ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

A STORM BREWING — TWO HOSTS — A GREAT CAMPAIGN—A KING’S DUTY—PEACE, PLAGUE AND FAMINE — THE CODEX AUREUS — THE TRAVELS OF OHTHERE—ÆLFRED’S LEGACY-KING EADWEARD

6

GOÐRUM SE NORÞERNA CYNING FORÞFERDE, þæs fulluhtnama wæs Æþelstan, se wæs Ælfredes cynginges godsunu, 7 he bude on Eastenjylum, 7 þæt lond ærest gesæt...1

890. Guðrum, the northern king whose baptismal name was Æðelstan, passed away; he was King Ælfred’s godson, and he dwelt in East Anglia, and was the first to take possession of that country.

891. Three Irishmen came to King Ælfred in a boat without any oars from Ireland... The boat in which they set out was made from two and a half hides... and after a week they came to land in Cornwall [Cornwalum] and soon went to King Ælfred.

892. ^* After Easter... appeared the star which in Latin is called ‘cometa’. In this year the great Host about which we formerly spoke went again from the east kingdom westward to Boulogne [Bunáan] and were there provided with ships so that they crossed in one voyage, horses and all, and then came up into the mouth of the Lympne [Limene mupan ] with two hundred and fifty ships... Then soon after this Hæsten came with eighty ships into the mouth of the Thames [ Temes], and made himself a fort at Milton Regis [ Middeltune], and the other host at Appledore [Apuldre: literally ‘Apple tree’].2

25. THE DANISH GAFF CUTTER Eda Frandsen: Gabriel Clarke on the bowsprit.

The departure from the political stage of Guôrum, Ælfred’s former antagonist, could hardly have been more ill timed for the king of the West Saxons. A storm was brewing in the east. In 889 one of the Scandinavian armies, which had enjoyed rich pickings among the fractured Frankish kingdoms in the previous decade, came out of the Seine and, sailing up the River Vire to St Lô, was heavily defeated the following year by a Breton army. The Host now moved north and east, penetrating the River Scheldt, and encamped at Louvain on the River Dijle, a tributary of the Scheldt, 10 miles (16 km) or so east of what is now Brussels. Here it was met by an army of East Franks, Saxons and Bavarians under King Arnulf, son of the late Carloman. The Host was put to flight, its camp overrun. The gloating annalist of the monastery at Fulda recorded that the river was blocked by the bodies of dead pagans.3

That winter a severe famine struck the region, ravaging Christian and pagan communities alike. The Scandinavian armies, perhaps sensing that the fates were against them, now decided that their Frankish game was no longer worth the candle. Odo, de facto king of the West Franks since 888, saw an opportunity to be rid of their menace, and gave them sufficient ships to leave. The annalist of St Vaast wrote that ‘seeing the whole realm worn down by hunger they left Francia in the autumn, and crossed the sea’.⁴ En masse, and perhaps in collusion with Northumbrian and East Anglian allies, they determined to mount a decisive assault on the Angelcynn.

A highly detailed series of entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the next three years, at precisely the time when it was first being compiled, reads like an almost continuous war narrative, fought for the highest stakes. They crossed the Channel as two fleets: warriors, dependents, animals, the lot. Two hundred and fifty ships entered the mouth of the River Lympne on the south coast of Kent. Lympne, once a Roman port, is landlocked now, its ancient hythe lying high and dry at the foot of the chalk scarp that overlooks the flat expanse of Romney marsh; the Royal Military canal, a relic of more recent invasion fears, is its only access to the sea.† During the ninth century the river was sufficiently deep to enable the Viking Host to row as far up as Appledore, now some 8 miles (13 km) from the sea and lying at the east end of the Isle of Oxney whence the River Rother once issued.

At or close by Appledore the Host captured ‘a fort of primitive structure, because there was [only] a small band of rustics in it’ and made of it a winter camp.⁵ Thirty miles (48 km) to the north, across the Downs of Kent, a smaller but no less menacing fleet of about eighty ships sailed up the Thames to the Isle of Sheppey; from there they rowed along the muddy channel of the River Swale and a mile or so up Milton Creek to make their winter camp uncomfortably close to the fortress at Rochester.

Canterbury offered rich pickings, as did trading settlements at Sarre and Fordwich and minsters on Thanet and Sheppey.^‡ Kent east of the Medway had not been fortified under Ælfred’s burghal plans of the 88Os^§ and we do not know what, if any, provision the Kentish administration had made for its defences. Ealdorman Sigehelm seems to have been a loyal ally of Wessex: his daughter became the third wife of Eadweard, Ælfred’s son and presumptive heir. Archbishop Plegmund was a member of Ælfred’s ‘renaissance’ court; a close political and military relationship is implied.

26. CANTERBURY, the site of St Augustine’s missionary church of 597 and perhaps the only recognizable town in ninth-century Britain.

Without the defensive and offensive advantages of garrisoned fortifications, Ælfred could not hope to expel such large forces; nor could he concentrate his attack on one for fear of allowing the other to penetrate west into Wessex with impunity. He had not yet, it seems, installed Eadweard, who makes his first stage entrance in the year of the invasion, as sub-king in Kent.¶ That Eadweard was being groomed to succeed him is in no doubt. He was provided with substantial estates in his father’s will, including all Ælfred’s booklands in Kent and, judging by the frequency with which he witnessed royal charters, he spent much time with the king on his itineraries through the shires.⁶

Ælfred’s response to the arrival of the Continental fleets, early in 893, was to bring his own army to a point more or less equidistant between the two, unsure of their ultimate intentions. He had by this time instituted radical changes in the way his forces were able to respond to external threats. His field army, the was now divided into two, so that one force was always in the field, with a contingency for those permanently on standby to garrison the burhs.⁷ The system was now to be tested to its limits.

According to the Chronicle, the Host at Appledore disdained to take the field against Ælfred’s army. Instead its scouts, mounted warriors and foraging parties probed the edges of the vast dense woodland of the Weald: Andredesweald, the haunt of wild beasts, charcoal burners and an ancient iron-working industry stretching across the Downs as far as Hampshire. It was a form of guerrilla warfare: testing, teasing. They moved ‘through the woods in gangs and bands, wherever the margin was left unguarded; and almost every day other troops, both from the levies and also from the forts, went to attack them either by day or by night’.8

Only after Easter did they abandon their redoubt and their fleet at Appledore and march west; they kept to ‘the thickets of a huge wood called Andred by the common people, spread as far as Wessex [Occidentales Anglos’. and gradually wasted the adjacent provinces, that is Hamtunscire and Bearrucscire’⁹ and After this campaign of plundering with no attempt, it seems, at conquest, during which they were apparently shadowed but not engaged in open battle,^# they ‘seized much plunder, and wished to carry that north across the Thames into Essex to meet the ships’.¹⁰

Sometime during the early summer of 893 they were brought to battle at Farnham ( Fearnhamme: ‘River meadow where ferns grow’) on the River Wey in Surrey. The Chronicle is silent regarding the names of the commanders, but Æðelweard, writing a hundred years later and drawing on material from a lost version of the Chronicle, names the West Saxon leader as Eadweard, the king’s son. Eadweard’s forces inflicted a heavy defeat on the Host, injuring its leader and retrieving all the booty that had been taken during the rampage across Sussex. The mycel here was driven north over the Thames somewhere near Staines, apparently in such disarray that they did not even manage to find a ford. One imagines the pell mell chaos of a rout: baggage, weapons, loot and even armour cast aside; panic, slaughter on the river banks and bodies floating downstream.

The survivors followed the course of the River Colne as far upstream as the island called Thorney (on the north-west periphery of the Heathrow Airport complex, now swallowed by a motorway interchange) and, their commander too ill to flee further, found themselves besieged by Eadweard.

At the point of victory the momentum was lost: according to the Chronicle the levies, coming to the end of their deployment, ran out of provisions and left for home. Æðelweard says that the ‘barbarians’ asked for peace and that the West Saxons negotiated their withdrawal with an exchange of hostages; the Host retired not to Kent, but to East Anglia. But these accounts pose more questions than they answer. After Eadweard’s brief appearance at Farnham and Thorney his role in the war of 893-894 is obscure.** Was he written out of the official Ælfredan narrative to ensure that the king stood alone as hero? Or was his inability to keep his levies in the field regarded as a failure of leadership or loyalty? Who were these levies: his own retinue, certainly, and also those of the shires which had been ravaged by the Host, perhaps: Hampshire and Berkshire? But it is an intriguing possibility that, in preparation for his installation as sub-king of Kent, which may have happened in about 898, Eadweard was already in command of the Kentish levies; that they regarded themselves as having gone far beyond the traditional call of duty in chasing the Appledore Host across the southern shires and then beyond the Thames. And then, Æðelweard says that while Eadweard was still at Thorney, his brother-in-law Æðelred, ealdorman and sub-king of Mercia, came from London to his aid. If so, why lift the siege? Despite the contemporaneity of the Chronicle and the value of Æðelweard’s insider information at court, it seems that either the complexities of the 893 campaign were such that no coherent account could be constructed; or, if one wants to detect political undercurrents, the West Saxon spin doctors were already at work to contrive an official account that would cover unsightly stains and keep the narrative focused on Ælfred.

Ælfred’s policy had always been to bargain straight and trust the enemy’s sense of decency: it seems extraordinarily naive. Time and again the Scandinavian armies accepted Ælfred’s terms and defaulted, as they had so often in Francia. Given the otherwise sophisticated strategies displayed during the Viking wars, one must surmise that the underlying rationale of the Angelcynn leadership was always to buy time and limit its own casualties. There is a fine line between appeasement and low cunning.

The West Saxon and Mercian leadership now anticipated fighting wars on multiple fronts. Their principal fear was probably not either Host in isolation but that the two forces should combine and that the slumbering giants of East Anglia, Danish East Mercia and Northumbria might join in. While Eadweard had expelled the Appledore Host from Wessex, Ælfred seems to have concentrated diplomatic efforts on persuading the force under Hæsten, in the Thames estuary, to cross the Thames to Essex. If this war band leader is to be identified with the Viking raider whose name appears periodically like a rash in Continental sources spanning half a century, then the Angelcynn had good reason to fear him. He is implicated in a notorious series of raids deep into the Mediterranean in the years 859-862, with campaigns along the Loire at the end of that decade and into the 870s. Later tradition has embellished his feats and cruelties; even so, he seems to have been an unusually successful and energetic warlord over several decades. Whatever the truth, his career took him to the mouth of the Thames in 893.

In the uncertain political aftermath of Guðrum’s death, Ælfred and Æðelred may have hoped that Hæsten would compete for the East Anglian kingship, killing two birds with one stone. We gather, from events later in 893, that while the Host lay at Milton Regis, Hæsten and his family received baptism. At least, the Chronicle records that his two sons were godchildren of, respectively, Ælfred and Æðelred. No such ceremony is likely to have been conducted without a peace deal ensuring that the Deniscan would leave Wessex alone; they had, it seems, been paid off. Given that Æðelred is recorded as co-sponsor, we might reasonably argue that the venue for both negotiation and ceremony was London, the timeshare capital for Mercia and Wessex and symbol of their alliance.

Hæsten’s fleet duly crossed the estuary and built a fortress in Essex, at Benfleet (Beamfleote: ‘Tree creek’) overlooking the edge of the marshes to the north of Canvey Island, even as their comrades were fighting their way out of trouble across the Upper Thames. Here the remnants of the Appledore Host also arrived that summer and the two forces now combined. The Angelcynn had bought time in exchange for future trouble; and they are unlikely to have anticipated the grim news coming from the West Country. A Northumbrian fleet had sailed south from a port somewhere on the Irish Sea†† and landed on the north Devonshire coast, while an East Anglian fleet, sailing along the south coast, now besieged Exeter.

This turn of events in the west looks like a co-ordinated plan to draw West Saxon forces away from the east and open up a second front. Hæsten, it appears, had successfully enrolled both the East Anglians (Guðrum’s veterans of the campaign of 877-878, perhaps) and those of Guðroðr, the nominally Christian king of Scandinavian York, in his plan to finish what the mycel here had begun in the 860s. If the community of St Cuthbert recorded their reaction to their adopted king’s involvement, it has not survived.

Ælfred’s reaction was to march westwards with the bulk of the West Saxon levies, leaving Eadweard and Æðelred‡‡ behind to confront Hæsten and the, by now, combined forces from Milton and Appledore at Benfleet. They marched east through London, picking up extra forces as they went. When they arrived at Benfleet they found a part of the combined Host in residence; but Hæsten was away on a raiding expedition in Mercia. In a stunning coup, the English put the Host to flight, stormed the fort and took possession of everything inside, including Hæsten’s wife and children. The ships of their considerable fleet were burned, sunk or otherwise taken to Rochester or London. For good or ill the Host could not now retire to the Continent whence they had come.

The Chronicle makes much of the victory at Benfleet and of Ælfred’s magnanimous treatment of Hæsten’s family, restoring them to the warlord in a one-sided gesture of good faith;^§§ but Æðelweard ignores the Benfleet episode entirely and, given that the Host was able to take to the field again very shortly, and in dangerous numbers, we may judge that the bulk of its fighting force had been absent with their commander, leaving behind only a small garrison and the baggage train in his new fort. The victory at Benfleet had not, perhaps, been all that glorious.

Far to the west, the East Anglian and Northumbrian forces retired to their ships on Ælfred’s arrival, precisely achieving their broader purpose to draw the main West Saxon fyrð from the east. Hæsten’s combined army, dispossessed of its fort at Benfleet, now took up station in a new stronghold at Shoeburyness ( Sceobyrig on Eastseaxum: ‘the fort on the shoe-shaped spit’) nearly 10 miles (16 km) to the east.

In that whirlwind year of punch and counterpunch, a new phase now opened. With the apparent knowledge that the fyrð was otherwise occupied, the Deniscan once again left their fortress and with extraordinary boldness marched along the entire length of the Thames into Gloucestershire, making a rendezvous with forces from Northumbria and East Anglia that seeped (or swept) through the Mercian border.

Their intention must now have been to wage a final war of conquest, staking everything on a swift victory; but the geography of southern Britain had changed since the campaigns of the 870s.¶¶ The forts of the Burghal Hidage, with their well-provisioned and trained garrisons, severely compromised the Host’s ability to live off the land, to steal or buy horses and force the submission of shire ealdormen. The old river route, which had enabled deep and swift penetration into the heartlands of the Angelcynn, was closed to them.

At Sashes, Wallingford, Oxford and Cricklade, along the full length of the Thames, they faced opposition secure behind new walls; opposition with the benefit of intelligence forewarning them of the advancing Host. The portable wealth of the countryside, its livestock, was corralled behind ramparts. The formerly overflowing cupboard of the Anglo-Saxon landscape was bare; and, for once, the Host was unsupported by its fleet, having lost the bulk of its ships at Benfleet. Moreover, the West Saxon-Mercian alliance was solid: Æðelred’s loyalty, sealed by his marriage to Ælfred’s daughter, Æðelflæd, was unimpeachable. There is no hint that even disaffected ealdormen would throw in their lot with the invaders.

These were epic campaigns: battle-weary veterans on forced route marches through enemy territory, denied the means to live off the land and at all times watched, pursued and hunted by an exhausted but determined fyrð under active, committed commanders. If Francia had, finally, proved too hot to handle, then Wessex and Mercia were now also too well guarded, too deeply defended.

Avoiding the burhs, then, and no longer tied to the river, the most direct route for the Host would have been to take Akemen-nestraete from London, heading north-west through St Albans and Bicester towards the Fosse Way, which would lead them directly towards Gloucester, avoiding the Thames burhs. Here, perhaps, a gathering of warriors and their jarls from the north and east, even from potential allies among the Welsh and Irish, might have been arranged. The combined army, reaching the River Severn, now traced a route north along the ancient marcher lands of Hwicce (surely avoiding Worcester, already fortified with a burh; but how?), Magonsaete and Wrocansaete, beneath the ramparts of ancient hillforts and past the ruins of Roman towns; and then, as the river turned west and south, into Powys.

Even here the Angelcynn now had allies among those Welsh kings who had submitted to Ælfred after 88o. All the time the Host was pursued by Æðelred, supported by the shire levies of Wiltshire and Somerset under Ealdormen Æðelhelm and Æðelnoth, who had long ago stood with Ælfred at Athelney and fought with him at Edington. The stores of the burhs, and their knowledge of the movements of the Host, allowed the pursuing levies to maintain pace and strength.

At Worcester, perhaps, the levies paused to regroup and resupply, to gather intelligence and take counsel. At Buttingtune on Sæferne staðe,## a ford just north of Welshpool where the Severn meets Offa’s Dyke beneath the naturally imposing ramparts of the Long Mountain, the Host ran out of steam and built a fortress, as they had so often before. On their long march they had been unable to capture a single major settlement although they had, in all probability, wasted many smaller estates and vills. With Ælfred still occupied on his watching brief in Devon, the combined levies laid siege to the Host on the banks of the river and waited: waited until those inside were half-starved and had slaughtered all their horses for meat.

At last, in desperation, they broke out and, after a fierce engagement, with much slaughter on both sides, marched overland all the way back to Essex. This time, at least, they might retreat north-east into friendlier territory, through the lands of the Five Boroughs, tracking across Danish East Mercia and through East Anglia; Æðelred’s forces were probably able to trace their progress but unable to engage them beyond the line of Watling Street.

It is an old axiom of military strategy that a powerful enemy should be afforded the means of escape. The destruction of the Host’s ships at Benfleet closed its back door to the Continent. Another plan seems now to have occurred to Hæsten. For the third time in twelve months, and with winter’s dark days approaching, he led his forces overland again and this time, according to the Chronicle, they marched day and night, right along the Mercian frontier. At this speed, perhaps, they might use the metalled road of Watling Street and outrun the fyrd. They reached a ‘deserted fortress in Wirral [ Wirhealum: ‘the hollows where the bog myrtle grows’], called Chester’ (þæt hie gedydon on anre westre ceastre on Wirhealum, seo is Legaceaster gehaten).11

If Hæsten hoped to buy himself time, to refortify and provision Chester, to make contact, perhaps, with friends in Gwynedd and across the Irish Sea in Dublin, he had again underestimated the capabilities of his enemy. Shortly after the Host’s arrival at Chester, Æðelred’s Mercian levies surrounded the old Roman fort and set about implementing an aggressive scorched-earth policy, stripping its hinterland of cattle, grain and horses and sweeping up unsuspecting foraging parties so that the Host should have no provisions for winter. By now, with corn reaped and threshed and trees losing their leaves*** it must have been difficult to keep any army in the field. It seems that the fyrð now withdrew; Hæsten, his options diminishing, marched his army into Wales, hoping to scavenge sufficient provisions for the winter. Here again he was denied, the land having been emptied of cattle and grain; instead, he plundered booty: bullion, jewellery, coin—anything to make this disastrous campaign seem worthwhile and satisfy his veterans.

The Welsh raid, diminished by a dismissive account in the Chronicle, was serious: the Annales Cambriae record its progress all through Brycheiniog and Gwent. Hæsten led the Host on a final, dispiriting march all the way across Northumbria and East Anglia out of the reach of the levies, to Mersea on the Essex coast, and relative safety, some time in the New Year of 894. Here they were joined by the remnants of the East Anglian fleet which had invested Exeter and which, raiding along the south coast on its way home, had been put to flight by the burh garrison at Chichester.

Now, at least, the Host had ships again, perhaps even sufficient to carry its forces back to the Continent. But its commanders were not done yet. Once more probing the edges of Wessex and Mercia, testing the mettle of the alliance, the Host left its baggage and camp followers, took to its ships and, during the summer of 894, sailed up the Thames estuary to the mouth of the River Lea opposite what is now Greenwich. The fleet rowed north past Stratford and its tidal corn mills, tracing the western edge of the great forest of Epping; past King Offa’s minster at Waltham (one wonders if it had been pillaged by earlier raiders) as far perhaps as Ware, whose name, literally ‘Weirs’, suggests the highest navigable point, close to Hertford. In 895 they built a new fortress at an unidentified spot, this time with access to their fleet: their escape route. In the late summer of that year the fyrð was sent to dislodge them; it was repulsed with serious casualties including, the Chronicle says, the loss of four of the king’s thegns. The Host’s intention was evidently to threaten London’s rich hinterland.

Ælfred, finally released from his long watching brief in the south-west, now brought his army across the Thames and camped somewhere on the south-west side of the Lea, ‘while the corn was being reaped’. This small detail evokes a vision of labourers in the fields, harvesting wheat with their saw-edged sickles; of oxen grazing on the stubble, stooks drying in hot August sun; of weary soldiers watching, leaning on their spears under shady trees; of barns filling with winter’s grain—like a bucolic passage from John Stewart Collis’s wartime reminiscences of the 1940s, perhaps.12

Nothing more perfectly captures Ælfred’s own vision of the duties owed by a king to his people: of the idea of economic security guaranteed by the king’s peace in return for duty and render. Content that the harvest was protected, Ælfred set his mind to a military solution. Inspired, it seems, by the example of Charles the Bald in Francia, Ælfred now sought to block the fleet’s escape. He and his engineers found a suitable spot on the Lea, downriver from the enemy’s camp, and set the fyrð to constructing a bridge that would connect forts built on both banks.

The threat was sufficient; even before the bridge and forts were complete the Host abandoned their new fortress and once again marched west, this time as far as æt Cwatbrycge be Sæfern:^††† Bridgnorth, a key crossing of the Severn in what is now Shropshire, some 13 miles (21 km) south of Watling Street, their likely route. Here they constructed a new fort, most likely on the west bank, and overwintered. Ælfred seems to have used the breathing space to bolster diplomatic efforts to isolate the Host. He sent Æðelnoth, his loyal Somerset ealdorman, to York to broker a treaty with Guðroðr. A year earlier the British chronicler of the Annales Cambriae had noted that Anarawd of Gwynedd ‘came with Englishmen to lay waste Ceredigion and Ystrad Tywi’; with Mercia and Gwynedd in collusion against the weaker Welsh kingdoms the Host’s last hope for a northern and Welsh alliance evaporated.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, its scribe seemingly as exhausted as his countrymen, has the following anticlimactic entry for the year 896:

on ðysum gere tofor se here, sum on Eastengle, sum on Norðhymbre, 7 þaþe feohlease wæron him þær scipu begeton 7 suð ofer sæforon to Sigene...

In this year, the Host dispersed, some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria, and those without stock got themselves ships there, and sailed south oversea to the Seine. The Host, by the mercy of God, had not altogether utterly crushed the English people, but they were much more severely crushed during those years by murrain‡‡‡ and plague, most of all by the fact that many of the best of the king’s servants in the land passed away during those three years.¹³

It is a salutary lesson for the historian, whose window on the remote past offers mostly the narrow view of great events, to learn that more damage was wreaked by the everyday woes of illness, poor harvests and diseased livestock—by the fates—than by the depredations of the Host. It is little wonder that while the Angelcynn reposed considerable and justifiable faith in their king, they also prayed to their God; and also, perhaps, to those capricious deities who had seemed for so long to favour their enemy: Oðin, Thor, Frey and the rest. Those same gods had run out of patience with the warriors whose apocalyptic thirst for battle, plunder and conquest had not, in the end, brought about Ragnarök, the last battle, and the dawning of a new world order.

The states of Wessex and Mercia, who had entered the lists against their Scandinavian antagonists so seemingly ill-prepared, had paid a heavy price for their education in modern warfare. They had been forced by extreme circumstances to adapt and to learn. Above all, perhaps, their appreciation of economic, military and political geography had undergone a decisive shift: by the end of the conflict they were more than a match for their enemies. They had mastered their own landscape. Ælfred had won his final victory at the age of forty-seven.§§§ He had successfully exploited the rules of lordship to embark on a most ambitious programme of military reform, maintaining the support of most of his nobility and attracting the loyalty of Mercians, Welsh and many others including, according to Asser, an assortment of Vikings, Gauls, Franks and Bretons.¹⁴ Now Ælfred was able to enjoy a few last years of peace in which to set the political and cultural seal on his brilliant military legacy.

Unimaginable treasures were looted from the minsters and palaces of the Insular kingdoms during the first Viking Age. Metalwork was cut into hacksilver, reforged as jewellery, weapons or coin; precious stones were recycled and given new life in distinctly Scandinavian ornaments like oval brooches. Much was set alight or cast into rivers and oceans; much more was buried for safekeeping, and some of those hoards turn up still. The greatest cultural destruction was wrought on the libraries of the monastic schools: York, Jarrow, Portmahomack, Iona and elsewhere. Countless manuscripts were burned or discarded, including single copies of annals whose loss leaves immense gaps in our narrative histories. The Historic of St Cuthhert is a lucky testament to that community’s extraordinary, stoical survival.

Rarely, very rarely, items were recovered after they had been looted and, in a unique instance, we have the testimony of those who recovered them. The Codex Aureus, a grand illustrated eighth-century gospel book now kept in the Royal Library in Stockholm but undoubtedly Anglo-Saxon in origin, was stolen, probably from Canterbury, in a Viking raid. On its eleventh folio (see p. 219) is a remarkable inscription written in a very elegant Old English hand, which reads as follows:

+ In nomine Domini nostri Ihesu Christi. Ic Aelfred aldormon ond Werburg min gefera begetan ðas bec æt hæðnum herge mid uncre clæne feo; ðæt ðonne was mid clæne golde...

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I, Ealdorman Ælfred, and my wife Werburg procured these books from the heathen invading army with our own money; the purchase was made with pure gold. And we did that for the love of God and for the benefit of our souls, and because neither of us wanted these holy works to remain any longer in heathen hands. And now we wish to present them to Christ Church to God’s praise and glory and honour, and as thanksgiving for his sufferings, and for the use of the religious community which glorifies God daily in Christ Church; in order that they should be read aloud every month for Ælfred and for Werburg and for Alhðryðe, for the eternal salvation of their souls, as long as God decrees that Christianity should survive in that place. And also I, Earl Ælfred, and Werburg beg and entreat in the name of Almighty God and of all his saints that no man should be so presumptuous as to give away or remove these holy works from Christ Church as long as Christianity survives there.15

It would be gratifying to know during which raid on Canterbury the Codex was stolen. The only Chronicle record of such an event is in 851. If we can date the theft that early, then the resulting campaign which led to the destruction of the Host at Acleah in that year might well fit the bill if Ælfred, the ealdorman of Surrey, was active in the 850s.¶¶¶ The campaign of 892 is another obvious possibility. We cannot be sure. We can, however, say a little more about Ælfred and his wife and daughter because, by happy chance, his will also survives.¹⁶ It must date from before 888 when one of its witnesses died. For historians it is rich in interest, not just because of its association with the Codex Aureus.

27. THE CODEX AUREUS, a magnificent bible of Anglo-Saxon origin, acquired by Ealdorman Ælfred and his wife Werburg from the mycel here. 'In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I, Ealdorman Ælfred, and my wife Werburg procured these books from the heathen invading army with our own money.'

Ælfred lists his bookland (his heritable estates) at places like Clapham, Sanderstead and Lingfield, all within the shire of Surrey, as well as two in Kent. These are left to his wife and their daughter, together with livestock and crops including 2,000 pigs (so long as his widow does not remarry). The property is to be inherited through his daughter’s children—in other words it would not pass to a new husband. Werburg, his widow, is ‘to take to St Peter’s’ (that is, to Rome) his two wergilds### by virtue of his birth and his title ‘if it be God’s will that she performs that journey’.

Ælfred also had a son, Æðelwold, to whom he leaves three hides of bookland and 100 swine, a comparatively small bequest. The son is also to have his father’s ‘folkland’, a clause that has given rise to some debate since it is explicit that the king himself must approve its transfer. There are other, minor legatees. One wonders why the wife and daughter were favoured over the son, unless he were the issue of an earlier marriage, or illegitimate.^**** The Codex, we know, Ælfred intended to be returned to Christ Church at Canterbury, that it might never leave there again. In that, at least, he hoped in vain. It is not known how the Codex Aureus ended up in Scandinavia, except that it had spent time in Spain. One doubts if its owner would have appreciated the irony.

During these last years other, more welcome Scandinavian visitors came to King Ælfred’s court. The celebrated tales of Ohthere and Wulfstan are preserved in an unlikely source: an Old English translation of Orosius’s fifth-century Historiarum Adversum Paganos libri Septem, ‘Seven books of history against the pagans’. Ælfred, advised by his two Continental scholars, Grimbald and John the Old Saxon, and by his senior clerics Plegmund, Wærferth and Asser, had compiled a list of those books ‘most necessary for all men to know’.17 Latin, he believed, was the rightful preserve of clerics and of charters; he wanted the children of his nobles and, inferentially, his administrators, to be able to read and write in their own language so that their counsel and judgement should be better informed through the wisdom and knowledge of their illustrious forbears. The evidence of the Codex Aureus shows that some, at least, of his ealdormen took this seriously and were capable of high standards of literacy; and a number of vernacular prayer books belonging to noblewomen survive from the period.^††††

To this end a new generation of literate scribes would produce Old English versions of Bede’s Ecclesiastical history of the English People and its historical sequel, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; of Orosius’s Historiae, Augustine’s Soliloquies and the Pastoral Care of Gregory the Great.^‡‡‡‡ The king’s own law code, the Domboc, was inscribed in Old English.

Ohthere’s account of travels along the Norwegian coast and among the Danish islands of the Baltic was logically appended to Orosius’s account, derived partiy from Pliny, of the geography of Northern Europe.18

Ohthere sæde his hlaforde^§§§§ Ælfrede cyning, þat he ealra Norðmonna norþest bude.. .¹⁹

Ohthere told his lord, King Ælfred, that he lived the furthest north of all Norwegians. He said that he lived in the north of Norway on the coast of the Atlantic [ Westsæ]. He also said that the land extends very far north beyond that point, but it is all uninhabited, except for a few places here and there where the Finnas have their camps, hunting in winter, and in summer fishing in the sea.

That Ælfred is described as Ohthere’s lord is an intriguing detail. The Norseman, outside his own land, was lordless and literally outwith the law. It was part of the duty of an Anglo-Saxon king to provide legal protection (his mund) and bona fides to such men and, therefore, Ælfred was his de facto lord while he dwelt in the kingdom.

The Norseman was a farmer of reindeer, wealthy in his own land, and a trader along the Norwegian coast and in the western Baltic. He must have brought some of his wares to the West Saxon court as gifts, to open access to wealthy buyers. Equally valuable were his accounts of the geography of the far north (he had sailed as far as the White Sea) and of the trading settlements at Sciringesheal (Kaupang, in Oslofjord) and Hæpum (Hedeby or Schleswig) at the base of the Jutland peninsula. The news-hungry West Saxon court must have been fascinated by his account of the tribute paid to his kind by the hunter-gatherer peoples he called Finnas (the nomadic Lapps). Their furs (bear, otter, marten), valuable ship-rope made from seal and whale-skin, and super-precious walrus ivory, highly prized by ornamental carvers, were the goods that had made Ohthere so wealthy despite the surprising—to the farmers of the Angelcynn—poverty of his own livestock: twenty each of cattle, sheep and pigs raised on the narrow cultivable coastal lands of Norway.

More exotic still was Wulfstan’s account of travels in the eastern Baltic and along the River Vistula; of a land of honey and plentiful fishing, of the habits of foreign kings and their burial rites and inheritance practices. In a time of war the Angelcynn were, at heart, still curious about the world beyond their shores. Modern scholars have also gleaned much from the detail of these stories, so carefully preserved by the Orosius scribe.¶¶¶¶ The Danish ship historian Ole Crumlin-Pedersen has shown that with the technology and type of ship likely used for coastal trading by the two captains entertained at Ælfred’s court (something like the capacious Skuldelev 1, or the Klåstad ship found near Kaupang and dating from around 800), Ohthere’s testimony that he sailed from his home to Kaupang in a month equates to something like a 2-knot net progress into the south-westerly prevailing winds; given better winds, the ships would have made as much as 5 knots on average. Even a single voyage a year, carrying the most valuable freight, would have accumulated sufficient profit for such skippers to justify the expense and risk.²⁰

The celebrated English historian of the Anglo-Viking period, Peter Sawyer, has studied the implications of both accounts for our understanding of Northern trade and shown how the entrepreneurs of southern Scandinavia were able successfully to exploit both the hunter-gatherers of the north and the voracious appetites of European courts for their produce—not just furs, skins and ivory, but also amber and other precious stones, jewellery and rare natural minerals.21 The trading and craft centres of the western Baltic acted as gateway emporia between Atlantic and Arab markets via the great rivers of the east. If there was passion for raiding and conquest among land-hungry Scandinavians there was, equally, a brilliant aptitude for exploration, trading and manufacture; a curiosity to explore and compass the world not matched until, perhaps, the fifteenth century.

Ælfred’s admiring biographer Bishop Asser saw the same curiosity and endeavour in his more homebound patron and deployed a favourite Anglo-Saxon simile to capture its essence:

Just like the clever bee which at first light in summertime departs from its beloved honeycomb, finds its way with swift flight on its unpredictable journey through the air, lights upon the many and various flowers of grasses, plants and shrubs, discovers what pleases it most and then carries it back home, King Ælfred directed the eyes of his mind far afield and sought without what he did not possess within, that is to say, within his own kingdom.²²

Ælfred’s desire for knowledge and wisdom was as much a personal crusade, an attempt to follow the Old Testament example of King Solomon, as it was politically and economically pragmatic. His pursuit of literacy, enthusiastically recorded by Bishop Asser, has something of the convert’s zeal about it. He famously, in writing of the books that he wished to be more widely read, commissioned the production of æstels, or ornamented book pointers, which he gave to his bishops to accompany the volumes of his own translations intended to be placed in their churches. One of these may survive in the beautiful crystal, cloisonné enamel and gold jewel found in 1693 a few miles from Athelney, where Ælfred established a small monastery in thanks for the victory at Edington. The Alfred jewel is now kept in the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. The tooled inscription on the jewel reads ÆLFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN: Ælfred had me made.

28. THE ÆLFRED JEWEL, found near Athelney in 1693 — probably one of the æstels or book pointers given by the king to his favoured bishops.

In his bespoke gifts, his book production, in the disposition of estates and preferments and the material evidence of his rule, Ælfred was exercising the political capital of hard-won patronage. The historian James Campbell goes so far as to argue that copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and others of his works, were kept on chains in major church buildings, to be publicly consulted by a newly literate élite.23

The magnanimity of protection afforded to foreign traders and to the kings of Wales and of Danish East Anglia was an expression of the dominance and universality of Christian kingship; of Ælfred’s victories over the twin evils of heathenism and ignorance. His coinage reflects this maturing comprehension of the political tools available to him. Even with his extensive itineraries the king could not be everywhere; the average ceorl, peasant, dreng or thegn would never have set eyes on him except through the image (highly stylized, in profile like a Roman emperor) that appeared on his coins with the words ÆLFRED REX or ÆLFRED REX ANGLOR(UM) . Wherever those coins ended up the message was understood: the Christian English looked to one king only. Mercians, owing their loyalty to the redoubtable and highly competent Æðelred, understood very well the meaning of overlordship, its benefits and costs.

At the beginning of Ælfred’s reign in 871, at a time of great crisis, his coinage was heavily debased, not above 20 per cent silver: useful for trade, but as a direct reflection of royal power the content spoke louder than words. During the 870s Ælfred undertook major reforms to bring the silver content up to Continental standards. He issued the joint ‘Two emperors’ series with Ceolwulf II of Mercia and then, after the victory and treaty of 879 and the West Saxon acquisition of London, increasingly confident, he issued the London monogram pennies. In the 880s and 890s the number of moneyers increased rapidly, even as trade with the Continent declined in the face of piracy and economic instability.

Whether the West Saxon administration immediately appreciated the symbiotic potential of the burhs, with their new freeholding market stall holders and customs regimes, to deploy and reinforce the political value of coinage in the economic recovery of the kingdom, is less certain. Before the Viking wars of the late ninth century central places in the British landscape, where people, services, ceremonials and production were concentrated, existed only at the sites of great minsters and royal palaces, in archaeological terms almost indistinguishable from each other, and at the few trading ports engaged in international trade. Villages and towns as we would recognize them did not exist.####

The processes of nucleation had not begun or were in their infancy. The population of the Insular lands was dispersed: ealdorman, king and bishop were lords who lived off renders and dispensed power by virtue of their progress through estate lands. People did not congregate in large settlements either for defence or for mutual economic benefit. With the secularization of minsters in the eighth century and their increased exploitation of specialized production and trade, the first signs of nucleation are witnessed in the excavated record. Church, barn, hall, cemetery, all exercised a centripetal force on the population and resources of their neighbourhoods.

The trading ports at Lundenwic, Hamwic, Eoforwic and Gipeswic attracted merchants, potters, craftsmen and the economic interest of kings. If lords were still itinerant, their reeves were nevertheless able to exercise elements of direct control over larger numbers of productive people. The nucleating forces were weak but dynamic: as the trading ports declined with the threat of piracy and as the great minsters, also undefended, were picked off, so the burhs began to attract population: at first for mutual defence and service, then for commerce under the protection of reeve, garrison and turf ramparts 15 feet (5 m) tall. The increasingly complex machinery of West Saxon and Mercian government applied similar forces to the royal court. For the first time, under Ælfred, it is possible to argue the case for a state capital.

Winchester had been a substantial Roman town: Venta Belgarum, the civitas capital of a powerful tribe. The urbanizing project which had proven so successful in Rome’s Mediterranean projects was imported almost like a flat-pack into Iron Age Britain. Winchester, like any other town, had its forum, its posh merchants’ and functionaries’ houses (mosaics, bath suites, underfloor heating and all), its sewage system and grid-square streets. In later centuries the towns of Roman Britain were provided with walls, to define their limits and to keep out undesirables. The name Venta was a native British term for a meeting or assembly place—what else could the indigenes call this new phenomenon? The urban experiment ultimately failed in Roman Britain: the toga-wearing élite retired to their country villas, then to their ancient hillforts, and left the towns to fall into ruin.

The centre of Winchester, lying on the west bank of the River Itchen,***** betrays the same telltale grid pattern in its streets today. High Street leads directly away from the river, running just north of west. Set back to north and south are parallel roads, linked by cross streets at right angles. The northern limit of the old town is marked by a road called North Walls, which rather speaks for itself. Close to where the east gate would have stood stands a Victorian statue of King Ælfred.

The apparent continuity of medieval Winchester from its Roman origins is an illusion; or, at least, it is partly coincidental. Between about 400 and 600 there is no evidence that Venta Belgarum functioned as a settlement, let alone as a thriving town. In the seventh century a plot in the old Roman town was given by King Cenwealh to found a second episcopal see for the West Saxons.^{†††††} Like York, Canterbury, Lincoln and London, the ruined Roman town was property in the gift of the king, regarded as suitable for the establishment of a church under royal patronage. At the beginning of Ælfred’s reign it had a small population: the church community, a royal residence and one or two small private estate complexes belonging to an élite benefiting from the king’s personal patronage.²⁴

Like other Roman towns, Winchester was seen as a suitable site for rebuilding as a defended burh in Ælfred’s ambitious scheme of the 880s: metalled road surfaces from an early phase of construction, excavated beneath the Norman castle, have been closely dated to the late ninth century by two coins: an Arab dirham and an Anglo-Saxon penny. The river crossing and the line of the Roman walls dictated that a similar size and grid plan were adopted for the new burh, whose massive ditch and ramparts enclosed the site of a grand basilica known as the Old Minster, burial place of the celebrated St Swiðun, a former bishop who died in 862.

29. STATUE OF KING ÆLFRED at Winchester, royal burh and sometime ‘capital’ of Wessex; sculpted by Hamo Thornycroft and unveiled in 1901.

Winchester superseded the coastal site at Hamwic as a principal, more secure trading emporium for southern Wessex. Under Ælfred it could not be described as a town in the modern sense; but urban elements were being assembled here, as in London, Oxford and elsewhere. What is now High Street, the main thoroughfare, was Cheap straet, the street of traders and stall holders; and a mint was established to service its market and supplement the royal coffers. With Wallingford on the Thames it was the largest of the Ælfredan burhs, requiring a nominal garrison of 2,400 men. The primary manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was compiled here and by 896 the Chronicle was recording the death of its wicgerefa, the wic reeve Beornulf, as a noteworthy event. When, that same year, a pirate fleet was intercepted and destroyed off the south coast, two of its crews were brought to the king at Winchester, where he had them hanged.‡‡‡‡‡ Here also, after his death six days before All Hallows in the year 899, Ælfred was buried in the Old Minster.

Eadweard’s accession to the throne of Wessex, his overlordship of Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms loyal to Ælfred, had been anticipated by both: in 898 the heir presumptive was styled Rex in a Kentish charter; he was the principal legatee in his father’s will and a close attendant at court.25 His older sister Æðelflæd was successfully married to Æðelred, the Lord of Mercia. He had been bloodied in battle against the Host. His first marriage, to Ecgwynn, had borne a daughter, possibly Eadgið, and a son, Æðelstan, who had been subject to investiture by Ælfred, legitimizing him as a future king. Eadweard’s new wife Ælfflæd, daughter of the ealdorman of Wiltshire, would bear him seven children. Ælfred’s line seemed secure.

There was, however, another candidate for the throne: Æðelwold, son of Ælfred’s immediately older brother King Æðelred, who had died in the year of nine engagements, 871. Æðelwold may have been a prime mover in the less than fulsome support that Ælfred received from his ealdormen in 877-878, the winter of greatest crisis. ^§§§§§ With the old king barely cold in his bed, Æðelwold, with a small force of retainers, his comités, seized royal townships on the River Stour in Dorset at Christchurch and at Wimborne, his own father’s burial place. In response Eadweard brought a force to Badbury Rings, an abandoned but eminently defensible Iron Age hillfort some 3 miles (5 km) north-west of Wimborne.

Æðelwold must have hoped for, or been promised, substantial support from disaffected collateral members of the House of Wessex; perhaps also from Mercia. If so, he was to be disappointed: no help came; no promises were fulfilled. The Chronicle recorded that he stayed at Wimborne, barricaded behind the gates of the minster enclosure, and resolved to remain there ‘alive or dead’. Eadweard waited with his army.

Under cover of night Æðelwold abandoned his redoubt, perhaps embarking on boats that allowed him to escape through Christchurch harbour. Alex Woolf has raised the intriguing possibility that a nun, said to have been seized by the pretender before or during his stay at Wimborne, was none other than Æðelgifu, Eadweard’s second sister, and that the usurper intended her to become his consort.26 But if so, she was inadvertently left behind, and the Chronicle records her ‘arrest’. Somehow Æðelwold was able to lead his force as far as Northumbria where, it appears, a convenient interregnum after the death of Sigfrøðr, the successor to Guðroðr in 895, offered fresh opportunities. At York Æðelwold seems to have been acclaimed as king and passed out of the Chronicle’s orbit for three or four years.

Eadweard ‘the Elder’^¶¶¶¶¶ was able to celebrate his coronation at Whitsun in May 900.²⁷ Later tradition and practice suggests that the coronation took place in the church of St Mary at Kingston upon Thames where, in 838, a symbolic conciliatory meeting had been held between Archbishop Ceolnoth and King Ecgberht.²⁸ The church collapsed in 1730; from the rubble a modest, rectangular block of stone was retrieved which, tradition suggests, is the coronation stone of the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon kings. Today it stands surrounded by an ornate iron railing next to the town’s Guildhall.

The site suggests two key aspects of the ceremony, about which there has been much speculation: first that, instead of choosing the perhaps more natural royal burh at Winchester, a site on the Thames symbolized the continuity of the Wessex-Mercia alliance.²⁹ Secondly, Alex Woolf, the historian of Scotland in this period, notes the similarity in time and geography with a great meeting held by Constantín mac Áeda at Scone within five years of Eadweard’s coronation.³⁰ Both sites lie at the natural tidal limits of great rivers: the Thames and Tay. Two other possible sites for important Insular meetings and inaugurations, Govan on the Clyde and Newburn on the Tyne, the latter also close to a tidal reach, inclines one to think that there was something uniquely symbolic about such places. Both Govan and Newburn may have had moot hills close by, the equivalents of Iceland’s Things, Scotland’s Dings (the place name Dingwall, for example) and Man’s Tynwald.

30. THE TIDE STONE at Kingston upon Thames, where Anglo-Saxon kings were anointed on the frontier between Wessex and Mercia.

The accession of Constantín, grandson of Cináed mac Ailín, in Alba in about 900, marks a significant moment in the history of North Britain. So too, two years later, does the expulsion of the Norse from Dublin, driven out by the Irish overkings of Brega and Leinster.31 Again, the clatter of great events in one part of the Atlantic world echoed across the sea, re-energizing the political dynamics of Britain’s kingdoms. Newton’s cradle was set in motion once more, this time responding to a new set of complex rhythms.

* Hidden in these portentous arrivals and departures, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is another: this is the last entry by the original scribe of the ‘A’ manuscript; a new hand took over for 893.

† Conceived in 1804 and completed in 1809.

‡ The abrupt cessation of coinage minted at Canterbury after 892 suggests that the Host, unrecorded by the Chronicle, attacked and razed the town that year. The mint did not resume production until after 910. Dolley 1970, 20-1.

§ The kings of the West Saxons and Mercians had been overlords of Kent for the whole of the eighth century; but their power to coerce its inhabitants and ealdor-men to contribute the common burdens of fort and bridge building seems to have been limited or non-existent. The fort near Appledore was, it seems, only half-finished when it was overrun.

¶ He was the oldest surviving son of Ælfred and Ælswið, a year or two younger than his sister Æðelflæd. Born sometime during the 870s, he witnessed his first charter in 892.

# There is some evidence that a series of signal beacons linked the Thames valley with the south coast during this period, allowing limited intelligence of enemy movements to alert the levies. Gower 2002; David Hill and Sheila Sharp, in a short essay included in Lavelle 2010, 2i8ff. The burhs were not generally intervisible; but there would have been considerable advantage in a system linking them by hilltop beacons. The place name element ‘wearð’—lookout, watch—often with the suffix ‘dune’ (hill) giving the modern Warden plus the pleonastic Hill, supplies one clue. Weardsetl is an alternative form. The place name element ‘Tot’ is also regarded as a marker for the site of a beacon.

** He is not mentioned at all in the Chronicle before Ælfred’s death in 899.

†† A port on the River Ribble close to the later town of Preston would be consistent with the route of the traffic we know to have existed between York and Dublin in the late ninth and tenth centuries.

‡‡ By inference: the Chronicle does not name the commanders.

§§ A passage in Ælfred’s own translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care makes it clear that, following the example of King David, he saw restraint of royal power over enemies as a sign of virtue. Keynes and Lapidge 1983,128.

¶¶ See Viking Age travel map, p. 281.

## Buttington: probably ‘Bota’s settlement’—an Anglian name.

*** Tree foliage is a valuable, often underestimated source of fodder: particularly elm and holly.

††† It means, unhelpfully, the Bridge to Quatt, a small village 3 or 4 miles (5-6 km) south-east of the bridge. Watts 2004.

‡‡‡ An archaic term for a variety of cattle maladies.

§§§ The same age, incidentally, as Nelson when he died at Trafalgar 900 years later fending off another Continental invasion.

¶¶¶ See above, p. 139.

### Wergild: the value of a man for purposes of compensation; otherwise an indication ofhis worth and social standing. Ælfred was a twelfhynde man, worth 1200 shillings. See above, p. 176.

**** Another charter survives bearing the ealdorman’s name (SI202, between 870 and 899). In it, Ælfred donates an estate to the monastic community at Chartham in the Kent downs, a few miles west of Canterbury, in return for a life interest in land at Croydon.

†††† I think it possible that the inscription added to the Codex Aureus was written in the hand of Werburg on behalf of her husband.

‡‡‡‡ Gregory was Pope between 590 and his death in 604. Augustine’s mission to the Anglo-Saxons in 597 conceived by Gregory after a famous meeting with Deiran slave boys in a market in Rome.

§§§§ Originally hlafweard, a loaf-keeper. Hlafdige, ‘lady’, derives from words for ‘loaf’ and for ‘kneading’: in other words, the providers of a household.

¶¶¶¶ The same, scribe, incidentally, who picked up his quill at the 893 in the Parker MS of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; but probably not the original translator of Orosius, according to the archivist at the British Library. Information accessed from: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_47967, July 2016.

#### With the possible, as yet unproven, exception of the ancient Roman civitas capital at Canterbury.

***** In the Early Medieval period it may have been navigable to this point from its issue on Southampton Water.

††††† Bede HE III.7 The first West Saxon see was established at Dorchester on Thames.

‡‡‡‡‡ The 896 contains the well-known reference to Ælfred’s construction of ‘warships to be built to meet the Danish ships: they were almost twice as long as the others, some had sixty oars, some more; they were both swifter, steadier and with more freeboard than the others; they were built neither after the Frisian design nor after the Danish, but as it seemed to himself that they could be most serviceable’. Keynes and Lapidge 1983, 90. Few historians would now suggest that this constitutes evidence that Ælfred founded the Royal Navy.

§§§§§ See above, p. 139

¶¶¶¶¶ A cognomen first used in Wulfstan’s late tenth-century Life of St Æðelwold to distinguish him from Eadweard ‘the Martyr’ (975-978).