ISAAC NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OF MOTION SEEMS TO GOVERN the events of the four decades between Ælfred’s victory over the mycel here at Edington and the conquest of York by the Norse warlord Rögnvaldr in 918. Each strike of foe against foe, like the suspended steel balls of a Newton’s cradle, energized the relations between other states, conserving the political momentum of the Viking Age and producing a dizzying display of reaction and counter-reaction, opportunity and risk.
After 880 Ælfred’s political capital was such that he could forge a mutually empowering treaty with Guðrum and embark on a programme of economic, military and educational reform that deserves to be compared with the Frankish renaissance under Charlemagne. Exotic visitors came to his court; the history of his people and age was written down; churches and their saintly cults were enthusiastically patronized. Above all, the painful lessons Ælfred had learned from his long-time enemy were put to good use in the series of defended garrison towns that he ordered built across the south. Relations with Mercia were consolidated, and flourished under his son-in-law and daughter. He put in place provisions for his successor and when, after some years of relative peace, a second great war of conquest broke out in 893, Wessex and Mercia were equal to its extreme dangers. Ælfred’s reign can be said to have professionalized the Anglo-Saxon state.
Accommodations were made between native and incomer at all social, political and economic levels. New lords, some more benign than others, brought both threats and opportunities to disrupt the status quo in the countryside and precipitate bold new ventures in production and trade. Archaeologists and historians looking for clear traces of such developments, the rattling local echoes of the Newtonian cradle, have to compile their case from hoards of coins deposited in unknown circumstances, from distributions of pottery and from other artefacts recovered from excavations that have often been expedient and, more often than not, provoke questions that cannot be answered. Charters, where they survive, offer another perspective, showing how kings and bishops deployed their political capital, with increasing savoir faire, by acquiring and gifting land, the stage on which dynastic and petty local interests were played out in small scenes against a grander background.
Despite apparently unstoppable forces leading towards what later historians have seen as almost inevitable unification, the evidence emerging from fragments of annals, artefacts and geographies shows just how regionally diverse and conservative the Insular lands were. If one can see the founders of three great kingdoms in Ælfred, in Constantín of Alba and in the grandsons of Rhodri Mawr in Wales, there is equally a patchwork of ineradicable identities expressed in the old kingdoms of Hwicce and Lindsey, of East Anglia, Kent and Northumbria, Strathclyde, Dyfed and Gwynedd. And another set of formidable grandchildren, those of the famous Ívarr, would intervene in the decades after 900 to show just how illusory the apparent forces of centralization were.
The fallout from such tensions, when they erupted in the Viking expulsion from Dublin in 902, was felt across Britain. Alba might have fallen permanendy under Norse control; Northumbria forged new and stronger links with its Irish overlords; the armies of Danish East Anglia and East Mercia retained their capacity to threaten the Wessex-Mercia alliance; and in the place names, archaeology and fragmentary annals which tell of raiding, settlement and conquest in the north and west of Britain lies a record of punch and counterpunch, shadowy undercurrents of alliance and betrayal but also of people getting by, adapting somehow to circumstances beyond their control or ken.
Part of this narrative is carried by the tenacious chroniclers of St Cuthbert’s followers, as they fought to keep their estates and influence intact. They supported prospective Danish kings in their bid for power and donated lands to Christian refugees fleeing across the mountains in the west. They were able, after a period of great insecurity, to settle with their precious relics at Chester le Street on the River Wear and carve out a new paruchia* by cannily playing one set of antagonists off against another.
Excavations across many decades have begun to sketch a pattern of settlement, acculturation and integration: on Man, where the best evidence for distinctive Norse houses and burials is wonderfully preserved beneath mound and pasture; on Anglesey, where hints of bloody regime change tell also of continuity and trading success; in the Hebrides and in Orkney, where grand sagas incant an age of derring-do, of conquest and, ultimately, organized settlement and rule.
The towns that emerge on the Danish side of England’s fault line, Watling Street, from the blanket silence of the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, do so in infuriatingly patchy detail. Four of the so-called Five Boroughs are enigmatic still, their Scandinavian phases as yet unyielding to the spade. Lincoln and York, both so distinct in their historical development, offer the best clues to the dazzling success of the Scandinavian settlers in galvanizing populations concentrated behind their formidable defensive ramparts to energize production and trade on local, regional and international scales. By the early tenth century tenements and workshops, effective coinage, wheel-thrown pottery and an exuberant love of metalwork and precious-stoned jewellery and dress accessories become visible. These tell of a shared self-confidence rather than triumphant exploitation of a subjected populace. In very obvious contrast, the burhs and their economies south and west of Watling Street, in the first years after Ælfred’s death, show only economic stagnation and a sort of mulish reluctance to join in the new mercantile game.
By the end of the first decade of the tenth century Ælfred’s son Eadweard, king of the West Saxons, and his enterprising sister Æðelflæd in Mercia were ready to restore the economic and cultural balance. Their great plan, to conquer Danish Mercia and East Anglia, was heroic in its scale and successes, even if the inevitable human cost, so sparsely attested in contemporary sources, did little to nurture a sense of Anglo-Saxon unity among the southern kingdoms. Local and regional interests fought back against national ideology.
Ancient historical and geographical realities underpinned developments on the Insular scale: ceremonies were held, treaties were signed, battles fought at locations etched into the warp and weft of hill and plain, ford and vill: tidal reaches of rivers, time-worn crossroads, royal townships, shire boundaries and the mounds where laws had been promulgated as long as people could remember. Tribal and dynastic affiliations ran deep; loyalties seemed to tilt as much against old enemies as in favour of new friends. Ælfred’s Britain was a cultural and political patchwork quilt rich in the regional languages, customs and lordships of its kaleidoscope components. The Britain of his children was no different.
* Paruchia: a network of monastic foundations with their estates, functioning under the authority of a mother church.