7 - Viking-Age Amounderness: A Reconsideration

Summary

Largely on the basis of place-name evidence, Viking settlements have been repeatedly identified within the environmental margins of the north-western landscape. The aim of this chapter is to consider whether or not the evidence underpinning this model still holds true, using Amounderness Hundred as a case study.

The first section reconsiders the environmental modelling underpinning this vision of the marginality of Viking settlements and concludes that existing models underestimate the scale and economic importance of the region's historic wetlands. The second section explores chronological problems within the current philological model of Viking and non-Viking settlement. Using Domesday Book it is possible to develop a more minimal settlement model, and caution may suggest that this is desirable. Taken alongside the new environmental evidence, it will be suggested that the relationship between Viking and non-Viking settlement was far more complex than previously suggested, that marginality was a ubiquitous feature of communities throughout the hundred, and also that Viking settlement was probably less dense than previously accepted.

The Landscape

The earliest known reference to Amounderness is in a charter of c. 930, in which King Athelstan granted the hundred to the Archbishop of York. Located in central Lancashire, its boundaries are identified as the River Hodder to the east, the River Ribble to the south and part of the rivers Wyre and Cocker to the north. Rivers no longer act as the boundary markers, but the modern boundaries are broadly the same.