building fences in viking dublin: exploring ireland’s first urban community

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Chapter 1

Building Fences in Viking Dublin: Exploring Ireland’s First Urban Community

Rebecca Boyd

The world of early medieval Ireland, (c.400–1200AD), was, by and large, one in which people stayed close to home. Society was essentially tribal, arranged around the túath, the tribe or kin-group (Kelly, 1988, p. 3). The survival of contemporary legal texts shows that only a limited number of persons were permitted to travel around the country: royalty or professionals such as poets, lawyers, and clergy. These were nemed, ‘privileged’, either because of their inherited rights, or their professional standing (Kelly, 1988, chs 1 and 2). Ordinary people who left their own túath ran the risk of losing all their legal rights, becoming ambue (a non-person), while mention is made of cu glas (literally ‘grey dogs’), exiles from overseas, who also had no honour price or legal standing (Kelly, 1988, pp. 5–6). Early medieval Ireland was not a society which welcomed migration or mobility, outside its own clearly defined set of rules.

The arrival in the late ninth century of Viking raiders heralded major changes for Irish society. The very nature of Viking raiding is based on movement and mobility, attacking quickly and leaving again with plunder and slaves. The early raids conformed to this pattern, but by the mid ninth century, the Vikings were staying for months at a time, launching raids from longphorts (shipcamps or bases), acting as mercenaries for hire, and marrying into Irish society (Valante, 2008). This coincided with the establishment of Ireland’s first real town: Dublin. The role of the Scandinavians in the development of urbanism is, as yet, something of a chicken-and-egg scenario: did the Vikings introduce towns to Ireland from northern Europe, or did these emerging markets attract the raiders? Either way, the creation of this new way of life introduced a new narrative within Irish society – that of movement to and from the towns. This narrative became a complex one, with dialogues of movements emerging on local, regional and national scales, supplying the towns with labour, raw materials, foodstuffs, building supplies, and a ready market for the items made and imported by the townspeople. The Scandinavian involvement (through their shipping capabilities) added a further international dimension, transporting both raw materials and finished goods into and out of Ireland to Scandinavia, the North Atlantic, Russia and the East, as well as to England and the continent. Limited exchanges of goods and people from Europe and Britain are evidenced throughout prehistoric and early medieval Ireland (indeed St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, was British, not Irish), but in

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Heritage, Diaspora and the Consumption of Culture12

the Viking Age, the scale of these exchanges intensified dramatically, from the occasional trade of luxury, portable items (Valante, 2008, p. 36), to bulky, low-value commodities such as slaves and agricultural produce like butter, cheese and wheat (Valante, 2008, p. 134). Ireland, and in particular, her towns, was a very different place by the end of the twelfth century than it had been before the Vikings arrived.

Towns are not traditionally viewed as immigrant communities, but that is essentially what they were. Throughout Europe, medieval urban populations, under threat from disease and high infant mortality, engaged in a continuous cycle of recruiting new townspeople from the countryside (Hanawalt, 1993, p. 23); as individuals and households died out, they were replaced by new members of the community. The first towns were composed of migrant households moving from the countryside (perhaps from just a few miles distant, or from much further afield) into this new type of settlement. As towns developed and grew, the numbers of people moving into them also grew, as did the relationships between the town and its hinterlands. These relationships also extended much further than the local hinterland, creating regional, national, and international links between Dublin and the rest of Ireland, as well as Britain, Scandinavia, the North Atlantic, continental Europe and Asia. These relationships were multi-directional; not only did people and goods move into the town from the countryside, but ideas and influences spread from the towns back to the countryside.

It is this process of exchange and movement of people which lends itself to viewing urban-rural networks of movement as part of Ireland’s diaspora. The hinterland supplied daily essentials for the town, as well as a necessary and ready market. The most important resource in this relationship, however, was the people who not only facilitated these exchanges and networks, but carried them out by walking, riding, or sailing into and out of the towns.

A Sense of Place

Place is a very influential concept within human geography, anthropology, ethnology and other social sciences, and has become more widespread in social archaeology (Meskell and Preucel, 2007, p. 215). Space and place are two very different concepts – space is the physical setting around us, while place is the result of the “social process of valuing space” (Meskell and Preucel, 2007, p. 215). The creation of ‘place’ is the result of a person acknowledging a connection to a physical space and placing value upon that connection (Rodman, 2003). Hazel Easthope defines place as somewhere which ‘can be a very influential force in one’s life’ and provides one with ‘a sense of belonging and comfort’ (2004, pp. 131–2). Easthope distinguishes between a conscious awareness of place – a sense of place – and an unselfconscious feeling of being comfortable in your place – rootedness (2004, p. 130).

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Building Fences in Viking Dublin: Exploring Ireland’s First Urban Community 13

In everyday life, people in early medieval Ireland typically moved around a very limited world, encompassing their own homesteads and families, and a small social and geographical network of neighbours, local lords and kings, and their households. This resulted in a deep connection to the birthplace and home, with settlement sites demonstrating occupation over centuries (O’Sullivan, 2008, O’Sullivan and Nicholl, 2011). Special deposits on the floors of abandoned houses indicate important events in the lifespans of the houses and their households, perhaps the death of a matriarch figure (O’Sullivan, 2008, p. 238). Individual houses were demolished and rebuilt, but homesteads were occupied over decades and even centuries, indicating a long-term connection to place. This connection would have been missing in the early years of Dublin’s establishment, before the town had acquired its own sense of place.

Households and communities work on many different scales, from the local to the global (Souvatzi, 2008, pp. 1–4), and, in an urban context, the property within which the household is situated becomes an important locale in the negotiation of those scales. Properties are not simply important because they were defined pieces of land in the town, but also because they were the location for the household – they were the places where people lived and worked. As such, the properties hold the key to understanding how the household viewed itself in relation to the wider world. In 989AD, the annalistic entry in the Chronicon Scotorum records that an ounce of gold was to be levied from each garrda (garden or garth) (Wallace, 2000, p. 264). This further emphasises the role that these divisions between and into households played, not only in terms of bounding movements, but also in regulating the economic and administrative functions of the town. Wallace rightly identifies these boundaries as ‘the very essence of town life’ (Wallace, 2000, p. 263) and argues that understanding the boundaries is crucial to understanding how the people of the Viking towns related to each other.

Viking Dublin – Ireland’s First Town

Excavations show that people were present in Dublin from the Mesolithic period onwards (Moriarty, 2011) but it is in 841–842AD that an annalist comments that “the heathens [are] still at Duiblinn” (Anon. 842). This brief line denotes the first over-wintering of Scandinavian Vikings in Dublin and is traditionally taken as the first reference to the town of Dublin. From these small beginnings, the city of Dublin emerged, growing from this simple settlement through the medieval period to become the British Empire’s second city in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and the global centre of today. Dublin represents Ireland’s first successful experiment in urbanism, and as such, it is uniquely positioned to pose, and answer, questions about the growth of urbanism in Ireland and about how people adopted and adapted to an urban life.

Viking Dublin’s archaeology is now well-known, thanks to half a century of intensive excavations (Simpson, 2011) provides an extensive survey of these

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excavations). Within the Viking and medieval town, a constant cycle of rubbish dumping, construction and demolition of buildings, and the replacement of pathways and floors led to a steady rise in contemporary ground-level, resulting in the preservation of metres of archaeological deposits underneath our feet. Thanks to water-logged soils in these deposits, which provide excellent archaeological preservation, the quality of Dublin’s Viking-Age remains is exceptional, allowing the recovery of many thousands of artefacts, from rubbish and craft debris to uniquely ornamented pieces of jewellery, to entire buildings, properties, and streetscapes.

Figure 1.1 Map of Dublin showing main sites mentioned in chapterSource: Rebecca Boyd

In brief, Dublin was founded around the banks of the rivers Poddle and Liffey and the Black Pool (under modern-day Dublin Castle). From the beginning, individual properties and households were enclosed by simple wooden fences. The earliest urban settlement evidence dates to the mid to late ninth century, approximately the same historical date given in the Annals for the Viking presence in Dublin. Settlement expanded westwards and southwards and by the mid-eleventh century, estimates suggest that approximately 4500 people lived within Dublin’s stone walls (Geraghty, 1996, p. 58). The early town was enclosed by a series of clay banks, which were slowly enlarged and expanded, culminating in the stone wall of the twelfth century. The main streets of the town ran east-west (along

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modern Dame St and High St), with smaller streets and lanes criss-crossing the town. Modern placenames hint at the presence of specific industries at particular places, e.g. Fishamble Street denoting medieval fish markets, while the surviving network of parish churches indicates a strong religious presence from the medieval period (Clarke, 2002). There must also have been market and assembly places in the early town, although the evidence for these has mostly disappeared.

Individual properties were set at right angles to the streets, creating long, thin slices of land, and, again, bounded by fences. Excavations of thirteenth century levels show that, some four hundred years after that first over-wintering, the inhabitants of the city still lived within the narrow, long property plots (Coughlan, 2000). It is possible to re-trace the lines of boundaries back through twenty-first century satellite imagery, nineteenth and twentieth century Ordnance Survey maps, fifteenth to seventeenth century maps, and through excavation plans to demonstrate boundary continuity right up to the modern day (Simpson, 2006, Wallace, 2004). These properties, containing buildings, yards, animal pens, rubbish dumps, storage pits and so on, are a key component in the social world of Viking Dublin, and also an important piece of evidence for understanding how individual households related to the wider, urban society.

The Appearance of the Boundary Fence

The boundaries of Viking Dublin are one of the most continuous and obvious features of its archaeology – lines of fences built and rebuilt over generations and centuries dividing houses from their neighbours. The fences themselves are quite simple constructions and usually consist of several stretches of post-and-wattle fences linked together to form a continuous boundary. They are set at a right angle to the street, forming long and narrow properties. Post-and-wattle is a wooden building technique whereby thin lengths of a flexible wood (usually hazel) are woven in between upright stakes (most commonly ash). The resulting panel looks somewhat like a lattice panel and is a very common woodwork technique in prehistoric and early medieval Ireland, found in house construction, fences, and pathways. The fences could be augmented by topping them with thorns, presumably in an attempt to stop trespassing across the top of the fence (Ó Corráin, 2005, p. 555). In addition, at High Street and Winetavern Street, blackthorn branches (a native Irish thorny tree) were woven into the bases of several fences (Murray, 1983, p. 20, Murray, 1979, p. 84), again presumably to deter trespassing under the fences. Buildings were often built up against boundary fences, and in many cases, the fences were themselves incorporated into the structure walls. At other times, the walls of the buildings themselves appear to have acted as boundaries. In some properties, no fences have survived, but the archaeological deposits respect some now invisible line and so the original boundaries can be inferred.

As far as can be determined, from the location of excavation trenches, these boundaries extended along most of the length of the properties to the front and

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back. While the boundaries may consist of different stretches of fencing, they form a continuous line and the boundaries between different properties are almost never breached by gaps. There are only three examples of access from one yard to the next. Wallace (2005, p. 824) cites one example in Castle Street, Dublin, where a wattle panel, left in a gap in the boundary fence, was interpreted as a gate. Two further examples come from a late tenth to early eleventh century level in Temple Bar West; there was a gap in the fence between properties two and three and a formal pathway between properties three and four (Simpson, 2002, p. 438, p. 449).These are the only known occasions of access between properties and it seems that the overwhelming preference was to maintain the divisions between properties and restrict access to either the front or back of the property.

The height of the fences is also important as this would have helped to maintain a degree of visual separation between the properties. Wallace maintains that the fences were relatively low, and his reconstruction drawings depict the fences as waist height.1 At least one fence at Fishamble Street survived to a height of 0.9m,2 but other fences may have been higher or lower (particularly given the 1.8m height of the nochtaile in the Bretha Comaithchesa). Certainly, in terms of acting as a barrier to the movement of cows or sheep across fields and neighbouring farms, a low fence is not very effective. However, cows and sheep were not reared within the towns, being driven in ‘on-the-hoof’ for butchery when ready to be slaughtered. Instead, the townspeople mostly kept chickens and pigs as food animals within the town, while dogs, cats, rats and mice were also common sights (Poole, 2013, pp. 151–2). Fences lower than 1.8m in height would have been quite sufficient to deter these urban animals from leaving their homes. The boundaries performed a very practical function – they were barriers restricting movement and separating spaces, animals, and people. The existence of these boundaries from the very earliest occupation levels indicates that this practical function was a necessity from the establishment of the town. These fences acted as physical, visual, and mental deterrents and it may have been that the social message displayed by erecting and maintaining the boundary fences was the important message, and any function as animal fences was a secondary (though still vital) function.

Fences in Early Medieval Ireland and Ninth Century Dublin

A late seventh-century law text – the Bretha Comaithchesa or the Judgements of Neighbourhood – considers the question of boundaries in early medieval Ireland, dealing especially with the question of trespass by domestic animals (Kelly, 1988, p. 273).3 The text sets out the four different types of fences used to mark out lands

1 For example, the sketch by Michael Heffernan appearing in Larsen, 2001, p. 136.2 Although found in a collapsed state, this fence (E190:F1569 – A. Corless, pers.

comm.) would have stood 0.9m high. This does not however take into account the depth to which this fence would have been sunken into the ground.

3 This text is found in the Ancient Laws of Ireland, Volume IV, pp. 69–159.REF.

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and prevent trespass (Ó Corráin, 1983). These fences are: the ditch (clas); the stone fence (cora); the oak fence (dairime); and the post-and-wattle fence, known as a felmed or nochtaile or ‘bare fence’. The text describes the nochtaile as follows:

it is effective against damscuithit (both full-grown and small animals); a small animal cannot go through it because of its closeness, an ox cannot go through it because of its height and its firmness. It is twelve fists high. There are three courses of wickerwork in it: one at the bottom, one in the middle and one at the top. Each paling post is levelled (smoothed) at the top. They (the paling posts) are pushed down by hand as far as possible and each paling post is given three blows of a mallet. A foot to the joint of the big toe is the distance between each two paling posts. The paling post extends three fists above the wickerwork and there is a crest of blackthorn on it. If that is on it, it is impassable to stock. (Ó Corráin, 1983, p. 248)4

Ó Corráin interprets this as a description of a fence which was 1.8m in height and was primarily intended to inhibit the movement (in or out) of animals. The nochtaile was noted by the glossator as being used on the tilled pastureland, but must have been used more widely than this.

Although the Bretha Comaithchesa is a seventh-century text, Ó Corráin believes that “it can be reasonably assumed that the fencing methods described predate the text by a generous period, and remained in use long after the 7th century” (Ó Corráin, 1983, p. 247). The text implies that there was a clear difference in status between the different types of fences. The nochtaile is the least important of the fences and Ó Corráin suggests that it may have acted as a temporary or seasonal fence. Thus, it is not surprising to see that the fences marking out initial landholdings (at Temple Bar West) are post-and-wattle, as this would be a suitable fence type to use to mark out new property lines. What is surprising is that the post-and-wattle fence remained in use in the town from this point onwards, as this fence was primarily intended as a short-lived fence in pastureland. Ditches and stone fences are much more permanent boundary markers. However, these fences are physically much bigger and are less practical where land is at a premium, as both stone fences and ditches had to measure three feet in width. In contrast, a post-and-wattle fence need only have measured a few inches wide and would take up much less space. It was also relatively easy and cheap to repair or replace, an important consideration given the constantly rising ground levels of the town.

4 Ó Corráin equates two fists to one foot (30 centimetres), therefore a fence of twelve fists is six feet or 1.8m high (Ó Corráin, 1983, p. 251).

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Who Built the First Fences?

Those constantly rising ground levels ensured that the fences had to be replaced, as they were slowly buried underneath the rising ground level. It is unclear how many years a fence may have survived, but houses probably had to be replaced every 20–25 years (Ref) and the pathways within properties, whilst needing periodic re-laying, were maintained across two to three levels of housing (up to 70 years or so). Individual sections of fences may have had a longer or shorter lifespan, but the lines of the boundaries are maintained across centuries. Fishamble St is the type site for Hiberno-Norse Dublin, and there, the exact property boundaries are maintained over fourteen levels of housing – up to three centuries (as in Fishamble St., see fig. 48.3, Wallace, 2010). However, who was the first to erect a boundary fence in what would become Dublin? The earliest fences excavated are from the Temple Bar West site where, in the ninth century, a series of three individual properties were established (Simpson, 1999, Simpson, 2002).

Wallace suggests that understanding the reasons for the establishment of property boundaries is key to understanding the development of urbanism and urban networks. However, most of Wallace’s coverage of the properties has been in relation to what the existence of these boundaries means in terms of authority and administration (Wallace, 2005, Wallace, 2000, Wallace, 2004, Wallace, 1987b, Wallace, 1987a). Wallace initially suggested that the static nature of the property boundaries may have been as a result of “the forces of tradition and practice” (Wallace, 1987b, p. 273). Since then, he has maintained that the boundaries are not evidence of day-to-day life, but witnesses to questions of civil administration and authority (2000, p. 265). The existence of such an authority in Viking Age Dublin is unclear. While a Dublin mint (a traditional symbol of civic or royal authority) was established by the late tenth century (Kenny, 2005, p. 846), new research suggests that this mint was established by the mercantile community to regulate their trades, rather than an imposition by a ruler (Woods, 2013).

The use of a nochtaile may also hint at the mindset of those who first enclosed their houses. The nochtaile was primarily a temporary fence, not intended to last for longer than a season or two. This may reflect a certain mentality amongst the early settlers – that of a migrant marking out their own space with no clear idea of how long they would stay in that space. Rather than investing in a stone fence or a ditch, the simple wooden fence made the necessary statement of ownership for these urban migrants. The first boundaries at Temple Bar West are associated with a settlement which does not have any obvious signs of hierarchy, wealth, or exceptional status as would be associated with the emergence of an elite or socially superior class. Indeed, Simpson has recently noted ‘a significant level of communal organisation’ in the construction of a roadway in addition to property plots (Simpson, 2011, p. 32). There is nothing at Temple Bar West to suggest the presence of an over-ruling ‘authority’ or an administration intent on imposing order on this new settlement. Indeed, the identification of elite warrior graves and a potential ceremonial structure at South Great Georges St, north of Temple

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Bar West (Simpson, 2005, Simpson, 2010), would seem to suggest that any such presence in ninth-century Dublin was removed both spatially and socially from the everyday settlement as found at Temple Bar West. Instead, it seems more likely that the fences were erected at a community level, built by the people themselves, thus favouring Wallace’s original suggestion of ‘tradition and practice’.

The repair and replacement of the fences is expected, given the short-term nature of post-and-wattle fencing, but the maintenance of the exact lines (give or take a few inches) is not. An importance is attached to these lines which transcends their practicality. This importance is emphasised later, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when a new type of architecture (sill-beam construction) arrives in both Waterford and York (Hall, 1994, p. 64, Hurley et al., 1997, p. 897). The new sill-beam houses were constricted to remain within the lines of each property, strongly suggesting that maintaining the boundaries was more important than the introduction of new construction skills. The lines of the boundaries can be traced over several centuries at sites with deep stratigraphies and even into modern times (Simpson, 2006, p. 113). These boundaries are almost religiously curated and one gets the impression that changing boundary lines was not ‘allowed’. Simpson (2006, p. 113) suggests that there is nothing special about the fixed nature of these boundaries – boundaries are, by definition, limits to movement and change – but it is exactly this unchanging nature which makes these boundaries remarkable.

The fact that these boundary ‘rules’ are almost never breached implies that the whole of society accepted and agreed upon them. There must have been a clear societal expectation of what was ‘done’ and expected in order to allow the boundaries to endure, again providing further support for the argument that the boundaries were a communal endeavour, as opposed to an imposition. Viewing the creation and maintenance of boundaries as a communal endeavour also opens up the possibility that they may have helped the community to establish their own connections to this new settlement. The act of bounding land into individual properties not only established land ownership and rights, but also may have enabled each household to begin to create their own sense of place and of belonging within the new town. The fences marked the connection of a property with the land and the history of the town, and so also denoted the connections of the household of that property with the town.

A Question of Privacy?

Hand in hand with the development of urbanism came the realities of living in towns. Prior to the emergence of towns, every household lived at a remove from their neighbours, set within larger or smaller farmsteads, and they were largely self-sufficient. Each domestic residence was surrounded by field systems, yards, and often substantial earthen boundary ditches, providing a sense of isolation and seclusion for the residents. A similarly dispersed pattern of settlement is evident in pre-Viking and Viking Age Scandinavia. A survey of the literary sources from

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Ireland, Scandinavia and Iceland show some clear similarities between these societies, particularly in terms of the proprieties involved in entering another’s property.

The Crith Gabhlach, an early eighth-century Irish law text, details the fines payable for damaging another’s land or holdings, suggesting that there was an acceptable code of behaviour in relation to other people’s property. Privacy in and around the home was also heavily protected with a series of fines assigned for breaches of privacy. These breaches ranged from simply looking into the farmyard, right up to entering the house without permission (Kelly, 1988, p. 110). Similar concerns for privacy and correct behaviours are also hinted at in the Icelandic sagas. Orri Vésteinnson (2006) tells the story of a visitor arriving at an Icelandic longhouse and makes the visitor circumnavigate the house to enter via the main door, based on saga evidence. As always, the dating of these documentary sources must be borne in mind; the Crith Gablach and the Bretha Comaithchesa are both seventh-century documents, while sagas such as the Íslendingasögur (Sagas of the Icelanders) were first transcribed in the thirteenth century (Ólason, 1998, p. 19). The critical question of how far these texts, some legal, some historical, some fantastical, can be used to reflect upon tenth and eleventh realities must be borne in mind. Regardless of this caveat, these texts do imply that household privacy was a matter of some concern in contemporary Ireland, Scandinavia and Iceland – the most likely places of origin for the new townspeople.

In the towns, the houses are divided only by these light wooden boundary fences and, perhaps, a few metres of open ground. Each property was surrounded by other properties on both sides and with roads, lanes and alleys to the front and back. The new townspeople found themselves living cheek by jowl, able to see into their neighbours’ properties and overhear their conversations, in contrast to the isolation of the farmstead. At the same time, they would have become aware that the neighbours could also see and hear them and their families. In the compact urban landscape, it may have been more difficult to maintain a sensation of privacy within and around the home, with neighbours on all sides. In addition, the world outside the property would also have impinged on those within its boundaries. The towns were filled with the strange and the exotic: traders, sailors, warriors, visitors, products, materials, and ideas, literally passing outside one’s door.

The private and public domains of the household engage at the front of the property, at the juncture between the private home and the public world, as represented by the street right outside the house. It is in the street and through the street that new ideas, trends, and thoughts are brought literally to the door of the house and the household. The Viking-Age town was a fast-paced environment, especially in comparison to the rural farmsteads, in which its occupants had to negotiate their way through a collision of old and new, familiar and strange, known and unknown. In this environment, the fences were not simply barriers to movement: they were also a means of separating the household – the private sphere – from the rest of the world – the public sphere. The act of bounding a

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household’s space was the key to creating a feeling of household privacy and place in that rapidly-changing townscape.

Property Boundaries and Property Lifecycles

Anthropological work has established that the lifespan of a house has an important role to play in how the groups which build, use and abandon that house regard the building (Waterson, 1997, Carsten and Hugh-Jones, 1995). The house is viewed as a ‘living’ entity with a lifecycle of its own, often linked to prestigious members of society or life events such as birth, marriage or death. Houses in prehistoric and early medieval Ireland also have been linked to the lifecycles of the families which occupied them (Smyth, 2006, Brück, 2008, O’Sullivan, 2008, O’Sullivan and Nicholl, 2011), as have individual houses in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic (Munch et al., 2003, p. 295, Gerritsen, 2003). These buildings and settlements represent ancestral homes, occupied over centuries and, although some of their structures may have changed, their long-term existence within a settlement area legitimated the household’s existence and control over the land.

Allison (1999, p. 4) argues that the majority of people do not dwell in houses which they have designed, instead living either in ancestral homes (Viking longhouses) or in the style of building preferred by the dominant social grouping. Unfortunately for their occupants, the post-and-wattle houses of Viking Dublin were simply not built to last and the ancestral homes argument does not hold true as there are no multi-generational ancestral homes. This does not appear to have been a matter of choice on the part of the occupants; environmental factors such as decay of building materials and rising ground levels meant that houses had to be rebuilt. A post-and-wattle townhouse may have lasted as little as ten years, but most estimates put the lifespan around twenty to twenty-five years (Bourke, 1995, p. 34, Geraghty, 1996, p. 63, Hall et al., 1983, p. 190). The longest period of occupation for a multi-phase building is four phases (this is house A9, Werburgh Street, Dublin, see Hayden, 2002). This is exceptional and it is more likely that a building would be reused over two phases, potentially a period as short as 25 or 30 years, if conservative estimates of house lifespans are used.

In this environment, the ancestral home is not represented by a structure, but instead by the property. Easthope (2004, p. 130) defined a sense of place as a conscious awareness of place: knowing, acknowledging and valuing one’s connection to a physical space in the landscape. The urban properties were occupied by familial groups over subsequent generations. The social world which those households occupied valued their personal histories and their own connections to each other and to their place, as exemplified by the maintenance of the property boundaries. The houses provided a short-term link to the sense of place, but simply did not stay standing for long enough to act as generational markers. In addition, the houses were in a state of almost-constant repair, with the need to re-lay floors, support or replace roofposts and doorjambs, repair walls and benchframes, and so

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on. Similarly out in the yard, cess and storage pits were cut and re-cut, animal pens and workshops were built, abandoned and destroyed, and, less frequently but still regularly, pathways were replaced as they sank into the mud.

The constant in the property was its boundaries, defining and delimiting the extent of the property to all four sides, and also defining the personal and private space of the household. Digging pits, re-building pens, repairing houses and maintaining pathways and boundaries constantly re-affirmed the connections to the past of the household. The boundaries contained the social world of the household and the existence of these limits allowed the household to form a mental link to the physical spaces which they enclosed. In forming that connection, the property becomes the link into the social and familial history of the household and provides the household with a sense of place, a past, present and future, and a permanence in a way that the houses cannot do in this transitory urban environment.

Creating an Urban Identity?

At this point, it is worth re-iterating one of the points made at the start of this chapter – that the towns are essentially migrant communities whose population is constantly reinforced by new arrivals from outside the town. With this in mind, we can turn to migration studies to shed some new light on the question of how Viking Dublin may have operated.

Stefan Burmeister (2000, p. 541) argues that when groups of culturally disparate people migrate to a new land, the traits which are maintained are those that are either highly functional and practical or those of the dominant social group. In order to survive, the settlers must adopt practices suitable to their new environment and be flexible enough to abandon any practices that were not economically and socially viable. This results in the creation of hybrid identities, incorporating a mix of social and cultural traits and practices. In this, people actively choose which traits to adopt, making this an instrumental, rather than primordial, expression of identity (see Jones, 1997 for a discussion of primordial and instrumentalist viewpoints in archaeology). Burmeister also argues that habitus is crucial in the construction of new ways of living in a community composed of migrants (Burmeister, 2000, p. 542). He makes a distinction between an internal and external domain and argues that, whilst the external domain – in this case, the outside appearance of the building and property – will match closely the status quo of the community, the internal domain will display the traditional cultural traits of the ‘home’ community. He argues that, in the external domain, individual households will quickly adapt to the new environment, changing their habitus as necessary to react to the social, economic and environmental climate within which the migrant households find themselves. In response, the household will maintain the habitus of home within the internal domain faithfully recreating the routines and settings of daily life at home in the new land.

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Specifically in relation to the Viking-Age towns of Ireland, this resulted in the rapid adoption of a standardised house form (the Hiberno-Norse Type 1 house, see Boyd, 2014) and property layout in which each household presents basically the same face to the world. Bounded by upright post-and-wattle fences, the houses are set at right angles to the street within a defined property. They are approached by a short pathway through the front yard which may have contained a few pits. This external panorama is one which is accepted by the community. Moving inside the property boundaries takes us into Burmeister’s internal domain where much more variation becomes apparent from property to property. The layout of the rear yards changes from one household to the next, with structures moving around the yard, pits opening and closing, and pathways snaking in different directions. Inside the houses is different again, with contemporary houses of comparable size exhibiting quite different layouts. This is the most private space which the household occupies and it is here where the household expresses its individual identity through their choice of internal layout, and furnishings.

While individual houses are built, altered, demolished, and rebuilt, the streetfront panorama stays the same. The boundaries of each property are fixed, as is the placement of the main house set at a right angle to the street. Judith Flanders’ study of the Victorian house notes a similar architectural stagnation in the mid-nineteenth century and she suggests that this desire for a stable and unchanging home environment was a reaction to the ‘dynamism … [and] … rapid technological change’ of the world outside the home (Flanders, 2004, p. xxi). This description could equally be applied to the world of the Viking Age towns and may be related to the development of coping mechanisms for life in the town. As I have discussed, life in the towns was fast-paced and dynamic, with a greater number of people, influences, and ideas on offer than in the smaller worlds in the countryside. Additionally, people were living very close to each other, with just a few metres separating households from each other. This closeness was mediated in one way by the creation and curation of property boundaries, but the boundaries on their own were not enough to reconcile the private world of the household with the public world of the town. The creation and replication of this somewhat standardised ‘streetfront panorama’ across the town allowed the townspeople to separate their private lives from their public worlds and become Ireland’s first urban dwellers.

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building fences in viking dublin: exploring ireland’s first urban community

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