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I wonder how many people quite realise the number of remarkable archaeological finds that have been made in Orkney over the last 150 years. Many of them are not on display in Orkney museum and can easily be overlooked. In fact many of them are apparently not on display in the National Museum in Edinburgh either, although that is where they are kept (see their collections database). Some are objects of national significance, and some are there because Orkney Museum didn’t open until 1968 and it didn’t have a full-time curator until 1976. There was nowhere to safely store or display finds in the islands. The Treasure Trove laws also come into it, and they are different in Scotland from those in England. Among these special finds from Orkney is a group of silver dirhams, Arab coins found with a hoard of Viking silver.

Silver dirhams were coins used throughout  the Islamic world at that time. They are a fascinating reminder of how far Viking contacts reached in the 10^th century. Vikings traded from Scandinavia to the Irish Sea, where the ircity of Dublin was probably the richest port in Western Britain at that time. They travelled to Russia and as far as Constantinople to the east and south, to Iceland and Greenland to the west. And Orkney lay in the middle of these, ruled by a Viking earl.

Several hoards of precious metal from this period have been found in Orkney. The Skaill hoard, which weighed 8kg, was found in March 1858 in sand dunes near St Peters Kirk at the Bay of Skaill. It was buried in a stone cist and contained not only hack-silver (chopped –up silver objects intended for recycling), but brooches, arm- and neck-rings, ingots, three Anglo-Saxon coins, and twenty-one Arab dirhams. Only one of the Arab coins is complete. The dates of the coins suggest that the hoard was buried in the 10^th century CE:  the latest of the dirhams was struck at Bagdad in 945CE, and the latest Anglo-Saxon coin was dated to c.925.

The hoard contained a number of silver brooches of probably Irish or Manx origin which have attracted much more attention. They are beautiful. But somehow I find these coins with their graceful writing even more beautiful, and coming from so much farther away, more exotic.

In the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall, in the ‘Merchant Lairds’ gallery, there is a large lump of butter excavated from a bog. Records show that rents and taxes in the Northern Isles were often paid by tenant farmers in butter as well as grain. There is even a skerry in Scapa Flow named the “Barrel of Butter”. The butter was usually poor quality fat known as ‘grease butter’,  intended as a lubricant rather than for eating. The Merchant Lairds of the 17^th and 18^th centuries then sold it abroad, to the German merchants who visited Orkney and Shetland. It was a well-documented trade. Shetlanders also paid part of their rent in butter, storing it during the year until payment was due in early summer.

 ‘Bog butter’, a waxy substance which may be either actual butter or tallow, has been recovered from peat bogs in Ireland and Scotland. It was deliberately buried in wooden containers or wrapped in things like animal skins or bark. This is a good method of preservation, as peat bogs are highly acidic and low in oxygen and so bacterial growth is inhibited. The earliest examples known so far date back thousands of years ago to the early Bronze Age. Bog butter typically does not contain salt, and does contain cattle hairs.

Burying a valuable commodity may have been intended to keep it safe from robbers in unsettled times, or to accumulate enough for a rental payment at a later date, or even to hide it from the landlord. A number of writers suggest that the taste of butter intended for eating is improved by burial in a bog (I do NOT recommend trying this.) Several reports mention bog butter being used for waterproofing, for making candles or cement, for greasing wool, or possibly as ritual offerings.

 I have never so far found a reference to the need to grease the axles of carts in any of the publications which describe the wheeled wooden vehicles used in medieval and early post medieval Europe. Diaries describing the difficulties of travel talk about dreadful tracks, and wheels coming off carriages, but do not mention stopping for the wheels to be greased. Other wooden machinery such as windmills, or windlasses for lifting, where friction would also have been a problem, would probably have needed greasing as well. 

However, from archaeological sources it is known that the use of animal fats to grease the moving parts of wooden vehicles goes back to at least the third millennium BCE. A wheel from a sled belonging to an Egyptian pharaoh, which had been used to transport heavy goods, was found to have been greased with animal fat (tallow). So had some chariot wheels from a later Egyptian tomb. The ancient Greeks used animal fat to lubricate chariot wheels during the Olympic Games. The Romans in the early centuries AD are said to have  done the same and in the early middle ages, it was used to grease the wheels of royal carriages and the lifting gear for castle gates. Other lubricants in antiquity included plant and fish oils. By the 18^th and 19^th centuries CE moving parts were starting to be made of metal and mineral oils took over.

So when you next pile your slice of toast high with cholesterol, or pay the garage bill for lubricating the many moving parts of your car, think of the days when a humble crofter’s wife churned rather nasty butter to pay the rent and keep the wheels going. And if you find a reference to greasing cartwheels with butter in early modern Europe anywhere, please let me know.

Some years ago I went to an exhibition at the British Museum in London about Ashurbanipal, ruler of the huge neo-Assyrian empire in the 7^th century BCE. Among the panels was part of the great king’s achievements, as declared by himself. It sounded just like a modern CV, or at least, the ones I was taught to write towards the end of my working life. Later I came across a similar declaration from the Norse period, by Rognald Kali Kollsson, Earl of Orkney in the mid-12th century CE. I was interested to see what the two leaders considered to be their qualifications for their jobs.

Ashurbanipal reigned between 669 – 631BCE. Although he was popular with his subjects, he was noted for his ruthlessness and cruelty to anyone who opposed him, even by the standards of his day. Some of the scenes recorded on the carved stone reliefs that decorated his palace at Nineveh record some nasty deeds. This one shows a peaceful scene where he is enjoying an al-fresco meal with his queen in a garden – until you notice the severed head hanging from the tree on the left.

He wasn’t shy about stating his qualifications for the job of king of Assyria. His CV proudly stated that he was good at maths, including complex multiplications and divisions – the Assyrians were advanced mathematicians. It’s nice to meet a head of state who considered being good at maths important for the job. He claimed to be good at ancient languages as well, (Greats at Oxford springs to mind) and could read difficult texts in both Akkadian and Sumerian. He himself would have spoken Assyrian, a Semitic language, for everyday use. Unusually for a monarch in those days, Ashurbanipal could read and write, and palace reliefs show him with long reed pens tucked into his belt, used for making the wedge-shaped impressions in soft clay of cuneiform, the earliest known writing in the world.  He was also good at sport, including archery, riding, throwing javelins and driving chariots.

The king had a passion for books and knowledge, and had a library which was famous for centuries afterwards, predating the famous library in Alexandria. He sent agents to temples all over his territory to collect copies of significant works on many subjects. These now form a priceless record of Assyrian civilisation, written at the time by the Assyrians themselves, among them the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, one of the oldest known works of literature in the world. The texts were preserved when the fire which eventually destroyed the palace at Nineveh baked the clay tablets hard, and they were protected when the walls collapsed on top of them. They were excavated in the mid-19^th century and many are now in the British Museum.

Rognvald Kali Kolsson (1136-58) didn’t rule an empire but he controlled a substantial earldom. He was the nephew of St Magnus Erlundson and built St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall during a power struggle with his cousin for the earldom. He later obtained control of Caithness on mainland Scotland as well.

The earl boasted of having nine skills. Like Ashurbanipal, he was proud of being able to read and write (the Vikings used runes), and compose poetry. The Orkneyingasaga describes a number of places and people he visited on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1151. This included a famous visit to Ermengard, the beautiful princess of Narbonne, about whom he wrote a number of poems recorded in the Saga. He was clearly smitten with her, but did not accept an offer to stay and marry her and rule Narbonne with her.  

Rognvald was good at the courtly arts of 12^th century Europe, including chess and playing a musical instrument. Like Ashurbanipal, he was good at archery, and he could ski (he was born and brought up in Norway) and row, as a good Viking should. He doesn’t seem to have included advanced mathematics among his achievements though. Rognvald and his companions made it home to Orkney but he was killed in 1158, buried in St Magnus Cathedral and (probably) canonised in 1192 by Pope Celestine III.

So it appears that literacy and sport were important for a ruler hundreds or even thousands of years ago, but numeracy was an optional extra!

Primogeniture means inheritance by the eldest legitimate male child. The British monarchy was a good example (until the 21^st century and the 2013 Succession to the Crown Act). According to this rule, a daughter could only inherit if there was no male heir, and however useless the eldest son might be at the job of being king, his younger brothers just had to sit there and watch. Primogeniture did have the advantage of not dividing land and property into ever smaller shares. Also until post medieval times, the monarch was supposed to sit on a horse waving a sword if there was a war, so a male monarch was usually a more practical choice (which is not to say that women didn’t join in from time to time with the political side). It could result in some fairly useless kings. However, throughout history, people found a way round it if they really wanted to. Some examples follow.

The Declaration of Arbroath

Some people just said straight out that they would choose their own king. The Declaration of Arbroath was a letter written to the Pope in 1320 during the Scottish Wars of Independence. It was sealed by fifty-one Scottish barons and freeholders, and asked the Pope to confirm Robert the Bruce as their sovereign, and Scotland as an independent country. But it goes on to say that they wouldn’t agree to any king who gave in to the English. They would choose someone else.

The Princes in the Tower

Another method, if you happened to be a royal relation who wanted to grab the throne, was to claim that your sovereign was illegitimate. A “pre-contract” or legally-binding betrothal was a handy device in these circumstances. One famous example was Richard III, who claimed that his elder brother, King Edward IV, hadn’t really been married to Elizabeth Woodville, mother of the Princes in the Tower, because Edward had been pre-contracted to Lady Eleanor Butler. Therefore his nephews and nieces were illegitimate and disqualified from inheriting the throne. It ended on Bosworth Field, with a distant relative winning the battle and consolidating his claim by marrying the eldest sister of the two now deceased male heirs, who had conveniently been declared legitimate again.

Hacking and smiting

Winning the throne by brute force was popular in the Middle Ages. The “Wars of the Roses” were a struggle for the crown between the descendants of Edward III.  The crown changed hands a number of times following a successful battle.

(i)  Richard II/Henry IV: Edward III died in 1377 and was succeeded by his grandson Richard II, son of his eldest son. However Richard II made himself so unpopular that he was forced to abdicate in favour of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) in 1399. Henry was the eldest son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, and John’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster. John had an elder brother Lionel, Edward III’s second son, but Lionel only had a daughter. Her grandson, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, was considered by many to be Richard’s heir, but he was only eight years old when Richard was deposed. He became a faithful supporter of Henry V and VI. However, he died without children and his sister Anne succeeded to the claim (see below)

(ii)  Henry VI/Edward IV:  Henry IV was succeeded by his son and grandson, Henrys V and VI. Unfortunately Henry VI was not a success. He was regarded as a weak king, dominated by his wife, and had attacks of mental illness. So he too was challenged by a cousin, the Duke of York. The Duke of York was descended from Edward III via two of his sons. His mother, Anne Mortimer, was descended from Lionel the second son through the daughter. On his father’s side he was descended from Edward’s fifth son.  So his claim depended on (a) whether a female had a claim to the throne and (b) hacking and smiting – lots of battles of the Wars of the Roses.  Brute force won the day, although the Duke of York was dead before the Yorkists won. His eldest son Edward took the throne as Edward IV.

(iii)  Richard III/Henry VII Edward had two younger brothers. George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of York. George died before Edward, leaving a son and a daughter. He had been attainted for treason. Richard survived his brother Edward who died while his sons were still children. Uncle Richard declared Edward’s children illegitimate (see above) and took the throne as Richard III.  The princes disappeared at some point. Whether it was Richard who killed them is still an unsettled question. Clarence’s son was bypassed on the excuse that he was disbarred by his father’s attainder.

The last Lancastrian heir was Henry Tudor, who managed to defeat Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, marry Edward IV’s eldest daughter and take the throne. His personal claim to it was weak. He was descended through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, from John of Gaunt. However, his descent was not from the marriage with Blanche but from John of Gaunt’s adulterous affair with Catherine Swynford. John and Catherine later married and the Pope legitimised their offspring after the event. Parliament during the reigns of both Richard II and Henry IV confirmed this. However, Henry IV then made a legal decree that his half-siblings should not have a claim to the throne, although people argued about whether he was allowed to do this.

So Henry VII’s claim that the Lancastrians had the better claim to the throne involved both inheritance via a female – he could therefore not object to the Yorkists’ claim to inheritance via a female – and a rather dodgy situation as regarded legitimacy. If he wanted to rule by right of his Yorkist wife, she was another female and had a male cousin living (the Duke of Clarence’ son), although Henry eventually got rid of him. In the end, it just depended on hacking and smiting – Henry won the Battle of Bosworth.

The Hanoverian Succession

And there is the Hanoverian succession, where the English Parliament chose a king on religious grounds. King James II was removed (without violence) from the thrones of England and Scotland in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 because of his attempts to rule without Parliament, and because he had converted to Catholicism, married a Catholic queen and announced that his son would be raised as a Catholic. They gave the throne to James’ elder daughter by his first, Protestant marriage. This was Mary, who was married to her cousin, William, Prince of Orange. She and William died childless and were succeeded by her younger sister, Anne.

Alas, Anne also died without children in 1714. The 1707 Act of Succession expressly forbade Anne to be succeeded by a Catholic monarch. Estimates of how many alternative candidates for the throne existed at that point range wildly from around fifty to six. There do appear to have been six definite contenders alive in 1714 who were more closely related to Queen Anne than the Elector of Hanover. But he was the closest Protestant relative.

To begin with there was Queen Anne’s half-brother, James Stuart, the “Old Pretender". Had it not been for the Act of Succession, James and his two sons, Charles (“Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender) and Henry, Cardinal Stuart would have inherited the throne. Not everybody in the by-then United Kingdom supported the exclusion of James and his descendants. There was trouble over this for years, culminating in the 1745 rebellion. Outside Britain itself, France, Spain, the Papal States and Modena all regarded James and Charles Stuart as the king of England, Scotland and Ireland.

In 1714, the next heir after Charles Stuart was Anne Marie d’Orléans. She was the daughter of Henrietta of England, Charles II’s sister, so Anne-Marie was Anne’s first cousin. Henrietta had married Phillippe Duc d’Orléans, younger brother of the king of France. She had converted to Catholicism on her marriage and her daughter was naturally Catholic as well.

Anne Marie d’Orleans married the King of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. She had two surviving sons in 1714. Also Catholics….

Next were two granddaughters of Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of James I. They were the daughters of her son Edward and were Anne’s second cousins. However, Edward had also converted to Catholicism, and his daughters were Catholics as well.  Oh dear…

So after Anne’s death the throne was offered to the nearest Protestant relative, the son of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s youngest daughter. This was another of Anne’s second cousins, the Elector of Hanover, a small principality in north-west Germany. An elector was a head of state entitled to vote in the election of the Holy Roman Emperor. He became George I, first of the Hanoverian line. The Electorate (later kingdom) of Hanover was ruled by the kings of Britain until the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.

So in practice, primogeniture does NOT rule, OK.  You can always tweak it a bit if it seems advisable!

No, “Striking gold in Sunderland “ is not about panning for precious metal in the icy waters of the River Wear. It is about one of my favourite types of antique pottery. The museum where I worked before my retirement had a small collection of later post-medieval pottery, the period when ceramic production had been industrialised. I first came across it when I was checking these objects against the catalogue, making sure that all the records were complete. I ‘m not usually terribly keen on pottery unless it is at least 700 years old but I make an exception for Sunderland lustreware.  It’s the beautiful iridescent pinky-mauve glaze. I especially like the plaques with transfer-printed images of things like bridges, railways and ships, often with some kind of written text.  This one says “May Peace & Plenty on our Nation Smile, and Trade with Commerce Bless the British Isle”.

Sunderland Lustreware was first developed at the Wedgewood factory in Staffordshire around 1805. It was produced from the early 19^th century to the early 1930s in factories in north-east England, initially in Sunderland (Tyne and Wear). Plaques were one of the commonest forms, together with jugs, although there were examples of many other shapes, even rolling pins. This piece is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who made the image available.

And how does gold come into it? Lustreware is a term referring to pottery with an iridescent metallic glaze. This is produced by painting a mixture of clay and metallic oxides over a first glaze and then re-firing it at a lower temperature. The beautiful pink colour on Sunderland lustre ware comes from traces of gold in this second glaze.