The Viking Age.
Before the Normans came our district was Scandinavian. From the year 876 they began to settle and behaved not as raiders but as colonists. They wanted homes and settled quietly down.
In the course of 200 years their descendants became leading landowners, as we see from the Norse names of the 12th century records.
Naturally the art of the district must have been influenced by such people: especially by the Scandinavians who had lived in Ireland, till then a very artistic country. Whether Irish taught Norse or vice versa, we see that there was a quantity of artistic work produced especially along the seaboard, and we are lucky in having analogies not far to seek.
In the Isle of Man the earliest series of Crosses have 11th century runes and figure subjects from the Edda and the Sigurd story which were late 11th century. Mr. Kermode, F.S.A., Scot., dates them 1050–1150 (Saga book of Viking Club, Vol. I., p. 369). We have them in the remains in Man a kindred race to ours in the age before the Normans came: and we find resemblances between these Manx Crosses and some of ours both in subject and in style. In subjects the 11th century Crosses of Kirk Andreas, Jurby, and Malew find a parallel at Halton, which Mr. Calverley places late in 11th century and attributes to people under strong Scandinavian influence: but Danish as it happens rather than Norse.
The Halton Crosses are not Norse in style. They are like the late pre-Norman work in Yorkshire where the Danes lived.
Then the Hogback stones have to be placed. We have fixed the Gosforth and Plumland examples by their dragonesque work as of the Viking settlement.
All these have the chain pattern, which Mr. Calverley called the Tree Yggdrasil or Tree of Existence, which shows that these monuments are of Viking origin.
From what models or pattern did these early sculptors copy their designs? It is sometimes said that they imitated MSS.: assuming that MSS. were fairly common and placed in the stone carver's hands. This is far less likely than that sculptors, at a distance from good models in stone, copied patterns from metal work which were the most portable, and most accessible of all forms of art, in the days before printing was invented.
Suppose, to make it plainer, the sorrowing survivor bids the British workman carve a Cross for the dead. "What like shall I work it?" says the mason. "Like the fair Crosses of England or Ireland, a knot above, and a knot below, and so forth." "But," says the mason, and he might say it in the 10th century, "I have never been in England or Ireland or seen your Crosses." Then answers the patron, "Make it like this swordhilt." (Calverley.)
The earlier Irish Christians were highly intellectual and literary, but not at first artistic. Literature in all races precedes art; it would be contrary to all historical analogy if Patrick and Columba had lived in the artistic atmosphere of the eighth and ninth century in Ireland. Patrick's bell is no great credit to Assicus his coppersmith: his crosier was a plain stick. There is no indication in our remains that Irish missionaries of the seventh century brought a single art idea into the country. It was the Irish Viking Christians of the twelfth century who did.
Mr. George Stephens, in his "Old Northern Runic Monuments of Scandinavia and England," vol. iii., under the heading "Runic Remains and Runic Writings," says:—
"I believe these stones, however altered and conventionalised, were all originally made for worship as gods or fetishes, elfstones, or what not, but in fact, at first as phallic symbols, the Zinga and the Zoni, creation and preservation, placed on the tumulus as triumphant emblems of Light out of Darkness, Life after Death. And the priapus and cups sometimes seen on burial-urns, must have the same meaning. Several of the grave minnes bearing old Norse runes were worship stones, carved with regular cups, etc., ages before they were used a second time for funereal purposes."
Prof. J. F. Simpson, M.D., Edinburgh, has a paper "On the Cup Cuttings and Ring Cuttings on the Calder Stones near Liverpool," in the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol. xvii., 1865, in which he states that—
"The Calder Stones near Liverpool afford an interesting and remarkable example of these cup and ring carvings upon this variety of stones—or, in words, upon the stones of a small megalithic circle. Some of the Calder Stones afford ample evidence of modern chiselling as marked by the sharpness and outray figurings. But in addition to these there are cut upon them, though in some parts greatly faded away, sculpturings of cups and concentric rings similar to those found in various parts of England and Scotland, remarkable for not only their archaic carvings, perfect and entire similarity to those found elsewhere, but still more from the fact that we have here presented upon a single circle almost every known and recognised type of these cuttings.
The Calder circle is about six yards in diameter, consists of five stones which are still upright and one that is fallen. The stones consists of slabs and blocks of red sandstone, all different in size and shape. The fallen stone is small, and shows nothing on its exposed side, but possibly if turned over some markings might be discovered on its other surface. Of the five standing stones the largest of the set, No. 1, is a sandstone slab between 576 feet in height and in breadth. On its outer surface, or the surface turned to the exterior of the circle, there is a flaw above from disintegration and splintering of the stone: but the remaining portion of the surface presents between 30 and 40 cup depressions varying from 2 to 3 and a half inches in diameter, and at its lowest and left-hand corner is a concentric circle about a foot in diameter, consisting of four enlarging rings, but apparently without any central depression. The opposite surface of this stone (No. 1) is that directed to the interior of the circle, has near its centre a cup cut upon it, with the remains of one surrounding ring. On the right side of this single-ringed cup are the faded remains of a concentric circle of three rings. To the left of it there is another three-ringed circle with a central depression, but the upper portions of the ring are broken off. Above it is a double-ringed cup, with this peculiarity, that the external ring is a volute leading from the central cup, and between the outer and inner ring is a fragmentary line of apparently another volute making a double-ringed spiral which is common on some Irish stones, as on those of the great archaic mausoleum at New Grange, but extremely rare in Great Britain. At the very base of this stone towards the left are two small volutes, one with a central depression or cup, and the other seemingly without it. One of these small volutes consists of three turns, the other of two.
The cup and ring cuttings have been discovered in a variety of relations and positions. Some are sculptured on the surface of rocks in situ—on large stones placed inside and outside the walls of old British cities and camps, on blocks used in the construction of the olden dwellings and strongholds of archaic living man, in the interior of the chambered sepulchres and kistvaens of the archaic dead, on monoliths and on cromlechs, and repeatedly in Scotland on megalithic or so-called "Druidical" circles.
The name Calder Stones is derived from Norse Calder or Caldag, the calf-garth or yard enclosed to protect young cattle from straying.