The other Melsonby hoard

The Melsonby Hoard has hit the news.

The find was unveiled this week, having undergone years of cleaning, conservation, and analysis following its excavation in 2022.

It apparently comprises Iron Age feasting equipment (a large decorated cauldron is mentioned) and copious quantities of harness fittings and vehicle parts, which the archaeologists have attributed to four-wheeled wagons, rather than the expected two-wheeled chariots.

We are informed that the material “could rewrite Iron Age Britain”. Sensational stuff! A statement from Historic England explains that the find “alters our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.” And one science journal claims that it “challenges centuries-old ideas about wealth, power, and identity in ancient northern Britain”. Quite significant, then.

Oddly, the BBC relegated the story to its Newsround web site for children, but other news outlets seem to have taken the discovery more seriously, even if equally melodramatically, with liberal use of superlatives.

Surprising?

The find is undoubtedly exciting, and some of the metalwork seems awe-inspiring. But is it about to “rewrite Iron Age Britain”?

Forty-odd years ago, I was fortunate to be in on the ground floor, when the real rewriting began. As an archaeology undergraduate at Glasgow University searching for a suitable subject for a dissertation (and keen to avoid Agricolan Scotland, which was flavour of the day in the 1980s), I selected the pre-Agricolan period, when the emperor Vespasian’s governors were coming to grips with northern England, the rich lands of the Brigantes, in the early to mid AD 70s.

Royal capital of a wealthy nation

We have always known something of the Roman interactions with the Brigantes during the AD 70s. The historian Tacitus chronicled the internecine squabbling that necessitated Roman intervention on behalf of the beleaguered Queen Cartimandua. Archaeologists and historians had sought Cartimandua’s capital around York (site of the future Roman fortress) or further south on a low hilltop at Barwick-in-Elmet. (See map, above, from my 1983 dissertation.)

As I embarked on my undergraduate research, the sprawling archaeological site of Stanwick immediately caught my attention — a massive earthwork complex extending across 350ha, which had been selectively excavated in the 1950s by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (amongst whose assistants was a certain Leslie Alcock, who became Professor of Archaeology at Glasgow University in 1973).

Here is the plan I drew for my dissertation (with Barwick inset at top-left for comparison). Incidentally, Melsonby lies barely 1km beyond the bottom righthand corner of the earthworks.

Stanwick was then generally accepted as the headquarters of Cartimandua’s rebel consort Venutius, who (so the story went) fled north to avoid the Romans. Amongst the rich material already found there was a hoard, mainly of harness fittings but including a sword and scabbard, the so-called “Stanwick Hoard”, uncovered in 1843 at — did you guess where? — Melsonby. But it seemed to me, particularly after discussions with the Durham archaeologist Perce Turnbull (now deceased), that the enormous, apparently wealthy site (around which Perce generously drove me at sometimes alarming speed, with the gearbox of his Morris Minor grinding and screaming atrociously) was not Venutius’ base, but could only be the royal capital of Queen Cartimandua herself.

Quite apart from the contents of the original Melsonby hoard (the “Stanwick Hoard”), the imported Roman material discovered on the site by Turnbull in 1981 surely hinted at this conclusion. (I well remember that my one and only conversation with Professor Leslie Alcock, during the five or six years I spent in his Department of Archaeology — the only time I ever entered his spacious office — concerned his disagreement with my reinterpretation of the site, which he took to be disrespectful to the work of Wheeler.)

It amuses me to reflect that, in my unpublished 1983 dissertation, I was probably the first to identify Stanwick as Queen Cartimandua’s capital. It is true that Turnbull, in 1982, had described Stanwick as “a major social and economic centre, which probably owed its success, if not its very existence, to the enormously increased opportunities for external trade which must have been afforded by the proximity of an expanding Roman world”. But it took several years before archaeologist Colin Haselgrove (if memory serves me correctly) started to talk in terms of Cartimandua’s royal seat. Even in his 2016 book, The late Iron Age royal site at Stanwick, North Yorkshire, he still defended Wheeler’s interpretation — Wheeler had “valid enough geographical reasons for placing Venutius at Stanwick” — while acknowledging that “there is no site in northern England more obviously qualified than Stanwick to be the seat of a ruler who had a treaty with Rome”. (I still wonder why he balks at naming Cartimandua.)

The new Melsonby hoard is a wonderful find, without question, but hardly unexpected, hardly surprising, and it won’t lead to a “rewrite” of Iron Age Britain. It is frankly baffling that, in this day and age, archaeologists should talk in terms of “challenging the idea that ancient northern Britain was a backwater”. That idea died forty years ago.

Gallienus and his battle cavalry

The emperor Gallienus ruled the Roman empire for fifteen years, from AD 253 until his murder in AD 268, and yet he is hardly known outside academic circles. To put his achievement into context, both Claudius and Nero each ruled for thirteen-and-a-half years, Commodus only twelve.

Admittedly, Septimius Severus reigned for eighteen years, Trajan managed eighteen-and-a-half, Hadrian almost twenty-one, and Antoninus Pius nearly twenty-three.

But the emperors of the third century were generally more ephemeral. Elagabalus reigned for four years; Gordian III, five-and-a-half; Philip the Arab, four-and-a-half; Decius, barely two. In this company, fifteen years is an impressive tally. And yet, for a long time, Gallienus was belittled by scholars.

A good or a bad emperor?

From Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776) until Theodor Mommsen’s Die Provinzen von Caesar bis Diocletian (1885), Gallienus was berated as “chaotic and dissolute”. But then, quite abruptly at the outset of the twentieth century, he was suddenly hailed as a brilliant military reformer who had created a rapid action unit of “battle cavalry” to defend the hard-pressed frontiers. So, was this new characterization of Gallienus justified?

Careful sifting of the ancient Greek sources by Léon Homo in a 1903 essay had certainly rehabilitated the emperor’s besmirched reputation to a large degree, but for Alfred von Domaszewski, author of the influential Rangordnung der römischen Heeres in 1908, Gallienus became “that most wondrous of emperors”.

From that time onwards, scholars were convinced that Gallienus was a military genius who had overhauled the Roman army system. This was the gist of the 1976 dissertation by Lukas de Blois, which remained for a long time everyone’s go-to book about Gallienus. Even into the new millennium, we still read about Gallienus’ sweeping military reforms. One writer has been so bold as to subtitle his book “the apogee of Roman cavalry” in a reference to the emperor’s newly created “battle cavalry”.

How had this happened? And — more importantly — was it true? These are the questions that I address in my forthcoming book Phantom Horsemen.