Communication and commerce along the western sealanes 400-800 AD

Abstract

This dissertation will examine evidence for communication and commerce between western Britain, Scotland, Ireland', their Continental and British neighbours, and the Mediterranean, in the period 400-800 AD. Parts of the terrain and subject of this enquiry have been covered in earlier, well-known studies by Heinrich Zimmer, Kuno Meyer and Joseph Vendryes, all of whom explored the evidence for 'direct' travel between Ireland and Gaul in this period, and by 0. G. S. Crawford and E. G. Bowen, who examined the early medieval evidence in wide-ranging studies of what they termed the 'western seaways'. Their sources and methods have figured more recently in studies of the 'Irish Sea Culture-Province' hypothesis4 and, most significantly, of the contacts indicated by imported ceramics identified on western British and Irish sites since the 1940s.

Despite the considerable literature arising from these previous researches, however, a separate historical study integrating archaeological and textual sources to answer the basic question of who was coming and going from the western shores of Britain and Ireland in the period 400-800 AD, and by what means, is lacking. It has to a large degree been taken for granted that maritime exchange would have constantly flourished along the western seaboard, to be invoked whenever an explanation was required for the movement of ideas or objects between regions. The studies of Zimmer and Bowen, in particular, sought to identify communication models as the background to theses concerning the spread of culture to and from early medieval Britain and Ireland. Other investigations have discussed aspects of the subject with reference to Zimmer, sometimes adding new material in the case of Crawford, James and Thomas, but in other cases, such as studies by Boissonade, Vendryes and Lewis, chiefly repeating the core of references assembled by Zimmer. Accordingly, the desire of the cultural theorists to imagine constant trading links as a background to cultural exchange has been carried over into studies of economic history where, for example, Zimmer's 'Wine trade' model, a theory particular to his thesis of the spread of classical culture to Ireland, has cast a misleading spell over most subsequent studies, both historical and archaeological, and has deflected any questioning of the causal relationship between commerce and the travels of cultural practitioners such as scholars who travel on trading ships. In some cases, for example where monastic links may be involved in the formation of commercial links, possibly crucial relationships are obscured.