Battle of Hastings, The by Harriet Harvey Harriet; Wood Harvey Wood Page A

the south coast are included. An archbishop would have been able to ride; those who had to go on foot
probably took longer. Pilgrims normally made their wills before leaving. But those who returned brought goods of foreign workmanship with them, apart from any spiritual benefits.
    Trade, however, internal as well as external, was the most important element in English prosperity in the late Anglo-Saxon period. It depended to a great extent on the maintenance of the means
of communication. The three basic services that landowners were rarely, if ever, excused contributed to this: if service in the fyrd or national host and the building and repair of fortifications
were demanded primarily for purposes of the defence of the realm, the work on fortifications would have included the maintenance of roads, and the bridge-building requirement, though it might also
have military aspects, was a significant contribution to the ability of merchants and goods to move around the kingdom. The evidence of caches of coins from the period all over England confirms
that money did move around, for the vast majority of the coins found so far were minted miles from where they were dug up. One of the problems of knowing what was exported is the fact that, as
already noted, much of it has perished during the last thousand years. Pottery tends to last better than other things and more pottery of the period has survived than anything else; if wood and
leather and textiles were profitable articles of trade, as the written evidence suggests, few examples have been recovered to prove or illustrate it and we must rely on written sources for
information. Henry of Huntingdon, writing about sixty years after the conquest (the basicconditions he described are unlikely to have changed significantly in the interim),
tells us that, although little silver was mined in England, a large amount came into the country from Germany in payment for English exports (he mentions particularly fish, wool and cattle) so that
there was more silver in England than in Germany itself. xxix As for the imports, the merchant in Ælfric’s Colloquy, that delightful
dialogue between a schoolmaster and his pupils, designed to be used to teach schoolboys Latin, gives us a list of what he brought back from overseas in the tenth century: purple garments and silks,
precious stones and gold, various vestments and pigments, wine and oil, ivory, brass and tin (Cornwall must have seemed as remote as overseas to many Englishmen), sulphur and glass. xxx
    Few artefacts, whether made in England or overseas, have survived from before 1066. This is easily understandable if we consider what hazards they were exposed to throughout the period of
Anglo-Saxon civilization. Early Anglo-Saxon England, like most Dark Age European countries, was a violent place; and in the ninth century there was the first wave of Viking invasions, starting with
the sack of Lindisfarne in 793 and continuing with the looting of most of the other English monasteries and churches for the precious metals and jewels with which they were lavishly and reverently
endowed. What had been stripped was painstakingly restored during the comparative peace of the tenth century, only for the second wave of Danish depredation to begin in the 980s. Throughout the
period, fire was a constant danger in a society that built largely in wood; textiles and books were especially vulnerable. The minsters in Canterbury (both of them) and York were all destroyed by
fire shortly after the conquest. Christianity meant that burials from the age of the conversion onwards took place without grave goods such as those found atSutton Hoo, and
where pagan burial sites did exist, they were frequently looted (that Sutton Hoo survived unlooted is, like the endurance of the Bayeux Tapestry, one of more inexplicable miracles). After the
Norman Conquest English art treasures, particularly artefacts in gold and silver, were exported to Normandy and