POSTSCRIPT

IN THE YEARS since this book was first published, new discoveries and fresh appraisals have continued, as always, to augment and modify our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon period. In particular, there have been a number of dramatic archaeological finds. The most significant in potential is still in its early stages. This is a comprehensive re-excavation of the entire gravefield at Sutton Hoo, which, as suggested in Chapter 3, is already proving to be a far more complex site than its first excavators could have guessed. Late in 1986 a Coptic bowl of the kind described here was found nearby, adding to our impression of the wide contacts of the East Anglian dynasty. New finds in local archives in Suffolk have provided place-name evidence pointing to the site of a pagan religious sanctuary between the ship burial and the river Deben: in Tudor times it was the site of a gallows (ancient execution sites often mark traditional places of heathen ritual). Other local place-names may help investigators pin down the whereabouts of the presumed royal residence at Sutton, and of the pagan cemetery for the royal staff. Excavation of the fields around the ship mounds has already shown that occupation of the site goes back through the Bronze Age to Neolithic times. Historical investigation has already established that the events which took place at Sutton Hoo in the early seventh century had a deep and lasting effect on the landscape and on subsequent settlement of the neighbourhood. How much this was in turn affected by the Roman, Iron Age and prehistoric history of the place remains to be discovered. Finally, as for the Sutton Hoo Man himself: was the mound opened in the mid seventh century and the body removed from the pagan burial site to a Christian church (at Sutton?), after which the wooden coffin rotted, leaving its impression, but no body?

Perhaps the most significant development in recent years in historical studies of the early Saxon period has been a revaluation of ideas about kingship, and especially of overlordship. In particular there is the notoriously thorny question of the ‘bretwaldas’. Recent scholarly work has tended to emphasise that Bede’s famous list of kings who held the imperium (see here) should be seen more as a literary reflection, as an attempt by Bede to give a ‘potted’ history of great Anglo-Saxon rulers, than as a list of successions to a recognisable political office. The nature and extent of their power must have varied greatly according to individual circumstance, and accordingly it would be a mistake to see the imperium literally as an ‘office’ of overking with rights and duties. The chronicler of King Alfred’s day who added Egbert of Wessex to the list as ‘the eighth king who was Bretwalda’ may be interpreting Bede’s kings in a way he never intended, just as modern historians have perhaps been too hasty in reading into this poetic term an institutionalised ‘bretwaldaship’. At the same time, the survival of such documents as the Tribal Hidage (see here) and a late copy of a remarkable seventh-century tribute list from Dal Riada (the early kingdom of the Scots in the Clyde valley), which was probably drawn up for one of the Northumbrian overkings named by Bede, suggests that Bede was still right to list certain kings who held power as ‘wide-rulers’ and claimed imperium over other kings.

One of those imperatores was Offa’s predecessor Aethelbald of Mercia (see here) who Bede notes was the pre-eminent king in England south of the Humber at the time he (Bede) was completing his Ecclesiastical History. Exciting finds at Repton in Derbyshire have confirmed the importance of that place to the Mercian royal family (see here). Close to the mausoleum used for royal burials, fragments of a standing cross have been found bearing a tremendously striking – and grimly realistic – image of a mounted warrior king, heavily armoured and bearded. It has been suggested by the excavator that this is a ‘portrait’ of Aethelbald himself in still vigorous old age, depicted in the manner of imperial Roman equestrian portraiture.

The Repton dig has also brought to light sensational new information about the onslaught of the Viking ‘Great Army’ on Midland England in 873–4. The semicircular ditch of the Danish winter camp that year has been excavated with a dock for repairing the Viking longships which had been sailed all the way from the Humber up the Trent into the heart of Mercia. Inside the ditches, under a mound covering a half demolished funeral monument, were found the disarticulated bones of about 250 men, many of them bearing the marks of old wounds. Presumably these were members of the ‘Great Army’ who had died of disease or in skirmishing during the occupation of Mercia in 873. A local antiquarian’s journal reveals that these burials were first exposed and then reburied in the eighteenth century: originally the bones were laid in neat rows around the central chamber, in which there was a single body, perhaps a Viking king or chief. Further mounds await investigation.

Alfred the Great’s response to the threat posed by the ‘Great Army’ and its successors is becoming much better understood. A recent revaluation of the Burghal Hidage (see here) has suggested that in its original form it may be dated from before 886, in which case it represents the defensive measures taken by Alfred to protect Wessex against Viking attack in the eight years after his triumph at Edington. This massive reorganisation involved the movement of thousands of settlers to provide garrisons and entailed the creation of a network of support in the surrounding countryside to feed the new ‘urban’ dwellers. Also implicit in the burghal system is provision to allow members of the burh garrisons, and of the mobile field army, to be absent from the normal duties of agriculture for long stretches at a time. Such far-going reorganisation probably demanded an even more drastic reshaping of society than has been thought. It is likely that the pressures of war during Alfred’s reign accelerated the decline of an ‘independent’ peasantry in southern England, and the spread of nucleated villages under strong lordly control, with the growth of the classic form of crop rotation and communal farming, the ‘three-field system’. Recent archaeological and documentary investigations strongly support the hypothesis that here, as elsewhere, the reign of Alfred was a watershed in the development of Anglo-Saxon kingship.

The models for Alfred’s ‘hidden’ revolution can be found in Carolingian kingship on the continent, both in its practical achievements and in the wealth of theoretical material generated by its experts on ideology and political theory in the ninth century. There had been connections between the West-Saxon dynasty and the Carolingians from the early ninth century, but in Alfred’s reign they were particularly close, and two of his chief intellectual advisers were continental scholars – Grimbald from St Bertin in Flanders, and John ‘the Old Saxon’ from the Rhineland. One practical result of the influence of such men may have been the creation or extension of the system of hundreds and ‘tenths’ (tithings) over southern England. Though we have to wait till the early twelfth century for a definite statement on this (in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum), the system of local government groupings of units assessed at 100 hides, each of which had its own court for administration and justice, seems to have developed between the late ninth century and c. 940; the idea was adopted from current Frankish practice, and bears out our numerous hints that underneath the idealised picture of Alfred as the ‘Truthteller’ and ‘England’s Darling’ lies the dimmer, more elusive image, far more complicated and subtle, of a politician who could be a far-sighted and even ruthless administrator, consciously juggling deeply felt secular and spiritual responsibilities – to God, to his kinsmen and people, to his dynasty (past, present and future) and even to English people in the wider territories occupied by the gens Anglorum: as one eminent scholar has said: ‘The gulf between the theory and practice of Christian kingship was never narrower than during his reign.’

If Alfred has scooped the praise of posterity, his son Edward the Elder is a most significant figure whom we are unlikely to know better because of the dearth of sources for his reign. Instead, it was Alfred’s grandson Athelstan who was able to bask in the glory. By his death in 939 the ‘hidden revolution’ in English government was complete. Under Alfred, his son and grandson, English administrative history was much more radically reshaped than it would be after 1066. The broad lines of the political fabric detailed in the Conqueror’s Domesday Book of 1086 were already present by 939, laid down by what looks like a ‘family plan’ pursued by the Alfredian dynasty over at least three generations. The laws of Athelstan show that by his time the government could assess the whole of the country south of the Humber in terms of ploughs and ploughlands – the essential units of the Domesday survey. Presumably such information was gathered from the hundred courts by the ‘shire reeve’ (sheriff – an office which first appears under Athelstan).

In this light it is worth considering how the accident of survival of government records from the Anglo-Saxon period has influenced our view of their achievement. Until Norman times – indeed until well into the twelfth century – a huge quantity of archival material from the Old English period was kept in the royal treasury in Winchester. What survives today, in addition to the royal law codes and around 2000 charters, are mere fragments: estate lists, inventories of stock and serfs from great abbeys, documents such as the Burghal Hidage from the central administration. Some local pieces, such as a list of places owing service to repair Rochester Bridge, a memorandum on contributions to ship crews, or an assessment for an entire shire, Northamptonshire, give an indication of the breadth and detail of the material which existed formerly. The pre-Conquest kings of England used literacy in their rule as much as the immediate post first Norman kings: but they used the vernacular across their kingdom as a means of transmitting their will down to the local courts of the hundreds, and as Old English ceased to be used in official circles under the Normans, the vernacular archives were eventually thrown out.

So these fragments are all that remains to testify to the sophistication of the Old English administration created by Alfred, Edward and Athelstan: such a paucity that earlier generations were tempted to underestimate the Anglo-Saxon achievement and ascribe to the Normans the great advances in government which seemed to be revealed in Domesday Book. In fact the survey of 1086 was in the Old English and Carolingian traditions, and the mechanisms which made it possible were in existence by 940. Recent work on Domesday Book has shown that the Conqueror’s surveyors relied not only on the sworn testimony of the local juries but on written material, ‘ancient rolls in the royal treasury still preserved with the [Domesday] survey of all England’ as a twelfth-century historian put it. These ‘Winchester rolls’ may have gone back as far as Athelstan’s day.

Politically, it has been said, the Normans were masters of their world. But the foundations of their England were Anglo-Saxon. Just as Domesday Book can be seen as a product of the Old English system of local government and the Old English royal administration, so the England it portrays is Anglo-Saxon England, the society built up on the ruins of Rome over 500 years and decisively shaped by Offa, Alfred, Athelstan and the others. It was, for its time, a remarkably unified country (at least south of the Humber) with a vernacular literature unmatched in Europe, a standardised form of Old English, and sophisticated machinery of government, chancery, coinage and law. It had created, too, under royal patronage, a great Christian Latin culture whose artists included the anonymous masters of the wonderful books from eighth-century Northumbria or late tenth-century Winchester and Ramsey. In Bede it not only produced the greatest historian of the Middle Ages, but the thinker who perhaps more than any other gave form to the identity of the English people, the gens Anglorum. This idea we can trace through Alfred’s preface to the Pastoral Care, Althelstan’s laws, and the Anglo-Saxon chronicler of Ethelred’s day with his identification with the English people as a whole, eall Angel cynn. This idea of English identity survived the Norman Conquest and of course continued to exist under Norman occupation in the language spoken by the peasantry in the countryside: indeed it is likely that the language itself had been a powerful maker of unity before 1066. During the thirteenth century the communal idea of the body politic expressed in Magna Carta may owe something to this: a ‘commune of the whole land’ bound together by mutual oaths – not to the Norman feudal lord, but to each other in the manner of Old English law. Sixty years later, in the Barons’ Revolt of 1265, we can glimpse such ideas working at the grass roots in the village of Peatling Magna in Leicestershire when some locals, ‘foolish men of the village’, tried to arrest men belonging to the marshal of the king’s household on the grounds that they were ‘going against the commune of the realm’, communitas regni according to the government record; this landes folk was perhaps what they actually said in English. So, five or six generations on from Domesday, the descendants of the Anglo-Danish free peasantry of Leicestershire, perhaps illiterate, had grasped the idea of a national community: very likely it had been handed down to them.

These speculations provoke a final question about the Anglo-Saxon legacy. Do some of the distinctive qualities of English – Anglo-Saxon – civilisation, which have been bequeathed to the English-speaking world as a whole, go back to ideas evolved in Anglo-Saxon England? Ideas about common law, property, marriage, inheritance, the role of women, personal freedom, and so on. Was ‘English individualism’, as it has been termed by modern scholars, already shaping itself then? And why is it that the structures of Anglo-Saxon local government, the shires, hundreds, sokes and tithings, were so effective and so long-lasting (many surviving unaltered until the so-called reforms of 1974)? Did English democracy depend in no small measure on these local institutions bound by the common oath? In the Victorian period it was widely believed that many of their institutions went back to Anglo-Saxon times. Subsequently such ideas were dismissed as nineteenth-century romanticism. But now many scholars are seriously reconsidering this judgement as the whole of the Old English period is revalued. The lineaments (and the thought world) of the state created by Alfred, Athelstan, and their successors, may have been much more long-lasting than we have suspected.