Dublin gives us streets, coins and thousands of finds. Wexford gives us a Norse name in shifting spellings, a handful of annal entries, one sizeable excavated plot and an account by a writer on the conquerors' side. This article lays the scanty evidence out in the open: what the Bride Street excavation actually dates, why the much-cited town defences remain uncertain, and what happened in May 1169.
Wexford sits in the far south-east of Ireland, where the River Slaney opens into a wide, shallow natural harbour. Nobody doubts that a Norse port stood here. The local historian Billy Colfer places a permanent base on the western shore of the harbour by the end of the ninth century. But ask what the town looked like around 950, who ruled it or how many people lived there, and the answer is silence. There is no founding year, I know of no named ruler, and the reports I checked offer no coins or graves from the early period.
Other articles here already tell the larger story: the Vikings in Ireland in overview, the Ostmen as an urban population, and Waterford with its big old-town excavation. This one asks the opposite question. How much can anyone really know about a Viking town when the written record is quiet and the ground is reachable only in patches?
The English name Wexford is held to be Norse. Colfer gives the form Waesfiorde and writes, carefully, that it is believed to mean "the bay of the mudflats". The Irish education portal Ask About Ireland spells it Weisfiord, and English Wikipedia offers Veisafjǫrðr and Waesfjord. Veisafjǫrðr is a normalised Old Norse form, which is to say what philologists reconstruct as a starting point. I have not found it in an Old Norse text, and at this point Wikipedia leans, of all things, on a newspaper article from 1975. That does not rule out such an attestation. I simply have not verified one.
The meaning, too, is looser than it often sounds. In the Cleasby-Vigfusson dictionary, Old Norse veisa means a pool of stagnant water, even a cesspool. "Mudflat" is a rendering adapted to the landscape, not a dictionary entry. It does suit the landscape, though: later accounts describe silting that limited the size of ships in the harbour from the fourteenth century on.
The Irish name, Loch Garman, often written Loch Carman in the annals, owes nothing to the Norse. Tradition explains it through a man called Garman who drowned in the harbour. In one version he is a thief fleeing with his loot; in another he steals the queen's crown at Tara during the feast of Samhain. This is a place-name legend from the Dindsenchas, the Irish lore of place-names, and not a story anyone can date.
The Norse trace is denser on the map than in the town. According to the Irish place-names database Logainm, the Selskar district probably takes its name from "seal skerry", comparing Icelandic selr (seal) and sker (skerry). The 1212 form is Selescar. The supposed "Saint Selskar", on the other hand, is a phantom: the church was dedicated to Peter and Paul. Logainm counts Selskar among the few Norse place-names in the county, which does not square with the much higher count that follows.
Writing in History Ireland in 2020, the geographer William J. Smyth counted about 200 names with Scandinavian affiliations in County Wexford, some 70 of them in the barony of Forth, the south-eastern corner around Rosslare. In the townland of Ting near Rathmacknee (a townland is the smallest Irish land unit) he sees an assembly site, a thing. Against the official reading as a bog he sets the field evidence: well-drained land on a slope. This is a research thesis, and Smyth himself calls his maps "indicative" rather than conclusive. Individual names call for care as well: for Libgate in neighbouring Bargy, Logainm finds an Anglo-Norman coinage more likely than a Norse one.
Colfer reads the overall picture this way: Forth held a mixed rural Hiberno-Norse population, part Irish and part Norse, which helped to feed the town. Support comes from an unexpected direction, since late thirteenth-century documents, according to Colfer, record a concentration of Ostmen, descendants of the Norse, around Rosslare. The town therefore had a hinterland still recognisable about a century after the conquest.
The written witnesses before 1169 are quickly listed, at least those I looked up in the Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT). The list is not complete.
The Four Masters' dates for this early period are not reliable to the year and diverge from other annals; I have not cross-calculated the individual entries. Three observations hold all the same. Wexford almost never appears alone, but in a row with neighbouring towns. Its name stands for a group of fighters and sailors, not for a king. And in 1137 the town fights alongside the king of Leinster against nearby Waterford, which argues against the image of a wholly free city-state without proving lasting subordination. How much tribute Wexford paid to Leinster cannot be read from the passages I have seen.
Scholars work out the plan of the early town from its topography. Today's Main Street is thought to follow the old high-tide line. Where the Bishopswater stream met the estuary lay a deep inlet, the "Pool", and according to an excavation report by Cóilín Ó Drisceoil this became the focus of the Norse settlement. The summary of the urban survey on irishhistory.com gives about six hectares for the settlement. That is an estimate from the street plan, not an excavated outline.
Anyone standing on today's quay stands on made ground. Monitoring of the main drainage works in 1993 to 1995, under Joanna Wren, found organic dumps up to two metres below modern level in the lanes between Main Street and the quay, with gravel and silt among them that point to repeated flooding. On Oyster Lane and Keysers Lane rows of posts stood, perhaps to hold back the water. At 117 South Main Street, Ó Drisceoil read a dark silt as refuse tipped onto the tidal flats on purpose, though only a single medieval sherd dates it.
Here lies one reason why Wexford is so hard to grasp. The town was never abandoned, its past lies under working shops, and most knowledge comes from narrow service trenches or a few test pits. Several streets in the 1994 monitoring yielded nothing at all. At 18 Bride Street, 90 metres outside the walled town according to the report, Ó Drisceoil found only gravel beneath the topsoil in 2003. And at 84–86 South Main Street, beaten clay floors are described only as features that "may be associated" with later Hiberno-Norse use. Wording like that is typical of the state of research.
The one great exception lies at the corner of South Main Street and Bride Street. From April 1988 to January 1989 Edward Bourke of Wexford Corporation excavated there, funded by the Corporation and the Office of Public Works. The post-excavation work was paid for by the National Heritage Council and a body calling itself the Friends of Viking Wexford. The excavators were in luck: the nineteenth-century buildings had shallow footings and had hardly disturbed the medieval layers. The ground was waterlogged, and organic material survived excellently.
Bourke found the foundations of 15 post-and-wattle houses, along with pits, paths and animal pens. In this technique, upright timbers carry walls of woven rods plastered with daub. According to Bourke the plan is a local variant of the common Dublin house that Patrick Wallace called Type 1, the three-part house described in the article on Viking Dublin: a central aisle with the hearth, benches along the sides. It is a long way from the Scandinavian longhouse.
The dates are what matter. The houses run from the early eleventh century to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth. The oldest thus lie about two centuries after the first recorded raid, the youngest more than a hundred years after the conquest. Bourke presented two of them as "Two early eleventh century Viking houses" in the journal of the Wexford Historical Society (no. 12, 1988–89). I could not consult that article, only its title and his short report. The title speaks of Viking houses. More precisely, they are houses of an eleventh-century Hiberno-Norse urban population. This evidence contains nothing from the ninth or tenth century. Colfer, incidentally, dates the two houses to around 1000, while Bourke's report says early eleventh century, so the accounts differ slightly here.
The most striking observation hides in a subordinate clause. In the early twelfth century the site was divided into two properties, and that boundary survives today. A line drawn before the Normans still decides where a plot ends in Wexford. It also means that the conquest left no break on this plot that the short report thinks worth mentioning: the sequence of houses runs on past 1169. Who lived there after 1169, the evidence does not say.
A good deal of work went on here. Bourke lists iron-working, carpentry, shoemaking, comb-making, bone-working, spinning and weaving, and quern-making. The pottery changes origin over time. Eleventh-century layers held stamped lead-glazed sherds whose source Bourke leaves open. The twelfth century brought ware from south-west England, the thirteenth sherds from South Leinster, Bristol and Bordeaux. The much-quoted Bordeaux trade therefore belongs to the thirteenth century, after the Vikings. For the commerce of Norse Wexford, this evidence offers little beyond an unidentified hint. The plot also originally faced the waterfront, so it formed part of the harbour front.
Gerald of Wales says the defenders of 1169 withdrew behind their walls, so a defence of some kind existed. Finding it securely is another matter. The summary of the urban survey on irishhistory.com says so openly: the line of the earthen ramparts is inferred from the town plan and has never been confirmed by excavation.
Two features are often cited. On Barrack Street, Wren found a bank and ditch. Her verdict, however, is that the bank is too small for a town defence, and she suggests it enclosed the church of St Olaf, reputedly pre-Norman. The ditch held twelfth-century pottery. She also suggests that the barracks on this street may mark the original pre-Norman settlement or a longphort (ship camp). In the report that is a possibility, not a finding. On Mary Street, about 20 metres inside the town wall, she found a north-south ditch about seven metres wide. Wren writes that it probably formed part of an earlier defence, perhaps the one in Gerald's account. Later excavators such as Ó Drisceoil already write of "pre-Norman urban defences", yet the report itself offers no date. That is how a guess hardens into a fact with no new evidence. Colfer's statement that the houses stood beside a rampart, with a market just outside it, belongs at the same level: I could not find an excavation report that demonstrates the rampart, let alone the market, in the ground.
The background is well known. Driven out of Leinster in 1166–67, Diarmait Mac Murchada recruited knights in England and Wales and came back. For what happened at Wexford the chief source is Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) and his Expugnatio Hibernica, the history of the conquest of Ireland. It was written some twenty years later and from the winners' viewpoint.
According to Gerald, Robert Fitz-Stephen landed around 1 May (the excerpt adds 1170 in brackets; 1169 is the usual date) at the Banne, about twelve miles from Wexford, with three ships, 30 men-at-arms, 60 men in half-armour and about 300 archers and foot soldiers. Maurice de Prendergast, from the district of Ros, followed with two ships, 10 men-at-arms and a large body of archers. The Fordham excerpt adds "Maurice Fitzgerald" in brackets, which a note there calls an error: these are two different men. Maurice Fitzgerald lands only later in Gerald's account, at Wexford itself, with 10 men-at-arms, 30 mounted retainers and about 100 archers and foot soldiers. Diarmait sent his natural son Duvenald ahead and followed himself with 500 men.
Some 2,000 men from the town went out to meet the army. The figure is Gerald's and cannot be tested. At the sight of the armoured horsemen they changed their plan. Gerald sums up the turn like this:
"… so confident in their wonted good fortune, having been hitherto independent […] they adopted new plans with a new state of affairs […] and having set fire to, and burnt the suburbs, forthwith retired within their walls."Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica, three fragments; translated by Thomas Forester, ed. Thomas Wright (1863), from the excerpt in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham.
The first assault failed. The attackers fell back to the nearby shore and set fire to every ship they found there, a blow to the heart of a harbour town. The next day came a settlement, through the mediation, Gerald writes, of two bishops who happened to be in the town. The townsmen submitted to Diarmait and gave four leading men as hostages. Diarmait granted the town and its territory to Fitz-Stephen and "Maurice". The excerpt adds no surname here; older biographies take him to be Maurice Fitzgerald. Hervey de Montmorency received two cantreds, that is, administrative districts, between Wexford and Waterford.
One detail deserves a note. In Gerald's text the townsmen give in because they see that they are resisting their own prince. That is the conquerors' view, keen to show Diarmait as rightful lord. It may reflect a dependence that the 1137 passage also hints at. This cannot be proved. How things went a year later at Waterford is told in the article on Waterford.
According to the survey, the new lords built a stone wall roughly along the line of the presumed Norse earthworks and enclosed about 18 hectares instead of the estimated six. The town walls conservation plan, by contrast, gives about 25 hectares. For 1307 the survey summary gives 365 burgages (town plots held by burgesses), and it dates the first formal charter to 1318, while the conservation plan puts the first surviving charter in 1317. Trade suffered: as the harbour silted up, New Ross and Waterford pulled ahead of Wexford.
The Norse did not vanish at a stroke, as the Ostmen near Rosslare show. Colfer also sees Forth as the only part of Ireland where Irish baile names and English town names cluster together, a many-tongued setting in which the English dialect Yola lived on into the nineteenth century. He puts names of Danish origin at about four per cent of the surnames he analysed. What that says about descent stays open, because surnames travel. No direct line runs from the foreigners of 888 to the Yola speakers on this evidence.
What does the name Wexford mean? It is held to be Norse and is usually rendered "bay of the mudflats". The element veisa means stagnant water or a pool in Old Norse. The form Veisafjǫrðr is a modern normalisation; I have not seen it in an Old Norse text.
When was Norse Wexford founded? This cannot be clearly established. A raid is recorded under 819, foreigners at the place under 888. Colfer speaks of a base by the end of the ninth century.
Can you visit the Viking houses? I know of no public display of the Bride Street remains. I have not checked this exhaustively, so it is worth asking locally before a visit.
Why do we know so much less than about Dublin? The annals rarely name Wexford, no royal house is known, and large-scale excavation has been rare. Most knowledge comes from one plot and from narrow service trenches.
Was there a wall against the Normans? Gerald speaks of walls, but the surviving town wall is Anglo-Norman. For the older defence there are only candidates such as the Mary Street ditch, with no secure date.
Waterford: foundation, Woodstown and the conquest of 1170
Viking Dublin: from ship camp to town
Vikings in Ireland: an overview
The Ostmen of Dublin, Waterford and Limerick
The Viking longhouse
The thing
Comb-makers of the Viking Age
Waterford · Vikings in Ireland · Viking Dublin · The Ostmen · The Battle of Clontarf 1014.
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