Creating defended communities in late Saxon Wessex

The settlement landscape of England underwent a striking redesign in the 9th and 10th centuries. A heightening of Norse or Viking raids and in particular their inward, riverine penetrations initially witnessed an ever retreating English resistance; but a rallying of effort, a Viking-inspired change in tactics, and the major deployment and mobilisation of native manpower enabled a significant recovery. A new landscape of defence and control resulted for the period c. AD 880–920 that was centred on fortified sites of diverse size and scope. While elements of this militarised landscape subsequently faded or faltered, the resumption of large-scale Viking assaults in the late 10th and early 11th centuries re-ignited the defensive apparatus and accelerated the growth of many of these strategic sites or burhs into full-fledged urban centres.

This paper outlines various aspects of this transformation of landscape, whose development and consolidation went hand-in-hand with the growing dominance of the kings of Wessex in England. Issues of burh design, placement and logistics will be considered, plus current problems of chronology and of interpretation of these sites and their take-up – or not – of urban functions. The paper needs no more than to summarise, since the last few years have seen a set of hugely important publications, notably those generated by or linked to the UCL Institute of Archaeology’s Leverhulme Trust and British Academy supported Anglo-Saxon Civil Defence (ASCD) Project (Baker and Brookes 2013; Baker et al. 2013), combined with analyses on warfare and strategy by scholars such as Haslam (2010, 2011, 2012) and Lavelle (2010), a new analysis of the formation of the English kingdom in the 10th century (Molyneaux 2015) as well as a major archaeological project centred on the late Saxon and medieval townscape of Wallingford (Christie and Creighton 2013). [Introduction]