LAW CODES — COINS — EADWINE ÆTHELING — ÆÐELSTAN’S NORTHERN ADVENTURE— CUTHBERT’S WISH-LIST—ARMES PRYDEIN FAWR—EMBASSIES AND REGENTS—ART AND IDENTITY
WITHIN A YEAR OR SO OF THE PEACE of Eamont Bridge, Æðelstan and his councillors promulgated a law code at Grately in north-west Hampshire, during a great assembly designed also to consult and to display. Grately was not the site of a royal estate (the nearest, Andover, lay a few short miles to the north-east along a Roman road known as the Portway) but of an Iron Age hillfort, Quarley Hill, whose powerful atavistic symbolism, and good local hunting, may have dictated the location.1 Equally significant, perhaps, is that Grately lay a day’s ride from Winchester: close, but not too close. Some of Æðelstan’s assemblies were attended by up to forty sub-kings, prelates, ealdormen and thegns, not to mention his stepmother Eadgifu, each with an entourage of their own.
At Grately, one imagines a magnificent temporary township encampment of hundreds of leather tents, awnings and lean-to shelters, ensuring a sense of occasion both portentous and festive. Farriers, smiths, falconers, masters of hounds, clerics, the royal entourage, hostages and ministers congregated in their hundreds. As the Anglo-Saxon state grew in size and administrative complexity, so its assemblies became greater but less agile occasions, taking longer to plan and deliver. For visitors (embassies, fostered exiles, élite merchants, subreguli, churchmen and scholars) they must have succeeded in creating an atmosphere of sublime intimidation. For artisans, traders, local worthies and thieves the meetings of the Witan, the wise councillors of the state, were ripe with opportunity.
45. YORK: the centre of a Scandinavian kingdom and a powerhouse of the northern church.
II Æðelstan, or the Grately Code as it is known, sets out ordinances for the treatment of crimes petty and capital;* punishments for sorcery; rules for the exchange and recovery of livestock, for trial by the ordeals of water and iron and the treatment of fugitives. The Witan*s concerns extended to the collection of tithes, and to the charitable treatment of the poor, while the king was also interested in making broad provisions for the economic management of his enlarged kingdom.
Seemingly inserted from earlier or separate coda, otherwise novel clauses from 12 to 18 deal specifically with the administration of burhs and trade. Burh defences were to be repaired by a fortnight after Rogation days.† Goods over the value of 20 pence were only to be bought and sold inside a town, in the witness of the town-reeve at a public meeting (gerefena gewitnesse on folcgemote).2 Then:
Be myneterum... Đridda: þæt an mynet sy ofer eall ðæs cynges onweald: 7 nan mon ne mynetige buton on port.
Concerning moneyers: thirdly, that there is to be one coinage over all the king’s dominion, and no-one is to mint money except in a town.3
A single coinage for a single kingdom: the intent could not be clearer. Another clause deals with the penalties to be meted out to fraudulent moneyers: the severing of the offending hand, or trial by the ordeal of hot iron. And the following clause provides an invaluable list of the mints that Æðelstan has established, or intends to establish, in his towns: seven at Canterbury, three at Rochester, eight in London, six in Winchester, two in Lewes, two each in Southampton, Wareham, Exeter and Shaftesbury and one each at the other burhs.
The simplest observation to make of this list is that all the named mints lie in Wessex or Kent: so much for a national coinage. London, Canterbury and Winchester are to provide the bulk of the king’s currency. What of York, Chester and the Five Boroughs; what of East Anglia? Historians must turn to the independent witness of the coins themselves. A brilliant analysis by numismatist Christopher Blunt in the 1970s demonstrated just how far the complex reality of managing coin production and trade over such a heterogeneous geographical and political landscape diverged from intention, ambition and law code.4 The regular use of inscriptions on Æðelstan’s coins, recording both the name of the moneyer and that of the mint during the 930s, allows numismatists, almost for the first time, to create a geography of currency for an Insular king.
Oddly enough, the largest single collection of coins, more than 400, from Æðelstan’s reign comes from a hoard excavated in the ancient Forum at Rome in the nineteenth century, deposited between 942 and 946, while the most diverse belongs to a hoard found on Skye, buried in about 935. The coins from the Roman Forum hoard have been convincingly identified as a consignment of Peter’s pence,‡ sent to Pope Marinus II in the mid-940s. Along with many other individual finds and smaller hoards widely scattered across Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, these paint a rich and telling picture of political and economic tensions at variance with the unification narrative. Blunt’s stark conclusion was that in the ‘second quarter of the tenth century the coinage of England was still being organised on a regional basis’.5
By 928, a year after Eamont, a series of coins was issued bearing the abbreviated style REX TOT. BRIT., or a variation thereof. But these coins, portraying a crowned bust on the obverse and a cross on the reverse, were not produced uniformly in all the king’s mints and their chronological span is only about half of a decade. The single East Anglian mint, at Norwich, omitted the regal style entirely; in West Mercia the same series carries the title REX SAXORUM (a mistake for REX SAXONUM). Three unprovenanced series, which seem to have been minted at Lincoln, also omit the REX. TOT. BRIT. style. Mercian mints seem to have avoided use of the bust motif altogether. In York, a single moneyer produced all the coins issued there during the later part of Æðelstan’s reign, displacing a mint which seems to have been under the influence of York’s archbishops. Here, too, portraits of the king occur rarely on coins.
Detailed analysis shows that distinct expressions of region-ality were displayed by moneyers in the Western marches, in the area of the Five Boroughs, in East Anglia, Northumbria and north-west Mercia. Outside Wessex the most active mints, those where the level of economic activity required the greatest output of currency, were at Chester (probably second only to London), Shrewsbury, Derby, Oxford and Norwich—judging, at least, by the numbers of identifiable moneyers at each. By numbers of coins, York may have been the second most productive mint. None of these is mentioned in the Grately Code. Blunt also regarded some of the more irregular groups of coins as Scandinavian copies of the official series.
46. ÆÐELSTAN PRESENTS A BOOK to St Cuthbert: ‘If Æðelstan was, indeed, a Rex Totius Britanniae, he was careful not to proclaim it too loudly outside Wessex.’
The king was, it seems, successful in keeping foreign coinage out of circulation, even if he could not prevent fraud altogether. And his extension of imperium is impressive: he could impose a single currency over the nations of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms so that all trade was, effectively, carried out in his name and for his partial profit. That is not, however, the same thing as unification. If Æðelstan was, indeed, Rex Totius Britanniae, he was careful not to proclaim it too loudly outside Wessex.
The coin evidence prompts a more sceptical view of Æðelstan’s unifying message, that in fact it was by no means welcome in all quarters; that old, and possibly new, regional affinities prevailed. The evidence of the king’s own travels accentuates that view. Just as the moneyers of the central part of his reign were assiduous in recording their names and locations, so a single, meticulous scribe (historians unimaginatively call him ‘Æðelstan A’) recorded assemblies and land grants with impeccable lists of attendees and witnesses, dated and located: we can often pin down the movements of the king and his itinerant court; sometimes minutely so. Between 927, the year of the Eamont convention, and 934 the king could be found at royal estates in Exeter (at least twice), in Sussex, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and once, on a single, exceptional occasion, in Colchester. There is otherwise no evidence of Æðelstan visiting or campaigning north of the Thames or holding assemblies in any of the Mercian burhs, where he might be expected to have had political and economic interests. He does not seem to have ventured into the territories of the Five Boroughs in those seven years. Nor do the charters suggest that he had property transactions to conduct outside the West Saxon heartlands or the south-west corner of Mercia.
To see Æðelstan’s grand project as unification is to impose much more recent ideas of conquest and dominion on an age in which imperium, the right to boss subject kings and extract tribute from them, to enforce their attendance at court and marry one’s daughters off to them, to be seen to have won gloriously in battle, mattered more than any sense of unifying peoples whose Mercian, Deiran, Danish or East Anglian affinities over-rode the notion that they belonged to an idea of England.
For a stay-at-home king the alternative means of governing disparate and distant parts of this enlarged imperium was to have his ealdormen and earls come to him. In November 931, at the royal estate of Lifton on the River Tamar, bordering the lands of the Britons of West Wealas, the king’s Witan or council was attended by the Welsh kings Hywel and Idwal, by both archbishops and, among many others, no fewer than seven Danish duces or jarls: Urm, Guðrum, Haward, Gunner, Đurferð, Hadd and Seule§ The ancient truism of keeping one’s enemies close at hand was well understood by the heirs of Ælfred.
If Æðelstan was reluctant to travel far from Wessex, apparently for the most part even avoiding his old Mercian constituents, an entry in the ‘E’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 933 may offer a partial explanation. In this year, we are told, Æðelstan’s half-brother Prince Eadwine was drowned at sea. Eadwine was the younger brother of Ælfweard, who had so briefly succeeded his father Eadweard in 924; his mother was Eadweard’s second wife, Ælfflæd. He was, therefore, the king’s half-brother. Eadwine, too young to challenge for power in 924 but now of an age to command an army, might legitimately have harboured a superior claim to his father’s kingdom, having been born after his father became king. In view of Æðelstan’s Mercian loyalties, one suspects that Winchester’s apparent antipathy towards him was a function of Eadwine’s claim.
Accidents happen at sea; we can read no more than that into the brief entry in the Chronicle. But a Frankish source, the Acts of the abbots of St Bertin, offers more suggestive detail:
King Edwin, the brother of this same famous king [Æðelstan, was] buried in the monastery of St Bertin. For in the year of the Incarnate Word 933, when the same King Edwin, driven by some disturbance in his kingdom, embarked on a ship, wishing to cross to this side of the sea, a storm arose and the ship was wrecked and he was overwhelmed in the midst of the waves. And when his body was washed ashore, Count Adelolf, since he was his kinsman,¶ received it with honour and bore it to the monastery of St Bertin for burial.6
The much later Historia Return is even more explicit: ‘King Æðelstan ordered his brother Eadwine to be drowned at sea.’7 Eadwine might not have been pushed; but he does at least seem to have been pushed out, and a plausible motive for his expulsion is that he had failed in an attempted coup against his older half-brother. That the Frankish chronicler afforded him a regal title may be significant in that context. His death, convenient or otherwise, removed the threat of usurpation which seems to have kept Æðelstan in such close attendance on, but not in, Winchester.
Finally secure in his West Saxon heartlands, the king might now flex his muscles. Three other deaths, in close succession, allowed or propelled the king to contemplate actions that would justify his pretensions to be styled Rex Totius Britanniae. In 933, or thereabouts, King Haraldr Hárfagri of Norway, Harald Fairhair, died in what must have been something like his eightieth year, leaving a large number of sons to potentially compete for his kingdom and overseas interests.# The loss of such a large personality lent new impulse to the Newton’s cradle of the Atlantic kingdoms. Then, the Annals of Ulster report that in 934 Guðroðr, grandson of Ívarr and recent contender for the throne of York, died of sickness. His dominance over Dublin and the Irish Sea, including the kingdom of Man, ensured that his death injected yet more instability into the multiplicities of Insular politics.
Another Irish chronicle, that of the monastic community at Clonmacnoise, records a third significant death in the same year: Adulf mcEtulf, king of the North Saxons’.8 Alex Woolf argues that this is a garbled reference to a king of Northumbria, probably an heir to the Bernician lords of Bamburgh who had already intervened in the fortunes of Rögnvaldr and St Cuthbert in 918. Alternatively, it is not impossible that Adulf, or Eadwulf, might have been a native Deiran, holding York for its absentee overlord Æðelstan. One way or the other, his death demanded personal intervention in a year whose fortunes might swing in any number of ways. How might the Irish Sea Norse seek to take advantage; how might Constantín react in Alba? What of the apparently compliant jarls of Danish Mercia?
We can track the progress of Æðelstan’s second northern adventure, seven years after the Peace of Eamont Bridge, thanks to the meticulous records of his court scribe, ‘Æðelstan A’. In May 934 the king held court at Winchester for the first time, basking in the novelty of domestic security. The land grant whose text survives in the archives of Christ Church, Canterbury to attest this council, seems insignificant in itself: a 12-hide estate at an unidentified place called Derantune, to be transferred to one of his ministers.9 But the list of witnesses present tells us that the grant was only a minor element in a much grander occasion. Both archbishops attended; so too did Hywel Dda, his cousin Idwal Foel (son of Anarawd), Morgan of Gwent and Tewdr of Brycheiniog (all listed as subreguli—tributary kings), no fewer than seventeen bishops and many dozens of ministri and duces. Five of the duces, or earls, present bore Danish names: Ragnald, Ivar, Hadder, Scule** and Hálfdan in the English tongue; and it is reasonable to suggest that they held, if not conveniently the Five Boroughs themselves, then significant territories in Danish Mercia.
The court now passed into and through those territories. By 7 June, just ten days after the date of the Winchester grant, the whole court had travelled 170 miles (275 km) northwards to reassemble at Nottingham on the River Trent, presumably at one of the two burhs flanking the river. The most obvious road route would have taken them through the fortified towns at Reading, Wallingford and Oxford via the old West Saxon episcopal centre of Dorchester on Thames; thence to Buckingham, Towcester, Northampton and Leicester. It is a substantial logistical feat, which shows that considerable planning underlay the entire campaign. The court must either have been sure of its reception in the towns of the Five Boroughs, or it was accompanied by a military force sufficient to ensure its security in a land where royal patronage did not extend its centripetal web of loyalties.
The grant that survives from this assembly, with a closely similar witness list to that issued at Winchester, is of great significance in its own right.10 It begins with a pompous preamble, which the king’s scribe seems to have delighted in copying out but which must have been torturous to attend to:††
The wanton fortune of this deceiving world, not lovely with the milk-white radiance of unfading lilies, but odious with the gall-steeped bitterness of lamentable corruption, raging with venomous wide-stretched jaws, bitingly rends the sons of stinking flesh in this vale of tears; and although by its smiles it may be able to draw unfortunates to the bottom of Acherontic Cocytus, unless the Creator of the roaring deep lend his aid, it is shamelessly fickle; and, therefore, because this ruinous fortune falls and mortally decays, one should chiefly hasten to the pleasant fields of indescribable joy, where are the angelic instruments of hymn-singing jubilation and the mellifluous scents of blooming roses perceived with inconceivable sweetness by the nostrils of the good and blessed and harmonies are heard by their ears forever. Allured by love of that felicity— when now depths disgust, heights grow sweet—and in order to perceive and enjoy them always in unfailing beauty, I, Athel-stan, king of the English...11
It is as if the king had swallowed the Book of Revelation whole and hybridized the Christian apocalypse with the Ragnarök of the Edda; that may, indeed, have been his intention. Its relevance to a grant of land might seem tangential. The main body of the text confirms that Æðelstan had purchased ‘with no little money of my own’‡‡ the substantial territory of Amounderness, ‘without the hateful yoke of servitude [i.e. it was freehold, or ‘booked’ land], with meadows, pastures, woods streams and all conveniences’, and gifted it in perpetuity to Almighty God and the Apostle Peter: in other words, to the minster church at York under its archbishop, Wulfstan (931-954/6). The preamble, I think, enshrines Æðelstan’s desire, as a Christian king, to impose order and rightfulness onto the actual fabric of his dominions, ensuring that their landed wealth be devoted to God, not to the impious and undeserving secular lords who had formerly possessed it.
Dire imprecations were aimed at anyone who would dare to challenge the king’s will or ‘infringe this little document’. Before the signatures of the fifty-eight witnesses, there is a description of the bounds of the Amounderness estate. Its northern edge was defined by the channel of the tiny River Cocker, rising a few miles south-east of Lancaster and falling into the River Lune close to the sea. From the source of the Cocker the boundary ran more or less straight to the east as far as ‘another spring which is called in Saxon Dunshop’. From this riverlet, now Dunsop, whose twin sources lie high up on the moors of the Forest of Bowland east of Lancaster, the boundary ran due south to the River Hodder at Dunsop Bridge, then downstream to its confluence with the River Ribble and thence to the sea. From the small town of Whalley, north-east of Blackburn, river and boundary alike follow the line of the Roman road as far as Preston, and the sea route to Ireland and Man. Along the way it passes the spot where the celebrated Cuerdale hoard was hidden in about 905.
The Amounderness of the tenth century was a large tract of land incorporating substantial parts of modern Lancashire. Its name probably derives from the Old Norse personal name Agmundr.12 Matthew Townend, a historian of Viking Age York, notes the presence of a hold bearing the name Agmundr at the Battle of Tettenhall in 910.13 He also makes a connection with Holderness, a similar-sized territory on the east coast whose name means ‘headland of the hold’. In northern Northumbria such territorial units were known as shires, the large territories centred on a royal vill and traditionally comprising twelve townships from which renders of goods and services, later rents, were gathered centrally for consumption by its lord. Townend suggests that these shire-sized territories were the sorts of lands that might be given by the kings of the Host to his holds or höldar, senior military followers one rank below the jarls or duces of the charters; and this agrees with the size and strategic nature of the Cuthbert lands given by Rögnvaldr to his powerful warrior, the potens miles Onlafbald, after 918§§ It is possible that in the early tenth century, before Æðelstan purchased it, Amounderness owed its renders not to any political centre on the Insular mainland, but to a lord on Man, or in Dublin.
In the late seventh century the ultra-orthodox Bishop Wilfrid had acquired for his monastery at Ripon the lands of former British churches west of the Pennines whose clergy had supposedly deserted or fled them. Of these estates, Dent in Cumbria and land ‘around Ribble’ belong in the area bounded by the Amounderness grant.14 What we might be seeing in Æðelstan’s purchase and gift is evidence of a long-standing claim to this territory by the church establishment at York; of its being bought out of Norse lordship and ‘returned’ to its rightful owner. Implicitly, Æðelstan was purchasing the loyalty of Northumbria’s institutional church and seeking its approval for his planned campaign in the North.
Whether Amounderness was actually worth very much in cash terms is quite another matter. Academic opinion is in any case divided on just how ‘Scandinavian’ the region was in the tenth century. There are, it is true, substantial numbers of Norse place names in western Lancashire and coastal Cumbria, which have often been associated with Ingimundr’s invasion and settlement following the expulsion from Dublin in 902. Most recently, though, archaeologist and Early Medieval historian Nick Higham has sought to cast doubt on the idea of a mass migration15 and paints instead a portrait of mixed or patchwork communities with distinct and complex regional affinities, rather than a single people identifying themselves as either ‘English’ or ‘Norse’. It must be significant that Amounderness lay some 50 miles (80 km) south of Eamont, the location of Æðelstan’s treaty of submission in 927, and that its southern boundary formed a principal route between Dublin, Man and York. The transfer to the Northumbrian church of such an important estate, fringing the Irish Sea and within the borders of the king’s extended dominion, looks like an astute political move.
The link with Ripon might be reinforced by a charter of Æðelstan purporting to confirm the liberties and customs of that foundation;16 but most commentators regard it as a later forgery. It is entirely possible that the court did visit Ripon on its way north: the minster with its famous crypt was certainly standing in the 930s¶¶ That Æðelstan had further business with the Northumbrian church cannot be doubted, however:
While king Æðelstan was leading a great army from the south to the northern region, taking it to Scotland, he made a diversion to the church of St Cuthbert and gave royal gifts to him, and then composed this signed testament and placed it at Cuthbert’s head.17
The charter recording gifts of land and fabulous treasures to the community at Chester le Street is preserved in the Historic Sancto Cuthberto. It lists, among sundry other items, a chasuble and alb (both priestly vestments), a thurible or censer, three gospel books, a Life of St Cuthbert, a stole with maniple, chalice and paten, a ‘royal headdress woven with gold’, a cross and two silver candelabra, cups, tapestries, horns of gold and silver, bells, banners, a lance## and two golden armlets. The king ‘also filled the aforementioned cups with best coin, and at his order his whole army offered Cuthbert 1200 shillings’.18 In addition, he gave to St Cuthbert an estate of twelve vills (an entire coastal shire in Early Medieval terms) at Bishop Wearmouth, on the south side of the Wear in what is now Sunderland.
The remarkable survival of the Historia is matched by the preservation of some of these splendid gifts. One of the gospel books, which contained an inscription matching the text of the charter, survived until its virtually complete destruction in the disastrous Cotton Library fire of 1731. It bore a portrait of both king and saint before a church, the king with an open book in his hand, perhaps in an act of presentation. Its loss would be all the more lamentable were it not for the fact that the Life of St Cuthbert recorded in the list of Æðelstan’s gifts seems still to exist. It belongs in the Parker Library, the rare books and manuscripts collection of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, listed as MS 183 (see p. 355). Folio 1, verso, shows a slightly different version of this same image: the king, three-point crown on his bowed head, presents the tonsured saint with a gospel book on the steps of his church at Chester le Street. A thick border is richly decorated with plant scrolls in a style linked to the court at Winchester. That same style is evident on the stole and maniple which also survive, almost miraculously, in the collections at Durham Cathedral, having spent most of the last thousand years with the saint’s relics*** Those unique examples of Anglo-Saxon embroidery are the same items made by or under the supervision of Ælfflæd (mother of the unfortunate æthelings Ælfweard and Eadwine) during the reign of Eadweard.†††
The meeting between King Æðelstan and St Cuthbert (in the terrestrial guise of Bishop Wigred, incumbent of the Lindisfarne see) at Chester le Street during the high summer of 934 enacted a ceremony of mutual legitimization. The king gave the saint the promise of his protection, wonderful treasures, cash and lands suitable to the needs of a great monastic house. St Cuthbert, in return, gave his blessing and backing to the king’s military campaign and to his claim to wield imperium over all Britain (like the first royal patron of Lindisfarne, and Mercian cult hero, King Oswald). By the well-understood rules of such transactions the relationship between the Chester le Street community and the royal house of the West Saxons was also back-dated.
Æðelstan’s magnificent patronage of the Bernician saint during the 930s surely lies behind ‘earlier’ entries in the Historia in which St Cuthbert appeared to the isolated and desperate Ælfred in the dismal marshes of Athelney at a time of extreme distress‡‡‡ Æðelstan’s visit was not, then, meant to be seen as opportunistic but as the fulfilment of a visionary meeting between his grandfather and the saint. Whether the fond remembrance of that episode would have survived military defeat at the hands of Constantín of Alba is another matter.
The king’s Mercian progress, his grant to the archbishop, his visit to Chester le Street and the nature of the gifts themselves require some explanation. Why choose Nottingham as the venue for a grant of Cumbrian land to York? Why ply St Cuthbert’s church with what looks like the contents of a clearance sale, albeit an extravagant one? And how did the king acquire a coastal estate on the banks of the River Wear in the first place? One detects the operation of careful diplomacy.
We know, from the witness list appended to the Nottingham charter of 7 June 934, that both Archbishop Wulfstan of York and Bishop Wigred of Chester le Street were present.19 Here was the perfect opportunity to negotiate terms in advance of the visit: to ensure a peaceful reception, to sound out the archbishop’s position regarding the proposed campaign; to seek his advice on the niceties of the Northern political situation. The Amounderness grant might be seen as his brokerage fee. Instead of seeing the Cuthbert gifts as a random collection of baubles and the odd patch of land, we might better regard them as a sort of wish-list, provided by the community to indicate the sorts of gifts that would be acceptable to the saint in return for endorsing the king’s Alban expedition. The very specific nature of some of the gifts is telling: at the end of MS 183 is a list of kitchen utensils and what looks like part of a dinner service.
Æðelstan must either have purchased the estate of Bishop Wearmouth from its current Norse lord (it had been given by Rögnvaldr to Onlafbald after 918), or was merely confirming rights to the estate that had lapsed with time. These were his means of extending those thin northern lines of patronage§§§ His army’s donation to Cuthbert of 60 pounds of silver (1200 shillings) was, significantly, matched by an identical later gift from King Eadmund’s army: evidently 60 pounds was the going rate for blessing an entire host on its way to do battle. It is tempting to think of it as a shilling per warrior—if so, it would be useful evidence for the size of a tenth-century army.
The campaign was duly successful, reinforcing the pact between the Æðulfings and St Cuthbert. The Chronicle (all versions are identical here) records merely that Æðelstan invaded Alba with a land and naval force and that he harried much of the country. There is additional detail in the pages of the Historia Regum, drawing on a more regional tradition. Here we are told that Æðelstan’s land army laid Alba waste as far as Dunottar (the great coastal fortress just south of Stonehaven, which had been attacked by Norse raiders in 900 and where Constantín’s immediate predecessor had been killed) and the mountains of Fortriu; and that his fleet raided as far as Caithness in the extreme north-east.20
Much has been written about the implications of this campaign for understanding Æðelstan’s military capabilities. So little is known of late Anglo-Saxon fleets that it is difficult to draw very much from the notice of a raid along the east coast of Scotland, except that these would appear to be hostile and dangerous waters, requiring skilled pilotage and knowledge of safe anchorages (such as Portmahomack). It is pointless to speculate where the fleet was based. It is equally difficult to know how often, if at all, the land army was forced to fight in the open against a significant military force, or whether Constantín was content to stand off and limit the damage to raiding. Æðelstan, for his part, may have been satisfied to demonstrate that, like his illustrious seventh century Northumbrian predecessors Æðelfrið, Oswald and Oswiu (and, for that matter, the Roman emperors), he could claim imperium over all the lands of Britain. There can be no doubt that the king of Alba submitted to him, despite the shortness of the campaign. The whole enterprise cannot have lasted much more than a month: on 13 September the king, on his way south again, issued a charter at Buckingham; this time Constantín subregulus headed the list of witnesses, while the Welsh kings’ names were not recorded.21 Constantín was still in attendance at the king’s assemblies in the first part of 935, unrecorded by the diplomatically silent Chronicle of the Kings of Alba. An abridged copy of a lost charter records his presence at what must have been a grand occasion ‘in civitate a Romanis olim constructa qua Cirnecester dicitur’:
In the city at one time built by the Romans that is called Cirencester has been recorded by the whole class of nobles rejoicing under the arms of royal generosity—I, Æthelstan, endowed with the rank of extraordinary prerogative, king, etc.—I, Constantíne, sub-king. I, Eogan mac Domnaill, subking. I, Hywel Dda ap Cadell, sub-king. I, Idwal Foel ab Anarawd, sub-king. I, Morgan ab Owain, sub-king. I, Ælfwine, bishop.22
47. THE ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE at Cirencester: an imperial venue to impress Æðelstan’s royal guests.
Cirencester is a throwback to the geography of Ælfred’s campaigns against the mycel here in the 870s, when Guðrum’s beaten army retired there before embarking on its final journey into East Anglia. Lying a few miles north-west of Cricklade, the burh sited at the highest navigable point on the Thames and the historic boundary between Mercia and Wessex, the Roman town of Cirencester ( Corinium Dobunnorum, civitas capital of the Dobunni ) was a key royal estate in the lands of the Hwicce, enjoying the fruits of a productive landscape and well connected to all parts¶¶¶ Its grand amphitheatre, which still stands on the outskirts of the town, may still have been thought of as a suitable venue for a royal council, endowed with imperial associations that could hardly have been lost on a king bearing such an illustrious name as Constantín. The magnificent minster church here, rebuilt in the early ninth century, is known primarily from excavation; it seems to have matched basilicas at Brixworth and Wareham for grandeur and what John Blair calls Roman monumentality.23 All three would have made suitable settings for royal or ecclesiastical councils.
The apparent harmony of these occasions masks serious tensions. The sub-kings required to attend Æðelstan were isolated from whatever political developments their absence was fomenting back home. Worse, perhaps, was the large quantity of tribute that they had to raise annually for their overlord. William of Malmesbury seems to have had access to a now-lost source when he records that, in the aftermath of the Peace of Eamont in 927, Æðelstan forced the Welsh kings to meet him at the burh of Hereford, at the northern edge of the region inhabited by the Dunsæte. Here, he imposed on them an annual tribute of 20 lbs of gold (9 kg), 300 lbs (136 kg) of silver, 25,000 oxen, ‘besides as many dogs as he should choose’.24
Some of those kings’ constituents might have wondered if they would have been better off suffering the periodic depredations of Norse raiders. To some, the relationship of their kings with Æðelstan went beyond expedient tribute; amounted, in fact, to supine capitulation to the old enemy. An extraordinary, bitter expression of Welsh resentment survives in a 199-line poem called Armes Prydein Fawr: the Prophecy of Britain. The dating of the poem is not certain, but some time in the second quarter of the tenth century during the reign of Æðelstan would suit its themes and message very well.25
The muse foretells that the day will come
When the men of Wessex meet for counsel
In one chorus, with one counsel, and England will burn.26
The targets of the prophecy’s ire are the ‘high king’ and his officers, particularly those at Cirencester (meiryon Kaer Geri): ‘the taxes that they try to raise are a great source of trouble’.27 The high king is likely to be the man whose coins proclaimed him Rex Totius Britanniae’. but the title also invokes the cursed memory of a more ancient figure, Vortigern (the name carries the same meaning in Brittonic) the British tyrant who rashly lost Thanet in the middle of the fifth century when Hengest and Horsa, legendary Saxon warlords, acquired it ‘by mendacious guile’.28 Since then, the ignoble, arrogant progress of the English, the Lloegr###, has been inexorable: the ‘slaves from Thanet are our rulers’,29 and the present subreguli of the Welsh are castigated for their timidity.
The poet predicts a war in which the free Welsh, ‘excellent men in the tumult of battle, wild and steadfast, quick under pressure, stubborn in defence... will drive the foreigners as far as Caer Wair’.30 The war will be won when the Welsh forge an alliance with the Men of Dublin, the Irish of Ireland, Anglesey and Pictland, the Men of Cornwall and Strathclyde. In the vision of the poet, English and Welsh meet on the banks of the River Wye with enormous armies. There will be ‘cry after cry on the shining water’, with banners discarded and the English falling like ‘wild cat’s fodder’.31 The high king’s treacherous tax gatherers will wallow in their own blood, fleeing through the forest before they are banished forever from the island of Britain. The Cymri will have their Day of Judgement. In modern terms, the Armes Fawr is a patriotic call to arms, or the nationalist manifesto of a liberation movement. Just how much traction it achieved cannot now be measured.
Just as the West Saxons and Mercians had appropriated the battle-saints of the Northumbrians, Cuthbert and Oswald, to drive forward their political and military ambitions, so the Welsh invoked St David and his martial lieutenants Cynan and Cadwaladr to carry them to victory. St David’s relics lay in the tiny city that bears his name in the extreme west of Wales in Dyfed, on the Pembrokeshire coast north of St Bride’s bay. In the early tenth century these were the lands ruled by Hywel ap Cadell, the king later blessed with the nickname Dda, ‘the Good’. Hywel was a grandson of Rhodri Mawr, the king of Gwynedd (reigned c.844-878) whose dynasty had probably crossed from Man earlier in the ninth century. Famous for notable battles against Viking war bands and for having been slain by King Ceolwulf II of Mercia, Rhodri consolidated Venedotian power over much of north and central Wales. On his death he left the rule of Gwynedd to his son Anarawd, who was succeeded by Idwal Foel (‘the bald’). Rhodri’s son Cadell inherited Seisyllwg, anciendy Ceredigion, and divided it between his sons Hywel and Clydog. On Clydog’s death in about 92032 Hywel became sole ruler of both Seisyllwg and Dyfed, the latter acquired by marriage, and this new polity became known as Deheubarth: the ‘Right-hand part’ (that is, the south, looking from an Irish Sea perspective). By 930 Hywel seems to have extended his control to include Brycheiniog; he and Idwal had submitted to Eadweard and he had made an unlikely pilgrimage to Rome in 928.
That the policy of aligning the Welsh kingdoms with the West Saxons (a continuation of the strategy encouraged by Bishop Asser during his time at the court of King Ælfred) was unpopular among some of Hywel's constituents is evident from the Armes Prydein Fawr. That Hywel was regarded by the poet as the principal Welsh appeaser is suggested by the invocation of St David (Dewi Sant) himself, and the same evidence may point to Dyfed as the origin and affiliation of the poet. The prayers of David and the other saints of Britain would ensure that the foreigners were put to flight.
More practical assistance was to be found in two legendary resistance leaders. Cadwaladr was a Venedotian king of the late seventh century, the son of the Cadwallon slain by King Oswald in 634 in a battle, described by Bede, near Corbridge on the banks of the River Tyne. He could be relied on to avenge the enemies of his father. Cynan was, in legend, associated with the founding of the Breton kingdom, an event lost deep in the mists of the fifth century before even St David had taken up episcopal residence in Dyfed:
A candle in the darkness walks with us.
Cynan is at the head of the troop in every attack,
The English sing a song of woe before the Britons.
Cadwaladr is a spear at the side of his men.33
Hywel, his cousin Idwal and the other native kings in attendance on Æðelstan in the mid-930s must balance domestic pressures with realpolitik. The high king, too, must be careful not to overplay his hand.
If Æðelstan was nervous at the prospect of a great alliance against him in 935-936, his response was to look to the North and to reinforce alliances overseas. At some point in 935 Constantín was allowed to return home: a charter issued close to Christmas at Dorchester in Dorset records the names of only four subreguli, and the king of Alba is not among them.34 Æðelstan’s own whereabouts during the following year cannot be tracked by his charters: only one survives from 936 and it was not drawn up by the informative scribe ‘Æðelstan A’. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is silent, too. Only one source, and that a Frankish Historia compiled at the end of the century, offers a clue.
Flodoard of Rheims records an embassy sent in 936 by Hugh, duke of Francia, requesting the return from exile at Æðelstan’s court of Louis d’Outremer (‘from over the sea’). Louis was the son of Charles the Simple and Æðelstan’s sister Eadgifu, whose marriage had been engineered by Eadweard in 919. Charles was deposed in 923 and Louis, with his mother, spent the next thirteen years among the Angelcynn with his uncle; he was one of a number of exotic foster sons at the West Saxon court. Later in the same century the annalist Richer of Rheims elaborated on Flodoard’s brief narrative, describing the embassy’s departure from Boulogne and arrival at the city of York, where it was known that Æðelstan’s household, including Louis, was resident.35
If Æðelstan can be placed at York in 936, one might reasonably ask whether it was his only visit and if it may have a greater significance than mere progress through his expanded kingdom. Before the drowning of the pretender Eadwine in 933 and the northern campaign of 934 the king seems to have confined the bulk of his annual itinerary to Wessex. But William of Malmesbury suggested that after the death of Sigtryggr in 927 and the expulsion of Guðrøð;r, Æðelstan razed the city’s Danish defences. He can reasonably be supposed to have visited the city in 934 on his way north to Chester le Street and beyond; and his gift to Archbishop Wulfstan of the Amounderness estate suggests that he sought closer co-operation with the Northumbrian élite. He cannot have been unaware of the city’s Roman past, as the site of the Emperor Constantine’s acclamation in 306. Parts of the ancient fortress must still have been visible and contemporary York was, as its archaeology has shown, a thriving production centre with a well-established mint. The River Ouse connected the city directly with the Humber and North Sea, and its Continental and Scandinavian connections are proven by the raw materials and artefacts that filled the rubbish pits and workshops of its crowded tenements.
If Hugh’s embassy of 936 can credibly be placed at York, it may not have been the only grand arrival. William of Malmesbury, in accounting for the enthusiasm with which foreign rulers tried to "purchase his friendship either by affinity or by presents’, records a gift sent to Æðelstan by Haraldr Hárfagri, king of Norway:
A ship with a golden beak and a purple sail, furnished within with a compacted fence of gilded shields. The names of the persons sent with it were Helgrim and Offird: who, being received with princely magnificence in the city of York, were amply compensated by rich presents, for the labour of their journey.36
Haraldr was certainly dead before 936, but these two independent traditions linking embassies with York suggest the court’s presence there on more than one occasion spanning, perhaps, a decade. Much later Norse sagas, recounting these legendary times, accorded to Harald’s son Hákon góði (‘the Good’), the epithet Adalesteins fóstri: Æðelstan’s foster-son.37 Like Louis, he was said to have been raised as a Christian at the West Saxon court and later returned to Norway to claim the kingship. His arrival at court might be linked with the gift of the gold-pro wed ship. A third exile, Alain Barbetorte (‘Crooked beard’) of Brittany, had been brought up at the West Saxon court from infancy, according to the Chronicle of Nantes. Now, in 936, perhaps timed to coincide with the return of Louis, Alain crossed from Britain to Brittany with a few ships full of fellow Breton exiles and with Æðelstan’s support, to ‘cast out the Norsemen’.38 If foreign embassies could be confident of his presence there it seems reasonable to suggest that Æðelstan’s visit to York in 936 was planned and prolonged. A sustained residency would allow for administrative and legal business to be conducted; for incipient West Saxon networks of Northern patronage to be extended; for a review of coinage and trading regulations and to hear petitions from both Danish and native interests concerning land disputes, marriage negotiations, the granting of small estates and visits to appropriate shrines and churches. It was an opportunity, too, to collect tribute—not, perhaps, the immense booty rendered by the kings of the Welsh, but a substantial quantity, sufficient to keep the court in splendid luxury for a few months.
Some members of the Scandinavian élite, perhaps descendants of the warlords of the mycel here, might have resented the imposition enough to want keep their portable wealth discreetly out of sight. Three hoards dating from the years immediately after the death of Sigtryggr in 927 have been recovered from York’s hinterland. The traditional interpretation of such caches of wealth is that they belonged to those fleeing pursuit, or to victims of battle. In recent years it has been argued that some might have constituted the equivalent of savings accounts. It is also worth contemplating the idea that some were hidden to avoid the Early Medieval tax man, the king’s treasurer—with a modest remnant, displayed at home, given up to ensure compliance with the gross impositions of annual tribute. In 1807 a hoard of at least 270 coins, arm rings and silver ingots was found encased in a leaden box, turned up by the plough.**** Its location, at Lobster House close to what is now the A64 road between York and Malton, some 8 miles (13 km) north-east of York, and the presence of freshly minted coins of Rögnvaldr and Sigtryggr but nothing later, suggests a date not long after the latter’s death, during Æðelstan’s supremacy; and a context of discontent with, or apprehension about, the new regime.
In 2007 two metal detectorists located a hoard, also contained in a lead chest, near Harrogate, 20 miles (32 km) west of York. A stunning silver cup decorated with vine motifs and running beasts, of ninth-century Continental manufacture, contained more than 600 coins, silver and gold arm rings, silver ingots and hacksilver. The coin collection includes parcels†††† from the reigns of Ælfred (51) and Eadweard (402): booty from an old raid, perhaps; a substantial group minted under Sigtryggr in the so-called Sword St Peter series; one of St Martin type minted at Lincoln, five Danelaw imitations, a score of Arab dirhams, four Frankish coins and more than 100 of Æðelstan, mostly minted at York. One of these carried the distinctive REX TOTIUS britanniae inscription.39 Two more recent coin finds known demurely as the ‘near York’ hoards and retrieved during 2012, have yielded compatible, if more modest collections dated to the late 920s or early 930s.40
Either substantial numbers of Scandinavian lords were on the run during Æðelstan’s reign or, more likely, economic uncertainty was prompting wealthy men to exercise discretion over their wealth. We might, equally, argue that the ancien régime of the Scandinavian lords of York had operated a laissez-faire policy with regard to taxation from their former comrades.
If Æðelstan was now recognized as overlord in Northumbria, who governed the old kingdom day to day? The native dynasty of Bernicia survived the upheavals of the second quarter of the tenth century to emerge as the high reeves, later earls, of Bamburgh. The Deiran dynasty of York, whose scions had become puppet rulers, it seems, of successive Scandinavian kings, cannot be traced after their shadowy appearance in the pages of the Historic de Sancto Cuthberto. There has been considerable speculation that several successive archbishops either held the reins of power or governed southern Northumbria on behalf of Scandinavian lords. One of these, Wulfhere, had been expelled briefly for some act of complicity or betrayal in 872, but his longevity (he died in office in 896) suggests canny political instincts. Of the two subsequent archbishops, Æðelbald, whose archiépiscopal reign is dated tentatively 896-916, witnessed a single charter of King Ælfred, but is not recorded at Eadweard’s court; and Hroðweard (c.916-931) appears as a witness on several of Æðelstan’s charters between 928 and 931. The latter must have been a relatively familiar member of the royal court.
Wulfstan (931-956) is a much more rounded historical figure. He was prominently present at the king’s assemblies and councils, witnessing all known royal charters between 931 and 935 and was the beneficiary of the Amounderness grant of 934. Like his predecessors, his chief motivation seems to have lain in maintaining the interests of the cathedral church at York. Scholars do not entirely agree whether he or any of his predecessors minted their own coins there, but the suspicion is that Wulfstan was closely involved with both coinage and trade in the city. David Rollason allows that he may have played some sort of gubernatorial role in southern Northumbria during the second part of Æðelstan’s reign. Like most members of the Northumbrian élite, Wulfstan showed no signs of any special loyalty to the West Saxon dynasty; nor did he or his predecessors show any obvious antipathy to Scandinavian rule, pagan or otherwise: political pragmatism seems to have been the prevailing philosophy. That York retained its archbishops through two centuries of upheaval speaks for itself.
Æðelstan may have employed a form of direct rule, bringing an army north every year or every other year, but otherwise allowing existing institutions to exercise their customary powers. It seems likely that the Scandinavian regimes had exercised a lighter, less interventionist hand than the highly developed state institutions of the South. The arrival of Æðelstan and his centralizing legal and fiscal policies must have come as a profound shock to the locals, native and incomer alike.
David Rollason argues that some sort of royal palace existed in York; and the presence of an archiepiscopal residence close to or within the city is highly probable.41 It is perfectly likely, though, that like their contemporaries to the north, south and west, the kings and regents of southern Northumbria progressed through royal estates in the traditional heartlands of East and West Yorkshire, and as far north as the lands of the Cuthbert community. Archaeology has yet to pin them down: Yorkshire’s Yeaverings and Cheddars‡‡‡‡ have not revealed themselves. In the absence of better evidence, we must suppose that Æðelstan’s rule over Northumbria was quite different from that in Wessex and Mercia. Authority seems likely to have devolved, when there was no direct Scandinavian rule, onto more local lords, with the archbishop pre-eminent. West Saxon kings’ access to local and regional patronage, such an important tool of governance, was as yet limited. One is reminded forcibly of the problems which occupying powers have had in more recent centuries, lacking local intelligence and unaware of subtle, deadly undercurrents that constantly threaten to undermine the bare stick of martial law.§§§§
Northumbria’s distinctive political history is matched by a cultural diversity unfamiliar in Wessex and West Mercia. Elmet, a Brittonic-speaking kingdom with its own independent dynasty, existed in what is now West Yorkshire into the seventh century, and the names of settlements on its eastern edge survive, improbably, into the present day with Barwick-in-Elmet and Sherburn-in-Elmet. A hybrid Anglo-British culture in Bernicia was heavily influenced at the same period by an influx of Irish intellectual and artistic talent, so that even before the arrival of the Scandinavian armies of the 86os the north-east was a melting pot. Frisian merchants are attested in York in the eighth century; one of York’s own, the scholar Alcuin, was an intimate of Charlemagne and it would be surprising if merchants from the Baltic lands were not also familiar with the famous trading settlement.
In the 870s, according to the Chronicle, the lands of the Northumbrians were parcelled out among the followers of the Host, and the place names of Yorkshire and Durham reflect the widespread presence of Danish individuals in positions of ownership. That there are Normanbys as well as Danbys suggests that the Northumbrian connection with Norse Dublin fostered landowners from across the Irish Sea during the tenth century. Other, more obscure immigrations are suggested by settlements associated with people from the Færoes (Ferrensby). Native Irish, too, lent their ethnic badges to villages (two Yorkshire Irtons and one Irby) as did men, perhaps moneyers or specialist craftsmen, with Germanic-sounding names like Arnold and Fulcard (Arnodestorp, Foggathorpe).42
The patchwork cultural map of Northumbria south of the Tyne allows us to reconstruct a landscape of linguistic and ethnic diversity against a backdrop of mutual comprehensibility in language and many customs. To what extent that diversity led to integration, ethnic tension and spiritual conflict, or whether Northumbrian society maintained a perpetually evolving set of affinities with ambiguity, is hard to tell. We cannot say, for example, if the small silver crucifix buried with the Bossall/Flaxton hoard identifies its owner as a Christian, a pagan with a taste for apocalyptic imagery, or merely a collector of scrap metal.
A large body of evidence, in the form of stone sculpture that seems to flirt with both Christian and pagan imagery, takes the acculturation debate on to a more complex and subtle level. In the parish church of St Nicholas at North Grimston (a hybrid Scandinavian/Anglian name if ever there was one) on the western edge of the Yorkshire Wolds, a marvellous font, perhaps of the eleventh century, is carved with a continuous frieze depicting a very graphic crucifixion, the last supper and a bishop or saint. On one of the walls outside is carved the distinctly vernacular, ambivalent figure of a sheela na gig.¶¶¶¶ In the parish church at Middleton, on the north edge of the Vale of Pickering, a wheelheaded relief-carved cross also bears the image of a warrior with spear, axe, shield, sword and fighting knife. Similar figures appear on crosses, or fragments thereof, at Sockburn in County Durham and in St Cuthbert’s at Chester le Street (see p. 419).
There is nothing inherently jarring in the portrayal of a warrior on a cross: church patronage by retired or veteran soldiers is a common enough trope in medieval and later iconography. The appearance of strange beasts on the same monuments, and of many others (both crosses and the distinctly Anglo-Scandinavian memorial known as the hogback tomb) on which more equivocal messages seem to be displayed, offers a complex set of messages to decode.
In the parish church of Gosforth, on the Cumbrian coast, where a celebrated high cross of the Viking Age still stands in the churchyard, lie several hogback tombs. One carries a frieze of warriors along its side. Set into a corner in the wall of the north aisle is a relief carving that has been widely interpreted as a story from the Norse sagas (see p. 393). Thor, in one of his many trials of strength, disguises himself as a young boy and is taken fishing by the sceptical giant Hymir. The giant will not share his bait, so Thor slaughters one of the giant’s own oxen, cuts off its head and lashes it to a strong line. Such is their mutual determination to show prowess at the oars that they end up far out at sea, beyond the giant’s fishing grounds and in the perilous waters where Jörmungandr, the Midgard serpent, lurks. Undaunted, Thor casts his monstrous line and, sure enough, hooks the infernal beast. Faced with such a foe, Thor raises his hammer, Mjolnir, to strike the beast down but the giant cuts the line and the monster returns to the deep.43 The Gosforth carving captures the moment of greatest drama, like a cartoon panel from a storyboard.
Thor, like the other gods of the Northern pantheon, was familiar to both native and incomer; his deeds were part of the repertoire of stories told to young children and against which warriors of the Viking Age pitted their own reputations. Might one put a Christian spin on the Thor sculpture: a portrayal of hubris, perhaps, or the evangelical tale of the fishers of men? Do we need to? The sponsor of a programme of church building might decorate his monument how he or she pleased, challenging the priest to perform the theological feat that would convert a pagan tale to something more palatable and instructive. Other Anglo-Norse narratives, of the thumb-sucking Sigurd, of Wayland the Smith and of bloody sacrifices that might be crucifixion scenes or Odin hanging from Yggdrasil, the world tree, offered similar opportunities for contemporaries, and for the historian, to chew on. That these stories and symbols were carved in stone and meant to last tells us that the incomers had decided to stay, and to throw in their lot with the curious theologies of the Christian natives.
Unlike coins and pottery, large stone sculpture tends to remain in the place where it was first installed: the survival of many hundreds of crosses, hogbacks, memorials and other fragments allows us to map the presence, if not the motives, of those who commissioned them. Across what are now the counties of Durham, Yorkshire and Lancashire wealthy tenth-century patrons (of whatever ethnic background) chose to invest in an art form that committed them to a Christian future, to a sense of belonging and community. But their ideologies and cultural sensitivities were neither conservative nor isolated from the wider Atlantic world; their imaginative repertoire was eclectic.
From the simple plaiting of the Borre tradition,#### through the intertwined beasts of the Jellinge style, all rotating hips and elongated, writhing limbs; through its evolution towards the Mammen style and then to its ultimate expression in the floral exuberance of Ringerike ornament, Christian and non-Christian Anglo-Scandinavian art is a fluid correspondent between peoples, ideologies and cultural expressions.
A sense of unresolved spiritual tension is nevertheless played out in the wider landscape. Some place names seem to reflect a revival of paganism in the North. Roseberry Topping, the striking eminence that overlooks the Tees Valley from the edge of the North York Moors, was once Othenesberg— Oðin’s hill; places incorporating the element haugr— Old Norse ‘mound’, as in pagan burial mound, are relatively common in Yorkshire, as at Kilgram Grange (Kelgrimhou: Kelfgrím’s mound) and Ulshaw Bridge ( Ulveshowe: Úlf’s mound).44 It is also true that many pre-conquest churches did not survive the Viking Age. Some of them, like Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, were refounded in the tenth or eleventh centuries while others, like Ripon, Beverley and York itself, show evidence of continuity despite records of attack and pillage or the dumb witness of neglect. Ironically, the presence of tenth-century sculpture at church sites where seventh- to eighth-century carving is also present is considered one of the most secure markers for continuity of worship and institution through the first Viking Age.
Æðelstan’s motives for visiting York, and his experience there, must be set against a fluid and responsive background, full of cultural and political risks and opportunities. If, in that Northern summer of 936, his intelligence sources were alert to noises offstage in Ireland and the Irish Sea, he might also have sensed a new or perhaps recycled threat to his northern imperium.
By 935 Óláfr Guðrøðsson, son of the would-be conqueror of York in 927 who had died the previous year, was attracting the notice of the Ulster annalist, who recorded that he plundered the royal crannog on Lough Gabhair in Meath. In 936 the same Annul records the shocking news that the monastic church at Clon-macnoise had been plundered by ‘the foreigners of Ath Cliath’— that is, the Dublin Vikings, probably under Olafs leadership.
Æðelstan had few friends in the North. Kings in Cumbria and Alba might sense, in the bellicose Óláfr’s ambitions, a chance to throw off the yoke of his overlordship. If Æðelstan contemplated the possibility that Óláfr might compete for the throne of Northumbria, and that a number of his tributary kings might be tempted to join a new anti-West Saxon alliance, he was being no more than prescient.
* Among the more extreme punishments are stoning, burning, throwing off a cliff, drowning and the cutting off of hands. A later ordinance of Æðelstan declared a general amnesty. Ill Æðelstan and IVÆðelstan. Attenborough 1922,143-51.
† Days of prayer and fasting to celebrate the Ascension in the Christian calendar.
‡ An annual cash render owed to the Holy See; King Offa seems to have initiated the practice. King Æðelwulf willed 300 300 (each worth 30 30) to be sent to Rome annually after his death. Observance of the practice seems to have been intermittent.
§ In Old Norse: Urm, Guðpormr, Hâvarðr, Gunnarr, Đorrøðr, Haddr and Skuli. S416: Stenton 1971, 351. Of these, Gunnarr, Urm and Skuli were still attesting charters in 949, under King Eadred: S 552a. Urm (see below, p.404). Jarl Urm’s last charter attestation took place as late as 958/9: S679 679 the reign of Eadgar.
¶ King Ælfred’s daughter Ælfthryth was Adelof’s mother; his father was Baldwin II of Flanders.
# One of these sons may have been fostered at Æðelstan’s court. See below p. 377.
** Hadder and Seule had previously witnessed the 931 931 at Lifton (S416).
†† The scribe ‘Æðelstan ‘A’ must, it seems, represent the flowering of Ælfred’s programme to revive literacy and improve the quality of ecclesiastical Latinity. If so, its success is self-evident.
‡‡ A version of the grant held at York includes the telling phrase ‘from the pagans’. EHD 104: Whitelock 1979, 549n.
§§ In Nordleoda laga, The law of the North People, a tract from the beginning of the following century, the wergild, or head-price, of the hold equates to that of the king’s high-reeve, half that of a bishop or ealdorman and twice that of a thegn. EHD 51: Whitelock 1979, 469.
¶¶ It was destroyed twelve years later. See below, Chapter 12.
## It is possible that this was the lance with which Æðelstan had been presented by Adelolf, on behalf of Hugh the Great, in the great embassy of 926 926 which Hugh had acquired Eadweard’s daughter and Æðelstan’s sister, Eadhild. It was said to be the lance with which a Roman soldier (St Longinus) had pierced the side of Christ: one of the most precious relics in Christendom. No historian takes seriously the idea that this was actually a first-century lance; but the significance of the gift would not have been lost on any of the participants.
*** David Rollason shows that the manuscript cannot have been written as early as 934 934 might, therefore, have been given to the community at Chester le Street in 937 937 Æðelstan’s subsequent northern campaign (see below, Chapter 11); equally, he might have brought it north in 936 936, as seems likely, he was at York in that year. But he also allows the possibility that the manuscript was no gift to Cuthbert, but a possession of the king’s. Rollason 1989b.
††† See above, Chapter 9.
‡‡‡ See above, Chapter 4, pp. 145-6.
§§§ I am, once again, grateful to the members of the Bernician Studies Group for insightful discussions on the Æðelstan-Cuthbert charter.
¶¶¶ Cirencester is the meeting point of the Fosse Way, Akemennestmete and Ermine Street.
### Lloegr is a term of unknown derivation, but seems always to have been the name applied, perhaps pejoratively, to the English by the Cymri. Elsewhere in the poem, the West Saxons (Iwysor Gewisse) are more specifically identified as the enemy.
**** Known as the Bossall/Flaxton hoard. The numismatist Michael Dolley believed that some elements of this hoard were dispersed, so it may originally have been even more substantial. He describes a silver armlet, weighing 2.15 15 (61 61), as of‘Viking type’. It carries a distinct stamped trefoil decoration. Dolley 1955.
†††† A numismatic term denoting all the coins in a particular find spot.
‡‡‡‡ Royal townships revealed by excavation. Adams 2013, 221-5; Adams 2016, 226ff. And for Cheddar see above, p. 140, and below, p. 405.
§§§§ Compare the Viking Age travel map of the ninth century (p. 50) to that of the early tenth (p. 281), which shows the defence in depth of the burghal system.
¶¶¶¶ A depiction of a naked female with legs apart, the hands emphasizing the genitals. Examples are found in medieval churches in Britain and Ireland.
#### These styles, named after sites in Denmark where examples were first identified, appear on both stone sculpture and metalwork, an evolving set of artistic and cultural fashions that took on a new life in the British Isles as they hybridized with indigenous styles.