The Walls That Made Wales

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Hello, I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and this is Gone Medieval from History Hit. For millennia, walls have been built to mark out territory, to control movement, to keep people out and to keep them in. And here in Britain, people may be well familiar with something like Hadrian's Wall, which was built to guard the northwest frontier of the Roman territory.

but that's not the only wall or linear earthwork as we call them as well that we have here so in fact if you move towards the western boundaries of what is now England we find a few others and these turned out to play a vital role in shaping the Kingdom of Wales. Today we're going to be hearing about this from Professor Howard Williams from the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Chester. Thank you for joining me today, Howard. It's great to be here, Kat. Hello. Hi, so...

Howard is a specialist in early medieval archaeology and especially death, burial and commemoration. But he's also involved in the research and promotion of the history of these particular earthworks, especially through a number of new initiatives, such as the Office Dyke Collapse. laboratory which is a research network for office dyke what's dyke and early medieval western britain more widely so

We're going to get into the details of those particular earthworks quite soon. But just to start out with, Howard, I was hoping that we could go a bit broader to get a bit of the sort of wider context, first of all, in terms of walls and linear earthworks. Could you... tell me something about when really people start making these sort of artworks in the early medieval Europe and the sort of related question really of why?

Okay, it's a really complex question. No one has an answer because almost all of these have very few and very far between historical sources associated with them. We often don't know for sure because these earthworks and walls were built over millennia and we often don't have historical sources associated with who built them and why. And often there are explanations that come much later and they're very...

implausible. They're very stereotypical explanations written by authors looking with hindsight hundreds of years later. So across Eurasia from the first millennium BC...

through to the first millennium AD, we have lots of massive linear earthworks. And in early medieval Europe, we find them used in a whole variety of different ways, but only in specific areas. And they seem to be, in shorthand, are about walling people out and walling people in but they're also about controlling movement across their line in times of peace and wartime and also there seems to be another key function that links many of them

is they control trade and movement along their line. So they follow arteries, rivers or isthmuses. And in that regard, these linear earthworks serve a whole variety of functions. And so...

It's also important to say that their functions weren't fixed. And many of these earthworks have multiple stages to their development. So it's a mixed and messy problem to start with, with few historical sources and actually monuments that may be built for very different... different reasons on different scales by different agents, maybe local elites or merchants, but also rulers.

And so while you'll often see, oh, states build these walls against nomads and barbarians, the Romans did it, early medieval kingdoms did it. Actually, there may be a lot more nuance. Many kingdoms could be very effective.

successful without needing to build frontier earthworks and some of these earthworks when they are built by kingdoms don't seem to be on frontiers or borders but they seem to become frontiers and borders because an earthwork was built there so we often don't know the chicken and egg causation of the relationship. So yeah, you'll see a simplified view but actually we seem to have a lot of messy complication to why people wanted to build these earthworks and how they were used.

So, yeah, not a simple picture, as I was hoping you were going to give me a simple answer there. Absolutely not, yeah. If we think about... Early medieval Europe. Well, we'll go to Britain, but Europe. Can you give some examples of some of the notable walls that we have? Right. So we have from late prehistory in the island of Britain and also Ireland, you know, linear earthworks. And we seem to see this tradition.

pick up after the end of the Western Roman Empire. The most famous ones on the continent that we know about is the Danaverka, which is a multi-phase earthwork cutting across the base of the Jutland Peninsula in what is now northern Germany. but historically was on the southern edge of the emerging Danish kingdom. And that seems to have been built and rebuilt over eight, nine hundred years from at least the 5th century AD right up to the 12th century. And of course, it saw activity again.

the wars of the 19th century. So, you know, that is an earthwork that have many different phases. So it's often called a Viking earthwork because it becomes associated with the important Viking sort of trading side and an early town of Hedeby or Haidebu. But it had all...

Already many stages are being built and what it's doing is cutting across that peninsula, linking the river systems east-west, the links from the Baltic to the North Sea, but also stopping people freely moving up and down that peninsula. From Britain, the best ones known...

are the Cambridgeshire dike systems, some of which seem to be Iron Age, some of which seem to be early medieval, such as the Devil's Dike and Phlegm Dike. We also have the Wands Dike, West Wands Dike and East Wands Dike, which is often... And then in the Western Britain, the most famous big...

amongst many other smaller linear earthworks are Watts Dyke and Offers Dyke. These are the two big ones, but we also have lots of small little ones, little tiddlers, little small short dykes, as they're called, in this Western British zone of what it's going to be. England and Wales and these may have been built by lots of different times and by different individuals and many of them have been dated to the 6th and 7th century AD and then we have the big ones Watts Dyke and Offers Dyke.

Excellent. Okay, so let's go on to these two now then. And I think Office Dyke is probably the one that most people are... well, people are more likely to have heard of, even though I think these will be new to a lot of people. So let's just start with that. And I know there's some very good reasons to give Wattstike more attention than it has had so far. But tell us about Wattstike and whether it was actually associated with... offer at all yeah so the most famous one people will know about

is the monument but perhaps there'll also be where the long distance national trail the walking trail offers dyke path and there's a blessing and a curse of that fame is that people often get them confused and think that they're walking on the path they're actually on offers dyke and sometimes they are

Sometimes they're not. And the other thing is people will be aware of is Offersdijk is often used now as a shorthand for the border of England and Wales, which in very small sections is right. But large stretches of Offersdijk are in England and other large...

stretches of it are in Wales and there's also lots of areas where we don't know if it went there at all but yeah in short Offersdyke is known because the biographer of King Alfred the Great of Wessex in the late 9th century Asser records in his biography that there was a the king of old called Offa, who built a wall from sea.

And this is the only early medieval reference we have associating a king offer of Mercia of the late 8th century, therefore a hundred years before Asser's time, with this great... bank-and-ditch earthwork that, according to Asser, went from sea to sea. In other words, went from the 7 and Y confluence down, where the 7 spews out into the Bristol Channel, right up to the D estuary.

And so Offersdijk is preserved well over about 85 miles. And there are whole debates about whether it actually did extend from sea to sea. But this is the major earthwork everyone's heard of because it's our biggest. ancient monument it's longer than hadrian's wall it's huge and where it survives well it's a massive three sometimes even four meter tall bank and a two to three meter deep ditch to its western side and there's other features associated

with it too. So everyone's heard of Offers Dyke, but actually, do we know it was built only by offer or by offer at all? We're still not sure. We've got some radiocarbon dates by Cluid at Pius Archaeological Trust, and they've shown that it... For sure, it is an early medieval monument. We have radiocarbon dates from Offersdyke now confirming it was built after the Roman period. And indeed, frankly, we knew that already because Sir Cyril Fox excavated a Roman settlement.

at Freith in Flintshire and found that Offersdark was built over Roman layers. So we kind of already knew it was post-Roman. But, you know, it's looking definitely like an early medieval earthwork. You know, we don't know for sure whether it was built in one... by King Offa, commissioned by King Offa, he obviously didn't dig it all himself, or it was built by multiple rulers who were augmenting to a common scheme these western frontiers of the central English kingdom. And remember, Mercia...

in the 8th century, was the greatest power in these islands. A kingdom that stretched from London to the Wash to the Dee and Mersey estuaries to the Severn. So the four great sort of river estuaries of the island were controlled. It was a great trading power. They had connections with the Frankish Empire and with Italy. King Offa and his successors, but also his predecessors, were seeing themselves as kings of all Britain long before.

They had the military and social economic and political whack to actually. take on that role obviously something that was going to come only far later with the emergence of england in the 10th century in the wake of the early viking age so yeah these kings had aspirations and one of the things they wanted to do was build big earthworks and there's been a whole debate about was Offer, if he was the person building this massive earthwork, was he building it?

just as a prestigious thing to show off his ideology, his inheritance of Roman imperial aspirations. The Mercian kings and the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were aware of the ruins of the Antonine frontier and Hadrian's Wall in Norway. than Britain? Was he trying to bring back the golden age? Make Mercia great again, as people have been long joking. Well, joking for the last couple of years anyway. Was he trying to actually emulate the glories of Rome? And this was more of a vanity project.

Or was he actually facing real problems with his Western frontier, with the rival Welsh kingdoms? And this was about military dominance of an area which he really had trouble sort of controlling raids of the Welsh deep. into Mercian territory. And in between those two extremes, a symbolic ideological interpretation and a kind of

military one, there's a whole raft of other factors. And I've already hinted that trade and commerce would have been key. And by controlling that zone to the West, he's not only controlling and managing raids from his enemies, not only is he able to militarily strike out westwards over this frontier at will and harry and dominate areas to the west of the dike, but he's also able to control the trade. So it could be an economic...

as well as a political and an ideological aspect. And I think we shouldn't perhaps try to pretend we can work out exactly. the weighting of that with the evidence we have. We only have that one historical source and all the rest of the evidence comes from archaeological investigation. This episode is brought to you by Royal Kingdom, the latest puzzle game from the creators of Royal Match.

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Can you say a little bit just about what is happening to the West? What's actually happening for those like myself, whose knowledge of early medieval Wales is a little bit sketchy? What's going on that he might be sort of dealing with? So, yes, from the late 6th and... 7th centuries we see in lowland Britain Germanic speaking kingdoms coming to the fore as territorial entities on a big scale and these kingdoms are

at least seven in number by the end of the 7th century. And the biggest of them were Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, who by the Viking Age, you know, those horrible Vikings came and ruined it all. You know, the Northumbrians, the Mercians and...

The West Saxons were really the predominant forces and they were increasingly... pushing westwards, particularly the Mercians and the West Saxons, and gobbling up territory and becoming in control of areas that previously had been British speaking, Welsh speaking. kingdoms in areas that had been part of the former Roman provinces because remember Wales and Western Britain was all part of the Roman province of Britannia and after the fall of Rome very small British-speaking kingdoms

developed during the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries. So, Mercia was slowly building its strength by not only fighting and absorbing smaller Anglo-Saxon rival kingdoms, but also smaller British kingdoms. And so, by the 8th century... We see a really prosperous and powerful kingdom of Mercia with a network of routeways, river systems, market sites, ecclesiastical centres, with trade networks across the North Sea, long distance contacts. but also really...

expanding westwards. And how they did that seems to be through raiding. As they were recipients of raids, they were raiding too. But it seems to be increasingly they were using these linear earthworks to control territory and control movement.

And in times of both peace and war, I think this is a way of dominating the landscape and dividing it up. And in Western Britain, in the line that it's going to become, offers Dyke and very close to the modern English-Welch border, remember people were still British-speaking and large parts...

of Mercia were British territories in the 7th, 8th century. So you're not dividing between peoples. This is often the cliche, you know, you're walling in the Welsh. Wales hasn't been invented yet. You're creating the Welsh by dividing the British speakers. peoples to the west of the dike

from the lost lands, as the Welsh would call them, from the lands that had formerly been British to the east. And Offersdyke seems to do this in a really overt, almost arrogant way. And in some places, it's cutting through and across river valleys just to the west of historically... did.

big Welsh monasteries whose lands must have been some of the great sort of focus of spiritual and economic power in the Western British landscape. And they're saying we're having those. And by the way, we're building our earthwork just to the west of it.

so you can still come and visit them under our control. And you can still see them. You can see the lands you've lost. So if you go to Pits of Ulfers Dyke in northwest Shropshire, you can look one way and you can see the Welsh uplands, but you can only see about a kilometre that way. But you look east from...

and you can see stretching over the plains of Shropshire and Cheshire, you can see all the lands that only in perhaps your grandfather's time, if you were Welsh-speaking Britain, would have been yours, would have been part of an early medieval kingdom of British control. But we don't know too much.

much about them and we don't have much historical sources but we get a sense that they were powerful rivals to the Mercians and by the 8th century they were being gobbled up. So this is partially a land grab but it was also about trying to then install a frontier system that allowed the dominance of that territory okay so they're very much

a matter of just controlling territory, their political statements, they're doing an awful lot of jobs. So we've focused on office dyke so far, but let's go to the one that's a bit more overlooked. What's dyke? Tell me about that. One important thing to say about what's dyke is that it's... It's a linear earth worker, massive bank and ditch, and indeed it's long been recognised where it survives well to be just as big as Offersdike.

In contrast to Offa's Dyke, Watts Dyke runs further to the east in much lower lying landscape and it follows the tops of ravines but also cuts over relatively... rich agricultural land between those river systems. And the thing about that is that it's probably doing a very important job in the early Middle Ages, but it survives in a much more poor condition. Farmers have knocked it down for over a thousand years. People have built over it.

So we actually don't have many places where it survives as well as perhaps the more famous sections of Offersdike that people might have seen in TV documentaries or aerial photographs of it dramatically sweeping over the Clun Forest and so on. So that's another reason why I... feel it's a bit of a neglected monument.

That's an interesting thing too, because the recent excavations of Watts Dyke have shown that even in places where it's really heavily damaged, where the bank has been destroyed, where the ditch has long been filled in, the excavation showed that it was once a huge...

huge earthwork. So when Sir Silver Fox did his survey in the 1930s, he thought it was an intermittent monument. There'd been huge stretches that were just dense woodland or maybe they didn't need to build it. Actually, everywhere we... dig with modern methods we find the traces of this massive earthwork. So really those are the places where it's most damaged where actually we might get the best results from future fieldwork.

Watts Dyke is in the shadow of Offers Dyke all the time. In fact, I've gone to parts of Watts Dyke with students and been talking about them. Bloke has come out of his house and I said, oh, I'm just showing my students Watt's Dyke, which runs right next to your house. And he goes, yeah, it's Watt's Dyke. And so actually there's a lot of local confusion between Watt's Dyke and Watt's Dyke. In fact, that confusion goes back to the Middle Ages. So yeah, Watt's Dyke is...

the little sister, or if you want a gender, a little brother of Offersdyke. And it runs almost parallel with Offersdyke in the northern stretches. So it's basically a monument that was surveyed by Cyril Fox in the early 1930s. It's been excavated over 70 times in different places, but without conclusive results until very recently. But it's been really overlooked. It's not really in the national consciousness of either Wales.

England or indeed in the borderlands itself in the same way as offers Dyke is and partly that's because we don't know who what was who was what in the same way as we have Watling Street is this a reference to a people

Is it a reference to a late 8th, early 9th century Mercian or Northumbrian lord called what, which is one idea? Or is it a mythical character, the father of Wayland the Smith, who comes down to us as Wade in later... medieval sources in a very vague figure that people have often assumed was some kind of...

Germanic Anglo-Saxon legendary giant. We have Wade's Causeway in Yorkshire. So is this another legendary name or even a mythological name attributed to this monument because no one knew who had built it? Or is this a legendary name?

name given to this monument because people knew who built it but they wanted to make it sound like it was so impressive it's of a scale that could have been built by a giant you know or a greater smith or artisan so you know we don't know and that's really crazy so part of the reason why

it's kind of obscure it's we don't know who what was or wade or as it's in later sources gaddo and we don't have a like offers dyke we're still sketchy about the dates of what's dyke a lot of people have assumed that what's dyke because it's shorter is earlier than It's perhaps a first experiment in long-distance landscape management and control, perhaps by Mercian rulers who were predecessors of Offa in the late 7th, early 8th centuries. But...

Excavations at Gaboen in Shropshire a decade ago suggested, based on radiocarbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence dating, that we may be looking at a later date in the early 9th century. of Offa, who obviously a kingdom that's still very powerful, but not perhaps at its apogee, perhaps over the peak of its power, yet to be knocked out of the power games by the Vikings, still influential, still... wealthy.

but was trying to consolidate and sort of retrench against powerful new Welsh rivals 50 to 60 years after Offersdijk had been built. So maybe in that scenario, the king who may have built it would be Kenwolf. know actually died at basing work which is the northern end of watts dyke yeah but we still don't know and i'm aware of forthcoming optically stimulated luminescence dating and radiocarbon dates for other stretches and new excavations that pushed date back

But it's really not clear. So we don't have a name, we don't have an historical figure, and we don't have a precise date for what's dyke. But I think in many ways it's a crucial monument. It's our third longest ancient monument. So yeah, it's shorter than Offersdyke, but it's...

It deserves our attention. And what's shocking is that in 100 years of scholarship, there are only a handful of academic studies of this monument. And if you're thinking of other major monuments in the British landscape, Hadrian's Wall or Stonehenge. I had to try and synopsise the academic research on those monuments in five minutes. It'd be impossible. But I can honestly tell you, Cyril Fox surveyed it in the 30s. Margaret Worthington Hill did an M. Phil thesis at Manchester on it in the 90s.

1980s and published a paper in the 90s based on that and then there's the excavation reports at various points by various people up and down its line so really a handful of studies have been produced on this enigmatic but major

linear earthwork so you've mentioned some new dates and things like that could be done to help but what can we really do to improve knowledge about it though i mean is there much hope if we haven't managed to in the last hundred years is it just because we haven't really tried or it's the stuff we can do try and understand it better. In terms of archaeology happening in the early 21st century, we have to think of this as a two-pronged thing.

We have to actually agree what we need to know about this monument and trying to convince even heritage specialists and archaeologists this monument deserves attention is an uphill climb. It's so big it almost escapes attention. Many narratives, many of the history books, many of the archaeology...

books about early medieval Britain don't even mention Watts Dyke, even when they mention Arthur's Dyke. So it's shocking how it's neglected even by scholars. So firstly, we have to agree that there's questions we need to ask. And thankfully... part of the Office Dyke Collaboratory and working with Cluid Paris Archaeological Trust, but also others. We're hopefully building not only the momentum, the justification to do the work.

But also CPAT, Clue Palace Archaeological Trust, have been doing these new excavations. So we're starting that journey. The other prong is to try and convince people that this monument is in their landscape, to make them aware of it. Because often people don't know the linear earth.

is there that Watsdyke is running right by their house or indeed right by their primary school because it's in a lowland location compared with Offersdyke. Large parts of the suburbs of Wrexham and actually a lot of villages near Mould actually have been built over Watsdyke.

And so you have a Watts Dyke way or a Watts Dyke lane or whatever it might be. And people go, oh, I wonder why it was called that. And it's because they've destroyed when they were building the housing estate in the 70s or 60s. a major linear earth worker, but there are also sections where it's really well protected. There are National Trust properties where at Erdig near Wrexham.

where you can go and visit a wonderful example of late 17th, early 18th century landscape gardens and hall. But you also have impressively well-preserved sections of what's like, but the heritage sites don't tell you it's even there. So I suppose there's those two problems.

Firstly, we need to agree what we need to know and start doing fieldwork surveys and excavations to investigate the monument in a rigorous way and take scientific datings so we can build up a picture of its date and its scale. its character, but also we need to make local people aware that it's there because how can you expect people to be interested in something they don't even know exists?

That's a very good point. And actually, I want to just point out that you've been involved in making a really brilliant comic book type heritage trail, haven't you? Which is available freely online for people to have a look at. So if you're listening to this and you want to go and check it out, which I absolutely recommend that you should.

should where can you find that online yeah so we have an offers dyke collaboratory website and we're hosting on that the brilliant work of archaeological illustrator john swagger who's collaborated with me we've created a 10 panel comic trail so you can go to 10 points around the Welsh town of Wrexham. And each panel tells a story about Watts Dyke and the local landscape. It's called Watts Watts Dyke. So if you Google that or you go to our Collaboratory website, you'll see the links. Fantastic.

recommend people if they're stuck at home for a little bit longer as we might be in 2021 who knows then yeah go and have a look and give what's like some more love howard thank you so much for joining me and sharing all that today it's a pleasure thank you very much for having me

So this has been Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast already, please do so now. You can find it anywhere where you get your podcast fix. And I will be back again next week. Thank you for listening. Just in. Thousands of winter arrivals at your Nordstrom Rack store. Save up to 70% on coats, slippers, and cashmere from Kate Spade, New York. Vince, Ugg, Levi's, and more. Check out these boots. They've got the best gifts. My holiday shopping hack?

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