A possible source is revealed in another author’s reference to:

an interesting find of Viking objects on the foreshore at London Bridge a few years ago, no doubt evidence of one of the raids on London by these folk in the eleventh century. Six Viking axes of iron, two others with decorated bronze tubes to receive the shaft (one of them ornamented with typical Ringerike design), five spear-heads, another with silver plating on the socket with zoomorphic decoration, a grapnel and a pair of smith’s tongs, were all found in a mass.³³

This latter account, written in 1929, is by G. F. Lawrence, a London antiquities dealer who from April 1911 was paid a retaining fee to acquire archaeological specimens for the new London Museum (which opened in 1912), and continued in this role until retiring in 1926, shortly before Wheeler’s appointment as Keeper. Thereafter he occasionally provided material for the London Museum, as well as supplying foreign museums and private collectors.³⁴ Like Thomas Layton before him, he acquired material dredged from the Thames, but as the London Museum’s “Inspector of Excavations,” he also visited London building sites and came to informal (and mutually profitable) arrangements with the workmen to buy any interesting finds they might have made. What has been described as “a somewhat piratical attitude to the acquisition of specimens” unsurprisingly led to the occasional brush with the authorities, particularly over finds made in the City of London.³⁵ The most famous of these involved the Cheapside Hoard, a hoard of seventeenth-century jewelry discovered by workmen on a building site in Cheapside and acquired from them by Lawrence for the London Museum in 1912.³⁶ An unfriendly rivalry developed between Lawrence and staff of the City’s own Guildhall Museum. Lawrence seems not to have been averse to falsifying a findspot to avoid an inconvenient admission that he had no legal right to be on a particular site or to buy finds from the workmen – for in most cases the legal owners of such finds were the landowners.

The vast majority of the archaeological finds that entered the London Museum’s collections between 1912 and 1926 passed through Lawrence’s hands, and although in his 1929 article he does not claim any personal responsibility for the Old London Bridge material, and although the relevant entries in the museum accession register are not in his handwriting (unlike many earlier archaeological finds which he entered up in the register himself, sometimes rubber-stamping the entry “Inspector of Excavations”), it is surely inconceivable that he had no involvement in the acquisition of such an important group of finds from the City in 1920. If so, Lawrence must be the ultimate source of the published information about the find. After his official retirement from the London Museum, he remained on reasonably friendly terms with the new Keeper, Mortimer Wheeler. Wheeler would no doubt have discussed the circumstances of the discovery with Lawrence. It is not difficult to guess why he felt constrained to provide a rather imprecise description of its location in his 1927 publication. Indeed, the slight differences between his account and that of Lawrence in 1929 are significant. Lawrence placed the find “on the foreshore at London Bridge.” Although the tidal foreshore was already in the 1920s the legal responsibility of the Port of London Authority, the status of archaeological finds from this area was to remain unclear even in the 1970s, and few would have questioned the London Museum’s right to purchase such items directly from the finders. Lawrence adopted an ambiguous euphemism (for example, was it north or south of the river?), whereas the more professional Wheeler was less circumspect in referring to “workmen excavating in the former foreshore of the river, not far from the north end of Old London Bridge.” And surely Wheeler was more accurate: the discovery was on the former foreshore (that is, on a site that was now land, reclaimed from the river), north of the river, not far from the end of Old London Bridge. And that allows us to identify the area and probably the construction site from which the group of finds came.

Thanks to the major waterfront excavations carried out by Guildhall Museum and the Museum of London since the 1970s, it is clear that the strip of land in the City of London between Thames Street and the river, a hundred meters or more in width in some places, is reclaimed land: a sequence of earlier waterfronts and foreshores buried by dumping in a gradual series of encroachments on the river, beginning in the eleventh century and largely complete in the fifteenth century.³⁷ It is in this strip south of Thames Street that we should expect to find the site of the “former foreshore” alluded to by Wheeler. His additional description takes us almost inevitably to one major site – that of Adelaide House, at the north end of modern London Bridge, on the east side of the bridge approach, and including within it the location of the northern end of the medieval bridge.³⁸ Opened in 1925 as the company headquarters of coal-owner, steel magnate, and entrepreneur Richard Tilden Smith, Adelaide House was the first building in the City of London to be erected on a steel frame of the type already familiar in American skyscrapers. Demolition of earlier buildings, clearance of the site and groundworks had begun in 1920, and in April 1921 a complete surviving arch of the medieval stone London Bridge was revealed. A campaign to preserve it in situ or to dismantle the stonework for rebuilding elsewhere failed, and the arch was demolished in October 1922.³⁹ Given the very public and acrimonious debate, in which the Archbishop of Canterbury took a prominent role, one should not be surprised if Wheeler, writing a few years later, did not wish to make it too obvious if he knew or suspected that the London Museum, just a few months before the London Bridge arch came to light, had acquired a major archaeological discovery from the same site – presumably without the knowledge of the site owner, Mr. Tilden Smith, or the contractor, Sir Robert MacAlpine.

If this was the site, and if the museum register’s reference to “the Site of Old London Bridge” is meaningful, then some relationship between the find and London Bridge itself is a possibility, to which we shall return. However, as we have seen, Wheeler places the find merely “not far from the north end of Old London Bridge.” Although the Adelaide House site included the northern end of the stone bridge and land to the west as far as the approaches to the later, nineteenth-century, bridge, it extended no further east, and the exact alignment of the wooden bridge or bridges that preceded the building of the stone bridge, begun in 1176, is unclear. Nor do Wheeler’s references to “the former foreshore” and “the alluvium” assist. We are at best seeking to interpret the words of the finders, transmitted by Lawrence and Wheeler. Unrelated as it is to any report of a waterfront structure or timber revetment, and with no hint from Wheeler that such a structure (familiar features on every one of the waterfront excavations since the 1970s) had been noticed, we have no way of knowing whether this “former foreshore” was indeed the tidal foreshore immediately in front of a contemporary waterfront, buried by later dumped deposits, or was an area of the bed of the Thames some distance away from the contemporary shoreline, similarly buried as later medieval reclamation proceeded. Were the items lost, thrown or dropped from the shore, or from the bridge, or even from a vessel some way out in the river?

The Content and Date of the Group

What seems certain however, in view of both Lawrence’s and Wheeler’s statements, is that the items (plus others, according to Wheeler) were indeed a “group,” found “in the alluvium within a narrowly restricted area,” or “in a mass.” Wheeler hints that the group as originally found was larger. What happened to the other items? Did the finders decide they were not worth picking up, or retain them themselves, or dispose of them separately? It is now over a hundred years since the original discovery. Are there other items still in private hands or by now even in other museum collections? Have any other items from the original find resurfaced since in the antique arms and armor trade, bereft of any information about their findspot, and their true significance unrecognised?

The present contents of the group may not necessarily represent the nature of the whole, as discovered. However, we can reasonably assume that, as with what survives, the majority of the items found were weapons. Moreover, those that survive are weapons of high quality, some of them decorated. Seven of the axe-heads in the group are war axes of Scandinavian type, of Wheeler’s type VI (= Petersen type M), a form which Wheeler concluded began “about the year 1000.”⁴⁰ Wilson suggested that “some of the axes may well have been dropped in the river by workmen repairing or building the bridge.”⁴¹ This seems unlikely. The axes are of a form whose function as a weapon has never been doubted – they would not serve well as woodworking tools. They resemble far too closely the axes in the battle scenes of the Bayeux Tapestry to be anything other than weapons, in contrast to the obvious woodsman’s felling axes and the carpenter’s short-handled T-shaped axes portrayed in the Tapestry’s ship-building scene.⁴² Indeed, the eighth axe from London Bridge seems to be a felling axe, similar to those shown on the Tapestry – in form, weight, and crudity of workmanship it differs from the seven battleaxes.

But if there is any doubt about the purpose of the axes, the spearheads confirm that we are dealing with what is largely a group of weapons. Although varying in size, they can all be assigned to Petersen’s type K, which he suggests began in the tenth century and continued in the eleventh.⁴³ Two of the spears have traces of wood preserved in the sockets, but there is nothing to show whether the weapons were still fitted to their shafts when they entered the water. Two items have datable decoration. Two of the axe-heads have brass collars to protect the haft where it enters the socket, and in one case (A23346) this collar has incised decoration (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). The socket of one spear (A23353) is decorated with silver inlay (Figs. 3.4 and 3.5). In both cases the decoration reflects the familiar Scandinavian style known as Ringerike.⁴⁴ This decoration, consistent with Wheeler’s and Petersen’s dating of the axes and spears, places the objects, and presumably their deposition, somewhere in the first half of the eleventh century.

Figure 3.2: Axe-head A23346 with decorated brass collar. Photograph © Museum of London.

Figure 3.3: Drawing of axe-head, with detail of decorated brass collar, from London Museum catalogue London and the Vikings, 1927.

Figure 3.4: Spearhead A23353 with decorated socket. Photograph © Museum of London.

Figure 3.5: Drawing of spearhead A23353 with detail of decoration, from London Museum catalogue London and the Vikings, 1927.

Explanations

The weapons are Scandinavian in both form and decoration, not Anglo-Saxon. They are foreign to the place in which they were found, and we need to consider what circumstances might have brought them to this place. The proposed dating to the first half of the eleventh century does not allow us, with certainty, to choose between two possible historical contexts: the period of Danish attacks on London leading up to Cnut’s accession in 1016, or alternatively later in Cnut’s reign when there was a strong Danish presence and influence in London⁴⁵ – perhaps best illustrated archaeologically by the stone grave-marker, often cited as a classic example of Ringerike-style art, found in St. Paul’s Church Yard in 1852 and now in the Museum of London, with its runic inscription in Old Norse on one edge.⁴⁶

The grappling hook – four conjoined hooks with a ring to attach a rope – is undatable in itself, but seems to suggest a maritime context, and perhaps inspired Wheeler’s identification of the group as “the equipment of some Viking battleship.” The “tongs” – an unusual form, more like fire tongs than the blacksmith’s tongs with hinged jaws familiar in other medieval contexts⁴⁷ – are problematic. Lawrence, and after him Wheeler, included the tongs in his account of the group – and they were displayed together in the London Museum, as the photograph reproduced in our Figure 3.1 demonstrates. Yet, as we have seen, the tongs entered the London Museum’s collection several months later, and the two large iron nails acquired at the same time as the tongs seem never to have been thought of as part of the group. It is possible that whoever sold the tongs to the museum, presumably through Lawrence, claimed that they came from the group of weapons. Whether that claim was true is debatable. In any case, the presence of the felling axe seems to confirm that we are dealing with a mixed group, even if weapons predominate.

An obvious assumption would be that the weapons represent debris from a battle, and Wheeler wrote: “it is tempting to associate them with one or other of the attacks which, in the days of St. Olaf and King Cnut, centred round the old timber bridge.”⁴⁸ And, as we have noted, he identified them as “the equipment of some Viking battleship,” although neither he nor Lawrence gives any hint that their informants had seen timbers suggesting the presence of a sunken ship. It would have been tempting, but unwise, to associate the weapons with one particular battle, the famous occasion when, according to Snorri Sturluson, Óláfr Haraldsson (St. Olaf of Norway) attacked the bridge and succeeded in pulling it down, precipitating its defenders into the river (particularly unwise given doubts over the historicity of this event).⁴⁹ However, it is difficult to envisage a process by which either the armaments of a Viking ship foundering near the bridge or weapons wielded by men standing on the bridge to defend it – or falling from it – could have landed so precisely in “a narrowly restricted area” or “a mass” with no other associated equipment or debris. Nor indeed does the close association of so many items suggest accidental loss during battle or a more mundane accident at a river crossing or embarkation point – falling from the bridge or a boat, attempting to ford the river, or unwisely venturing onto the muddy foreshore as the tide was turning.

The apparent association with the site of London Bridge may itself be misleading. If we are right in identifying Adelaide House as the location of the finds, then they clearly lay close to, or just upstream of, the northern end of the stone bridge (“Old London Bridge”), built between 1176 and 1209. But earlier bridges did not necessarily lie on the same alignment. It has been argued that the Roman bridge, while its northern abutment was close to that of the medieval stone bridge, reached the south bank at a point further upstream than the medieval bridge.⁵⁰ On the other hand, on the south bank, timbers found during excavations at Fennings Wharf and dated by dendrochronology to the years around 1000 have been identified as part of the Anglo-Saxon bridge; both these timbers and a later timber caisson structure, probably forming part of a later wooden bridge built in the early twelfth century, lie within the footprint or the immediate area of the stone-built abutment of the 1176 bridge.⁵¹ There is no evidence where the northern end of these earlier timber bridges lay.⁵² Indeed, it has been suggested that a structure found during excavations at New Fresh Wharf, to the east of Adelaide House, a cluster of regularly-spaced vertical timber posts which could be dated to the late tenth or early eleventh century and which was identified by the excavators as the foundations of a jetty, was in fact the northern abutment of a bridge.⁵³ If so, the site where our weapons were found would have been well upstream of the contemporary bridge, and, as long as the bridge was sound and was defended, not readily accessible to Danish attackers from the east and an unlikely place for them to attempt a landing. However, Watson concluded that these timbers “were too flimsy to have formed the foundations for a bridge abutment,” and argued that the stone bridge had deliberately been constructed on the alignment of its timber predecessor, replacing it piecemeal, arch by arch, during a building campaign that lasted more than thirty years.⁵⁴

If our group of finds was not the result of “accidental loss,” in war or in peace, we need to examine the possibility that it was thrown into the river or laid on the foreshore deliberately. And the identification of the material as “Scandinavian” – the types and forms of the weapons, the nature of the decoration – eases our task. For, as we have noted, there is a long tradition of the “ritual” depositing of weapons in watery places in Scandinavia – and there is now a long tradition among British archaeologists of accepting the reality of such a practice on British rivers in the Viking Age. Although we have doubted the reliability of a claim “river finds are numerous” as prima facie evidence of deliberate deposition, the nature and context of the London Bridge finds seems to imply the selection of good quality weapons and their deposition as a group on a single occasion. We have also seen a growing acceptance that the presence of tools or other ironwork – the felling axe, the grappling hook, and (if they belong) the tongs – alongside weapons need not debar a “hoard” from identification as “ritual deposition.” The motive or rationale of such a ritual (or, to adopt a neutral term, “ceremony”) is a matter for speculation. Here we offer just two possibilities.

Julie Lund brought the London Bridge group into a discussion of weapons apparently deposited deliberately at river crossings and bridge sites in Scandinavia, and concluded: “Considering the number of weapons found at crossings in the Scandinavian area, the [London Bridge] hoard is more likely to be the remnants of a ritual deposit.”⁵⁵ Elsewhere she has enlarged on the evidence for such practices in England, notably at a site at Skerne, East Yorkshire, where amid the timbers of a wooden bridge were discovered a number of iron tools, a sword (of Scandinavian type) datable to the tenth or early eleventh century, and the bones of over twenty animals: “The occurrence of a weapon and tools with the animal bones … indicate[s] that a religious ritual – a sacrifice – was intended.”⁵⁶ No animal bones are recorded from London Bridge – such bones, if found, would probably not have been reported by the workmen. Yet the mixture of weapons and tools leads one to ponder whether we are dealing with a “foundation deposit” of the type envisaged by Lund – part of a ceremony to inaugurate the building of a new bridge, or major repairs to a bridge damaged or “broken down” during the Danish attacks on London. In the excavations at Fennings Wharf, on the south bank of the Thames, the earliest timbers identified as being part of a medieval bridge structure came from a tree that (according to tree-ring analysis) was felled between ca. 987 and ca. 1032.⁵⁷ We can envisage building works taking place following the events of 1016 and the accession of Cnut, when there was a large-scale Danish presence in London. The weapons, then, would attest to the existence of a Danish garrison in or near the city – troops who donated weapons for a ritual they were familiar with in their homeland.⁵⁸

Alternatively, we can take note of a hint from John Blair, who, commenting on the large number of weapons from the Thames between Oxford and Reading, queried: “Did the English learn from the Vikings a practice of dropping weapons in the river at peace-making or oath-taking ceremonies?”⁵⁹ The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records under the year 1016 not only the momentous agreement between Cnut and Edmund over the partition of the kingdom, but that subsequently “Lundenewaru griðede wið þone here ⁊ heom frið gebohtan, ⁊ se here gebrohton heora scipa on Lundene ⁊ heom wintersetle þærinne namon” (the inhabitants of London made a truce [grið, a Danish loanword] with the raiding-army and bought peace from them; and the raiding-army brought their ships to London, and took winter-quarters for themselves in there).⁶⁰ Surely such a truce would warrant recognition in a suitable lavish ceremony. Might it entail the sacrifice to the river by the victors of some of their weapons, close to the bridge that had been the center of so much fierce fighting?

Conclusion: A Dedication?

The weapons and other ironwork that were found in 1920 close to the likely site of the eleventh-century London Bridge differ from the generality of river finds of weaponry of this date. The latter are usually single finds, and although there is currently a consensus that many may be examples of ritual deposition, this can rarely be substantiated. We must not dismiss the possibility of accidental loss. The context and nature of the London Bridge discovery, a compact group of related objects that were apparently deposited together at one time, make more acceptable the conclusion that some form of ritual or ceremony was involved. The weapons are Danish (or at least Scandinavian), and although we cannot date them more securely than the first half of the eleventh century, we may speculate about their possible relevance to the events of 1016 and the accession of King Cnut. We have suggested two possible scenarios. Although London Bridge may not have been pulled down at exactly the time or in exactly the manner described by Snorri Sturluson, his account suggests that at some point in the conflict it was badly damaged. Extensive repairs or rebuilding would have been needed – could the works have been initiated with a Scandinavian-style foundation deposit? Alternatively, perhaps an unrecorded ceremony confirming the truce made between the Londoners and the Danish army in late 1016 involved the deliberate casting of fine weaponry into the river. Both are tempting hypotheses, but, in the absence of written sources that describe such ceremonies, archaeology can only allow us to conjecture.

Notes

1

London Museum, London and the Vikings, 18–23. See also Bjørn and Shetelig (Viking Antiquities, 77), who based their description upon Wheeler’s text.

2

London Museum, London and the Vikings, 21.

3

London Museum, London and the Vikings, 18.

4

I am grateful to Richard Stroud, Museum of London photographer, for his skill in obtaining a usable image from a glass negative that is now more than ninety years old.

5

Torbrügge, “Flussfunde,” 123.

6

Torbrügge, “Flussfunde,” Beilage 20, 2: “Wikingische Waffenfunde aus der Themse bei London.” For this he drew extensively on the London Museum’s catalogue London and the Vikings.

7

Torbrügge, “Flussfunde,” 111: “ein Boot, das 1927 nicht weit von der Old London Bridge aufgedeckt wurde. Es muß um das Jahr 1000 gesunken sein, zu ihm gehörten allem Anschein nach acht Äxte, sechs Lanzenspitzen, eine Zange und ein Bootshaken.”

8

Bradley, Passage of Arms and Geography of Offerings; see also Testart, Les armes dans les eaux.

9

Wilson, “Some Neglected Swords,” 52.

10

Wilson, “Some Neglected Swords,” 51. Raffield (“‘River of Knives and Swords’,” 639) similarly feels that “battle detritus and casual loss” are not acceptable explanations for all such finds.

11

Lund, “At the Water’s Edge,” 51–53. John Hines (“Ritual Hoarding,” 202) notes a discontinuity between the latest finds from Scandinavian bogs and the earliest river finds, and suggests they may represent “convergent rather than connected traditions.”

12

Reynolds and Semple, “Anglo-Saxon Non-Funerary Weapon Depositions”; Lund, “At the Water’s Edge.”

13

Raffield, “‘River of Knives and Swords’,” 647.

14

Naylor, “Deposition and Hoarding,” 132. Naylor’s listing of Thames finds (139–43) is based largely upon published sources and the records of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. It thus differs to some extent from the Museum of London database from which the statistics in our next section are drawn.

15

Stocker and Everson, “The Straight and Narrow Way.”

16

Lund, “At the Water’s Edge,” 53–54. See also Naylor, “Deposition and Hoarding.”

17

Naylor, “Deposition and Hoarding,” 133–34.

18

For example, the British Museum and especially Reading Museum, which houses the Thames Water Collection, the collection of the former Thames Conservancy from dredging and other river works on the non-tidal Thames upstream of Teddington.

19

Burdon, Green, and Smith, “Portable Antiquities.”

20

These figures, and the discussion that follows, are based upon records downloaded from the museum’s central database in summer 2009. They represent a snapshot of the data held at that time, and take no account of additions to the collection or changes in identification or assigned date that may have been made since. In some cases, however, I have corrected findspots or refined the dating.

21

Evidence from the Museum of London collections, with more weapons of even later dates coming from the Thames than from the Witham (up to and including the sixteenth century), surely justifies Stocker and Everson’s decision to consider the later medieval material from the Witham, though it may cast doubt on their conclusions. The distribution, context, and possible significance of medieval and early modern weapon finds from the Thames are discussed in Clark, “The Sword in the Stream.”

22

Wilson, “Some Neglected Swords,” 51.

23

Clark, “The Sword in the Stream.”

24

Seaton, “Thomas Layton.” The majority of Layton’s collection of antiquities remains on long-term deposit in the Museum of London.

25

However, many of them are from Thomas Layton’s collection, and Layton’s interest in this area may bias the sample.

26

Apart from spearheads, totaling well over a hundred, the only other Thames finds of weaponry in the Museum of London collection that have been dated to the early Anglo-Saxon period are three swords, a seax, two shield bosses, and a decorative shield mount.

27

On the concentration of early Anglo-Saxon finds at Brentford see Clark, “The Sword in the Stream.”

28

One might, of course, question how many of these weapons are “Viking” – that is, Scandinavian weapons wielded by warriors from Scandinavia – and how many are “English,” and at what point in the eleventh century the distinction becomes meaningless.

29

The Museum of London’s dating of Anglo-Saxon spearheads from Brentford and elsewhere was dependent largely on the work of Michael Swanton, published in the 1970s (Swanton, Corpus and Spearheads), and may be overdue for revision.

30

These register entries seem to have been intended as drafts for the production of labels when the objects went on display. As a result, they are brief and formulaic.

31

For the early history of the London Museum and expenditure on purchases from its rather secretive “Fund,” see Sheppard, Treasury of London’s Past, 69–97, esp. 90–92.

32

London Museum, London and the Vikings, 18.

33

Lawrence, “Antiquities from the Middle Thames,” 93–95.

34

Macdonald, “Stony Jack.”

35

Macdonald, “Stony Jack,” 245–47.

36

Sheppard, Treasury of London’s Past, 71–72; Forsyth, London’s Lost Jewels, 7–16.

37

Milne, Port of Medieval London, 18–28.

38

Bradley and Pevsner, London I, 124, 539.

39

Watson, Brigham, and Dyson, London Bridge, 170 – although the authors did not note the first announcement of the discovery that appeared in The Times on April 22, 1921. The history of the campaign to preserve the arch can be traced through subsequent reports and letters in The Times.

40

London Museum, London and the Vikings, 25; Petersen, De Norske Vikingesverd, 46–47.

41

Wilson, “Craft and Industry,” 255; repeating an observation made earlier by the same author in “Some Neglected Swords,” 50.

42

Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, 184–45 (Plates 35, 36: woodsmen’s and shipwrights’ axes); 225 (Plates 62, 64, 65: battleaxes; and battleaxes carried as ceremonial weapons or emblems of authority, Plates 10, 28).

43

Petersen, De Norske Vikingesverd, 31–33, 183.

44

Fuglesang, Ringerike Style, 33, 43, 149–50 (Cat. No. 4), 166–7 (Cat. No. 46).

45

Discussed, for example, by Nightingale, “Court of Husting.”

46

Tweddle, Biddle, and Kjølbje-Biddle, Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, 226–28. See further the cover of this book.

47

Contrast the typical hinged tongs illustrated for example in Goodall, Ironwork in Medieval Britain, 12–13, or Arwidsson and Berg, Mästermyr Find, 14 (Plate 22).

48

London Museum, London and the Vikings, 18.

49

Heimskringla II: Óláfs saga helga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 13–18. I am grateful to Professor Alison Finlay for advice on the context and significance of Óláfr’s exploit. See further Reynolds in this volume, pp. 57–60.

50

Watson, Brigham, and Dyson, London Bridge, 28–30.

51

Watson, Brigham, and Dyson, London Bridge, 74–78.

52

For the argument that an Anglo-Saxon bridge existed long before the earliest archaeological evidence, and on the same alignment as the medieval stone bridge, see Haslam, “The Development of London by King Alfred,” 133–37.

53

Milne, Port of Medieval London, 57–58; Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield, The Bridgehead and Billingsgate, 28–29, 101–4, and cover illustration.

54

Watson, Brigham, and Dyson, London Bridge, 56.

55

Lund, “Thresholds and Passages,” 115.

56

Lund, “At the Water’s Edge,” 55–56.

57

Watson, Brigham, and Dyson, London Bridge, 57.

58

On the Danish garrison, see Nightingale, “Court of Husting,” 567–70.

59

Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, 99.

60

ASC (E), ed. Irvine, 74 (s.a. 1016); trans. Swanton, 153 (s.a. 1016).