Abstract
SCANDINAVIAN influence, owing to the Norse occupation, left a deep-seated and long-persistent mark on the life and culture of northern England, which is especially to be noted in art motifs and decorative design at the close of the first and beginning of the second millennia of our era. An interesting and instructive example of this influence is to be seen in the crozier of Bishop Ranulf Flambard, who died in 1128, and whose tomb on the site of the Chapter House of Durham Cathedral was opened in 1878. With his body were found the remains of a pewter chalice, his sapphire ring and his pastoral staff. The ring and staff were exhibited by Mr. T. D. Kendrick at the Society of Antiquaries on December 16. The wood of the staff has perished, but there remains the crook and ferrule of iron. The crook was silver-plated, and had been cleverly and delicately chased with an interlace of slender serpents, the design being inlaid in niello. As Mr. Kendrick pointed out, Flambard had so far identified himself with northern England as to adopt for his crozier the hard and economical ecclesiastical art of Northumbria in preference to the richer style of southern England. Mr. Kendrick went on to show that this ornament was in the characteristic eleventh century Viking style, and must have been made by a smith well practised in making the silver-plated spearheads with niello design of serpents and scrolls, which come chiefly from the- Baltic lands. Some of such spearheads had been found in England, and there was little doubt that Flambard's staff had been made by a Northumberland smith. Though the design was Scandinavian in style and feeling, in detail it showed certain marked peculiarities, which must be regarded as northern English, since they could be explained only as due to a long-established English manuscript style. They were not found in purely Scandinavian art. There was additional evidence for this Anglo-Scandinavian style, as for example in architectural detail at Kirkburn in Yorkshire, which helped to prove its general diffusion.
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Scandinavian Influence in Northumbrian Art. Nature 140, 1090 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/1401090b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1401090b0