Norman Sicily tends to be discussed by historians in terms of regnal years and decades. This chapter broadens the agenda, both chronologically and geographically, aiming to throw light on the people who do not have a written history. An archaeological investigation of Sicily in particular offers an opportunity to study the effects of the Norman regime on the pre-existing population, showing how Muslim and Christian communities co-existed, and incidentally to point up the rewards of integrating bioarchaeological and biomolecular evidence into an historical narrative of the Middle Ages.

As a method of historical inquiry, archaeology has both advantages and disadvantages. One good reason for encouraging an archaeological approach has been voiced by R. Allen Brown: ‘In all the story of Norman achievement across Europe … one scarcely meets a Norman peasant or parish priest, but everywhere an aristocratic free-masonry of lords and knights, bishops and abbots, priors and monks.’ Archaeology investigates the experiences of the people without history, the silent majority, and can do it in arresting detail. However, the encounters are random, and in more ways than one. Importantly, archaeological legibility is variably affected by the particular material culture and its subsequent decay, providing countries today with accounts of their own heritage that are not strictly comparable, perhaps especially between northern and southern Europe. But a self-imposed difference in modern heritage laws has also become significant. The huge and revealing harvest of artefacts retrieved by metal-detectorists in England and Wales, where the practice is legal, is not matched by a similarly intensive mapping elsewhere. The 500 copper and lead-alloy brooches so far collected by metal detecting throughout the Danelaw, and recorded by the UK Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), shows how grass-roots identities could be signalled in Scandinavian England; but the recognition of a culturally Norman diaspora in the rest of Europe remains elusive.

Nevertheless, comparative studies can be helpful in defeating differences in survival and discerning common trends. Thus, for the present book, where the focus is on the degree to which the cultures of Norman Sicily were integrated or not, we thought it might be rewarding to compare the experience of Sicily with that of England using the available archaeological material. Looking at Sicily and England together, at opposite ends of the Norman hegemony, may also throw some light on how far it is possible to discuss a concept of Normanitas.

Britain only became an island in around 8000 BCE, but since then it has made something of a profession of its insularity. Anglo-Saxon England has gone one better by making a separate country out of south-east Britain, an island within an island. Our own profession reflects this to some extent. The study of Anglo-Saxon England forms a subset of studies on early medieval Britain, and even these are further divided into the Christian and pre-Christian phases. In some ways this subdivision is an inevitable consequence of being confronted with materials in different ancient languages. But from an archaeological point of view such divisions can be inhibiting. In this paper I propose to treat the people of Britain as individuals and will try to make no a priori assumptions about their ethnic, religious, or political affiliations. I first offer an archaeological method of listening to and distinguishing the different voices, and then ask if we can hear ideas and opinions expressed that exceed expectations in their originality. As with practitioners of other disciplines, archaeologists have come in recent years to credit the people we study with a greater capacity for decision-making and more agency. It has become interesting and important to ask what was in the mind of the burial designer or the erector of monuments, and we increasingly credit these monument-makers with creativity, that is, an ability to escape the imperatives and exigencies of their day and express their own views on past and future.

Before the burh

The sand and gravel peninsula, which was to provide the arena for Stafford town, formed part of a prehistoric landscape, although not one that is yet well known (Fig. 4.1). The King's Pool on Stafford's north-eastern shoulder is a deep channel which trapped up to 21 metres of organic deposits, commencing in 13000 BP at the end of the last ice age. The subsequent pollen record shows the expected sequence of afforestation and elm decline, but the major episode of tree clearance is here dated to the mid Iron Age between 800 and 600 BC. From then on, cereal cultivation appears to be active, with later peaks possible in the seventh century and marked in the tenth and eleventh (see Chapter 3, pp. 53–55).

Iron Age

Excavations in the town and casual finds outside it have produced a handful of flints, one Mesolithic, the remainder Neolithic in date, and an antler pick from the pool. This may be seen as part of a general spread of prehistoric ‘dark matter’ without so far indicating a focus. But by the Iron Age the peninsula is largely surrounded by open water and there is a settlement at its centre. An Iron Age settlement is not easy to find under a modern town, but in this case we have enough evidence to identify one in the form of four-post granaries at the St Mary's Grove site (Fig. 4.2). There were two four-posters and part of a third (Fig. 4.3). The post-holes were defined against natural sand subsoil and contained charred matter. Samples examined proved to be 90% wood, but grains of emmer and spelt, with small amounts of bread wheat, rye and barley were also present. A radiocarbon date on wood from S19 came in at 520–190 cal. BC. No artefacts were recovered from the post‑hole fills, but the interface between 2240 (the natural subsoil) and the soil 2238/9, which sealed the four-posters, produced two fragments of possible Iron Age pottery. An area of subsoil 15 × 20 metres was cleaned at recovery level D but no other features were identified which could belong to this phase.

In July AD 913 Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, founded Stafford as part of a campaign for the recovery of England from the Danes. She was the commander of the left flank in the northward advance, while her brother Edward the Elder led the pincer movement on the right flank. Wessex had already been won, thanks to the persistence and ingenuity of their father, Alfred the Great.

The primary instrument of this war was the burh, a fortification with provision for residence and trade, which was garrisoned by levy or conscription from its local territory. In Wessex, some record of the procurement system has survived as the Burghal Hidage, which names the places and the human resources required to man them (Fig. 1.1). The places chosen were broadly of three types: former Roman forts or fortified towns, like Winchester, Portchester and Chichester; new foundations that resembled Roman forts, like Wareham, Wallingford and Cricklade; and smaller sites of unknown form at promontories or river junctions, like Lydford and Lyng. Together these places are thought to have formed a defensive system, in which some fortified enclosure was, or was intended to be, in reach of all the people.

The choice of the Wessex sites has been argued to have been determined by the fact that they were already royal property, or the site of an ecclesiastical community, or both. The intention, as perceived from documentary records, was also to canalise trade through these places, and to concentrate the income stream from fines and taxes within them to the benefit of king and church. Such a concept may have been in experimental development at Canterbury, before the age of Alfred. Even if the context of their creation was military, they thus appear as something more than forts, the first manifestation of the English borough. It is perhaps reasonable here to draw a distinction between the nature of places as observed in documents and on the ground. Burh and borough are documentary terms carrying a sense of the chartered town of the Middle Ages that might not be appropriate. On the ground we can define a fort by its fortifications, and a town by its artisan activity.

In 1974 – while I was busy doing something else – the telephone rang in the premises of our self-styled West Midlands Rescue Archaeology Committee (WEMRAC) at 25a The Tything, Worcester. On the phone was Ashley Carter, of the Stafford and Mid Staffordshire Archaeology Society, who had dug some test pits on the line of a proposed ring road at Clarke Street and found a great quantity of orange pottery. He thought it looked Roman – and yet. Soon I was Ashley's guest at his house near Stafford, where the potsherds were stacked high on the kitchen table. They were symmetrical, and orange or pink or grey in colour, smooth but very sandy, depositing a little weep of sand every time you picked one up. After some minutes I found what I was hunting for – a thin band of rouletting around the shoulder, like a row of marks from a toothed wheel. This pottery was not Roman, but tenth-century, the pottery of the earliest English towns. And Stafford was one of these: now the county town of Staffordshire, and long ago a foundation of one of England's few female generals: Alfred's daughter, Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, who built her burh in a loop of the River Sow. Next year I excavated the Clarke Street site and began a ten-year campaign exploring Stafford. And the rest is history – or I would hope it to be.

This book offers an account of the campaign of 1975–1985, the discoveries made, the analyses undertaken and the conclusions drawn. The new information I offer is archaeological, but it is not presented here in the form of a conventional archaeological report of the kind intended only for other archaeologists. The archaeological records are held in Stoke-on-Trent Museum, where they are available for consultation. I recommend a visit anyway, to see one of the country's great collections, but it is not obligatory in order to access the archaeological evidence on which this book is based. That evidence has been sifted and digested and placed online as a publicly accessible archive in eleven volumes hosted by the Archaeological Data Service.

St Bertelin's (ST01; FR3)

S1 Church 1. Timber building of 10th century. F13: Tree-trunk coffin

S2 Church 2. Stone building of 12th century

S3 Church 3. Stone building of 14th century

Clarke Street (ST15; FR4)

S1 Timber fence of 10th century

S2 Timber building of late 12th century

S3 Timber shack of late 12th century

Dump 1 of 10th-century Stafford ware

Dump 2 of 12th-century animal bone

Dump 3 of 12th- to 13th-century animal bone

Dump 4 of 13th century animal bone

St Mary's Grove (ST29; FR5)

S19 Four-post granary (Iron Age)

S20 Four-post granary (Iron Age)

S22 Two posts of structure, probably granary (Iron Age)

S4 Dryer/oven (10/11th century)

S5 Oven (10/11th century)

S12 Oven (10/11th century)

S14 Dryer/oven (10/11th century)

S16 Timber lined cellar (10–11th century)

S17 Fence (10/11th century)

S18 Fence (10/11th century)

S23 Cobbled platform (10/11th century)

F290 Quarry pit of Norman period

F404 Cess pit of Norman period

F608 Well of Late Saxon and Norman period

S7 Stone building of 14/15th century

S8 Grain dryer of 14/15th century

F298 Graveyard boundary ditch of 14/15th century

S3 Timber building of 16th century or later

S10 Timber building of 16th century or later

S15 Brewers’ kiln of 16th century or later

Tipping Street north (ST32; FR6)

S1 Pottery kiln (10/11th century)

S2 Pottery kiln (10/11th century)

S4 East fence of potters’ enclosure

S5, 5A South fence of potters’ enclosure (10/11th century)

S6 West fence of potters’ enclosure (10/11th century)

S3 Forge (12/13th century)

S7, 8 Medieval house, west side

S9, 10 Medieval house, east side

Bath Street (ST34; FR7)

F92 Shoulder of ditch (10–14th century)

S1 Fence or palisade (10th century)

S2 Structure (‘tower’) (10th century)

S3 House platform (medieval)